Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson

by S.C. Gwynne

It was called Manassas Junction. There were exactly two reasons why anyone cared about the little junction that summer. First, it marked the point where the 148-mile-long Orange and Alexandria Railroad, the principal north–south line in Virginia, crossed the Manassas Gap Railroad, a 77-mile-long line that linked the fertile lower Shenandoah Valley with the rest of northern Virginia. This made Manassas Junction the most important strategic site north of Richmond and the inevitable target of a Union advance. Second, the Confederacy had decided, at all costs, to defend it.

On paper, the plan was perfectly sound. Its principal weakness could have been predicted from the logistical horrors of July 17: these green soldiers and officers did not yet know how to march, and certainly not over unknown roads in darkness.

Beauregard, remarkably, wanted to do the same thing to his adversary, only in reverse. His mirror-image plan was to unleash the forces on the right side of his line to turn the Union’s left flank. This was in spite of the curious fact that Beauregard fully expected that his West Point classmate Irvin McDowell was going to hit the Confederate left.2 But instead of strengthening his forces there in expectation of a defensive fight, the Creole general’s answer to the expected Union advance was to beat McDowell to the punch, and do it so effectively that the rest of McDowell’s army would have no choice but to break off its own attack.

The scheme, as it unfurled, was a disaster. No advance was ever made, and the promised tactical movements never came close to happening. The entire elaborate pantomime is noteworthy mainly because it failed to provide any deterrent to McDowell’s own maneuver, and because it is such a perfect example of the almost comical incompetence of Beauregard and his staff.

The battle, which had lasted two hours, had been entirely the result of the initiative of a few rebel officers. The Confederate army’s top commanders had had nothing to do with it. They had not ordered the troop movements, they had not understood that the battle was going to take place on Matthews Hill and nearby Henry Hill and not where they had thought it would take place. All responsibility had passed to the brigadiers and colonels. They had seized the battle, they had fought with astounding ferocity and courage, and they had not broken in spite of great odds but were ultimately forced to retreat.

for some unknown reason, perhaps because he was momentarily stunned by his own success, or because he believed that, with such an astounding advantage in men and matériel, speed was no longer of the essence, McDowell paused. For two full hours, no orders came from his headquarters.

One soldier in the 33rd Virginia recalled that former VMI cadets, observing the cool confidence of their commander, now “saw the warrior and forgot the eccentric man.”

it seemed that the Union boys had finally cleared the plateau and had won the battle.23 McDowell certainly thought so.

He was desperately wrong. Though he did not know it, he was about to pay one final time for his earlier, two-hour delay. Suddenly it was McDowell’s army—which had started the day with a brutal march and was now exhausted, thirsty, and out of ranks in large numbers—that was in trouble. His midday lapse—plus the heroism and hard-nosed fighting of brigades such as Evans’s, Bee’s, and Jackson’s—had bought Johnston and Beauregard time, and time had brought them reinforcements both from their old Bull Run line and from Johnston’s arriving Army of the Shenandoah.

There would be no great offensive strikes. Instead, armies would be recruited and dispersed over a vast defensive perimeter—a theory of war, propounded by the famed military tactician and historian Antoine-Henri Jomini and studied closely at West Point, that favored the holding of cities and other real estate over the mass destruction of enemy armies.2 That theory would soon be discredited.

Confexerate strategy

Jackson’s proposal to have Southern armies operate without their supply lines deep in enemy territory was made fully eighteen months before Grant stunned the nation by doing that very thing—which he and Jackson had both learned from Winfield Scott in Mexico—on the way to his critical victory at Vicksburg in the summer of 1863.

Winchester, a pretty town of foursquare brick homes Jackson had fallen in love with during his brief time there with Johnston, had enormous strategic importance as the northernmost defensive post of the Confederacy.

The town was also the northern gateway and military key to the fertile Shenandoah Valley—that

There was little doubt, moreover, that a Union occupation of the valley would be an outright disaster for the Confederacy, shutting off a critical food source and opening a tailor-made corridor of invasion to Richmond complete with its own railroad line and supply base.

His mission, at the extreme left of the Confederate line, 80 miles west of Joe Johnston’s headquarters in Centreville, was to prevent that from happening.

“If officers desire to have control over their commands,” Jackson wrote, “they must remain habitually with them, and industriously attend to their instructions and comfort, and in battle lead them well, and in such manner as to command their admiration.”

Jackson might have helped his cause with men and officers if he had given them even the most rudimentary idea of what they were doing, or where they were going. He had told no one anything of his plans, not even his second in command.

The Romney Expedition witnessed the emergence of an extreme style of leadership that posed for the first time a question central to the outcome of the war: Just how far could you push both officers and common soldiers in pursuit of military goals?

The war they had enlisted in had begun as an exercise in glory and freedom. Under Jackson, it began to look more like grim servitude.

immense cavalry advantages the South held early in the war. There were a number of reasons for this. The South had more people who used the horse as an integral part of their lives, and the landed Southern gentry was full of accomplished riders.9 Northerners, meanwhile, were more likely to see horses as beasts of burden. Confederate cavalries also had superior animals, mainly because of the Southern fondness for racing, and because Southern cavalrymen supplied their own mounts.

the Battle of Kernstown was lost because Confederate soldiers ran out of ammunition, and that was Jackson’s direct responsibility.

He had also—somewhat mysteriously, considering his intimate control of his brigade’s fight at Manassas—remained a quarter mile or so from the stone wall. Though there were good reasons for this—he could see the entire battlefield and the Union position more clearly from there—he was not available to redeploy his regiments where they were needed.

Finally, Jackson had hampered Garnett’s effectiveness by not telling him his battle plan; Garnett did not even know where Jackson was.

Perhaps the biggest lesson to be learned from Kernstown, however, involved not fighting but politics. Jackson’s tactical defeat turned out to be one of the great strategic victories of the early war.

he canceled orders for both of Banks’s divisions to leave the valley. He ordered the brigades that had already departed back to Winchester. And then he ordered a full-out pursuit of the small rebel army.

McClellan Has to shift forces and change his OOB to meet threat

What made the rifled musket even more lethal was that the battlefield tactics of the Civil War remained largely frozen in the Napoleonic era. A rifle that was reasonably accurate at three hundred yards should have dictated infantry formations that were spread out, more like skirmish lines. Instead, Civil War commanders stuck to the old close-order formations that Napoleon had used half a century before.

There were several reasons for this. First, while spreading soldiers out made them less vulnerable, it also took away their main tactical advantage: their ability to concentrate their firepower.

Second, close tactical formations were the only way that officers could control and move men around a battlefield.

But now the muskets outranged the cannons. Any general who opened a battle by moving artillery forward would soon see his artillerists and battery horses shot to pieces.

Artillery thus moved back, and while canister was still used, much of the work of the guns was done against the other side’s guns—known as “counterbattery work.”6

Unlike the Federals, the Confederate army as a whole was still using smoothbores well into mid-1863.

With his ferocious little jab at Shields in Kernstown, he had single-handedly knocked McClellan’s offensive off balance.

Staunton, the prosperous commercial center of the southern valley, a critical base of food, clothing, arms, and other supplies, and the vital railhead of the Virginia Central Railroad, was the true key to military operations west of the Blue Ridge. Losing Staunton meant losing the valley and giving the Union the ideal staging ground for an eastward strike against Richmond.

By feinting east across the Blue Ridge, then making an about-face and moving his force by train from Mechum’s River Station to Staunton, he had effectively made his army disappear.

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.

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.

Though the existence of the single pass through the Massanutten connecting the Shenandoah and Luray Valleys was a mystery to no one—Shields had just passed through it on his march to Fredericksburg—Jackson had used it just as effectively, in combination with Ashby’s lethal cavalry screens, as he had used the Virginia Central Railroad in his advance on McDowell.

Thus did Jackson, who had not yet even engaged with the main body of Banks’s troops, rearrange, on a single afternoon, the carefully laid Union plans to join together two armies at Richmond and thus bring crushing numbers to bear against Joseph Johnston.

What happened next was a classic example of a successful Civil War flanking maneuver, using the advantage of numbers to extend a battle line farther than the enemy could extend his, then turning the enemy’s flank and making him face fire from two directions.

Lincoln’s main objective, however, in the wake of Jackson’s victory, was not to fortify Washington but to destroy Jackson where he stood.

The presence of McDowell’s troops in Front Royal was only one of Jackson’s worries. The larger potential threat to him—and the key to his defeat, in Lincoln’s mind—was not McDowell but Frémont.

As Lincoln saw it, there was no way Jackson could beat Frémont to Harrisonburg, which meant that Jackson would have Union armies to the north and south of him. He would be isolated, his supply lines cut. Even Jackson could not escape from such a trap.

Frémont had two problems: First, he was a man who insisted on seeing obstacles where none existed. Second, in this case there actually were obstacles,

Hotchkiss recorded in his diary on May 11 that he had procured axes and crowbars and by “sending details far up into the gorges . . . and cutting down trees and rolling large rocks into the road made a very effectual blockade especially of the road leading from Franklin to Harrisonburg.”

in spite of the delays, the jaws of Lincoln’s marvelous trap were finally in position to snap closed, and just in time, too. It was also that very same day—May 31—that Jackson, with his main column, infantry, artillery, wagons, and 2,300 Union prisoners, dragged themselves out of their camps north of Winchester in a heavy downpour. They had more than twenty miles to go. An objective observer would have said they had no chance.

All of this set up one of the most stirring footraces in military history, a perilous gauntlet run that few believed Jackson could possibly win.

“Everybody felt the great danger, but everybody looked at Old Jack & seeing him calm & cool as if nothing was the matter, they came to the conclusion that their destruction could not be as inevitable as they supposed.”

The fear began with basic assumptions about Jackson’s army. Though Jackson still had merely 15,000 men at his disposal, and the Union War Department believed this, in the eyes of its field generals Jackson’s strength had grown enormously.

Then, too, he saw phantoms: he got the ridiculous idea that Confederate James Longstreet was moving up the Luray Valley with an army—ridiculous, because that would have left virtually no Confederate troops to defend Richmond.

He did not have, moreover, specific orders from McDowell to attack, even though he knew as well as anyone that the whole idea, and the thing Lincoln wanted more than anything in the world, was to cut off Jackson’s retreat.