Both were in play as never before. Kernstown had been both intimate and brutal, a stark and bloody lesson in what it meant to fight an enemy who was as violent and determined as you were. There could be few illusions anymore about what war really meant, or about how much Jackson and his men risked. Back in war-shocked, Union-occupied Winchester, the courthouse was jammed with groaning, bleeding, disfigured men from both sides. One observer wrote, “A Confederate captain, Yancey Jones, was lying there with both eyes scooped out and the bridge of his nose carried away by a bullet. He was sometimes delirious and roared about forming his company and charging. An Ohio volunteer lay on his back, the brains oozing from a shot in the head, uttering at breathing intervals a sharp stertorous cry. He had been lying thus for 36 hours.”6
With the Union occupation of Winchester and the valley’s first real battle at Kernstown came bitterness and new contempt on both sides. “The inhabitants believed that the army was a horde of Cossacks and Vandals,” wrote David Hunter Strother, the Virginia-born writer who fought under Banks,
whose mission was to subjugate the land, to burn, pillage, and destroy. Hence they are received with distrust and terror, and their slightest disorders magnified by the imagination into monsters and menacing crimes. The [Union] soldiery, on the other hand, thought they were entering a country so embittered and infuriated that every man they met was a concealed enemy and an assassin, and every woman a spitfire.7
Strother was himself full of unalloyed contempt for these Virginians, a feeling shared in one form or another by many people in the North. He wrote:
I have myself considered the Old Virginia people as a decadent race. They have certainly gone down in manners, morals, and mental capacity. There seems to be nothing left of their traditional greatness but a senseless pride and a certain mixture of dignity and suavity of manner, the intelligence of a once great and magnanimous people. It was high time that war had come to wipe out this effete race. . . . That will be the final result of the war, I do not doubt.8
It was inevitable, too, that a Union army marching conspicuously through the valley would clash head-on with the institution of slavery. For many slaves the opportunity for escape was just too obvious, and many took that chance, crossing through army lines, seeking refuge and asylum. In normal times—which these emphatically were not—the escaped slaves would have been considered property and returned under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Some Union commanders in the opening months of the war did precisely that. But then an opportunistic Union general named Ben Butler, who happened to be a lawyer, came up with a new way of thinking about the problem. Confronted in 1861 with a demand for the return of three escaped slaves in coastal Virginia, he decided that if he took seriously Virginia’s claim to being a foreign power, and if it was making war upon the United States, then he was under no obligation to return any sort of property. Instead, he would hold the slaves as “contrabands of war.” The concept, which Lincoln did not like, first because he thought it might destabilize border states, and second because he would not then or later accept the Confederacy’s claim to sovereignty, quickly caught on anyway. (Congress would support Butler by passing the Confiscation Acts in 1861 and 1862, which allowed for the emancipation of slaves owned by masters in seceded states.) There was, in fact, little else the Union could do. Returning escaped slaves on a grand scale to the enemy was, in the long run, an absurd proposition. The “contrabands” were accepted, put to work, and paid for their services. Soon enough they would fight, too.
By the standards of the Deep South, the Shenandoah Valley had relatively few slaves, and almost nothing that resembled the brutal, impersonal culture that often existed on the giant plantations of South Carolina. Only one valley property owner had more than one hundred slaves. Most had far fewer than that. But because many of the slaves were rented out to nonslaveholding families for agricultural labor or housework, the institution was more pervasive than the numbers showed.9 This phenomenon also provided at least one answer to a common question from Union troops: Why, if you do not own slaves, are you fighting for slavery? The answer was that ownership per se was only part of it; the institution pervaded the South on less apparent economic levels.
As Banks moved south, growing numbers of slaves began to enter Union lines. At Harpers Ferry, Federal troops faced what one soldier called “a flood” of escapees; in nearby Charlestown, a reporter wrote that “hundreds of contrabands are hourly seeking refuge within our lines.”10 They had different reasons for leaving. Some said they were tired of abuse and overwork. Many were treated well but just wanted freedom, or what they imagined it to be. A slave named George Washington, who had worked as a farmer and hotel waiter, said that his owner had never harmed him but that he simply preferred “freedom to slavery.”11
Such defections produced a range of effects—all of them deeply unsettling—on valley residents. One farmer lost seven slaves within a few months—one-third of his workforce. Some escapees took what Virginians considered to be brazen advantage of the new Federal power. A slave named Shipley, accompanied by a Union escort of twenty-five soldiers, marched boldly to a farm in Newtown to reclaim his wife, Mary.12 Even more unseemly to Southern sensibilities—hypocritically, in some cases—some of the Yankee soldiers enjoyed close relations, sexual and otherwise, with black women. One Confederate officer reported that three Union soldiers married black women while they were camped at Winchester.13 Yet another sign of cultural transfiguration was the sight of a Union colonel lecturing a white slave owner for striking a female slave. Though most slaves stayed home, and many were not so unhappy with their lot that they would risk blind flight, it soon became apparent that, as Banks marched through the valley, he was not only pursuing Jackson. He was also tearing at the social and economic fabric of the Confederacy.
• • •
If one was forced to run for one’s life, with a future that might be measured in days or hours instead of months or years, the Shenandoah Valley was a breathtakingly beautiful place in which to do so. Eleven months into the war, the place was still mostly unscarred, a graceful, mountain-walled land of clapboard farmhouses and steepled churches, rolling wheat and barley farms, valleys hidden within valleys, and land that rose and fell like gentle swells on the ocean. To outsiders the valley seemed, as it does today, a sort of idealized, postcard-perfect, Currier and Ives version of rural America. In the rain-drenched spring of 1862 it was a thoroughly sodden paradise, too. There was water everywhere, in cataracts that thundered out of the Alleghenies, in the swollen streams that ran along every road and path, and in the deep pools of the winding North Fork of the Shenandoah and its tributaries. Everywhere, too, were the valley’s trademark fog and mist, thick and smoke-blue, swirling through valleys and gorges, making mountaintops vanish and the high ridges seem to float on the air like sleeping giants. Jackson loved the place. “This country is one of the loveliest I have ever seen,” he wrote Anna, a sentiment he would express over and over again.14
It was also, at that moment, one of the most perilous. Though Jackson was directly engaged with two Union divisions, he had many more Union troops in the region to worry about. All threatened him. To his west, just over the Alleghenies in a parallel river valley, now camped Union general John Frémont, the old Pathfinder, disgraced in Missouri but somehow, through the magic of Republican politics, back in the field. He had 23,000 widely scattered men. Across the Blue Ridge Mountains in Fredericksburg, General Irvin McDowell of Manassas fame had 34,000 men. With Banks’s 19,000, the Federals thus had some 76,000 troops in the area. (This did not include the Union troops at Harpers Ferry, which by May would number more than 7,000.)
Opposing them—in the broadest sense—were three small rebel forces. In the Alleghenies just west of Staunton were 3,000 troops under General Edward Johnson. Just across the Blue Ridge, near Gordonsville, Major General Richard S. Ewell had 8,000.15 Jackson himself would soon, with the new Confederate draft and the return of stragglers and men on furlough, have abo
ut 6,000 men. Together the Confederate forces totaled some 17,000.16 Though the 76,000 would never face the 17,000 in a stand-up fight—Jackson would make dead certain of that—that was roughly the size of the troop disparity. They would all, Union and Confederate, figure in what happened in the valley theater in the coming months.
Jackson’s immediate need, in the wake of Kernstown, was to forestall his own destruction. He moved south, quickly at first, marching twenty-five miles the first day straight down the valley pike to the town of Woodstock. Then, realizing that Banks was not exactly in hot pursuit, he slowed down, making a leisurely thirteen-mile march the next day to Mount Jackson. Jackson was in no hurry, “running” as slowly as he possibly could, using Ashby’s rear guard to jab insolently at his pursuers. Banks followed, ever more sluggishly, then stopped altogether. Jackson, staying just out of reach behind Ashby’s cavalry screen, stopped, too, seeing no point in running from someone who was not chasing him. Amazingly, considering the order McClellan had given Banks, Jackson and his army were able to remain in the immediate area of Mount Jackson for the next twenty-three days, unmolested and unpursued. It was a stall worthy of McClellan himself. Jackson moved only once during that time, shifting a few miles south to a more defensible piece of high ground east of the pike and just south of Mount Jackson called Rude’s Hill.
With nowhere near enough men to attack Banks, but with free time suddenly on his hands, Jackson turned his attention to other things, such as reorganizing his army, which was still woefully short of supplies, weapons, and other equipment. While there he was confronted with a revolt of two hundred militiamen in Rockingham County, who had fortified themselves in the mountains and vowed to fight the new draft. Jackson put the mutiny down with characteristic grim efficiency. He sent seven regiments of infantry accompanied by cavalry and artillery—more than three thousand men—who shelled the mutineers into submission. They were all arrested, briefly jailed, then placed back in the ranks.17 Jackson’s dispassionate, businesslike approach to such problems made him even more formidable as a disciplinarian. The men knew that it would make little or no difference to him if he had to shoot them. Duty was duty.
Meanwhile, what was holding back this twenty-thousand-man Union army, fresh from its inspiring victory at Kernstown? The answer was, primarily, Nathaniel Prentiss Banks. Like McClellan, he was a deeply cautious man, and like McClellan he had to have his men and matériel precisely right before engaging the enemy. And everything was emphatically not right in the valley. There was, to begin with, the atrocious weather, constant driving rain, freezing winds, sleet, snow, and storms that encrusted men, horses, tents, and equipment in ice and caused tall trees to topple. Supply and artillery wagons churned the meadows into a deep, slippery ooze that mired horses and men and cannons and anything that fell into it. Sometimes the mud was so deep the men could not even drill, abiding in their frozen, muck-filled tents and trying vainly in the wind and rain to keep campfires alive.18 There was the problem of supplies, too, or lack of them, Banks told the War Department. The Harpers Ferry-to-Winchester railroad was out of service; his men were on half rations. Some of them had no shoes. Banks complained bitterly, too, about the incompetence of his cavalry. Here he really did have an insurmountable problem. His men could not ride or shoot with Ashby’s troopers, who bedeviled them at every turn. The Southern horsemen destroyed bridges and culverts, waited in ambush, and fired their light artillery at the invading Yankees from around blind corners.19
But Banks could not remain in place forever. On April 17, with clearing weather, his two divisions finally lumbered forward. At 7:00 a.m. his advance regiments triumphantly entered Mount Jackson, where they found nothing but the burning supplies and equipment the rebel army had left behind. Jackson had seen them coming. By midday the Union troops were pounding, under a hot sun, uphill through the muck toward Jackson’s camp at Rude’s Hill. Banks believed that if Jackson was going to stand and fight he would do it there, on this easily defended piece of high ground a mile to the east of the valley pike with a commanding view of the plain below. At last, Banks was ready to fight. With this in mind, he drew up his full corps in the wide river bottom just south of Mount Jackson, in what soldiers on both sides remember as one of the more striking military displays of the day.20 His infantry formed battle lines, as though preparing for a frontal assault. By late afternoon, Banks’s skirmishers were moving forward toward the crest of the hill.
But Jackson had anticipated this, too. Instead of an entrenched army, what the exhausted Federals found was an abandoned camp with the ashes of campfires. The only evidence of Confederates were the few stray shells tossed at them by Ashby’s vanishing rear guard. Jackson had never had any intention of fighting at Rude’s Hill. Indeed, he was happy to let Banks have Mount Jackson, and a lot more of the valley as well. An hour or two before, anticipating the Federal advance, he had put his army back on the turnpike heading south, once again staying just out of Banks’s range. Jackson, who knew he could move faster than his enemy, did not seem especially worried. He sent everything he did not need on to Staunton, then bivouacked for the night about twelve miles north of Harrisonburg. The next day he moved off the valley pike and headed east under the shadow of the southern end of Massanutten Mountain, through the tiny towns of McGaheysville and Conrad’s Store (now Elkton) and onward through the persistent mud to a smaller declivity within the Luray Valley known as Elk Run Valley.21
There, on April 19, his army made camp. None of his officers had even a vague idea of what he had in mind. Most of the men thought he was simply running away and that they would soon be driven ignominiously from the valley, where many of them lived. Such, they might have reasoned, were the mathematics of war. But somehow, in this bizarre, unwinnable endgame, Jackson had managed to find a superb little sanctuary. Elk Run Valley butted up against the towering Blue Ridge, which meant that Jackson’s flanks were anchored in dense, steep, pathless forests. In his front was the swollen-to-bursting South Fork of the Shenandoah, a far more formidable river than the lazier North Fork.22 And behind him he had a reliable escape hatch: a well-maintained road that led up and over the Blue Ridge and out of the valley at Swift Run Gap. Not only was Banks unlikely to attack him there with the force he had, but Jackson was poised, if Banks made a run at Staunton, to hit him from behind.
Now, again, something remarkable happened. Banks, his rickety supply lines lengthening, his worries mounting over the inadequacy of his cavalry, stopped pursuing Jackson. He remained at New Market for five days, then inched cautiously southward to the town of Harrisonburg, where he came to a full stop. This time he had a far more plausible reason for cutting off pursuit. On April 19 he had presented the War Department with the remarkable news that Jackson had left the valley. The Confederate general had disappeared, as though with a blinding flash of light, into the mist-shrouded ranges of the Blue Ridge. On April 20 Banks certified it. “The flight of Jackson from this valley, by way of the mountains, from Harrisonburg toward Stanardsville and Orange Court-house, on Gordonsville, is confirmed this morning by our scouts and prisoners.” This was wholly untrue. Jackson was sitting in his pocket valley in the far eastern part of the larger Shenandoah Valley, less than twenty miles from the desk in Harrisonburg where Banks was writing his dispatches.
What accounted for Banks’s blindness? It almost certainly had to do with the ineptness of his cavalry, which was not talented or brave enough to penetrate the brilliant Ashby’s screens. It also had to do with Banks’s desire to participate in the battle for Richmond, which was not going to happen if he was chasing Jackson’s broken and pathetic little force in the valley. Banks wanted to believe that Jackson had gone. On April 22, as though to persuade himself that it was absolutely, incontrovertibly true, he repeated that “Jackson has abandoned the Valley of Virginia permanently.” On April 24 he spoke of Jackson “at his present location near Stanardsville,” which was east of the Blue Ridge in the Piedmont country.23 Jackson, of course, hadn’t moved. Leaving t
he valley permanently, in fact, was the last thing on his mind. While Banks was assuring Stanton that Jackson was nothing to worry about, Jackson was quietly concocting a plan to drive Banks himself from the valley.
To Banks and his officers the meaning of Jackson’s departure was clear: their work was done. “There is nothing more to be done by us in the Valley,” he wrote Secretary of War Stanton on April 30, using words that he would come to regret. “Nothing this side of Strasburg requires our presence.” (North of Strasburg was the B & O Railroad, Washington’s main supply channel to the West, which would always be a matter of strategic concern.24) He added that “Jackson’s army is reduced, demoralized, on half rations.”25 Banks’s cool, self-possessed tone convinced Washington that he was right. Lincoln and Stanton already believed that he had pushed perhaps a bit too deeply into Virginia, putting too much distance between him and other Union commands.26 The result was that on May 1, Secretary of War Stanton ordered Banks to “fall back with the force under your immediate command to Strasburg.”27 More important, he also ordered Banks to detach Shields’s division and send it to General McDowell in Fredericksburg. It seemed a curious finish to a curious campaign. Early in March, Banks had swaggered into Virginia with twenty thousand men and seized Winchester. One of his divisions had beaten Jackson at Kernstown, then driven him down the valley. But there had been no follow-through. In the thirty days after Kernstown his 5th Corps had covered a mere sixty-seven miles, during which time he had failed to catch, and then had lost altogether, a small Confederate army. And now, soon, he would be turning around, retracing his steps. The campaign was all strangely inconclusive.