Longstreet viewed the battle with a fond eye for his own men, saw no cowards or skulkers, but, amid the rather grand phrases of his description, paused to criticize Jackson:
“The heavy fumes of gunpowder hanging about our ranks, as stimulating as sparkling wine, charged the atmosphere with the light and splendor of battle. The noble horses took the spirit of the riders. As orders were given, the staff pressed their spurs, and 25,000 braves moved in line as by a single impulse.
“Leaving the broken ranks for Jackson to deal with, our fight was made against the lines near my front. Jackson failed to pull up even on the left, which gave opportunity for some of the enemy’s batteries to turn their fire across the right wing as we advanced.… It was severely threatening upon General Lee … who would ride under it, notwithstanding appeals to avoid it.
“When the last guns were fired, the thickening twilight concealed the lines of friend and foe … and a gentle rain closely following, the plateau was shut off from view.… As long as the enemy held the plateau, he covered the line of retreat by the turnpike and the bridge at Young’s Branch. As he retired, heavy darkness gave safe conduct to such of his columns as could find their way through the weird mists.”
Jackson rode along the old line of battle in the fading light of day, passing dead and wounded by the hundreds. A young soldier from the ranks which had fought so fiercely here was feebly, painfully, trying to climb the earthen bank of the railroad cut. Jackson rode to him.
“Have you been wounded?”
“Yes, General. But have we whipped ’em?”
Jackson nodded and dismounted. “What is your regiment?”
“The Fourth Virginia, General. Your old brigade. I’ve been wounded four times, but never as bad as this. I hope I’ll soon be able to follow you again.”
Jackson walked to the soldier, picking his way among piles of round stones which his men had used to beat off the enemy. He put a hand on the wounded boy’s head, and to the listening Kyd Douglas the General’s voice seemed lower and huskier than usual.
“You are worthy of the Old Brigade, and I hope with God’s blessing, you soon will be well enough to return to it.”
Officers were sent for an ambulance and doctors. The soldier lay sobbing, attempting to voice his gratitude, but he could only weep and shake his head, as tears streamed on his cheeks.
The Federal troops had fled across Bull Run, and the leading Confederates were along the old Henry House Hill, which would always live in Jackson’s memory.
General Pope wired to Washington another claim of victory:
The battle was most furious for hours without cessation, and the losses on both sides very heavy. The enemy is badly whipped, and we shall do well enough. Do not be uneasy. We will hold our own here.
It was one of the last of Pope’s outrageously inaccurate estimates of his enemy in northern Virginia.
As he wrote his dispatch, many of his finest units were in full retreat. John M. Gould, one of Pope’s author-soldiers, described the experience of his Maine regiment: “Our turn came to retreat, and we marched steadily, profoundly thankful for the prospect of having our regular rations and a full pipe again. These things were more prominent in our minds than the sadness and humiliation of our position—but war will destroy all that is noble in man’s nature.
“We marched from nine till twelve, pulling one foot after the other.… We had been starved till we were sick and brutish; we were chafed and raw from lice and rough clothing; we were footsore and lame, there was hardly a man of us who was not afflicted with diarrhea; we had filled our clothes with dust and perspiration till they were all but rotten; our blood was thin and heated, and now this fierce north wind searched our very marrow.…
“At midnight we were halted on heights somewhere near Alexandria. We were groaning with pain, numb and shivering.… One o’clock, and we still went on … our regiment had now dwindled to a few officers and a color guard.… Two o’clock, and a staff officer rode up saying, ‘The General directs you to stack arms and rest for the night.’ The men dropped as if they had been shot.
“It was the darkest day and the darkest hour in our regimental history.”
Even now Lee planned to force the attack so that Pope might be destroyed. Through the night, he conferred with Jackson, Longstreet and Stuart. He gave Jackson orders to cross Bull Run at Sudley’s Ford, and down a road known as the Little River turnpike, whence he might cut off the retreat. Jackson left muttering, “Good, good.” By daylight he was ready to follow Stuart’s troopers on the chase. The day opened with a driving rain, and roads soon melted into ditches of mud. The army lurched ahead.
Soldiers looked in fascinated horror at the field they passed. E. A. Moore of the artillery wrote of “the striking difference between the Federals and Confederates who remained unburied for twenty-four hours or more.… While the Confederates underwent no perceptible change in color or otherwise, the Federals became much swollen and discolored. This was, of course, attributable to the difference in their food and drink.…
“Where Jackson’s old division had been attacked, at least three-fourths of the men who made the charge had been killed and lay in a line as they had fallen.
“I could have walked a quarter of a mile in almost a straight line on their dead bodies without putting a foot to the ground. By such evidences as this, our minds had been entirely disabused of the idea, ‘The Northerners would not fight.’”
Jackson was busy all day, trying to hurry his march in the face of cruel obstacles. Not only were the roads mere bogs; the men were nearing starvation, for the captured rations from the depot were long since gone. In the most sternly disciplined regiments, veterans dropped out and fell upon the cornfields. Jed Hotchkiss wrote: “The soldiers were very bad, stealing everything eatable they could lay their hands on, after trying to buy it. They were nearly famished.”
Jackson and Lee met in the morning for a look at the enemy, and then Stonewall took time for a tour of Federal hospitals on the field. At each tent men stirred, crawling, hobbling and climbing to have a look at the celebrated Confederate conqueror.
At about this time, General Lee had a painful accident. He was standing in a grove during the rain, dry enough in his rubber cloak and coveralls, when someone raised the alarm that Federal cavalry was coming. The shout startled Lee’s big gray, Traveler, who plunged, and Lee dived for his reins. The commander fell on his hands; a doctor found a small bone broken in one wrist and a severe strain in the other. Lee went into an ambulance, where he was to travel for several days.
The chase was becoming ineffectual. The roads could not be overcome, and Jackson, when he reached his objective on the Federal flank tomorrow, could hardly deal with Pope’s entire army. Longstreet remained behind to clear the battlefield, later to follow the route of Jackson. In addition, D. H. Hill was coming up from the south with reinforcements, though these were not likely to arrive in time to destroy the Union army. And the problem of feeding the men grew more serious each day. Stragglers were everywhere.
The next day was the first of September. Jackson pushed slowly toward the enemy, collided with a Federal wing in the midst of a thunderstorm and fought a brief battle. This sharp encounter was known as Chantilly, from a ruined mansion near by, or Ox Hill, from a neighborhood eminence. It soon died away.
General Branch led the assault of Jackson’s troops, charging his men across wet fields and through woodlands, until halted by fierce resistance. Here his ammunition ran low, and Branch sent a message that one of his regiments must retire because the ammunition was wet from the rain. Jackson heard this complaint and drawled, “My compliments to the Colonel, and tell him the enemy’s ammunition is just as wet as his.”
The bootless fight went on in charge and countercharge, with the line of Jackson turned until it crossed a loop of the Little River turnpike. It sputtered out when darkness came. Among the dead was General Phil Kearny, one of the most able of the Federal high command; the Union ranks lost so
me thousand men, and Jackson about five hundred.
As the guns died away under the rumbling thunder at Chantilly, a campaign had ended. At the end of June, when Lee had so recently assumed command, a vast Federal army had crouched just outside Richmond. That was just two months ago.
Today, at the beginning of September, Pope was retreating across the Potomac, and Virginia was all but free of the invaders.
Jackson had not been able, alone, to halt Pope, nor even to destroy his wagon train; perhaps Lee might have thrown forward Longstreet as well, though the roads had been discouraging and the army severely bled. In any event, there had been nothing since Jackson had left Richmond except victory after victory. The last of these was the most breath-taking of all. Throughout the Confederacy men now began to talk of the exposed Yankee border—and of a thrust into Northern territory, an invasion which could end the war.
In his councils, Lee began to make just such bold plans.
18
INVASION!
Jackson wrote his usual Monday letter to Anna on September first, almost casually enumerating the battles of the past week, “in all of which God gave us the victory.” He still found an intimate relation between the Lord and Confederate triumph, as in the closing of this letter:
It greatly encourages me to feel that so many of God’s people are praying for that part of our force under my command. The Lord has answered their prayers; He has again placed us across Bull Run; and I pray that He will make our arms entirely successful, and that all the glory will be given to His holy name, and none of it to man. God has blessed me through his great mercy.
In that mood, Jackson had fought through the thunderstorm at Chantilly. By the next morning, with the assent of Jefferson Davis, Lee began the move of which Jackson had dreamed since leaving Lexington. Stonewall at last had orders to lead the army across the Potomac into Maryland. They would carry the war to the enemy’s country at last, as Jackson had urged since the first battle of Bull Run. While Pope’s whipped army crowded in the Washington defenses, the war would suddenly shift its scenes. Pennsylvania. New York, perhaps.
Lee was not blind to the condition of his army. The ranks were thin, even with the arrival of the division of D. H. Hill and the additional brigades of Lafayette McLaws and John Walker. The survivors of the bitter campaign against Pope were also worn and hungry, and straggling in such numbers that the commander put officers throughout the region to direct laggards to Winchester, where they were gathered to avoid their capture.
Lee wrote to Davis: “The army is not properly equipped for an invasion.… It lacks much of the material of war, is feeble in transportation, the animals being much reduced, and the men are poorly provided with clothes and in thousands of instances are destitute of shoes.… What concerns me most is the fear of getting out of ammunition.”
The stakes were so large, however, as to make any risk seem paltry. The army’s rolls would show about sixty-five thousand men in ranks, but the commander knew that the total was swiftly dwindling as the tattered, hungry men sought food, or slipped away homeward. The word that the army was to invade the North had the curious effect of hastening desertion and straggling. By the thousands men protested that they had not enlisted to invade Yankee territory; they would fight only to defend their homes.
At Jackson’s headquarters, there was such excitement over the march that these matters got scant attention. Richmond would now be freed from the threat of attack; the Federal army would be chased all over the North, seeking to find Lee; the thousands of loyal Southerners in Maryland would flock to join the ranks.
There were changes in command which seemed of little importance just now. General Garnett went out of the division, since Jackson would not consider giving him a brigade. Of Jackson’s fourteen brigades, many were only fragments; eight were now under command of colonels; field officers of experience were suddenly rare, and general officers almost extinct.
Jackson took the road. Along the route, people who gathered to gawk at the troops particularly sought Stonewall, whose fame had spread widely. At times, crowds pressed all about him, as he glared with vexation and embarrassment, and many threw their arms about the neck of his horse. (Sorrel was still missing, having strayed or been stolen the week before. He was soon to return.)
As the army went through the village of Leesburg, a woman in a doorway recognized Jackson, dashed into the road and tossed her scarf before his horse. Jackson halted, at a loss to understand; he stared at the young woman on the sidewalk, and then at the scarf, until a staff officer advised him, “She means you to ride over it, General.”
Jackson turned with a smile, doffed his cap, and, in Anna’s words, “gallantly rode over the scarf.”
At about this time Jackson was also dealing sternly with stragglers, and with the marching problems of A. P. Hill. He gave brief orders that men leaving the ranks were to be shot on sight. And on September fourth, he put Hill under arrest, for the latest in a series of failures to get his men under way according to Jackson’s orders.
The night before, as usual, Jackson had planned an early start; and when he rode out at dawn, he found most of Powell Hill’s brigades were not only out of line; they had not yet broken camp. Jackson found Maxcy Gregg, whose men showed no sign of readiness, and asked him shortly why he had not obeyed orders. Gregg replied heatedly that the men must fill canteens, and the two bristling generals, in a brief argument in a roadway, laid the basis for future enmity.
Jackson rode with an eye on A. P. Hill, who did not take proper steps to halt straggling. After most of an hour had passed, Jackson expected the men to pause for their customary ten-minute rest, but Hill ordered no halt. Jackson, in an obvious temper, gave orders for the leading brigade to halt. Hill rode back to the commander of this brigade, Ed. Thomas, and demanded to know why he had stopped.
“By whose orders did you stop?”
“By General Jackson’s,” Thomas said.
Jackson was sitting his horse at the side of Thomas.
Hill turned to Old Jack. “If you are going to give orders, you have no need of me.” Hill unbuckled his sword and handed it to Jackson.
“Consider yourself under arrest for neglect of duty,” Jackson said.
“You’re not fit to be a general,” Hill snapped, and turned away.
Jackson placed Branch in command of Hill’s men, and the column wound on northward toward the river of the border.
The army looked more like a world congress of chicken thieves than a band of liberators as it began to ford the Potomac into enemy country. They were four days crossing at White’s Ford. The first of them waded the broad stream on September fourth, rolling their trousers to splash along on the firm, pebbly bottom, going no more than hip-deep; miles of men, with bands blaring away as they moved. When Jackson appeared on horseback and took off his cap in salute, cheering broke out. The curious from the Maryland and Virginia sides of the river gathered to watch. The passage of the cavalry was a thrilling spectacle to Heros von Borcke, the flamboyant “Major Bandbox” who was in Stuart’s coterie:
“A magnificent sight as the long column of many thousand horsemen stretched across this beautiful Potomac. The evening sun slanted upon its clear placid waters, and burnished them with gold, while the arms of the soldiers glittered and blazed in its radiance. There were few moments … of the war, of excitement more intense, or exhilaration more delightful, than when we ascended the opposite bank to the familiar but now strangely thrilling music of ‘Maryland, My Maryland.’”
But the army was lamentably ragged and hungry, and from a close inspection was by no means impressive—a stream of scarecrows limping up out of the water, their wagons and guns on leaning, creaking wheels, men wizened by sun and exposure and the long strain of battles, bedeviled by itch and vermin. On the Maryland bank a young boy who watched them go by—Leighton Parks—had this recollection:
“They were the dirtiest men I ever saw, a most ragged, lean and hungry set of wolves. Yet there was a
dash about them that the Northern men lacked. They rode like circus riders. Many of them were from the far South and spoke a dialect I could scarcely understand. They were profane beyond belief and talked incessantly.”
Many apprehensive Marylanders expected this noisy horde to fall like a plague upon the fat countryside, but though Lee had resigned himself to feeding the men from cornfields, he imposed a rigid discipline about the town of Frederick, which lay eight miles from the site of the crossing; guards were posted at the town limits, and soldiers forbidden to enter without passes.
Lee had brought only fifty-three thousand across the river, so that at least eleven thousand stragglers fell off behind him. A Charleston newspaper reported that forty thousand pairs of shoes were needed in the army, and the barefoot condition of the troops was to exact penalties in the days ahead. The army settled down near Frederick.
As the regiments rested, there came news that the Federal Government had unhorsed Pope and replaced him with General McClellan. Despite the victories won before Richmond in the spring, the Confederate command received this as sobering news. McClellan was not bold, but he was able. Lee had respect for him.
Jackson found admirers in Maryland. He was brought many gifts, among them a big, bony, powerful gray mare, which was to substitute for the still-missing Sorrel. When he mounted the mare, Old Jack found her slow and stubborn, and touched her flanks with spurs. She reared and fell, and flung Jackson to the ground with violence. He was unconscious for a time, and for half an hour was unable to move. There was a searing pain in his back, and doctors placed him in an ambulance, fearing a crippling injury to his spine. He rapidly improved, but was to be in pain for days; temporarily, he gave command of his troops to D. H. Hill. Thus Lee and Jackson, both handicapped, remained close by their tents at Best’s Grove, near Frederick. The Marylanders saw little of them.
They Called Him Stonewall Page 33
