Rebel Yell

  What had happened to cloud Jackson’s mind? His staff was convinced that he was a victim of complete physical exhaustion. He was at least as tired as his men, many of whom had simply dropped by the roadside. He was often up at what he euphemistically called “early dawn”—what we would call the middle of the night—working on the endless details of command, many of which he insisted on keeping track of himself. Colonel Samuel Fulkerson wrote that his commander “is remarkable for his energy and industry . . . and sleeps very little. Often while near the enemy, and while everybody except the guards are asleep, he is on his horse and gone, nobody knows where.”6

  He thus took the fate of the entire army on his shoulders, its life and death, its hard marches and whatever food and clothing he could secure to keep it going. All of this cost him rest. There is little evidence that he had had a single full night’s sleep since the valley campaign began. On many nights the wet weather precluded sleep at all. On June 4, Jackson’s tent was the victim of a small flash flood in the middle of the night that carried away his hat and boots. He tried to sleep anyway, even though the tent was still full of water. The next morning, according to Douglas, it was still full of “various small articles of apparel and furniture . . . floating about like little boats.”7 Such was life on the march that spring. Jackson was so weary that he sometimes fell asleep fully clothed, even wearing his sword and boots. Sandie Pendleton, who was probably closer to his commander than any of his aides, thought that in the first week of June “General Jackson was completely broken down.”8

  The consequences of Jackson’s strange lassitude were not long in coming. At about 8:30 a.m. on the dry, mild morning of June 8, approximately 150 cavalry with four guns under the command of Colonel Samuel Carroll forded the South River, galloped into Port Republic, and created an astounding amount of havoc in a short time, capturing three staff officers and nearly taking Jackson himself, who escaped only by a mad gallop the length of the main street and over the North River bridge.9 The immediate result of the assault was that Carroll’s raiders suddenly found themselves in possession of that bridge. It was Jackson’s worst nightmare. Carroll had only to burn the bridge and Jackson and his army would be cut off from his supply trains and his escape routes. Frémont would have him cornered against the rampaging North River.

  And then something miraculous happened. Carroll, who might have changed the war and made himself a hero by burning the bridge, was actually determined to hold it. That was because his superior, Major General James Shields, had explicitly ordered him, in writing, to do so.10 It was one of the campaign’s greatest tactical mistakes, and it still is not clear how Shields could have been so foolish. In keeping with his character—he was a chronic liar—Shields later blamed it all on Carroll, who by “some unaccountable misapprehension” had failed to burn the bridge. Shields, in reality, had not been able to make up his mind and had given at least one set of conflicting orders, though his final order was clear enough: “Hold it at all hazards.”11 Carroll did, until he and the rest of his little group—plus some infantry that had remained in the rear—were chased off by a determined Jackson backed by two regiments and artillery.

  Still, why would Shields have ordered Carroll to, as Union general Nathan Kimball later put it, “hold the only bridge over which Jackson could possibly escape from Frémont”?12 The real reason may have been petty jealousy, which would also have been in keeping with Shields’s deeply deficient character. According to an Ohio soldier, on the previous day Shields had said in a voice “loud and rather sarcastic, ‘Frémont thinks he is going to raise hell up there, and I’ll show him.’ ” The idea was that Frémont wanted the bridge burned to trap Jackson; Shields wanted to deny Frémont that glory. Kimball, generally a reliable source, later made the same accusation.13

  As for Jackson’s own tactical lapses, there was another reason for his sudden blindness that morning: Turner Ashby, his brilliant, erratic cavalry chief, was dead, killed in a skirmish with Union cavalry on June 6. (His death underscored how dangerous life was for Civil War officers, who had a 50 percent greater chance of being killed than privates.14) Though he had failed to execute Jackson’s orders at half a dozen key moments—most egregiously at Winchester—Ashby had closed out his life with a rush of redemptive glory.15 During Jackson’s retreat south in June, he had been his old brilliant self, launching daring attacks that slowed Frémont’s army, at one point even rallying straggling infantry to make a successful counterattack. For all his flaws, he was supremely brave, capable of feats of endurance in the saddle that amazed his contemporaries, and uncannily aware of where the enemy was. Such devotion to duty had taken its toll on him, as it had on Jackson. At the time of his death he was, in the description of a contemporary, so thin he looked emaciated. With his dark skin; long, dark beard; and long hair he presented a wild sight. “He told me that he had been under fire for sixty consecutive days, but he found no inconvenience from it,” wrote the soldier. In place of meals, Ashby said, “I eat a few apples, drink some spring water, and draw up my swordbelt a hole or two tighter, and I’m all right. It’s just as good as eating.’ ”16 He had the blind loyalty of his men, but in his absence the cavalry quickly lost whatever meager discipline it had, and bore at least some of the blame for Carroll’s freakish success that morning at Port Republic. Still, in his official report, Jackson praised Ashby as he had never praised anyone else:

  The close relation which General Ashby bore to my command for most of the previous twelve months will justify me in saying that as a partisan officer I never knew his superior; his daring was proverbial; his powers of endurance almost incredible; his tone of character heroic, and his sagacity almost intuitive in divining the purposes and movements of the enemy.17

  But on the morning of Sunday, June 8, there was no time to mourn the fallen hero. From the north came the distant roll of artillery: Frémont’s big guns were opening up on Ewell. The Battle of Cross Keys had begun.

  • • •

  Frémont should have won the battle quickly. He had a two-to-one numerical advantage, and better than that in artillery. If he had thrown his entire force directly at Ewell’s line, which was set up on a long ridge, he would very likely have broken it. But with Frémont nothing was ever that simple. He was facing not just Stonewall Jackson now but also the myth of Stonewall Jackson, and the myth told him and his officers that they were facing twenty thousand battle-hardened Confederate troops instead of the five-thousand-plus effectives in front of them. At Frémont’s council of war he and his brigade commanders worried about this terrible numerical disadvantage and bemoaned the poor condition of their ragged, starved-out, exhausted army. A hundred and fifty years later, you can almost hear the defeatism. One thinks of the astonishing moral distance between their outlook and that of the dead Ashby, a man who slept little, often went hungry, and fought bravely and almost continuously without complaint.

  After some inconclusive skirmishing, the main battle began, as most of these battles seemed to, with long-range artillery. And while cannons were very satisfying to shoot, watch, and listen to, they often did little significant tactical damage. For a cautious warrior such as Frémont, this probably seemed like a good way to fight without getting his hands dirty. (George McClellan, another hesitant fighter, loved nothing better than the idea of bringing up his big guns in front of Richmond and pounding the city into submission from afar.) The cannonade began at Cross Keys at 10:30 a.m., roared for six full hours, and consisted mostly of shooting at other batteries. An enormous amount of ordnance was used up in the process. A single Union battery shot six hundred rounds that day, meaning one round per cannon every three minutes. In spite of this, there is little evidence that much damage was done. Another Union battery stood on the front lines for four hours of this shelling and lost only one man killed, one wounded.18

  The battle on the ground, on the other hand, clearly belonged to the Confederates. It was conducted entirely by Richard Ewell, barking his profane orders in his
squawky voice from his headquarters, which, unlike that of Frémont, was up on the field of battle near his artillery. Jackson, wary of the arrival of the rest of Shields’s army, remained four miles south, in Port Republic. Rebel soldiers under Brigadier General Isaac Trimble tore into the Union left, driving three brigades back a full mile. In the center, Brigadier General Robert Milroy, who had fought Jackson so well at McDowell and who was impatient with Frémont’s passive battle management, launched a two-thousand-man assault in midafternoon on his own initiative, only to see his men cut to pieces by Virginians in the woods. There was plenty of hardnosed fighting on both sides, too, men standing in the open and loading and firing and stepping or inching forward or backward depending on the flow of the battle.

  Why a particular regiment of soldiers advanced or retreated at this and other battles in the Civil War is still something of a mystery. At bottom, fighting was about the ability to hurl enough lead at a concentrated group of soldiers so that, seeing enough of their friends go down, they became convinced that they had to withdraw. Often it was just that simple. At other times the effects of musket fire were almost imperceptible, as much the result of a soldier’s belief in his chances of survival as of the actual danger he faced. Belief counted for a lot—in one’s general, in the captain in front of you brandishing his gleaming sword, in the bravery of one’s fellow soldiers, in the idea of winning itself. A rout might start with men taking small steps backward while reloading, then taking slightly larger steps backward while their enemy, two hundred or three hundred yards away, began to move very slightly forward. Soon the retreating line would begin to lose individual soldiers, then groups of them, and finally the entire line would turn and run—all without ever experiencing a single definitive moment when the battle turned.19 Sometimes regimental and brigade commanders simply became lost in the thick clouds of gunpowder smoke. Blinded and feeling isolated, and with the whoops and shouts of the enemy newly magnified in their ears, they might also be inclined to retreat. Though it is impossible to measure the effect of Jackson’s growing reputation as a winner on his men, it was undoubtedly strong.

  By early evening, when Frémont ordered his troops to withdraw from their advance positions under cover of his artillery, it was clear that Ewell had gotten the better of him. He now occupied the ground from which Frémont had launched his first attack. The final tally of casualties—288 for the Confederates and 684 for the Federals—suggests the level of Confederate dominance. Still, Frémont’s force was bloodied but not beaten; he would be able to fight the next day.

  Jackson, meanwhile, spent most of the day in Port Republic, fully expecting Shields to follow up on Carroll’s attack. Jackson spent time placing artillery on the bluffs that overlooked the village—enough to be sure that he could stop Shields if he tried another attack across the South River. When one of his officers pointed out this possibility to him, he replied, waving his hand toward his commanding artillery positions, “No, sir! No! He cannot do it! I should tear him to pieces!”20

  The news of Ewell’s victory at Cross Keys thrilled Jackson’s men. They had been attacked by Frémont’s full army, had struck a hard blow in return, and had driven him back. More important, as far as Jackson’s staff was concerned, was the meaning of the victory. With Frémont checked and Shields not yet in evidence, they all believed that Jackson would now do the supremely logical thing: slip out under cover of darkness, take his exhausted army on the road for Brown’s Gap, and call an end to the long campaign. They had underestimated their commander once again. That evening he amazed them all by ordering his quartermaster, John Harman, to bring up the supply wagons, roll them across the North River bridge, and give the troops rations to cook. They were going to stay and fight. Among his staff members there was a good deal of eye-rolling and looks exchanged. “The General seemed to like traps,” wrote Henry Kyd Douglas, “and, at any rate, was not yet satisfied with the risks he had run and the blows he had inflicted. . . . We were getting used to this kind of aberration, but this did seem rather an extra piece of temerity.”21 And so the huge supply train rumbled forward; campfires were lit; and, likely to the astonishment of Shields and Frémont, no Confederates showed any signs of leaving Port Republic.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  SLAUGHTER IN A SMALL PLACE

  Any Union officer who was surprised by the idea that Jackson was not slipping quietly away in darkness would have been shocked to learn of his actual plans. He had been thinking about what he would do as he paced the high ground around Port Republic and listened to the thud of artillery from Cross Keys. He had concluded that, as he put it later, “as no movement was made by General Shields to renew the action that day, I determined to take the initiative and attack him the following morning.”1 And that was only the first phase of an extraordinary plan—some might have called it purely crazy—to destroy both Federal armies. It may or may not have been the scheme of a man who was in the middle of a physical breakdown. It was certainly, as Douglas had observed, a lot of risk even for Jackson to take, which was saying something. The idea was to move the main body of his army, including Ewell, by night to Port Republic, cross the South River, and attack and defeat Shields’s two brigades in the early morning. Then—having left a reinforced brigade under Brigadier General Isaac Trimble to hold off Frémont—Jackson would recross both the South River and the North River, march to Cross Keys, and defeat that Union army as well, this time once and for all. All before early afternoon.2 If anything went wrong, the cavalry was to hold the road to Brown’s Gap open for escape.

  The plan was Beauregard-like in its wild optimism. Indeed, Jackson’s staff officers were all amazed at their commander’s lack of anxiety. The combative Ewell, who bridled at the timetable for marching from Cross Keys to Port Republic with his tired infantry, was nonetheless by now a full believer in his eccentric commander. Late that night he was sitting in front of his tent in conversation with new cavalry chief Tom Munford—the ranking cadet at VMI when Jackson first arrived and one of Jackson’s first acquaintances there—when the bald-pated Ewell said, in his fidgety, nervous way, “Look here, Munford, do you remember my conversation with you at Conrad’s Store when I called this old man an old woman? Well, I take it all back! I will never prejudge another man. Jackson’s no fool; he knows how to keep his own counsel and does curious things, but he has a method to his madness.”3

  That method was sorely tested on the morning of June 9. What was supposed to be a relatively simple task—getting the army across the South River—turned out to be a logistical nightmare. Engineers had worked through the night to build a makeshift bridge by placing wagons in the riverbed and then laying wooden planks on top of them. But the bridge was made poorly; there were gaps in the planks, and the wagons were of different heights. Soldiers began crossing in single file, and many fell off into the fast-moving, chest-high water. Many more had to wade the river in thick fog, stumbling and floating off downstream in the process. Jackson had lost his advantage almost before he started.

  But he was so fatigued and impatient that instead of waiting for his five full brigades—some eight thousand men in total—he marched boldly up the small river valley with only four of the Stonewall Brigade’s five regiments (the Stonewall) and two batteries under the command of Charles S. Winder. Facing him were two Federal brigades under Brigadier General Erastus B. Tyler, a wealthy Ohio fur merchant and one of the tougher Union fighters in the valley, and Colonel Samuel Carroll, who had made the daring raid that almost netted Jackson. Shields, who should have been with them, was stuck in Luray, forty miles north, preparing to fight yet another ghostly apparition of General James Longstreet. Though he repeatedly assured Tyler and Carroll that “I will be with you soon,” he would never show up.

  But his subordinates’ defensive position was superb. Their right flank was anchored on the rampaging South Fork. Their left, a mile away across open wheatfields, was anchored on a lovely, elevated, mountain-laurel-covered shoulder that jutted out from th
e foothills of the Blue Ridge. On that shoulder was a flat piece of ground where charcoal had been made, known as the Coaling. The cannons that Tyler had placed there commanded the entire river plain below.

  By attacking with such a small force, Jackson had made a mistake. Perhaps he was still bone-weary and not thinking clearly. He had risen at 3:00 a.m. that day after another cruelly short night. But by failing to wait for his main force—including most of Ewell’s army—he was feeding his troops into slaughter. It was not long in coming. The worst of it was at the hands of the Federal gunners on the Coaling, spraying canister at rebel troops in the shelterless fields and at the base of the shoulder. The Confederates had their hands full with the Union infantry, too, which outnumbered them. Winder’s men fought hard, but the replacements they desperately needed were mired for the moment in a thick tangle of wagons, men, and horses back at the South River. At about 8:30 a.m. Winder and three regiments mounted a heroic charge against twice their number, surging forward through the flat farmlands. They were soon under murderous fire. One of those regiments, the 7th Louisiana (the lead unit of Brigadier General Richard Taylor’s brigade), would lose half its men.

  While the battle raged and the Confederate line shuddered along its length, Jackson, who now understood that just about everything was going wrong, made two critical moves. He sent orders to Isaac Trimble to abandon Cross Keys as quickly as possible, cross the North River bridge, burn it down, and join the rest of the army east of Port Republic. Frémont, stuck on the other side of the river, would be unable to follow. Jackson, his light eyes blazing with the glow of battle—the men were beginning to call him “Old Blue Light”—also grabbed his mapmaker, Jed Hotchkiss, and ordered him to gather the rest of Taylor’s 1,700 Louisianans, who had just appeared on the field, and, in his words, “take that battery.”4 By that he meant those Federal guns on the Coaling that were tearing his men apart.