Rebel Yell

by S. C. Gwynne

  What followed was the first of many savage fights that day that raged along Jackson’s two-mile line, the opening of the battle that would come to be known as Second Manassas or, as Northerners called it, Second Bull Run. With nine thousand men in place, Franz Sigel fought the battle’s first phase, mounting steady assaults on the center of Jackson’s position. For four hours Sigel’s troops came on, advancing in successive waves through the woods against the Confederates, who mostly fired from behind the cuts and fills of the railroad embankment. The Union attacks were repulsed, and many Union boys fell, but they were starting to take a fearful toll. The battle was just beginning.

  Pope, who arrived on the field at noon and conducted a reconnaissance of the front, had a very clear idea about how to fight this battle. His plan was to keep Jackson occupied in his center and left, while Fitz John Porter’s 5th Corps fell on the Confederate right. Porter would strike the crippling, turning blow; he would flank Jackson, cut off his retreat, while the rest of the army would drive straight ahead. Pope had given those orders to Porter in the morning—or so Pope thought—but as the day progressed there was still no sign of Porter’s corps. In keeping with his scheme Pope unleashed another series of devastating attacks on Jackson’s increasingly weary, depleted lines. At about 2:00 p.m. he sent Joe Hooker’s division forward, and again the woods exploded in sheets of flame and smoke, minié balls thudded into trees and human flesh and bone, and again the Federals advanced through what one of them called “a hurricane of death.”17

  Now the hours of constant defensive battle against superior numbers began to tell on the beleaguered rebels. Men from Massachusetts and New Hampshire regiments finally broke Jackson’s line and came pouring over the edge of the embankment. Suddenly they found themselves down in the cut with their enemies, exchanging fire at such close range that the muzzles of their weapons touched, and swinging their muskets by their barrel ends. It was brutal, destructive, highly personal warfare. In spite of their fierce, almost unbelievably brave charge, the Union soldiers, under their commander, Cuvier Grover, could not sustain their drive. The enemy position was too strong, and their assault had cost them a third of their force. Like all the other Union attackers that day, they faltered, broke, and fell back. As they did so, two Confederate brigades under Taliaferro’s replacement, William E. Starke, counterattacked, routing Grover’s and three other brigades in the process. Since Jackson was under strict orders from Lee to fight only a defensive battle, there was no question of further pursuit. That attack was followed by yet another thrust at Jackson’s center, also repulsed.

  The fight wasn’t over yet. With Porter’s ten thousand fresh troops still nowhere to be seen, shortly after 5:00 p.m. Pope ordered Kearny to move against A. P. Hill’s division on Jackson’s left. This assault was the most brutal yet, the brunt of it falling on Brigadier General Maxcy Gregg’s five regiments of South Carolinians, who were dug in on a rocky knoll behind the embankment. Gregg, a brainy South Carolina lawyer whose side interests included botany, astronomy, and ornithology, rallied his men by shouting, “Let us die here, my men!” That they did, by the score. They had been fighting almost continuously for eight hours. They had lost a third of their brigade and were running out of ammunition.18 Alarmed, A. P. Hill sent a message to Gregg asking if he could hold his position. Gregg replied that, even though he was almost out of bullets, he could “hold the position with the bayonet.”19 Hill relayed the news to Jackson, and Jackson sent his unadorned reply through his aide Henry Kyd Douglas: “Tell him if they attack again he must beat them.” Jackson then thought better of it, and accompanied Douglas on horseback. They were met by a worried A. P. Hill, who was on his way to see Jackson. Jackson was sympathetic. But there was no question of retreat. “General, your men have done nobly,” he told his West Point classmate. “If you are attacked again, you will beat the enemy back.” History does not record Hill’s reaction. But a moment later, as a new, rising sound of musket fire came from Gregg’s front, Hill said, “Here it comes!” then turned and galloped away. Jackson called after him, “I’ll expect you to beat them!”20

  What happened next was as close as Jackson came to disaster that day. Kearny’s ten regiments drove forward into the Confederate lines. They charged, broke, fell back, then charged again and again, line after line of bluecoats driving closer and closer to the embankment. There seemed no end to it. Kearny’s men were on the verge of a shattering breakthrough—one that might also have closed off Jackson’s only path of retreat—when 2,500 Confederates under General Jubal Early arrived on the field. In the battle’s most brilliant counterattack, Early’s fresh troops collided with the exhausted Federals, raking their depleted lines with fire, and almost immediately pushing them back. Soon they were in full retreat. Within ten minutes of Early’s attack, Kearny’s force was reeling out of the woods toward the turnpike as the rebel yell rose behind them and the Confederate lines rolled forward, stopping only when Hill reminded Early that his orders were not to advance beyond the embankment. That was the end of the fighting that day on Jackson’s front.

  When it was over Hill sent a staff officer with a message for Jackson: “General Hill presents his compliments and says the attack of the enemy was repulsed.” Jackson smiled. “Tell him I knew he would do it,” he said.21 Jackson’s army had withstood the best the Union could throw at it and had paid for it in unimaginable amounts of human blood. Jackson and his commanders had furiously plugged holes in their lines all day and had fought off the repeated assaults by an army that was just as determined as his own to win. Pope had helped them by attacking sectors of the line instead of making multiple simultaneous advances. Jackson had been able to shift reinforcements to meet each Union threat.22 He ended the day in possession of virtually the same ground he had started with—ground that was now littered with dead and wounded men.

  But that was by no means the full story of one of the most tactically complex and politically charged days of fighting in the war.

  • • •

  Jackson’s first concern, on the clear, warm morning of August 29, before the successive waves of Union assaults began to crash and break against his lines, was the whereabouts of Longstreet’s corps. He knew it had passed through Thoroughfare Gap and the village of Gainesville. He knew it was close. Now, above the line of trees to his west, he could see an enormous cloud of dust rising in the still summer air, heralding the imminent arrival of thirty thousand men and more than eighty pieces of field artillery. They had been sent to him from God and they had arrived in time and the question was where to put them. He had carefully selected a position on his right, almost perpendicular to his own line. Together the two Confederate wings would form a three-mile-long, slightly warped L—or, as some would describe it later, an open jaw with Jackson as the mandible—that put Longstreet immediately on the Union flank.

  At 8:00 a.m. Jackson sent Jeb Stuart and his cavalry to Lee and Longstreet. Stuart’s job would be to guide Longstreet’s column in and install it in its new position. At 10:00 a.m., under Stuart’s guidance, Robert E. Lee led John Bell Hood’s Texas brigade east on the Warrenton Turnpike to the place designated by Stuart. As Lee did so he noticed that there were skirmishers everywhere, hundreds of them, fanned out and darting through the light and shadow in the woods. But he could not tell whose side they were on. He dispatched scouts to find out. After a couple of tense minutes, he got his answer: they were Jackson’s men. This meant that the two armies, which had traveled a combined one hundred miles or more at an interval of two and a half days, had somehow managed to fit their fifty-four thousand soldiers and trains perfectly together deep in enemy territory and in the presence of a large Union army. And they had done it, for all practical purposes, in secret. Lee’s plan had been more than daring. That it was working bordered on implausible. The three generals soon met and made plans, though there is no record of what was said. By noon, Longstreet’s men were fully deployed, positioned invisibly in woods just as Jackson’s men had been on Au
gust 28. East of them were open fields all the way to Bull Run.

  Lee’s most obvious move at this point—as Jackson was being hammered by Union assaults—would have been to throw Longstreet forward against the Union left, using the full power of his L formation to turn Pope’s flank. But in one of the battle’s odd twists, that did not happen. Longstreet stayed in the woods. Jackson was left on his own to absorb the terrible fury of the pounding, dawn-to-dusk Union attacks. As would become apparent during the day, Lee and Longstreet had good reasons for holding back.

  The first of these had to do with the wayward column of Union general Fitz John Porter. That morning he and his 5th Corps found themselves about two miles due south of Jackson’s right wing, listening to gunfire from the front, and waiting for orders. What he got from Pope was a masterpiece of self-contradiction and military nonsense. The rambling “Joint Order,” written at 10:00 a.m. from Pope’s headquarters near Henry Hill, seemed to direct him to simultaneously advance, stay put, and fall back. It was, in any case, not a clear order to advance against the enemy. Part of the order revealed Pope’s own shocking ignorance of Longstreet’s location: “The indications are that the whole force of the enemy is moving in this direction at a pace that will bring him here to-morrow night or the next day.” Porter knew better. Every soldier on the Union left knew better. Irvin McDowell had been informed of Longstreet’s arrival by his calvary chief at 9:30 but he inexplicably failed to tell Pope, a shocking lapse that would eventually severely damage McDowell’s reputation. In the spirit of Pope’s simultaneous and contradictory demands, Porter elected to stay where he was, assuming he would receive clarifying orders.

  Pope, meanwhile, assumed that Porter would move against Jackson’s right and spent the entire day waiting for it to happen. Porter’s attack was to be the pivot of the entire battle. Porter, of course, did not have a clue that his superiors two miles to the east were waiting for him to do anything. (This issue—Porter’s orders from Pope and how he carried them out—was the subject of the war’s most famous court-martial. Porter was initially found guilty and removed from command. Not until long after the war were the charges overturned and Porter reinstated.23) At four thirty Pope, now furious and convinced that Porter’s failure to move was related to his political alliances, finally sent an order for Porter to advance, but Porter did not receive it until 6:00—too late, he believed, to move such a distance and attack before dark. Pope later lashed out at Porter, writing, “During these long hours General Porter still remained idle with his corps in column, and many of them lying on the ground, for ease of position probably, as they were not under fire. . . . It is not unreasonable to say that, if General Porter had attacked Longstreet . . . with ten or twelve thousand men . . . the effect would have been conclusive.”24

  Porter, frozen in place as he was, was to be the great strategic pawn of the battle. He was more than just the key to the failure of Pope’s grand plan of attack. He was also the main reason why Longstreet’s corps stayed out of the fight. During several scouting expeditions that day, Lee, Longstreet, and Stuart had discovered two truths, both of which were disappointing to Lee, who wanted very much to attack. First, there were several Union divisions right in front of them that covered more than half of their mile-plus-long front. It was not clear to Lee how numerous his enemies were or what the terrain would be like. His main worry, sitting just south of them on the Manassas-to-Gainesville Road—directly on their right flank—was Porter, whose intentions were unknown. For the Confederates to attack now, Longstreet reasoned—he was the voice of caution—meant shifting a large part of his own force to guard against a flank attack, thus weakening the whole operation. And he reminded Lee that they still did not know what sort of terrain lay in front of them. Three times that day Lee proposed to attack; each time Longstreet talked him out of it.

  The day’s fighting might thus have ended with Early’s repulse of Kearny except for one final, strange twist. Lee decided, at the last minute, and with only a little daylight left, to send John Hood forward with his Texans, Georgians, and Carolinians along the Warrenton Turnpike in a reconnaissance in force. The idea was to discover what was in front of them, in preparation for Lee’s planned advance the next day. Hood moved forward at about six thirty. By coincidence John Pope had also sent a force forward along the Warrenton Turnpike, but for such a bizarrely different reason that it requires explanation. Pope had seen Confederate wagons moving west down the Warrenton Turnpike and had come to the conclusion that the rebels, reeling from Kearny’s brutal though ultimately unsuccessful assault, were retreating. Though Pope’s chief of staff pointed out that the wagons were probably ambulances conveying wounded to the rear, Pope would not believe it. Instead, as a blazing sun streaked the sky over the Bull Run Mountains, he ordered an immediate pursuit. Soon Brigadier General John Hatch with three brigades was marching westward down the turnpike to strike a blow at the fleeing rebel army. As he left, his superior, Irvin McDowell, who agreed with Pope, barked, “General Hatch, the enemy is in full retreat! Pursue him rapidly!” The Union command could not shake the idea that Jackson was scared and running away, though all of Jackson’s behavior since August 26 argued against that idea. For some reason Pope was not thinking about the whereabouts of Longstreet.

  Imagine, then, the surprise of General Hatch when, as his brigades crested a ridge overlooking Groveton, they suddenly faced a headlong frontal assault from several thousand of General Hood’s eager, battle-tested fighters. As Hatch immediately understood, the Confederates were not retreating. They were not fighting a rearguard action. The rebels were in force, and looking for a fight. He sent a message to Irvin McDowell saying as much. When McDowell received it, he exploded, “What! Does General Hatch hesitate?! Tell him the enemy is in full retreat and to pursue them!” No amount of pleading was going to save Hatch from a fight. So he fought bravely on, into and beyond darkness, and his men were beaten and driven back and many ended up wandering lost in the dark. There had not been much point in the battle—Lee was able to gather very little battlefield intelligence from it—and there were only a few hundred casualties on both sides, testimony to the difficulty of trying to hit a moving target in the darkness. Soldiers who watched from miles around as the fight illuminated the night described its strange beauty. They were unused to seeing so many muskets fired after dark.

  Thus the day’s battle—one of the war’s greatest and bloodiest combats—finally ended. Pope, who still did not understand that he had struck Longstreet, closed the day out with an early-morning dispatch to Halleck that suggested he had won a decisive victory. He wrote, “We fought a terrific battle here yesterday with the combined forces of the enemy. . . . The enemy was driven from the field which we now occupy. . . . The news just reaches me from the front that the enemy is retreating toward the mountains. I go forward at once to see.”

  Jackson, at his headquarters several miles away, would have been astonished to read that message. He was ending his day by patching up his lines and preparing for renewed attacks in the morning. Now that Robert E. Lee was present, he had assumed command of the battlefield. Jackson was following Lee’s orders, which meant holding fast, defending his position. According to Hunter McGuire, Jackson ended his day around a campfire, where his black servant Jim made coffee for him and his staff. McGuire told Jackson that Maggie Junkin Preston’s nineteen-year-old stepson, “Willy” Preston, had been mortally wounded that day. The blue-eyed, beardless Preston, a former VMI cadet, had recently joined the Stonewall Brigade and had quickly become one of Jackson’s favorites. When McGuire said this, Jim “rolled on the ground, groaning in his agony of grief.” Then McGuire noticed Jackson’s face.

  The muscles were twitching convulsively and his eyes were all aglow. He gripped me by the shoulder till it hurt me, and in a savage, threatening manner asked me why I had left the boy. In a few seconds he recovered himself, and turned and walked off into the woods alone. He soon came back, however, and I continued by the fire, drinking
the coffee out of our tin cups, when I said: “We have won this battle by the hardest kind of fighting.” And he answered me very gently and softly: “No, no; we have won it by the blessing of Almighty God.”25

  We will never know what passed through Jackson’s mind when he heard about Willy. Perhaps it was a vision of that vanished old world of Lexington, a world inhabited by his dead wife, Ellie, and her spirited sister Maggie, Jackson’s beloved surrogate father George Junkin and his great friend John Lyle, and by apple-cheeked young men in immaculate uniforms marching peacefully across the VMI parade ground. All of that was gone, vanished—more completely than he would ever know. It had lived in some way in Willy. Now Willy, too, was gone.

  • • •

  One of the most important players in the Battle of Second Manassas was a man who was never there: George B. McClellan. After moving his army north, he had assumed command of those parts of it that had not joined Pope’s army, most significantly the corps of Edwin V. Sumner and William B. Franklin, containing fourteen thousand and eleven thousand men, respectively. Together they were larger than Jackson’s entire force. As Lincoln and Stanton saw it, the logical thing was to move this impressive force to the battlefield as quickly as possible. But it never happened. From August 27 to August 30, in an effort that required considerable energy, McClellan kept these troops in or near Washington. In the peninsula campaign his endless dithering, pettifoggery, inflated enemy troop estimates, and stubborn refusal to advance suggested to many observers that McClellan was incompetent. At Second Manassas, his behavior started to look to his critics—including the Secretary of War—more like malfeasance or even treason.