Rebel Yell

by S. C. Gwynne

  Pope himself was deeply depressed. On September 2 he wrote a letter to Halleck that was alarming in its tone of meekness, gloom, and resignation. “As soon as the enemy brings up his forces again,” he wrote, “I will give battle when I can, but you should come out and see the troops. They were badly demoralized when they joined me, both officers and men, and there is an intense idea among them that they must get behind the intrenchments. . . . You had best decide what should be done. The enemy is in very heavy force and must be stopped in some way.”

  Lee’s message to Richmond, meanwhile, which was played and replayed in newspapers throughout the South, was a measure of the true size and sweep of this Confederate victory:

  The army achieved today on the plains of Manassas a signal victory over the combined forces of Genls McClellan and Pope. On the 28th and 29th each wing under Genls Longstreet and Jackson repulsed with valour attacks made on them separately. We mourn the loss of our gallant dead in every conflict yet our gratitude to almighty God for his mercies rises higher and higher each day, to him and the valour of our troops a nation’s gratitude is due.

  Perhaps the most astonishing thing of all to happen at the Battle of Second Manassas took place at the very end of the campaign. On the afternoon of September 2, the sun had finally come out and Generals Pope and McDowell were riding at the head of their retreating column, followed by their shuffling, silent, disconsolate men. In the road ahead they saw a small group of horsemen led by a small man riding a great black horse and wearing a jaunty yellow sash. It was George McClellan. As he approached he saluted crisply and proceeded to inform them—to their numb amazement—that by order of President Lincoln he was now back in full command of the armies of Virginia. A few moments later General John Hatch, who hated Pope and felt mistreated by him, addressed his infantry in a parade-ground voice that was heard by all, “Boys, McClellan is in charge of the army again! Three cheers!”41 His men erupted, shouting and screaming “with wild delight.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  THE MONGREL, BAREFOOTED CREW

  Robert E. Lee was going north. As he saw it, he did not have much choice. His army was beaten up, half starved, barefoot, threadbare, and minus nine thousand experienced fighters who had been killed or wounded in the previous three months. With such a force, there was little to be gained and much to lose by attacking Washington’s fixed defenses, now bolstered by more than a hundred thousand men. Remaining where he was, in a country that had been stripped of its bounty by ravening armies—and poised precariously at the end of a rickety, vulnerable supply line—made no sense, either. Returning to Richmond would likely reset the clock for another massive Union assault.

  Invading the North, on the other hand, had clear advantages, even with his tattered army. It would allow Lee to retain the initiative and replenish his depleted commissary. By threatening Washington and other Northern cities he would keep blue-clad troops clear of long-suffering Virginia. He had political motives, too: a Confederate army abroad in a nation already deeply divided over the conduct of the war, civil liberties, and the emancipation of slaves could help elect more “peace” Democrats in the fall elections in the North.1 Lee, who was acutely aware of the advantages that would accrue to the North in a long war, was intent upon securing peace, and quickly. On September 8 he wrote to Jefferson Davis with an idea for a peace proposal that would deliberately be “made when it is in our power to inflict injury upon our adversary.”2

  So north it would be, across the Potomac and into Maryland and then on to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, cutting railroads and bridges and telegraphs—Washington’s connections to the West—as he went. If he could somehow pull that off, as he told a “much astonished” General John G. Walker, “I can turn my attention to Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington, as may seem best for our interests.”3 This of course was exactly what Jackson had suggested more than a year before to men in Richmond who thought he was being unreasonably aggressive. So of course Jackson liked this idea very much. (Longstreet, typically, was the voice of caution.) There was hardly any delay in putting it into action. Jackson fought the Battle of Chantilly on September 1. Lee then gave his army a single day of rest. At daybreak on September 3 the Army of Northern Virginia marched for the enemy’s ground: the United States of America.

  Jackson’s new fame went with them. It is impossible to underestimate the pride, wonder, and unalloyed happiness that surged through the Confederacy after Second Manassas. Victory had scarcely seemed possible. Ruin had seemed inevitable. Yet there it was: a huge Union army slinking back into Washington’s defenses, while the ragged boys in butternut and gray stood magnificent and bloody and triumphant on the field. Though the name of James Longstreet was spoken reverently, the clear heroes of the day were Lee and Jackson. Lee was the mastermind, the great solemn presence and genius of war whose strategies had driven not one but two Federal armies from Virginia within two months. Jackson was Lee’s iron fist, his righteous tool of destruction. Southerners saw it that way. They also saw the two generals, quite accurately, as a team. The two men thought alike and acted in concert. Lee trusted Jackson, alone of his generals, to make his own decisions. The nearly miraculous linking of the two armies near Manassas on the morning of August 29 was not only the culmination of one of the war’s most brilliant tactical maneuvers, it also was the product of a sort of high-command teamwork not previously witnessed on either side.4 The Richmond Whig put it this way:

  The central figure of the war is, beyond question, that of Robert E. Lee. His the calm, broad military intellect that reduced the chaos after Donelson to form and order. But Jackson is the motive power that executes, with the rapidity of lightning, all that Lee can plan. Lee is the exponent of Southern power of command; Jackson, the expression of its faith in God and in itself, its terrible energy, its enthusiasm and daring, its unconquerable will, its contempt of danger and fatigue.5

  Meanwhile, the stories of Jackson’s march around Pope were passing quickly into legend. Everywhere he went now, people wanted to see and touch him. Men wanted to shake his hand and speak to him. Children pressed as close as they dared when he passed. At Martinsburg, Virginia, he rode down the town’s main street to tumultuous cheers, and women clustered around him and actually managed to cut off buttons from his coat. Some of them screamed for locks of his hair, to which the blushing general replied, “Really, ladies, this is the first time I was ever surrounded by the enemy!” When he sought refuge in a hotel, citizens surrounded the place, rattling the doors and windows, even as his poor horse, Little Sorrel, was being stripped of his hair by souvenir hunters.6 Jackson, who disliked such adulation, escaped it only by setting up a secret headquarters outside of town.

  In Frederick, Maryland, despite an otherwise chilly reception by the town’s mostly non-slave-owning, pro-Union citizens, Jackson was ambushed in the street by two “bright Baltimore girls” who had concealed themselves in his carriage. One took his hand, while the other “threw her arms around him,” according to Henry Kyd Douglas, “and talked with the wildest enthusiasm, until he seemed simply miserable.” A few minutes later, the young ladies rode off, “leaving him there bowing, blushing, and speechless.” Jackson, fearing another such encounter, did not venture out again until late in the evening.7 That same day in Frederick, Jeb Stuart’s chief of staff, Heros Von Borcke, experienced what it was like to be mistaken for the famous Stonewall Jackson. Von Borcke wrote later, “All remonstrances with the crowd were utterly useless. . . . I was very soon followed by a wild mob of people of all ages, from the old greybeard down to the smallest boy, all insisting that I was Jackson and venting their admiration in loud cheers and huzzas. Ladies rushed out of their houses with bouquets. . . . To escape these annoying ovations I dismounted at last at a hotel, but here I was little better off. It was like jumping in the mill pond to get out of the rain.”8

  Some of Jackson’s enemies, too, were swept up in this wave of national adulation. A short time later, as he was riding by a large body of capti
ve Union soldiers, “Almost the whole mass of prisoners broke over us, [and] rushed to the road,” wrote one South Carolina soldier. “[They] threw up their hats, cheered, roared, bellowed, as even Jackson’s troops had scarcely ever done. . . . The General gave a stiff acknowledgement of the compliment, pulled down his hat, drove spurs into his horse, and went clattering down the hill, away from the noise.”9 It is hard to know how his new celebrity struck him. Perhaps he really could not tolerate the idea that he, and not God, was getting credit for his victories. Perhaps, too, as his brother-in-law D. H. Hill theorized, what bothered him most was the temptation he felt, the warring of his own desires. Maybe some part of him liked being famous. Maybe that was what bothered him.

  The notion of Lee and Jackson as invincible warriors had more practical effects. It gave new hope and inspiration to many Northern antiwar Democrats and Lincoln opponents whose vision of an endless, bloody, and unaffordable war was starting to look more and more real. European leaders had followed each turn of the Virginia campaigns with rapt interest, and the Confederate victories had convinced many of them that Lincoln would never be able to restore the Union by force of arms. With their triumph at Second Manassas, Lee and Jackson—who became overnight folk heroes in Europe—had made the case for de facto Confederate independence. All that remained now, many influential Europeans believed, was to formally acknowledge that state of affairs, either by an offer of mediation or outright diplomatic recognition or both. A majority in the House of Commons—saddled by a Union blockade with a “cotton famine” that had left three-fourths of British cotton millworkers unemployed or working part-time—clearly favored it, as did rising numbers of ordinary Britons. The British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, who had blocked a parliamentary resolution favoring mediation in June, now seemed ready to accept the idea. The Union had received “a complete smashing [at Second Manassas],” he wrote Lord John Russell, “and it seems not altogether unlikely that still greater disasters await them, and that even Washington or Baltimore might fall into the hands of the Confederates.”10

  The French seemed to be leaning Richmond’s way, too. That summer Emperor Louis-Napoléon seriously considered a Southern alliance in exchange for cotton, and told his foreign secretary to “ask the English government if the moment has not come to recognize the South.”11 By September, according to the French foreign secretary, “not a reasonable statesman in Europe believed the North could win.”12 Confederate diplomat John Slidell, riding this wave of pro-Southern feeling, said, “I am more hopeful [of recognition] than I have been at any moment since my arrival.” Even better, there was clear American historical precedent for all this. Colonial victory over Great Britain in the Second Battle of Saratoga in 1777 was a turning point in the Revolutionary War and led directly to French recognition of American independence and subsequent intervention on the American side. All this was in play as never before when Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, James Longstreet, and the Army of Northern Virginia tramped north.

  • • •

  The Confederate army that splashed across the Potomac River into Maryland on September 4 and 5, fresh from its victories in the Seven Days and at Cedar Mountain and Second Manassas, shocked the civilians who saw it. “They were the roughest set of creatures I ever saw,” wrote a correspondent for the Baltimore American, “their features, hair, and clothing matted with dirt and filth; and the scratching they kept up gave warrant of vermin in abundance.”13 Many were without shoes, their uniforms so tattered they barely held together, their slouch hats so riddled with tears and holes that their greasy hair protruded from them at odd and comical angles. They stunk so badly—many had not even removed their clothing in weeks—that it was said that you could smell the vaunted Army of Northern Virginia long before you could see it.14 The most striking thing about the men was their gauntness, the startling hollowness of eyes and cheeks and chests. Many were malnourished; most suffered from diarrhea brought on by everything from poor sanitation to bad water to a steady diet of roasted green corn and green apples. They were victims of the long and unreliable supply line that stretched all the way to Richmond, victims, too, of the Confederate military withdrawal from central Tennessee, where most of the South’s pork was produced, and of the severe summer drought that had ruined the corn crop in several states.15

  As always, Lee’s men were poorly armed. By Union standards, what they carried across the river with them was just as unsettling as their beggarly appearance. Fully 30 percent of their muskets were still the antiquated .69-caliber smoothbores. There were also large numbers of .54-caliber muskets—three types, in fact—including some models that dated from 1841. Some were captured Springfield .58-calibers; and the balance—most—were imported, British-made .577-caliber Enfields. (A requisition from Jackson’s command in the fall of 1862 listed twenty thousand .69-caliber cartridges and forty thousand .58-caliber cartridges.16) Their batteries were woefully inferior, too. Not only did they possess vastly fewer rifled guns than the Union, but also some 20 percent of their cannons were ancient Model 1841 six-pounders. The quality of their fuses was often atrocious: many shells either failed to burst or burst prematurely; a good number exploded while still in the guns.17

  Lastly, for anyone who could see it, the army that marched up into Maryland was simply not the same one that had departed from the vicinity of Washington just a few days before. Lee approached the river with fifty thousand to fifty-five thousand men, a force that had been replenished by Richmond after Second Manassas. Twelve days later he had less than forty thousand.18 The cause was straggling on an unprecedented scale. Some of the men fell away for lack of shoes, some because of illness or diarrhea or malnourishment. Many wanted nothing to do with an invasion of the North. They were fighting only to protect their homeland, as they saw it, only to repel the invader. But “straggling” didn’t quite cover what was going on: a lot of this was outright desertion by men who had a bellyful of fighting and marching and suffering.19 (The Union, too, was experiencing straggling at record levels: Union general in chief Henry Halleck was so frustrated by it that he wrote McClellan to suggest that “shooting them while in the act of straggling from their commands is the only effective remedy.”20 McClellan himself complained that “the states of the North are flooded with deserters and absentees.”21)

  Strangest of all, perhaps, was that the undernourished, lice-infested troops who stayed with the army were remarkably happy. Morale was high. Hopes were high. They were fully conscious of their new fame. The name of the Army of Northern Virginia was now known to the whole world. They were the heroes of the Confederacy and they knew it. In spite of great disparities in troop strength and in the quality of weapons, ammunition, and supplies, from the start of the war to the present—First Manassas, Jackson’s valley campaign, Seven Pines, Seven Days, Cedar Mountain, and Second Manassas—the Yankees had not beaten them. They had a sense, moreover, that one more big victory might change everything. When they crossed the river at White’s Ford, near Leesburg, they did so, in the words of one of Jackson’s soldiers, “with great enthusiasm—bands playing, men singing and cheering!”22 The regimental band was playing “Maryland, My Maryland”—a pro-Southern song that portrayed Lincoln as a tyrant. (“The despot’s heel is on thy shore, Maryland! / His torch is at thy temple door, Maryland!”) Even Old Jack got caught up in the excitement, removing his hat while the band played, and, once on the other side, accepting gifts from Confederate sympathizers of a powerful gray mare and a prize melon.23

  The mysterious new land they were entering—Maryland—was a slave state that had not seceded and thus remained divided in its loyalties. Just how divided no one knew for sure. It had been an article of faith among Confederate officialdom that the state was ripe for conversion. They believed that their troops would be welcomed with open arms by a people who had felt the heavy hand of a Federal government that had occupied it militarily, arrested its citizens and legislators without warrants or charges, and suppressed its newspapers and ri
ghts of free speech. Lincoln had done all that, and more, while trying to keep Maryland in the Union.24 But the Confederates were wrong, especially in the town of Frederick, where they arrived on September 6. Able-bodied men did not throng to their ranks. There was no uprising or movement to force Maryland to join the Confederacy. The majority of citizens treated them coldly and fearfully, having made sure to hide their money and valuables.

  But that would not change Lee’s plans. With the knowledge that McClellan’s army was on its way to intercept him, he had an idea for yet another daring maneuver whose key player, once again, was Stonewall Jackson. As the rebel army moved north, Lee had worried about the two Union garrisons in his rear, one at Harpers Ferry with 10,400 men, and one at nearby Martinsburg with 2,500. Left alone, this force, the size of a full army corps, would menace both Lee’s supply lines and his escape routes. As anyone who had ever been there knew, Harpers Ferry was extremely vulnerable, a custom-made trap wedged into the delta formed by the confluence of two great rivers, with mountains rising as high as a thousand feet on three sides. Harpers Ferry had been Jackson’s first command. He knew its weaknesses better than anyone.

  On September 9, Lee, camped at Frederick, Maryland, decided to divide his army and send part of it to capture Harpers Ferry. He had done so in consultation with Jackson, who was very much in favor of the plan, and had based it on the assumption that McClellan would move with his typical slowness. That would allow Jackson to reunite with Lee and Longstreet before McClellan caught up. Longstreet, who had opposed the idea, later recalled that he came upon Lee and Jackson together, eagerly plotting the destruction of the Union garrison. Seeing the enthusiasm of his colleagues, he yielded. “They had gone so far that it seemed useless for me to offer any further opposition,” he wrote, “and I only suggested that Lee should use his entire army in the move.”25