In preparation for what he believed might be the last great battle of the war, the Federal commander had reorganized his army while it was still on the march toward the Chickahominy crossings. Shuffling and reconsolidating while in motion, he created two new corps, one under Fitz-John Porter, the other under Franklin—both of them original pro-McClellan brigadiers—which gave him five corps in all, each with two three-brigade divisions. The order of battle, as reported in mid-May:
gave him a tightly knit yet highly flexible fighting force of 102,236 front-line soldiers and 300 guns. Another 5000 extra-duty men, including cooks and teamsters, laborers and suchlike, were with the advance, while 21,000 more had been left at various points along the road from Fort Monroe, sick or absent without leave or on garrison duty, to give him an over-all total of 128,864.
McClellan did not consider this a man too many. In fact he was convinced it was not enough. Pinkerton was at work again, questioning prisoners and contrabands and totting up figures he received from his operatives beyond the enemy lines. A month ago, in front of Yorktown, he had said that the Confederates were issuing 119,000 daily rations. Presently this grew to 180,000, reported along with a warning that the figure was probably low, since 200 separate regiments of southern infantry had already been identified on the Peninsula, plus assorted battalions of artillery, cavalry, and combat engineers. One corps commander wrote in his journal that 240,000 rebels were concentrated in front of the northern army. McClellan never believed the figure was quite that high, but he clearly believed it might be. Complaining to the War Department on May 10 that he himself could put barely 70,000 on the firing line, he continued to plead for more: “If I am not reinforced, it is probable that I will be obliged to fight nearly double my numbers, strongly intrenched.”
Whatever their strength, the Confederates kept falling back and McClellan continued to follow. By May 15 he had advanced his base another fifteen miles along the railroad, from West Point to the head of navigation on the Pamunkey, which gave him both water and rail facilities for bringing supplies forward. Here was a large southern mansion called the White House, where the nation’s first President had courted the Widow Custis, and there was a note attached to the front door. “Northern soldiers who profess to reverence Washington,” it read, “forbear to desecrate the home of his first married life, the property of his wife, now owned by her descendants. A Grand-daughter of Mrs Washington.” The author of the note was Mrs R. E. Lee. She had already lost one home in the path of war—Arlington, near Alexandria—and McClellan respected her wishes in regard to this one. He pitched his headquarters tents in the yard and set up a permanent supply dump at the landing, but he stationed guards around the house itself to keep out prowlers and souvenir-hunters, and provided an escort with a flag of truce to see the lady through the lines to join her husband.
Glad of this chance to show that the practice of chivalry was not restricted to soldiers dressed in gray, he then enjoyed a brief sojourn among the relics. Even though the house itself was a reconstruction, the sensation of being on the site where Washington had slept and eaten and taken his ease gave the youthful commander a feeling of being borne up and on by the stream of history; he hoped, he said, “that I might serve my country as well as he did.” Riding toward the front on May 16, he came to old St Peter’s Church, where Washington was married. Here too he stopped, dismounted, and went in. That night he wrote his wife: “As I happened to be there alone for a few minutes, I could not help kneeling at the chancel and praying.”
What followed next day was enough to convince an agnostic of the efficacy of prayer. Officially and out of the blue, he heard from Stanton that McDowell was being reinforced by a division already on its way from Banks in the Shenandoah Valley. As soon as it got there, McClellan was told, McDowell would move south to join him in front of Richmond with an additional 40,000 men.
This was the one calamity beyond all others Lee had been seeking for means to avoid. McClellan was a hovering threat—his frontline troops could hear the clocks of Richmond strike the hours—but at least Johnston stood in his path; whereas at present there was nothing between McDowell and Richmond that he could not brush aside with an almost careless gesture, and if Johnston sidled to block him too, the capital’s defenses would be stretched beyond the snapping point. The fall of the city would follow as surely as nightfall followed sunset of the day McDowell got there.
For possible deliverance, Lee looked north. Numerically the odds were even longer in Northern Virginia than they were on the Peninsula—three-to-two against Johnston, three-to-one against the troops he had left behind—but Johnston was wedged tight in coffin corner, while northward there was still room for maneuver. If anything, there was too much room. A brigade of 2500 under Brigadier General Charles Field—another of Sidney Johnston’s ubiquitous former U.S. Cavalry lieutenants—had been left on the Rappahannock to watch McDowell. Jackson’s command, grown by now to about 6000, opposed Banks in the Valley. Ewell’s 8500 were posted at Gordonsville, equidistant from both, instructed to be ready to march in support of whichever needed him worse. Beyond Jackson, Edward Johnson with 2800 was observing Frémont’s Allegheny preparations. McDowell, with Franklin detached, had 30,000; Banks had 21,000; Frémont had 17,000 and more on the way. Numerically, then—with 68,000 Federals distributed along a perimeter guarded by just under 20,000 Confederates—the outlook was as gloomy there as elsewhere, even gloomier. But Lee saw possibilities through the gloom. If the two largest southern commands, under Jackson and Ewell, could be combined, they might be able to hit one of the three opposing forces hard enough to alarm the Union high command into delaying the advance of all the rest: including McDowell. That is, Lee would stop McDowell not by striking him—he was too strong—but by striking Banks or Frémont, who would call on him for help.
Daring as the conception was, a great deal more than daring would be needed before it could be translated into action. Field, for instance, would have to be reinforced. To leave him where he was, without support from Ewell, would be to invite McDowell to smother him. But when Lee appealed to Johnston to spare the men from the Yorktown intrenchments, Johnston would not hear of it. “To detach troops from this position would be ruin to those left,” he said. Once more Lee had to improvise, robbing Peter to pay Paul, and this he did. Burnside’s aggressiveness having subsided, he took three brigades from North and South Carolina, 10,000 men in all, and sent them up to Fredericksburg under Brigadier General J. R. Anderson, who combined them with Field’s brigade and assumed command by seniority. Ewell could now slide westward toward the Blue Ridge and conjunction with Jackson.
They were a strange pair: so strange, indeed, that perhaps the most daring thing about Lee’s plan was that he was willing to trust it to these two to carry out. Dick Ewell was an eccentric, a queer-looking forty-five-year-old bachelor who spoke with a sort of twittering lisp and subsisted on a diet of cracked wheat to palliate the tortures of dyspepsia. With his sharp nose and bald-domed head, which he frequently let droop far toward one shoulder, he reminded many people of a bird—an eagle, some said; others said a woodcock. He was a West Pointer, but a generation of frontier duty, he declared, had taught him all about handling fifty dragoons and driven all other knowledge from his mind. So far, his only appreciable service in the war had been at the Battle of Manassas, where he crossed and recrossed Bull Run, far on the right, and never came to grips with the enemy at all. He had a habit of interjecting odd remarks into everyday conversations: as for instance, “Now why do you suppose President Davis made me a major general anyway?”
Stonewall seemed about as bad. The fame he had won along with his nickname at Manassas had been tarnished by last winter’s fruitless Romney expedition, which resulted in much friction with the War Department, as well as by the bloody repulse he had blundered into recently at Kernstown. His abrupt cashiering of Garnett after that fight had caused his officers to think of him distastefully, and quite accurately, as a man who would be quick to
throw the book at a subordinate who stepped or wandered out of line. Like Ewell, who was three months his junior in rank and seven years his senior in age, he had adopted a peculiar diet to ease the pains of dyspepsia: raspberries and plain bread and milk, supplemented by lemons—many lemons—though he would take no seasoning in his food: pepper made his left leg ache, he said. Nor was his appearance reassuring. His uniform was a single-breasted threadbare coat he had worn in the Mexican War, a rusty V.M.I. cadet cap, which he wore with the broken visor pulled well down over his weary-looking eyes, and an outsized pair of flop-top cavalry boots. A religious fanatic, he sometimes interrupted his soldiers at their poker and chuckaluck games by strolling through camp to hand out Sunday School pamphlets. They did not object to this so much, however, as they did to the possible truth of rumors that he imagined himself a southern Joshua and in combat got so carried away by the notion that he lost his mental balance. They feared it might be so with him, for they had seen his pale blue eyes take on a wild unearthly glitter in the gunsmoke; Old Blue Light, they called him. And there was substance for their fears. Just now he was writing his wife that he hoped to make his Valley command “an army of the living God as well as of its country.”
Such as they were, they were all Lee had—and strictly speaking he did not even have them. Both were still a part of Johnston’s army, subject to Johnston’s orders, and Johnston was extremely touchy about out-of-channels interference. Whatever was to be done in Northern Virginia would have to be done with his coöperation, or anyhow his acquiescence, which he seemed likely to withhold in the case of a proposal that violated, as this one did, his cherished principles of “concentration.” On the other hand, Lee had Davis to sustain him. Unlike Lincoln, who did not count a soldier as part of the Washington defenses unless he could ride out and touch him in the course of an afternoon’s round-trip carriage drive from the White House, Davis could see that a man a hundred miles away might do more to relieve the pressure, or stave off a threat, than if he stood on the capital ramparts. With the President’s approval, Lee went ahead, trusting that he and Johnston would not issue conflicting orders—or, in Lee’s case, suggestions—to the generals out in the Valley.
April 21 he wrote to Jackson, outlining the situation at Richmond and emphasizing the need for holding McDowell on the Rappahannock line. The key force, as he saw it, was Ewell’s, which could be used in one of three ways: either by leaving it where it was, or by reinforcing Field—Anderson was still on the way—or by reinforcing Jackson. Lee preferred the latter, and he was writing to find out whether Stonewall thought it practicable: “If you can use General Ewell’s division in an attack on General Banks, and to drive him back, it will prove a great relief to the pressure on Fredericksburg.” A letter went to Ewell the same day, stressing the necessity for “a speedy blow.” Four days later this emphasis on the necessity for speed was added in another note to Jackson: “The blow, wherever struck, must, to be successful, be sudden and heavy. The troops used must be efficient and light.”
Jackson replied that he did indeed think an attack was practicable, either against Banks, who had advanced to Harrisonburg, or against Frémont’s lead division, which was threatening Edward Johnson near the village of McDowell, west of Staunton. In fact, now that Ewell was at hand, Jackson had formulated three alternate plans of attack: 1) to reinforce Johnson for a sudden lunge at Frémont, leaving Ewell to watch Banks; 2) to combine with Ewell for a frontal assault on Banks; or 3) to march far down the Valley and strike Banks’s rear by swinging around the north end of Massanutton Mountain. For the present, he wrote, he preferred the first; “for, if successful, I would afterward only have Banks to contend with, and in doing this would be reinforced by General Edward Johnson.”
That was the last Lee heard from Stonewall for a while, though on May Day Ewell informed him, in a postscript to a report: “He moves toward Staunton and I take his position.” Plan One was in the course of execution. Ten days later the silence was broken by a wire from Jackson himself. Routed through Staunton, it was dated the 9th: “God blessed our arms with victory at McDowell yesterday.”
In normal times the dispatch would have been received with an exultation to match the sender’s, but this was the day the Federals took Norfolk, forcing the Virginia’s destruction, and Pensacola toppled. down on the Gulf. From Mississippi came news that Farragut had followed his occupation of New Orleans by forcing the upriver surrender of Baton Rouge and Natchez, while Halleck’s ponderous southward advance inched closer and closer to Corinth. Worse still, from Richmond’s point of view, Johnston’s army was crossing the Chickahominy, near the end of its muddy retreat up the Peninsula. The government archives were being loaded onto canal boats for shipment to Lynchburg, in anticipation of the fall of the capital; the Treasury’s gold reserve was packed aboard a special train with a full head of steam kept in its boiler, ready to whisk it out of the city ahead of the Yankees. President Davis had sent his wife and children to North Carolina, and there was talk that he and the cabinet were soon to follow. The soldiers seemed disheartened by their long retreat, and their general had submitted his resignation in a fit of pique because men under his command on the south side of the James had been ordered about by Lee. “My authority does not extend beyond the troops immediately around me,” Johnston wrote. “I request therefore to be relieved of a merely nominal geographical command.”
Lee managed to calm Johnston down—“suage him” was the term he generally employed in such cases—but the flare-up seemed likely to occur again whenever the general thought he detected signs of circumvention; which he well might do if he looked out toward the Valley. It was a testy business at best. By now, too, details of Jackson’s “victory at McDowell” had shown it to be less spectacular than the brief dispatch had indicated. As at Kernstown, more Confederates than Federals had fallen. In fact, except that the outnumbered enemy had retreated, it hardly seemed a victory at all. Meanwhile, alarming news had come from Ewell: Banks was moving northward down the Valley toward the Manassas Gap Railroad, which could speed his army eastward to reinforce McDowell or McClellan. Apparently Jackson’s strategy had soured. His attack on Frémont’s van seemed to have had an effect quite opposite from the one he had intended.
Lee did not despair. On May 16, the day after the repulse of the Union gunboats on the James—perhaps as McClellan knelt in prayer at the chancel of St Peter’s—he wrote to Stonewall, urging an immediate attack: “Whatever may be Banks’ intention, it is very desirable to prevent him from going either to Fredericksburg or the Peninsula.… A successful blow struck at him would delay, if it does not prevent, his moving to either place.” A closing sentence opened vistas; Banks was not the only high-ranking Federal the Valley blow was aimed at. “Whatever movement you make against Banks do it speedily, and if successful drive him back toward the Potomac, and create the impression, as far as practicable, that you design threatening that line.”
2
McDowell, the sharp but limited engagement fought twenty-five miles beyond Staunton on May 8, was in the nature of a prologue to the drama about to be performed in the Shenandoah Valley. Jackson at any rate thought of it as such, and though, like a good actor, he gave it his best effort, all through it he was looking forward to the larger action whose cast and properties—Ewell and Banks, with their two armies, and the mountains and rivers with their gaps and bridges—were already in position, awaiting the entrance of the star who would give them their cues and put them to use. In the wings there were supernumeraries, some of whom did not yet know that they were to be called on stage: McDowell, for example, who by coincidence shared his surname with the furious little battle that served as prologue and signaled the raising of the curtain.
As such it held the seeds of much that followed, and this was especially true of the manner in which Stonewall put his army in motion to reinforce Edward Johnson for the attack on Frémont’s van. Staunton lay to the southwest, with Johnson west of there; but Jackson marched southea
st, toward Richmond, so that his men, along with whatever Federal scouts and spies might be observing, thought they were on the way to help Joe Johnston stop McClellan. Leaving his cavalry with Ewell, who moved in through Swift Run Gap to take over the job of watching Banks while he was gone, the Valley commander took his 5000 infantry through Brown’s Gap, then—apparently in rehearsal for the boggy work awaiting them on the Peninsula—exposed them to a three-day nightmare of floundering through eighteen miles of ankle-deep mud before they struck the Virginia Central Railroad, ten miles short of Charlottesville, and boarded a long string of boxcars, double-headed for speed with two locomotives. When the train jerked into motion the men cheered; for it headed not east, toward Richmond, but west toward Staunton. Sunday, May 4, they got there—to the delight of the townspeople, who had thought they were being left at the mercy of Frémont, whose 3500-man advance under Brigadier General Robert Milroy was already pressing Johnson back. In compensation for the violated Sabbath, Jackson gave his men two days’ rest, acquired a new uniform—it was homespun and ill-fitting, but at least it was regulation gray—then marched westward to combine with Johnson for a surprise attack that would outnumber the enemy better than two to one.
Numerically it did not work out that way; nor was it a surprise. Despite Stonewall’s roundabout approach and careful picketing of the roads, Federal scouts and spies had informed Milroy of the odds he faced. He fell back to the village of McDowell—a sort of miniature Harpers Ferry, surrounded by heights—and called for help from his fellow brigadier, Robert Schenck, thirty-four miles away at Franklin. Schenck got started before midday of May 7, made a driving all-night march with 1500 men, and arrived next morning, just as Jackson was assembling his 8000 for a downhill charge against Milroy, who was in position on the outskirts of McDowell, firing gamely with the trails of his guns set in trenches to elevate the tubes. Reinforced to 5000, he decided to attack before the Confederates got their artillery on the heights. It was done with spirit, catching Jackson off balance and rocking him on his heels. But Milroy fell back on the town, lacking the strength for anything more than one hard punch, and retreated toward Franklin under cover of darkness, having inflicted 498 casualties at a cost of 256.