Old Winfield Scott, now vainly puffing in his effort to preside over a similar scene in Washington, had not long since agreed: “If I were on my death bed, and the President should tell me that a great battle was to be fought for the liberty or slavery of the country, and asked my judgment as to the ability of a commander, I would say with my dying breath, let it be Robert E. Lee.”
But it was not Lee whose eye first glimpsed Jackson in the melee of politicians and speculators, last-minute Yankee tradesmen and swarming Virginia boys come in to war. John Letcher, the professional politician who was now governor, came from Rockbridge County, and knew Jackson well. Letcher had just appointed a military commission to guide the State Convention, one member of which was Colonel Francis Smith, the Institute superintendent. Even so, Jackson was not immediately rescued.
His cadets were snapped up, and were busy drilling newcomers in every vacant lot and up and down the streets, leaving Jackson without an occupation. For a day or two—the record is not clear—he was stuck away in a draughtsman’s office as a topographical engineer. But the Confederacy had not yet moved in, and the Virginia bureaus of war had not become so proficient in the use of red tape as to hold him from the field, and Jackson escaped.
Smith mentioned his name to Letcher, who, without hesitation, proposed Jackson for the rank of colonel, to command Virginia infantry. Jackson was sent to Lee, who gave him a sincere welcome. He told Jackson in bald terms of the strategic situation and approved Letcher’s suggestion that this new colonel be sent to Harpers Ferry, where a mob of Virginians had burned the Federal armory. Lee and Jackson discussed this Potomac post, which could not be long defended because of surrounding hills, but must be held as long as possible, to secure the river line against Federal invasion. Jackson was to hold the town, begin training of troops, and send to Richmond the guns and arms-making machinery found there.
A natural question had arisen when Jackson’s name was presented to the State Convention, along with those of other colonels: “Who is this man Jackson?” That was too much for the patriotic pride of S. M. Moore, the delegate from Rockbridge County, who shouted, “He’s a man we can order to hold a post, and know he’ll never leave it alive to be taken by the enemy.” Jackson’s reputation as a Lexington eccentric was forever changed.
This rhetoric was enough, with the backing of friends, to get convention approval of Jackson’s colonelcy and his post on the frontier where war might flare at any moment.
Soon Jackson was in Winchester, on the way to the post, wearing the drab, worn Institute uniform, with no mark of rank. He had so undistinguished a look that one recruit blandly asked him to teach him the manual of arms, which Jackson did. He could not stifle his pride. He wrote to Anna:
On last Saturday the Governor handed me my commission as Colonel of Virginia volunteers, the post I prefer above all others.… Little one, you must not expect to hear from me very often, as I expect to have more work than I have ever had in the same length of time before.
He got from Harpers Ferry about the reception which would have been given a Yankee shell. Virginia had just removed from service her swaggering volunteer officers above the grade of captain; the border village had been full of generals and colonels, all enthusiastic civilians whose conception of war was to dash about the village to the cheers of lounging troops. These favorites banished, the two thousand ill-assorted Virginia soldiers found in their place only this stern and uninspiring officer, Colonel Jackson. Not a fleck of gold on his shoulder nor a plume on his hat, yet he put troops to work as if they were laborers, or slaves. He kept rails and roads filled with cars of machinery and captured guns going back to Richmond. The easiest of the routes was to Winchester by rail, then a painful overland transfer to the Manassas Gap Railroad at Strasburg, and then eastward to the Orange and Alexandria tracks at Manassas Junction, and so to Richmond. The arms-making machinery got an almost hysterical welcome in the capital.
Jackson brought discipline to his garrison; he brought in more volunteers, established pickets and supervised endless training. He had little to say, even to his officers, and sometimes rode incognito on inspections of his outposts. He found some able men in the village, and some old friends: John Imboden, a gifted artilleryman; Colonel W. N. Pendleton, the Episcopal rector from Lexington whose Rockbridge Artillery was housed in a church (his gunners, chiefly from seminaries, christened his guns Matthew, Mark, Luke and John); there was also Major J. L. T. Preston, from the Institute, who had married Margaret Junkin.
A visiting band from the Maryland legislature called on Jackson, and though it was important to woo these neutrals, the colonel could not unbend. When the guests indiscreetly asked him of his strength, Jackson barked, “I should be glad if President Lincoln thought I had 50,000 men.”
Anna learned little more through the mails: “I haven’t time now to do more than tell you how much I love you.… You say that your husband never writes you any news.… What do you want with military news? Don’t you know that it is unmilitary … to write news respecting one’s post?”
One of Jackson’s chief works at Harpers Ferry was perhaps the most devious ruse of his career—the virtual kidnaping of a railroad. The Baltimore & Ohio tracks lay through his lines, and though Richmond forbade him to tear up the road for fear of repercussions, he plotted to capture its priceless rolling stock by guile. Traffic was heavy since the road was hauling great loads of coal from the mountains. Jackson played for the fine locomotives and cars as if in a chess game.
He complained to John W. Garrett of Baltimore, president of the railroad, that trains disturbed his men at night, and must be routed through Harpers Ferry at about noon; the railroad agreed, though it was a troublesome chore. Garrett was hardly in position to argue with a Confederate officer who held the big bridge over the Potomac.
John Imboden, who helped in the capture, wrote: “But since the ‘empties’ were sent up the road at night, Jackson complained that the nuisance was as great as ever, and, as the road had two tracks, said he must insist that the west-bound trains should pass during the same hour as those going east. Again he was obliged, and we then had, for two hours every day, the liveliest railroad in America.”
Jackson was then ready to close his trap. He sent Imboden to Point of Rocks, across the Potomac, with orders to halt all east-bound trains, and pass all those heading west. At Martinsburg, a few miles upriver, he reversed the order. At twelve o’clock, as Jackson ordered, the lines were closed at each end of the double-track area, and the Confederacy had netted fifty-six locomotives and more than three hundred cars.
This coup was soon a source of torment to Jackson, however. He was able to shift four of the smaller locomotives across the Shenandoah bridges to Winchester by the Winchester and Potomac Railroad, but this line was light and could not accommodate the huge engines he had captured; further, there was no rail line to the south of Winchester.
That was not the worst of it. Within a few days, when strategy dictated a withdrawal from this town, Jackson was forced to blow up the Potomac bridge and run his captive engines into the river, or leave them charred and burning for the enemy to discover. A Washington reporter was to count over forty ruined locomotives in a line: “Red and blistered with heat. The destruction is fearful to contemplate.”
Not even John Garrett could have more bitterly rued the destruction than did Jackson, who fully understood the value of this rail stock and was saddened to see it lost to the Confederacy.
A Richmond newspaper, the first to salute Jackson’s fame, wrote that week:
“The commanding officer at Harpers Ferry is worthy of the name he bears, for ‘Old Hickory’ himself was not a more determined, iron-nerved man than he. Born in Virginia, educated at West Point, trained in the Mexican War, occupied since at the pet military institution of the Old Dominion, his whole life has been a preparation for this struggle.
“A brother officer says of him, ‘He does not know fear!’ Above all, he is a devoted Christian, and the
strongest man becomes stronger when his heart is pure and his hands are clean.”
In the glow of this tribute, Jackson lost his command. One morning Joseph E. Johnston appeared in Harpers Ferry announcing that he was to relieve Jackson. Old Jack quietly declined to surrender the post until Johnston, fumbling through his papers, found an order from Lee which satisfied the ever-soldierly Jackson that the transfer was proper. He then stepped aside.
He was given some Virginia troops, five regiments from the Shenandoah country, for the most part tough mountain men. In the moment, however, Jackson could see no future glories, and there were tones of chagrin in letters to Anna:
My precious darling, I suppose you have heard that General Joseph E. Johnston, of the Confederate Army, has been placed in command here. You must not concern yourself about the change.… I hope to have more time, as long as I am not in command of a post, to write longer letters to my darling pet.
Federal troops appeared in Western Virginia, and Johnston, saying, “The want of ammunition has made me very timid,” burned bridges and public buildings, and abandoned Harpers Ferry. Before he got out of the town, Jackson took a couple of captured horses. One of them was the stout Sorrel, or Fancy, the mount that was to become famous with him.
On the day he left the smoking town, he wrote Anna: “You speak of others knowing more about me than my darling does, and you say you have heard through others that I am a brigadier general. By this time I suppose you have found out that the report owes its origin to Madam Rumor.”
This wounded pride was short-lived, however, for three days later, on June seventeenth, he was made a brigadier, with ten other Confederates; among them: Magruder, commanding on the Peninsula below Richmond; Dick Ewell and Colonel Barnard E. Bee of South Carolina, known to Jackson in Mexico—and now serving at his side, under Johnston.
A new hero now streaked across Virginia like a meteor: Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, the conqueror of Fort Sumter, a genuine, war-tested scourge of the Yankees. He passed rapidly northward, through a cheering Richmond, and, as if intuitively migrant, settled at Manassas Junction. This spot was less than thirty miles from Washington, an important rail junction, a way point on a Federal invasion route to Richmond, and a convenient spot to link the Confederate armies of the east and west. Beauregard began to collect troops, to the number of about twenty thousand, and to spin elaborate plans of war.
Jackson had his hands full. He had already shown a kinship with Lee in his plea that Harpers Ferry be held—and an unspoken contempt for the timid Johnston:
“I am of the opinion,” he had written Lee, “that this place should be defended with the spirit which actuated the defenders of Thermopylae.… The fall of this place would … result in the loss of the northwestern part of the state, and who can estimate the moral power thus gained to the enemy and lost to ourselves?”
Lee had agreed, but was forced to leave Johnston to his own devices. In any event, the deed was done, and Johnston’s force was patrolling south of the Potomac in the western quarter, waiting for war to come.
Jackson went through marches and countermarches, up to Charlestown, and out toward the enemy camp at Martinsburg. It seemed to Old Jack that Johnston moved to no purpose, or was frightened by shadows. He left a hint of this in a letter to Anna: “I hope the general will do something soon.… I trust that through the blessing of God we shall soon be given an opportunity of driving the invaders from this region.”
To the east, in the Tidewater country beyond Richmond, the war had already started with a little brush at Big Bethel Church, an affair in which Jackson’s brother-in-law, D. H. Hill, had come to the fore as a commander. His name was on many lips, though he had left many gray-clad bodies on the field of victory.
In the west, Jackson got no more than an occasional sniff of the enemy. He once reported one of his men shot in the abdomen but said, “I am inclined to think it was done by a Virginian rather than a Northerner.”
It was at this time that he acquired a new man on his staff: Sandie Pendleton, an affable son of the rector, who was made ordnance officer and adjutant general. Despite his youth, Pendleton became the real, if untitled, chief of staff to Jackson.
Old Jack also met here a fascinating comrade in arms, a warrior so irrepressibly gay that Jackson could not keep his eyes off him: James Ewell Brown Stuart, lieutenant colonel of cavalry, just in from the Western plains. Stuart had three hundred troopers galloping the dusty roads, riding circles around the dazed Federals. The look of him was enough to stun Jackson.
Stuart dismounted from one of his punishing rides, sweeping back a soiled cloak to reveal a faultless Confederate-gray coat lined in scarlet silk; he wore tiny golden spurs, and there was a floppy black ostrich plume in his big hat. His French saber was hooked over a golden silk sash. There was a red rose in his lapel, and he wore white buckskin gloves. The solemn Jackson was dazed.
At Stuart’s back rode a curious man with a banjo strapped to his shoulder, one Joe Sweeny, an old minstrel-show man who fell to making music, in which all these incredible horsemen joined:
“The years creep slowly by, Lorena,
The snow is on the grass again;
The sun’s low down the sky, Lorena,
The frost gleams where the flowers have been.…”
Or, without warning, the fey company would howl a parody of a tune becoming popular in all camps:
“Just before the battle, mother,
I was drinkin’ mountain dew.
When I saw the Yanks amarchin’,
To the rear I quickly flew.”
But Jackson understood Stuart immediately, for the horseman divined the true meaning of orders and carried them out like a military artisan, with creative improvements of his own. Stuart was a strong temperance man, too; he behaved as if he were perpetually inspired, but this was from natural causes, for he was a teetotaler. He, like Jackson, was a stern Sabbath-keeper, if the enemy permitted. And he worked hard with his command; Stuart did not ask the troopers to ride where he dared not go himself.
Jackson liked the ring of Stuart’s words: “If we oppose force to force we cannot win, for their resources are greater than ours.… We must substitute esprit for numbers. Therefore I strive to inculcate in my men the spirit of the chase.” Jackson understood him.
The two worked together as Jackson had his first formal meeting with the enemy, at a place called Falling Waters, on July 2, 1861. General Robert Patterson of the Union army pushed across the Potomac and began to probe the Rebel lines, in this case an error. Patterson was still crossing the river when Stuart advised Jackson of the move, and Old Jack rushed forward with one regiment and a few guns. He had timid orders from Johnston to feel out the enemy and fall back under cavalry cover. Jackson and Stuart managed to accomplish much more, though without breaking orders.
Jackson found the Federals near a church just south of the Potomac and put his men to wait for their advance over open fields; the unpracticed bluecoats met staggering musket fire, and then Jackson charged them. He was taking a heavy toll when superior numbers forced him to fall back. The Federals misinterpreted this move as a rout. The Union volunteers were hurried along an open highway in column, a perfect target for the Reverend Pendleton, who came up with his big guns. Tradition pictures him as raising his bushy head and praying, “Lord have mercy on their souls,” before he tore apart the Union formation with a single gun.
Jackson went back slowly, so alert that he actually counted his artillery shells: “My cannon fired only eight times, while the enemy fired about 35 times; but the first fire of Captain Pendleton’s battery was probably worth more than all of theirs.” Jackson lost twenty-five men. “My officers and men behaved beautifully,” he said.
Stuart came off well, with a string of prisoners (fifty of which he took singlehandedly). The cavalryman had closed roads on all sides of the enemy and helped to confuse Patterson so thoroughly that the latter thought he faced thirty-five hundred Rebels, rather than the band o
f under five hundred Jackson actually commanded. The Federals settled down in Martinsburg.
Jackson wrote Anna: “The enemy are celebrating the 4th of July … but we are not observing the day.” He spoke once more of his recent brigadier general’s commission: “It was beyond what I anticipated.… I have had all that I ought to desire in the line of promotion.”
Affairs, however, were swirling toward a rapid climax, and he was about to step into the center of the stage of war.
Soon after midnight, July eighteenth, General Johnston was aroused in his Winchester headquarters. The main Federal army was sweeping toward Manassas Junction. He was to elude the enemy in his region and rush his men to the east. General Beauregard was attacked by an overwhelming force.
Officers woke the men, and with Stuart behind to hoodwink General Patterson, the infantry started south through Winchester, turned eastward, and in the dark road paused while officers read orders: “The Commanding General hopes that his troops will step out like men, and make a forced march to save the country.” There were cheers, and the green troops tried, but were pitifully inept. Johnston long remembered “the discouragement of that day’s march, to one accustomed to the steady gait of regular soldiers.”
The troops reached the Blue Ridge at dark, after almost eighteen hours on the move, and early in the night forded the chest-deep Shenandoah. During the night, Johnston’s army crossed Ashby’s Gap. They had a rest at 2 A.M., after going twenty miles. Men fell asleep in their tracks without a thought for pickets. Jackson refused to have the exhausted men aroused for sentry duty, and he alone stood guard over the sleeping brigade. Just before daylight an officer persuaded him to lie down, while he substituted for him, and Jackson took a few moments of rest.
They Called Him Stonewall Page 15
