Rebel Yell
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UNION GENERALS
GEORGE MCCLELLAN
After being relieved of command by Lincoln in November 1862, McClellan entered politics and in 1864 won the Democratic nomination for president. He ran against Lincoln on an antiwar platform and lost. Following the war he worked at various engineering jobs, including as chief engineer for the New York City Department of Docks. He was president of a railroad. In 1878 he was elected governor of New Jersey, a position he held for a single term, until 1881. He spent much of his last years traveling and writing his memoirs, which were published posthumously. He died unexpectedly of a heart attack in Orange, New Jersey, in 1885 at age fifty-eight.
AMBROSE BURNSIDE
Burnside’s war career after his defeat at Fredericksburg was spotty. Exiled to the Department of the Ohio, he engineered the successful defense of Knoxville. He commanded the Union 9th Corps in the overland campaign, which included the Battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Courthouse, North Anna, and Cold Harbor. At the siege of Petersburg he famously approved a plan for Union coal miners to tunnel under a Confederate fort and blow it up. Though the mine’s explosion indeed blew a huge hole in the Confederate lines, Burnside’s men were unable to take advantage of it, a failure for which he was unfairly blamed. After the war he did rather well. He was president of three railroads and served three one-year terms as governor of Rhode Island. He was elected a US senator in 1874 and served until 1881, when he died suddenly of angina at age fifty-seven.
WILLIAM H. FRENCH
Old Blinky—Jackson’s nemesis in Florida and beyond—served in the Gettysburg campaign. His reputation was ruined for good in the Mine Run campaign in November 1863 when he was harshly criticized by General George Meade for being too slow to pursue an advantage. Though he saw no more combat, he remained with the army, serving on various military boards in Washington. From 1865 to 1872 he commanded artillery on the Pacific Coast. In 1875 he was appointed commander of Fort McHenry. He retired in 1880 and died in 1881 at age sixty-six.
JOSEPH HOOKER
After his defeat at Chancellorsville, Hooker moved the Army of the Potomac north to block Lee’s invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania. When he impulsively offered his resignation after a minor squabble, Lincoln and Stanton were quick to accept it, replacing him with the man they preferred anyway, George Meade. Hooker was transferred to the western theater, where he saw success at the Battle of Lookout Mountain. Later he served well in Sherman’s 1864 Atlanta campaign. From 1864 until his retirement from the army in 1868, Hooker served as commander of various Federal departments. He suffered from poor health in the postwar years and was partially paralyzed by a stroke. He died in 1879 at age sixty-four.
IRVIN MCDOWELL
After the defeat at Second Manassas, McDowell spent two years in effective exile from Union military leadership. He remained in the army, and spent the years from 1864 to his retirement in 1882 in a series of regional army commands that included the Department of the Pacific, the Departments of the East and South, and the Division of the Pacific. In 1879 a presidential board of review issued a report on the Battle of Second Manassas, recommending a pardon for General Fitz John Porter. The report was harshly critical of McDowell, arguing, among other points, that he had failed to forward information to either Pope or Porter about James Longstreet’s position. After his retirement, McDowell became parks commissioner in San Francisco, helping to lay out parts of Golden Gate Park. He died in 1885 at age sixty-six.
JOHN POPE
Pope’s Civil War career did not end with the fiasco at Second Manassas, nor did it suffer over the long term. He spent the remainder of the war fighting Indians, first in the Department of the Northwest. In 1864 he became commander of the Department of Missouri, and by war’s end the Military Division of the Missouri, the largest geographical command in the United States. He was a prominent departmental commander during the Indian Wars. Like Irvin McDowell, he rose to the rank of major general in the Regular Army, of which there were only six. His final posting was in California in the Division of the Pacific. Also like McDowell, his reputation was damaged in 1879 by the federal report on the Battle of Second Manassas that concluded that he and not Fitz John Porter bore most of the blame for the defeat. He retired in 1886 and died in 1892 at the Ohio Soldiers’ Home near Sandusky at the age of seventy.
NATHANIEL BANKS
Banks’s military career continued to sputter after Second Manassas. He was briefly given command of defense forces in Washington, then shipped south to New Orleans to assume command of the Department of the Gulf. There he performed poorly in several military campaigns, though he did have the distinction of commanding the first African-American troops in combat. In 1864 he was sent back to Washington for the rest of the war. He spent the rest of his life doing what he always did best: politics. He served in Congress from 1865 to 1879, then as US marshal for Massachusetts—a patronage job—until 1888, and again in Congress for a single term, from 1888 to 1890. He died in September 1894 at age seventy-eight. His death made national headlines.
MISCELLANY
LITTLE SORREL
Lost after the Battle of Chancellorsville, the horse Jackson called “Fancy” was eventually recovered by a Confederate soldier and sent to Virginia governor John Letcher, who in turn sent him to live with Anna Jackson in North Carolina. The horse became a much-loved pet, famous for using his mouth to lift latches and let himself out of his stable. In Anna Jackson’s memoir she wrote that he would “go deliberately to the doors of all the other horses and mules, liberate each one, and then march off with them all behind him . . . to the green fields of grain around the farm.” Fences proved no obstacle to him, either. He would use his mouth and muzzle to lift off fence rails until the fence was low enough to jump over. He later lived at VMI, where he grazed on the parade ground and was a favorite of cadets, and spent his last days at the Old Confederate Soldiers’ Home. His hide was stuffed and mounted and can be seen today at VMI.
SHENANDOAH VALLEY
What Sherman’s men did to Georgia is more famous, but what happened to the lovely Shenandoah Valley was just as horrific, and a great deal more systematic. The valley’s unfortunate location made it an almost continuous battleground. It was the scene of three major campaigns and some twenty-three battles. Winchester alone changed hands an estimated seventy-two times. The worst of it came in the fall of 1864, when Union general Philip Sheridan’s army embarked on a deliberate campaign to destroy the valley’s food-producing capacity during what was a bumper year. In a two-week period Sheridan’s soldiers burned barns, mills, and standing crops. They burned at least fifty houses to the ground. They rounded up livestock and killed them or drove them away. Much of the devastation wrought by Sherman’s soldiers on his march to the sea was haphazard or accidental. Here it was all quite deliberate, and every bit as destructive. By the end of it much of the valley was a smoking ruin.
VMI
On May 15, 1864, the cadet corps from VMI fought as a unit for the first time, at the Battle of New Market in the Shenandoah Valley. Ten were killed and forty-seven wounded. Less than a month later, the institute was shelled and burned by Union troops under David Hunter. Destroyed were the barracks where Stonewall Jackson taught, the mess hall, two faculty residences, and the library—all but two buildings. The cadets were relocated to Richmond. A total of 1,800 VMI cadets fought in the war (16 for the North), and of them 250 were killed.
STONEWALL BRIGADE
Jackson’s most famous brigade later fought in the Gettysburg, Mine Run, and Wilderness campaigns. When its commander Colonel James Walker was wounded at Spotsylvania, the brigade was disbanded and dispersed to other units. They continued to fight in the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864, at Petersburg, and at Appomattox. By the war’s end only 210 of the 6,000 men who had served in the brigade during the war were still under arms.
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NOTES
PROLOGUE: LEGENDS OF SPRING
1. A. R. Boteler, “Stonewall Jackson in Campaign of 1862,” Southern Historical Society Papers, September 1915, vol. 40, p. 176.
2. Ibid., p. 177.
3. Ibid., p. 176.
4. Gary Ecelbarger, Three Days in the Shenandoah, p. 3; he notes that the army was the largest in the Western Hemisphere.
5. Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography.
6. James McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 32.
7. Allan Nevins, War for the Union: 1862–1863, vol. 2, p. 108.
8. Ibid., p. 32.
9. Ibid., p. 39.
10. Ibid.
11. Boteler, “Stonewall Jackson in Campaign of 1862,” p. 177.
12. Henry A. Chambers diary, June 19, 1862, North Carolina Department of Archives and History. Cited in James I. Robertson, Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Legend, the Soldier, p. 459.
13. Biographical Sketch in Alexander Robinson Boteler Papers, Duke University.
14. Boteler, “Stonewall Jackson in Campaign of 1862,” p. 177.
15. Ibid.
16. Chambers diary.
17. Ibid.
18. Letter from Jackson to Thomas Taylor Munford, June 17, 1862. Manuscript in Huntington Library, Pasadena, CA.
19. J. William Jones, “Reminiscences of the Army of Northern Virginia,” Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. 9, p. 364.
20. Letter from Edwin Stanton to George McClellan, June 25, 1861; cited in Jubal A. Early, War Memoirs, p. 75; Stanton had reports placing Jackson at four locations, one of which was Gordonsville with forty thousand men.
21. Jedediah Hotchkiss Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Anecdote by J. William Jones, former chaplain in Jackson’s army.
22. Hunter McGuire, “1897 Address to R. E. Lee Camp,” Southern Historical Society Papers, June 23, 1897.
23. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering, p. 3.
24. Richmond Whig, June 11, 1862, and June 12, 1862.
25. “A Great General,” Richmond Daily Dispatch, June 18, 1862.
26. Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee’s Lieutenants, vol. 1, p. 303.
27. Allen C. Redwood, “With Stonewall Jackson,” Scribner’s Monthly 18, no. 2 (June 1879).
CHAPTER ONE: AWAY TO RICHMOND
1. Lenoir Chambers, Stonewall Jackson, p. 22.
2. Napier Bartlett, A Soldier’s Story of the War, p. 16.
3. G. H. M. Cloverlick Recollection, February 16, 1880, Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. 9, 1881, pp. 44–45.
4. Ibid.
5. Dabney Herndon Maury, “General T. J. Jackson: Incidents in the Remarkable Career of the Great Soldier,” Richmond Times, January 23, 1898.
6. Board of Visitors Minutes, VMI Archive.
7. Raleigh Colston, Reminiscences, Raleigh Edward Colston Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina.
8. Colonel William Couper, One Hundred Years at V.M.I., vol. 2, p. 98.
9. “Recollections of Charles Copland Wight, 1841–1897,” manuscript, Wight Papers, Virginia Historical Society.
10. Sherman, on hearing that South Carolina had seceded in December 1860, remarked to a Southern friend: “You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. . . . You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing!”
11. Mary Anna Jackson, Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson, p. 143.
12. Thomas Jackson Arnold, Early Life and Letters of General Thomas J. Jackson (London and Edinburgh: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1916), p. 294.
13. Jackson, Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson, p. 141.
14. Ibid.
15. Margaret J. Preston, “Reminiscences of Stonewall Jackson,” Century Magazine, October 1886, pp. 927–936.
16. Robert L. Dabney, Life and Campaigns of Lieutenant-General Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson, p. 154.
17. Ibid.
18. Jackson, Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson, p. 144.
19. January 26, 1861, letter from Thomas J. Jackson to Thomas Jackson Arnold, in Thomas Jackson Arnold, The Early Life and Letters of General Thomas J. Jackson, p. 294; Jackson papers, West Virginia University.
20. Ibid.
CHAPTER TWO: THE IMPERFECT LOGIC OF WAR
1. The acquisitions stack up as follows: the Louisiana Purchase—828,000 square miles; the Mexican Cession—525,000 square miles; the annexation of the Oregon Territory—260,000-plus square miles.
2. Mary Anna Jackson, Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson, pp. 139–140. Anna wrote of Jackson, “In politics he had always been a Democrat, but he was never a very strong partisan, and took no part in the political contest of 1860 except to cast his vote for John C. Breckenridge. . . .”; Robertson, Stonewall Jackson, p. 197. Here Robertson makes the point that “Jackson was aware of the growing schism between North and South. He was a Democrat with inherent respect for states’ rights. . . . That is probably as much thought as Jackson gave to the national picture. Marriage, the loss of another child, a new home, persistent illnesses, business ventures, renewed church activities—these were matters of greater concern to the major.”
3. Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, vol. 1, The Improvised War, 1861–1862, p. 10.
4. Jackson’s view of this was expressed in his January 26, 1861, letter to his nephew Thomas Jackson Arnold. “If the free states . . . should endeavor to subjugate us, and thus excite our slaves to servile insurrection in which our Families will be murdered without quarter or mercy . . .” (italics mine). The reference is to Brown’s raid. Like many Southerners, this was how Jackson saw it.
5. U.S. Census shows 490,865 slaves in Virginia in 1860, and a free population of 1,105,453.
6. William Couper, One Hundred Years at V.M.I., vol. 2, p. 17.
7. Ibid., p. 11.
8. Dispatch from Charleston of November 26, 1859, Richmond Daily Dispatch.
9. Letter from Thomas Jonathan Jackson to Mary Anna Jackson, November 28, 1859, in Jackson, Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson, p. 130.
10. Couper, One Hundred Years at V.M.I., vol. 2, p. 15.
11. Letter from Jackson to his wife, December 2, 1861, in Jackson, Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson, p. 131.
12. For an excellent treatment of the John Brown material, see Robert E. McGlone, John Brown’s War Against Slavery.
13. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 208.
14. New York Herald Tribune, November 3, 1859; report of Brown’s courtroom speech.
15. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 210, citing other sources.
16. Robert Lewis Dabney, The Life and Campaigns of Lieutenant-General Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson, p. 144.
17. Henry Kyd Douglas, I Rode with Stonewall, p. 3.
18. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 211.
19. Susan Leigh Blackford and Charles Minor Blackford, Letters from Lee’s Army, or Memoirs of Life In and Out of the Army in Virginia During the War Between the States, pp. 2–3.
20. Couper, One Hundred Years at V.M.I., vol. 2, pp. 78–79; James I. Robertson, Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Legend, the Soldier, p. 208.
21. Robertson, Stonewall Jackson, p. 213, citing David X. Junkin, The Reverend George Junkin, pp. 518–526.
22. Recollections of Charles Copland Wight, 1841–1897. Manuscript at the Virginia Historical Society, Wight Papers, Richmond, VA.
23. Couper, One Hundred Years at V.M.I., vol. 2, p. 79.
24. In his 1939 history of VMI, Couper cites a story in the Valley Star newspaper of April 18, 1861, that lists “Maj. Colston,” “J.W. [sic] Brockenbrough,” and “J.W. Massie” as speakers. Colston
taught French at VMI, Massie taught math at VMI, and Brockenbrough was a state judge.
25. Couper, One Hundred Years at V.M.I., vol. 2, p. 81. As Couper points out in his voluminous note on this subject, there are so many accounts of the cadet riot that it is difficult to tell what actually happened. Charles Copland Wight, who was there (see his manuscript at the Virginia Historical Society, Wight Papers), left a fair account; Couper did by far the best research. It remains a bit confusing.
26. Wight Recollections, manuscript.
27. William S. White, Rev. William S. White, D.D., and His Times, p. 173.
28. Randolph Barton, “Stonewall Jackson,” Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. 38, p. 273.
29. Official Records, Series 3, vol. 1, pp. 67–78.