Rebel Yell

  What of Banks, who merely a week before had greatly outnumbered Jackson and threatened him with annihilation? That same day—May 7—he wrote Secretary of War Edwin Stanton from his camp at New Market to say, “Nothing important has occurred today.” He noted blandly that Jackson’s army, which he had characterized the day before as “broken and demoralized,” had somehow occupied Harrisonburg. It had done no such thing. But something “important” was definitely occurring, more or less right under Banks’s nose. Jackson was moving against Milroy, in such force that Milroy that same day sent an urgent plea for help. “Enemy is pressing us. . . . Must have aid,” he wrote to his immediate superior, General Robert Schenck. “Cannot Blenker’s force make a forced march, relieve you and myself? Cannot you join me? Ask Frémont to have Banks press in on the rear of Jackson.”48

  • • •

  The Battle of McDowell, as it came to be known, was a small, fierce, bloody, four-hour firefight on a steep mountain slope that ended up being more equal—and far more lethal—than either side had expected it to be. It was fought because Jackson, moving invisibly and with remarkable speed, had succeeded in intercepting a smaller Union force under General Robert Milroy that had been preparing to advance against Staunton. Because Milroy’s army was well in advance of the rest of Frémont’s other divisions, which were scattered somewhere north of Franklin, Jackson, by arriving when he did, had achieved decisive numerical superiority. That was the idea—to strike at the enemy’s weak points, prevent him from concentrating his forces. A similar plan at Kernstown had failed because of faulty intelligence. This time Jackson had taken better care to find out what he was up against.

  In the late morning of May 8, having crossed several high, rugged mountain ridges, the bulk of Jackson’s army, with General Johnson commanding the advance, ascended a long, flattened, ragged chunk of vertical land cut by steep hills and ravines known as Bull Pasture Mountain. From its crest the world seemed a simple place: below them to the west was a river, and behind the river was a small village, and spread out neatly on the valley floor, as in a giant amphitheater, were six regiments belonging to Milroy, and three to General Robert Schenck, a courtly four-term congressman from Ohio and former minister to Brazil who also happened to be one of the nation’s most accomplished poker players and would later be known as the “father of British poker.” He had just arrived that morning after a forced march triggered by Jackson’s sudden appearance in Staunton. If Jackson had harbored any doubts about Union troop strength, the sight of the Federal camps allayed them. Combined, the Union had about four thousand men.49 Johnson took his force off the main road and laid them out in long defensive lines on a steep, mile-wide spur of Bull Pasture Mountain known as Sitlington’s Hill. Jackson’s plan, already in play, was to use his superiority in numbers to move a large force of infantry and artillery by night on a flanking march around the Federal left. His engineers had already found a route that would allow them to strike the main road five miles west of McDowell. In that way he would block the Union army’s retreat, envelop it, and destroy it.

  But Milroy, as Jackson would soon learn, was no Nathaniel Banks. The gray-haired forty-six-year-old former lawyer and judge from Indiana was one of the more aggressive Union commanders in the East. He was fearless and even reckless. In the words of Robert Schenck, he was “undaunted and impetuous, though rather uncalculating.”50 He liked to fight, and wanted, more than anything else, to bring Old Testament–style retribution to the South for the sin of slavery. He wanted to attack Jackson with the full Union force but was overruled by Schenck, who nevertheless agreed to let him lead an attack that evening with a little over half their troops. They were not going for victory, just a temporary advantage. They would inflict a sharp, quick blow, and then, as Schenck put it, “retire from his front before he had recovered from the surprise of such a movement.”51 That was the idea, anyway.

  The plan was daring in the extreme, bordering on foolhardy. Both Union commanders understood that Jackson and Johnson had joined forces. Both understood that they were outnumbered, camped in an indefensible valley, and facing an entrenched Confederate force on top of a high ridge. They knew that they would have to attack straight up the side of a mountain. The one advantage they had was surprise: an attack under those conditions, and with such a desperate disadvantage, was the last thing Generals Johnson and Jackson expected. While the troops under Johnson’s command dug in on top of Sitlington’s Hill, Jackson ordered his staff to his headquarters at a local hotel for a meal and some rest.52 They were all eating, about a half mile away, when the Union attacked. (An interesting parallel occurred a month before, when, at Shiloh in Tennessee, Ulysses Grant was surprised by an early-morning Confederate assault while he was eating breakfast nine miles downriver. Like Jackson, he had not believed the enemy would attack.)

  At about 4:30 p.m. Milroy, having received an erroneous report that Jackson was moving artillery to the summit of Sitlington’s Hill—which would have been disastrous for the Union troops—gave the order to advance. Up the hill the Federals came, courageously and in good order, toward the waiting Confederates. What happened next, in textbook terms, should have been a disaster for the Union. But in the Switzerland-like topography around the small village of McDowell, there were good reasons why it was not. Mounting the hill, Milroy’s regiments, mostly Ohioans, engaged with Johnson’s battle line. At first the advantages seemed to be with the Confederates. They held the high ground, and could duck behind the crest of the hill to reload. The Federals, meanwhile, had to struggle upward over steep terrain that offered little cover. But these advantages soon vanished. Facing west, against a clear blue sky, the rebels presented neatly silhouetted targets, while the Union troops below were obscured in deepening shadow. Nor did the Confederates have artillery to take advantage of their high ground. As Jackson explained later, the terrain was too steep to drag the cannons up and, even if they managed to do that, the guns could not easily be removed and thus would be subject to capture. A final advantage was that the slope was so steep that the Confederate riflemen shot consistently high.

  But the main disadvantage was the disparity in firepower: Union regiments were mostly equipped with Springfield rifled muskets. The Confederates all had smoothbores. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the plight of the 540-man 12th Georgia Regiment, which had taken a forward position in the center of the Confederate line. Facing them was the 75th Ohio. Both sides quickly discovered the gap in firepower, which meant that, along most of the 12th Georgia’s line, soldiers had to hold their fire, while Ohio riflemen loaded and fired at will. “The Yankee scoundrels would not advance near enough,” wrote a Georgia soldier.53 The mismatch was so severe that the right side of the Confederate line had to stand fire, without returning it, for from one to two and a half hours. This problem of firepower, plus an unfortunate choice of position—a V-shaped formation dictated by a jutting piece of land that left them exposed to fire from two sides—meant that much of their regiment was simply shot to pieces. To their credit, they did not back down; some of them, having run out of ammunition, lay flat on the ground, ready to fight with bayonets. They suffered for such courage. Over the course of four hours, until darkness fell, the Georgians sustained 182 casualties—fully 40 percent of the Confederate total.54 “I felt quite small in that fight,” wrote Captain S. G. Pryor of the 12th in a letter to his wife after the battle,

  when the musket balls and cannon balls was flying around me as thick as hail and my best friends falling on both sides dead and mortally wounded Oh dear it is impossible for me to express my feelings when the fight was over & I saw what was done the tears came then free oh that I never could behold such a sight again to think of it among civilized people killing one another like beasts one would think the supreme ruler would put a stop to it.55

  Pushing their unique advantages, Milroy’s Federals struck Johnson’s brigade along the hill’s crest with unexpected fury. Suddenly it was a real fight, and it was General Johnson’s,
because Jackson had, in his words, “intrusted” him with “the management of the troops engaged.”56 Jackson’s job was to command the reserves. While Johnson slugged it out with Milroy’s attacking regiments, Jackson ordered two Virginia regiments to block the road that gave access to Sitlington’s Hill from the main highway, and, seeing how hot the fight had become, he quickly summoned reinforcements. “The engagement had now not only become general along the entire line,” wrote Jackson later, “but so intense that I ordered General Taliaferro to the support of General Johnson.”57 As one of Taliaferro’s men observed, Jackson “was evidently in a bad humor.”58 Jackson also called up the Stonewall Brigade, camped several miles in the rear.

  Thus did the Army of the Valley engage, as Taliaferro’s Virginia regiments now advanced to the center of the line. (After Johnson was wounded in the ankle, Taliaferro took over command of the battlefield.) Though the 12th Georgia continued to sustain disproportionate casualties, sheer Confederate numbers began to take a toll. As night began to fall, Milroy’s troops, exhausted and running out of ammunition, had no choice but to withdraw. Wrote Jackson, “Every attempt by front or flank movement to attain the crest of the hill, where our line was formed, was signally and effectually repulsed.”

  At 10:00 p.m., Milroy took his men off the hill. At 12:30 a.m., fully understanding how much danger they were in from the now united Confederates, Union forces silently began their full retreat, north, into the mountainous country beyond. Jackson set off the following day, May 9, in pursuit, leaving his two hundred VMI cadets in charge of prisoners and supplies and under the command of Maggie’s husband, John T. L. Preston, and his former boss, Francis H. Smith. Jackson also took care to send a team of engineers to fell trees, roll boulders, burn bridges, and otherwise block the mountain passes in the Alleghenies that might have allowed Schenck to join with Banks. The Union forces, marching well into dark each day, managed to reach Franklin on May 11. Jackson arrived a day later, having been slowed down when Schenck’s forces set the forest on fire. There he found Schenck’s and Milroy’s forces drawn up in a dominating position on a large hill. Jackson, for whom Banks, not Frémont, was the principal target, convinced of the “impracticability of capturing the defeated enemy, owing to the mountainous character of the country being favorable for a retreating army to make its escape,” decided to withdraw.59 On May 13, after the army had attended a Jackson-sponsored “divine service” to thank God for their victory, Jackson put his army back on the road to the valley. The goals: unite with Ewell and destroy Banks.

  In conventional military terms, the Battle of McDowell was a tactical victory for the Union, though Milroy and Schenck had fought with superior weaponry and with odd and unpredictable advantages provided by the battlefield itself. They had inflicted disproportionately large losses on the enemy, while accomplishing their purpose of saving themselves by delaying Jackson’s advance. Jackson lost 146 killed and 382 wounded, while the Federals lost 26 killed and 230 wounded. It was one of the rare examples in the war when the defending force suffered more than the attackers.

  But in all other ways the field belonged to Jackson. He had won the battle, in fact, before it had ever been fought, by his valley-encompassing sleight of hand that had allowed him to evade a Union army and to place his own force in the field against a much smaller one. Jackson’s great brilliance was maneuver—the chess-like movement of an army to the right place at just the right time—and McDowell was the most prominent early example of this. Union forces could surprise him, yes, and hit him, but they could never have held the town for more than a few hours. Milroy and Schenck were not only forced into a headlong retreat but had to flee fully forty miles up the valley of the South Fork of the Potomac, putting enormous distance between Union forces and Staunton and thus fulfilling Jackson’s primary goal. Protecting Staunton had been his original idea. He had also put distance between the individual armies of Banks and Frémont. And by fooling Banks into thinking he had left the valley, he had gotten the additional benefit of Banks’s ordered withdrawal from Harrisonburg. On May 1, Staunton and the precious Virginia Central Railroad had been threatened by two Union armies. Now, a week later, those threats were gone.

  But the real value of McDowell was inspirational. Jackson’s simple message on May 9, which he rewrote three times, shortening it from half a page to a single sentence—“God blessed our arms with victory at McDowell yesterday”—landed in Richmond with the force of a punch.60 Nobody had ever heard of McDowell, and nobody could tell how decisive a win it was, or exactly what was at stake, but here, at last, was a Confederate victory. In a season that had seen disaster after disaster—including Forts Henry and Donelson, Roanoke Island, Port Royal, Shiloh, and New Orleans—and when the South was watching with growing despondency as McClellan’s giant army began to crawl up the peninsula toward Richmond—this was worth something. The Southern press ran with it. “Who can doubt when Jackson speaks?” asked the Lynchburg Virginian. “Like a Christian hero, as he is, he ascribes the victory to the Lord of hosts. Long live Jackson!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  HAZARDS OF COMMAND

  A little more than a year after Jackson and his bright-eyed cadets marched picturesquely down the hill at VMI and off to war, this was what it had come to: a desperately hard world of death and dismemberment and terrible sickness that killed you as surely as bullets, and marches through hip-deep, ice-encrusted mud into camps that were nothing more than fetid pools of muck. The victory at McDowell had been purchased with much blood and sweat: Jackson’s men had marched great distances and traversed two mountain ranges, all without the faintest idea of where they were going or why. They had fought a battle that left the corpses of their close friends strewn on a mountainside and had returned, with scarcely a break, to their interminable marches. War, in Stonewall Jackson’s army, was never going to be anything but a hard and desperate thing. There was no stasis, no easy living, no resting on laurels—no rest at all, in fact. Oddly, his footsore army, amid its cursing and grumbling, was starting to embrace this idea. If Jackson was not exactly likable, he was certainly a man you could follow, and in spite of his delphic refusal to share information, he was at least predictable: you were going to march fast and far and then you were going to fight, and you were lucky if you got lunch.

  This hardness and lack of ease carried into Jackson’s own role as manager of his army as it campaigned from Kernstown to McDowell and beyond. Alone in the valley, nothing came easily. Command carried with it a thousand headaches, which included the constant wrangling with the War Department and with commissaries and quartermasters over supplies, the endless petty infighting among officers, and Jackson’s constant battles with Richmond over officer promotions. He bore this burden silently. In camp he spent most of his time in his room, poring over maps and reports. “He is at times very chatty, but usually has but little to say,” wrote his mapmaker Jedediah Hotchkiss after Kernstown. “He stays to himself most of the time; eats very sparingly; does not drink tea or coffee and eats scarcely any meat.”1 And while he sometimes kept, Ahab-like, to his quarters, he pestered his staff at odd hours, too, with odd requests. Once, at midnight, came a quiet message from his office that he wanted to know the distance from Gordonsville to Orange Courthouse. Fifteen minutes later he requested the same information in writing. “For a while I was wont to wonder if the General ever slept,” wrote Henry Kyd Douglas. “But I soon found out that he slept a great deal, often at odd times.”2 For a man who was all about action and movement, he was remarkably withdrawn from the common society of his fellows, though always furiously busy. When he did speak he was, as always, stingy with his opinions about anything at all, from the weather to his fellow officers and men. He held fast to his old Christian etiquette. “I never knew a man more guarded in his speech in reference to others,” wrote Hotchkiss. “I do not remember to have ever heard him say ought in derogation of anyone, at any time.”3

  That did not mean that he did not have opinions, a
nd strong ones, about his generals and senior officers and, in particular, about the man who commanded his prized Stonewall Brigade, Brigadier General Richard Brooke Garnett. Though Jackson had outwardly professed satisfaction with the results of the Battle of Kernstown—“Time has shown that while the field is in possession of the enemy,” he had written Anna, “the most essential fruits of the battle are ours”—he remained quietly furious at Garnett for ordering the retreat. He was absolutely certain that if Garnett had not ordered the men back, the fight would have ended in darkness and stalemate.4

  Though it is not precisely clear why, Jackson had never liked Garnett, a Tidewater aristocrat who had graduated five years before him at West Point. (A story circulated through the frontier army that Garnett had left behind a bastard son by his fifteen-year-old Sioux mistress; perhaps Jackson heard it.) Handsome, likable, and popular with his men, Garnett had spent twenty years in the army, mostly on the western frontier. Jackson had complained to Secretary of War Judah Benjamin as early as December 1861 that Garnett lacked discipline, and had reprimanded his brigadier for allowing his exhausted, chilblained brigade to fall out—in 18-degree weather—to eat a meal.5 To Jackson, Garnett’s actions at Kernstown merely fulfilled his own, long-held suspicions. Though Jackson’s religious feelings were every bit as fervent in wartime as they had been in Lexington—he prayed many times daily; distributed religious tracts; diligently organized worship services and imported preachers to preside over them—there was not a shred of Christian forgiveness in what he did next.