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

by S.C. Gwynne

On October 7 he was promoted to major general, thus completing a dizzying ascent from a disregarded major of engineers to high command in six months. He was in rarefied company, now one of four division commanders in Johnston’s army (the others were James Longstreet, Earl Van Dorn, and G. W. Smith), and earning three and a half times his salary at VMI—$4,812 annually compared with $1,300.15 The promotion was perhaps the final measure of how his performance on Henry Hill was seen in the Confederate army’s high command. Jackson’s skill and courage as a field commander were undeniable.

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.

General T. J. Jackson, Winchester, VA: Our news indicates that a movement is being made to cut off General Loring’s command. Order him back to Winchester immediately. J. P. Benjamin, Secretary of War By his own description, Jackson was astonished by what he read. He had just cleared, with considerable pain and suffering, all Union armies from three large Virginia counties, destroyed a hundred miles of railroad track, and had suffered only thirty-five casualties doing it.30 The tone of the message must have struck him as strange, too—as though addressing an underling who did not need to understand the order’s ramifications, instead of a full major general commanding six thousand square miles of Virginia. Within the hour, he had decided what to do, probably with the help of prayer. He would comply with the order as given. And then he would resign.

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? What the Confederates had done was no ordinary march.

Pikes. Jackson was planning to go into battle, outnumbered seven to one, with medieval weapons against rifled muskets. Not only that but Lee, who saw pikes as a way to solve a larger weaponry shortage, actually approved the request.

It would change hands seventy-two times during the war, and thirteen times in a single day. It would eventually be depopulated and, for all practical purposes, destroyed.

Jackson could not know that on that same day, eighty miles to the east, events were taking place that would change both the course of the war and his own destiny. Lincoln, frustrated with McClellan’s refusal to advance in spite of considerable prodding, relieved McClellan of overall command of Union armies. While he was left in charge of the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln and Stanton would now assume authority over the other parts of that army. This included the newly constituted 5th Corps under Nathaniel Banks, who had previously reported directly to McClellan.

It is worth remembering this moment, in the middle part of the chilly, rainy month of March 1862, in the second year of the war. Joe Johnston and D. H. Hill are falling back to the Rappahannock; Confederate armies are being routed in the West; Confederate coastal defenses in North Carolina are crumbling; Jackson is on the run in the Shenandoah Valley; the once buoyant optimism of the South is giving way to fear and hopelessness. Jackson’s opponent Nathaniel Banks holds such a crushing numerical advantage that he is less worried about Jackson’s pathetic, slapdash army than about missing the real action east of the Blue Ridge. To Banks and his bosses in Washington, Jackson is merely an insignificant buzzing on the periphery of the real war, something to be swatted away. They would soon have occasion to change their minds.

What made the rifled musket even more lethal was that the battlefield tactics of the Civil War remained largely frozen in the Napoleonic era.

Ninety-four percent of all men killed and wounded in the war were hit by bullets. Jackson’s love of the bayonet was an anachronism: less than half of 1 percent of wounds were inflicted by saber or bayonet.

When the war began in 1861, a high percentage of the weapons in both armies were the old .69-caliber smoothbores. The Union quickly remedied that problem. In 1862 most Federal soldiers were equipped with either Springfield or Enfield rifled muskets. But the Confederacy lagged far behind. Jackson’s valley army fought at Manassas and in the valley campaign with smoothbores, a condition that did not begin to change until he later captured so many Union arms that he was able to partially reoutfit his army.

Nor would he ever again embrace the love and friendship of his sister, Laura. The war famously divided brother from brother. Here it parted brother from sister. We don’t know exactly how the break happened, but it happened precipitously, sometime after the beginning of the war in mid-April 1861. It was very likely the result of Laura’s wartime

Jackson, in his camp in Elk Run Valley, started to correspond for the first time in earnest with Robert E. Lee, and thus began an extraordinary partnership. Though Lee was officially President Davis’s military adviser, the former had begun, with Davis’s full approval, to function more like his chief of staff.

He then wrote, “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.”28 Attack. Drive him back. Lee had watched Jackson’s bold, if imperfect, moves in the campaigns leading to Romney and Kernstown. Reading Jackson’s correspondence from the valley, he was convinced that the two shared the same deeply aggressive instincts. It is worth noting that, at this moment, few in either the United States or the Confederate States yet had any idea of this rougher, more combative side of the courtly, soft-spoken Lee; Jackson was one of the first to see it and grasp it. Somehow, the two kindred spirits—whose personalities could not have been more different—had found each other.

The basic Confederate fare in the war consisted of two principal items: salt pork and cornmeal. The former, sometimes called “bacon” or “sow belly,” was what most Americans of the era would have considered nasty stuff: often blue-colored, cloyingly salty, fatty meat with hair, dirt, and skin left on.

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.

On April 1, nine days after the battle, he relieved Garnett of his command, placed him under arrest, and charged him with neglect of duty.

Even more remarkable than the act itself of arresting a general—Lee, by contrast, never arrested any of his generals or subordinates—was that there was scarcely any substance to the charges, as Jackson’s regimental colonels would all later testify. Garnett had performed well and even gallantly at Kernstown under extremely adverse conditions. To remain on the field would have meant the destruction or surrender of the valley army. Jackson’s reserves simply did not get there in time to save it; his reserve ammunition was sitting on wagons miles back on the valley pike. Garnett’s order to withdraw was what saved the army.

After Kernstown, Jackson had also added to his staff the remarkable Jedediah Hotchkiss, a man who would play a large role in Jackson’s success. Hotchkiss, thirty-three, was from Staunton. He was one of Virginia’s leading geologists and an accomplished amateur cartographer. He was devoutly religious, and neither drank alcohol nor smoked. Jackson summoned him, asked him about the topographical work he had done in Virginia, and then gave him his first order: “I want you to make me a map of the Valley, from Harper’s Ferry to Lexington, showing all points of offence and defence in those places. Mr. Pendleton will give you orders for whatever outfit you want. Good morning, sir.”22 At a time when many commanders were forced to use store-bought maps of atrocious quality, Hotchkiss was an extraordinary asset.

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. By the night of May 24 more than thirty-five thousand troops were under orders, quite specifically, to stop Stonewall Jackson.

Banks had lost more than 3,500 men, 3,000 of whom were now prisoners of war. Jackson had already knocked the Union war in Virginia off balance; his victory at Winchester would soon shift the attention of the world from what seemed certain defeat in front of Richmond to the strange, shimmering new possibilities that were rising from the mists of the Shenandoah Valley.

Christian charity. Something else had taken place, too, at Winchester, something less tangible though quite as real as the battle itself. The moment of victory also marked the birth of the legend of Stonewall Jackson, of the idea of the man as warrior and hero that would soon loom much larger than the man himself.

While Jackson was leading his army through the last phase of the valley campaign, an event of singular and momentous importance had taken place in Richmond. That event was not, as one might have expected, the wounding on June 1 of Major General Joseph E. Johnston at the Battle of Seven Pines, a bloody eleven-thousand-casualty stalemate fought after Johnston had attacked McClellan’s left wing east of Richmond. Though that might have been a crippling blow to a Confederacy already short of competent generals, it turned out to be a wonderful piece of good fortune. The transformative event was an order, issued by Confederate president Jefferson Davis at 1:30 p.m. on June 1, appointing Robert E. Lee to replace Johnston as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. This was by no means an obvious move. Lee, while widely respected, had not performed well in his only prior field command in western Virginia in 1861, and had spent the war in a desk job as Davis’s military adviser.

the two generals shared one very large and important attribute: they had both been members of the Class of 1846 at the US Military Academy, a class that eventually produced more generals—twenty-two, twelve Union and ten Confederate, including two lieutenant generals and fourteen major generals—than any West Point class to that point in history.

While Union soldiers drilled in their camps, gnawed on hard biscuits, and complained about the heat, Richmond prepared for battle, siege, and more death. How could one dusty, disheveled major general and 18,500 ragged troops possibly live up to such outlandish expectations? That is one of the most intriguing questions of the war. Because Jackson, against all odds, did. He fulfilled all of his countrymen’s most wildly optimistic and absurdly unrealistic expectations of him, and he did it before summer’s end. It is a matter of record that, mainly on the strength of Lee’s daring and Jackson’s astounding maneuvers, within two months the capital being threatened was no longer Richmond but Washington, DC, a city into which the defeated Union army beat a humiliating retreat—the greatest military disaster of the war to date.

The second, and far more serious, problem was that by placing sixty-five thousand Confederate troops—six of his ten divisions—north of the Chickahominy, Lee had at most twenty-five thousand troops under Generals John Magruder and Benjamin Huger to defend the city. He was not only leaving a token force to defend the Confederate capital—an almost crazy risk all by itself—he was also planning to deploy the bulk of his army on the far side of a swollen river, from which point it would be difficult or impossible to come to Richmond’s aid. It was the inverse of the tactical dilemma Lee intended to inflict on McClellan. To say that Lee’s plan was fraught with danger is to understate the point: he was risking everything—his army, his capital city, perhaps the survival of the Confederacy itself.

As the two generals left, Ewell remarked to Whiting, “Don’t you know why Old Jack would not decide at once? He is going to pray over it first!”15 When Ewell discovered he had left his sword in Jackson’s room and returned for it, he indeed found Jackson on his knees, deep in prayer.

He was likely also in the early phases of some sort of severe cold or sickness—“fever and debility,” as he described it to his wife later in the week.17 Including that night, he had spent three sleepless nights in a row. He had had no more than seven hours’ sleep in the preceding four days. During that time he had ridden more than ninety miles without rest to and from Lee’s meeting, then added another twenty-five miles on June 25 with his army.

This was Porter’s suggestion. Other generals suggested variants of this plan. They all believed Richmond was vulnerable. They all thought the solution was to attack. McClellan disagreed. More convinced than ever that he was facing a two-hundred-thousand-man force, he began, in the wake of his victory, to think only of how he was going to save his army. Lee, after his defeat, was thinking only of how he was going to corner and destroy his adversary.

Because of McClellan’s choice of strategy, the question was not whether the Union army would be defeated but how badly it would be defeated. It was in many ways the oddest sequence of the war: a large army retreating from a smaller one, as though it could not possibly, with the resources of an industrializing nation behind it, just stand and fight. Mechanicsville and its aftermath established the model for the campaign: the Union army would wage a defensive battle by day, always on the ground of its choosing, and then retreat south toward the new base on the James River under cover of darkness. As at Mechanicsville, the rebel advance was marked by incompetence, shoddy staff work, inefficiency, miscommunication, and an almost shocking failure to take advantage of the openings McClellan gave them. In spite of this, the Seven Days was a thrilling, war-changing Confederate triumph.

The Seven Days made Robert E. Lee famous.

The battle was soon over. In seven hours’ fighting over possession of a swamp and the bluff that rose above it, the Union sustained six thousand casualties and the Confederates nine thousand. On an hourly basis, Gaines’s Mill was one of the war’s costliest battles. The ratio was predictable for a force attacking such a strong defensive position.

Lee, not Jackson, who had ordered the latter’s divisions into place. That night Jackson went to the tent of his new friend Jeb Stuart, woke him, and the two men sat on blankets and talked of the next day’s work. Jackson observed that Gaines’s Mill “was the most terrific fire of musketry I ever heard.”

If I save this Army now I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington—you have done your best to sacrifice this Army.13

At about five thirty, Jackson, who was commanding the D. H. Hill units, ordered those brigades forward, too. The result was pure slaughter, some of the worst of the war. To their credit, the Southern infantry did not give up. They pressed attack after attack and were badly shot up, a huge percentage of them by artillery. “It was not war, it was murder,” said D. H. Hill later.

Mass murder, actually. By sundown more than five thousand rebels had fallen, compared to three thousand Federals.

Malvern Hill was a bloody, and pointless, end to the Seven Days, which had seen a total of 36,463 casualties, half again more than at the Battle of Shiloh, whose killed-and-wounded numbers had shocked the nation. The casualties in this single week, in fact, equaled those in all the battles of the western theater in the first half of the year 1862, including Shiloh. It was by far the bloodiest week in the nation’s history.

But the irony here—and it was grand and tragic irony—was that Lee’s counteroffensive actually marked the end of that brief, fragile period when the Union could still be preserved without making slavery the war’s central issue—without, in other words, destroying the South. From the first days of the war, the stated goals of Lincoln and Congress had been to quell the rebellion and restore the Union. Congress had been quite explicit about this; the previous summer it had passed a resolution specifically disavowing any intent to end the institution of slavery. For a time this remained the essential position of moderate and conservative (i.e., nonradical) Republicans in the North, as well as both “war” and “peace” Democrats, neither of whom believed that freeing Southern slaves was worth spilling Union blood. Lincoln appeased the radicals in his own party and pursued his policy of fighting a war for limited ends.

I hear constantly of “taking strong positions” and holding them, of “lines of retreat,” and of “bases of supply.” Let us discard such ideas. . . . Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear.3

Pope might as well have called the Army of the Potomac cowards.

Though the infantry battle had lasted less than ninety minutes, more than 3,000 soldiers had fallen. Jackson’s troops had killed or wounded 1,786 Federals and taken 617 prisoner. Banks had killed or wounded 1,376 and taken only 42 prisoner.36

Stuart was Ashby without the administrative shortcomings and the hair-trigger temperament.

Jackson himself considered his victory at Cedar Mountain his greatest military achievement, and he was uncharacteristically proud of

Though we do not know what words were spoken, we know with great certainty what the meeting was all about. What had gotten Jackson’s attention was one of the most profoundly daring plans of the war, one that violated both military theory and common sense in equal measure. To pry Pope out of his secure position behind the Rappahannock, Lee proposed that Jackson and his entire corps march in a sweeping arc around the Union right, climbing north across the foothills of the Blue Ridge, then turning east through the Bull Run Mountains, and landing on the plains deep behind Union lines. His mission was to cut the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, Pope’s main supply line.

Now, as the afternoon waned, the fatal weakness in Pope’s character—his indecision under pressure—began to show itself. Soon after issuing those orders he received word that Longstreet’s army had reached Thoroughfare Gap, where it had clashed with a small Union force. In his zeal to catch and destroy Jackson, Pope had somehow neglected the rest of the Confederate army. Consumed by an impulsive desire to correct that mistake, he abruptly changed his orders again, directing his army to turn and march west. He soon rescinded those orders, too.1 Pope’s waffling only grew worse.2 At 5:00 p.m., swayed by persistent reports of Jackson’s march eastward, and believing he could defeat Jackson, then wheel and fight Longstreet, Pope ordered his troops to turn yet again and resume their march to Centreville, much to the dismay of his generals—

One of every 3 men in the fight was hit by a bullet.

Even more impressive than these deceptions, Jackson had accomplished what he had really wanted all along: to goad Pope into attacking him, entirely on Jackson’s own terms, before the Army of Virginia had been fully reinforced by McClellan. Adrift in visions of glory, Pope had been drawn into a battle he did not have to fight.

This meant that the two armies, which had traveled a combined one hundred miles or more at an interval of two and a half days, had somehow managed to fit their fifty-four thousand soldiers and trains perfectly together deep in enemy territory and in the presence of a large Union army. And they had done it, for all practical purposes, in secret. Lee’s plan had been more than daring. That it was working bordered on implausible.

(This issue—Porter’s orders from Pope and how he carried them out—was the subject of the war’s most famous court-martial. Porter was initially found guilty and removed from command. Not until long after the war were the charges overturned and Porter reinstated.

In the peninsula campaign his endless dithering, pettifoggery, inflated enemy troop estimates, and stubborn refusal to advance suggested to many observers that McClellan was incompetent. At Second Manassas, his behavior started to look to his critics—including the Secretary of War—more like malfeasance or even treason.