Clouds of Glory

by Michael Korda

  Jackson’s progress on August 27 and 28 might have been designed to further confuse Pope, though it was not. With his usual taste for secrecy and for not letting the left hand know what the right hand was doing, Jackson sent two of his three divisions on roundabout routes on the far side of Bull Run. A. P. Hill marched in a lengthy dogleg as far as Centreville before he joined up again with Ewell and they crossed Stone Bridge to meet Jackson at Groveton. Frustrating as these moves were for Jackson’s generals, they presented Pope with a puzzle he was unable to solve: where was Jackson going, and what would he do when got there?

  The answer—though it did not occur to Pope—was that Jackson intended to provoke Pope into attacking him on ground of his own choosing. Groveton, though it was hardly more than a speck on the map, was now the point toward which thousands of men on both sides were marching, none of them as yet aware that Jackson was already there. Although invisible to each other, the opposing forces were tantalizingly close. Groveton was only ten miles from Thoroughfare Gap, through which Lee and Longstreet with 25,000 men would emerge the next morning. Manassas Junction, where Pope was trying to decide what to do with over 51,000 Union soldiers scattered across the map, was only seven miles away to the south. The Stone Bridge on Bull Run over which A. P. Hill’s division was marching from Centreville was only three miles away. But distances can be deceiving where battles are concerned, and nearness to the enemy is no substitute for a clear picture of his intentions. Close as he was to Jackson in miles, Pope still thought that his quarry was in headlong retreat toward the Bull Run Mountains. He seems to have had no inkling that far from retreating, Jackson was waiting impatiently for him, or that Longstreet was marching as fast as he could to join Jackson, or that Lee himself was less than seventeen miles away from his own headquarters.

  Throughout the hot, sultry morning of August 28 Jackson carefully placed his forces where he wanted them, with Major General William B. Taliaferro’s division in the center, putting A. P. Hill on his right, in front of Taliaferro’s, and Ewell on his left, as they came up during the morning. All three divisions were concealed by the railway cutting and the woods. Jackson’s troops rested in whatever shade they could find, while he himself lay down with a saddle for his pillow and went to sleep. He was in a position that would have kept most generals wide awake. True, he had chosen his spot, concentrated his forces there, and carefully overseen the siting of his artillery. Who after all could perform this last task better than the former professor of artillery at VMI? For once he even let Lee know by courier where to find him, and that intercepted intelligence indicated a large part of Pope’s army was on the move from Manassas Junction toward Centreville. Jackson realized that he might at any moment find himself fighting a battle in which he was hopelessly outnumbered, and that he had by now sacrificed any possibility of maneuvering or retreat. Before midday he was awake and riding restlessly up and down the tree line on Little Sorrel, alone and apparently determined to avoid conversation with his generals. As usual, he had confided his plans to no one.

  It was not until mid-afternoon that a courier, his horse sweating and exhausted, finally arrived from Lee to let Jackson know that Longstreet had reached Thoroughfare Gap. Hearing this, Jackson relaxed a bit, and his expression was actually described as “beaming,” an occurrence rare enough to be noticed by those around him. He shook hands with the courier—again an unusual gesture for such a remote and forbidding military figure—drank “a quantity of buttermilk” (his favorite beverage), and surveyed the empty Warrenton-Centreville Turnpike stretching before him. The undulating ground sloped gently down from the tree line to the road, just over a mile away, giving Jackson and his staff a view of it as if they were in a theater, except that for the moment nothing was happening onstage.

  Jackson had already ordered Taliaferro and Ewell to advance their divisions closer to the tree line, but it was a false alarm. As the hours went by and the sun began to set, it began to seem to many of the men after their long wait that nothing would happen today. Then, just after five o’clock, Jackson saw the glint of bayonets in the distance, the front ranks of a Federal column marching from Gainesville toward Bull Run and Centreville. As Brigadier General Rufus King’s Union division* approached Groveton, Jackson rode out onto the open ground alone to take a closer look, apparently without attracting any attention, though one would have thought the sight of a solitary uniformed horseman, however shabby and indifferently mounted, might have served as a warning that there was a Confederate force nearby, on the eastern slope of Sudley Mountain. Jackson took his time, calmly noted that there were four brigades of Federal infantry marching past him in good order as if he were taking their salute, then rode back into the woods. “Bring out your men, gentlemen,” he said. At 6:30 p.m. Confederate artillery began shelling the Union column.

  Considering the difficulties facing the Federals—they were taken by surprise, they were marching in a column spread out along a mile and a half of road, and their commanding officer was not present—it is amazing that they reacted so quickly and effectively. Just the need to halt, turn ninety degrees to the left, re-form into battle ranks, and advance away from the turnpike and toward the enemy under fire required a remarkable degree of training and discipline. Despite his excellent position, his superior numbers, and the fact that he had successfully “ambushed” the Federal column, the best that can be said for Jackson was that he managed to hold his position until darkness finally put an end to what he described as “a fierce and sanguinary struggle with the enemy.” He got only about 6,000 men into the fight, against about 2,100 Federals, and was hampered by thick woods, the encroaching darkness, and what one writer calls “the piecemeal deployment of his forces.” Since he held the high ground and had a full day to prepare for a Federal attack, it is hard to understand why Jackson failed to annihilate the Union brigades and send them reeling back to Gainesville in retreat. Instead, they managed to advance over open ground to Brawner’s Farm and exchange volleys of musket fire with the Confederates at eighty yards. The result was a bloody “stalemate” with 1,150 Union casualties and 1,250 Confederate. Some units sustained a casualty rate of 70 percent, and General Taliaferro was seriously wounded in the neck and arm. In addition, General Ewell received a musket ball in the leg; it shattered the bone, making amputation necessary the next day, and kept him out of action for almost a year. Nothing much was gained on either side by this “effusion of blood.” The Federals, though badly shaken, withdrew toward the turnpike in good order, while Jackson for once betrayed his anxiety by dismounting and putting “his ear to the ground to listen for Longstreet’s approach.” If Jackson was hoping to hear the rhythmic tread of Longstreet’s marching men, he was disappointed. Lee and Longstreet, with the other half of the Army of Northern Virginia, were still at the wrong end of Thoroughfare Gap, from which they had heard the muffled thunder of the guns at Brawner’s Farm.

  Some historians have argued that the battle was a “strategic” success and that Jackson wanted only to keep Pope’s attention fixed on him. Perhaps this is true, but it scarcely required a battle that cost Jackson 1,250 men, including two division commanders, to bewilder Pope, who now knew where Jackson was, and still believing that his enemy was in headlong retreat, hoped to “bag” him the next day. Late that night, Pope withdrew the only forces that stood between Longstreet and Jackson’s position at Groveton and ordered them to proceed at once toward Centreville along the Warrenton-Gainesville Turnpike—another fatal mistake.

  Certainly one reason why Jackson fought at Groveton was his overriding concern that Pope might cross his army to the northern side of Bull Run and attempt to make a junction with McClellan’s army, which was forming up in Alexandria after its voyage from Harrison’s Landing. This would have presented Lee with a Union force too numerous for him to meet; but as usual McClellan was moving too slowly, and—typically for him—he was warning Halleck and the president that Lee had perhaps as many as 120,000 troops, more than twice the actual num
ber. On August 28 McClellan was in Washington to urge that Pope, whom he held in contempt even more than Lee did, should “cut his way through and fall back to the capital.” He also urged preparing the Chain Bridge over the Potomac for demolition, a precaution that can only have caused dismay in the White House. On the evening of August 28 McClellan could hear the sound of gunfire from Groveton, but he was reluctant to send any of his army to support “that fool Pope.” The next day he caused a firestorm by recommending to President Lincoln that it might be best “to leave Pope to get out of his scrape,” rather than supporting him. Lincoln took this as a sign of disloyalty, perhaps even treason, on McClellan’s part, but it may have been no more than the basic battlefield wisdom embodied in an old British military adage, “Never reinforce failure.”* One of Lee’s assets during this campaign was McClellan’s pessimism, and his ability to sow alarm and despondency in Washington without even trying. The one thing that Lee feared was the union of McClellan’s army and Pope’s, which, as it happened, was also the one thing that McClellan was determined to prevent.

  Incompetent Pope might be, and looking in the wrong direction, but he could move a lot faster than McClellan when he thought an opportunity had presented itself, and now that he supposed Jackson was trapped, he intended to close on him from the east and the west simultaneously. But Pope’s forces were scattered piecemeal all over the map, and most of his generals at this point had no idea where their commander was. Pope had none of McClellan’s sense of order or skill at organizing the movements of a large army; but since he had over 60,000 men to bring to bear on the 18,000 effectives remaining to Jackson, none of that should have mattered.

  Jackson spent the night at Sudley Springs, alternately praying and napping in a house that had been turned into a makeshift field hospital to the far left of his line. At dawn he rose to reposition his army for the assault he knew was coming. He pulled his troops back to take as much advantage as possible of the unfinished railway cutting, and placed his artillery—forty guns—in the tree line, which would hamper their field of fire but partially conceal them. He anchored his left on Sudley Springs, close to a ford on Bull Run. Only his right was somewhat “in the air,” but he counted on Longstreet’s arrival with 25,000 men to hold that position once he arrived.

  By 10 a.m. the Federal forces, backed up by artillery fire, had begun a series of poorly coordinated attacks—Robertson refers to them as “probes”—intended to reveal the weak spots in Jackson’s line. These probes started on the Confederate right, where Jackson was weakest, and then gradually concentrated on his left, where A. P. Hill’s division repulsed several stronger Federal attacks; but Pope was hampered by not having a clear picture in his mind of what was actually happening, as well as by his failure to concentrate his overwhelmingly superior forces for a knockout blow against Jackson.

  By midmorning on August 29 the leading elements of Longstreet’s wing had arrived on the battlefield. Major General John B. Hood’s division, with the Texas Brigade in the lead, began to form up on Jackson’s right in two lines at “an angle of approximately 160 degrees, strongest at the apex near the Gainesville-Centreville road, looking east.” By this time, Lee himself was on the scene, and took command of the battle. He had already performed a feat seldom equaled in the history of warfare: he split his army in the face of a superior enemy; he marched half of it in a wide arc around his enemy’s flank; then he rapidly marched the other half forward so that the two forces were united on the battlefield, “a move of extraordinary audacity,” as General Fuller, normally not an admirer of Lee, admits. Pope still imagined that Longstreet was miles away on the other side of the Bull Run Mountains, when he was in fact lining up his troops on Jackson’s right.

  Lee rode forward to survey the scene, his usual impassivity unruffled by the fact that a sharpshooter’s bullet grazed his cheek. He found himself not only in possession of the high ground, but also in a position that formed a shallow V from which he could subject Pope’s army to enfilade fire if it attacked Lee’s center. Pope had been expecting that Porter and McDowell with their corps would arrive on the battlefield from Gainesville and attack Jackson’s right, but Longstreet’s force was now blocking their advance, his lines extending across the turnpike. Porter and McDowell, who had been harassed by Stuart’s cavalry on their march from Gainesville, had received a contradictory “joint order” from Pope, described by one student of the battle as “a masterpiece of contradiction and obfuscation,” and halted in place, uncertain of what to do. McDowell had already demonstrated a certain degree of ineptitude under pressure at First Manassas, but Porter was a competent officer who had fought well on the peninsula, and held Lee at Malvern Hill—it may be that as “McClellan” men, they possibly shared a lack of confidence in General Pope; but in any case, at this crucial point in the battle, they took counsel of their fears. At least Porter, could see that if he advanced against “Jackson’s right” his corps would collide with Longstreet’s 25,000 men, something that Pope could not or would not see, but in the meantime Pope was left to fight Jackson with only a portion of his potential strength.*

  Throughout the late morning and early afternoon Pope threw attack after attack at Jackson’s left. Often his troops engaged in volley after volley, sometimes at a distance of only a few paces, as “bodies piled in front of the railroad cut and sprawled over the descending ground to the east,” while Longstreet deployed his half of the army. What Lee saw before him was a perfect opportunity to attack and “crush” Pope. Jackson’s wing of the Army of the Northern Virginia had firmly beaten off a series of piecemeal and poorly coordinated attacks; Longstreet’s wing was now positioned perfectly to attack, closing like a hinge on the left flank of Pope’s forces before Porter could reach the battlefield. A glance at the map is enough to see that the battle was, at that point on August 29, a textbook illustration of classic battlefield tactics. Lee saw an opportunity to trap the enemy as if between the closing covers of a book, with Longstreet’s wing driving Pope’s forces toward Jackson’s artillery, squeezing the enemy until he had no option but retreat or surrender. Although Lee could see all this in an instant, it did not happen.

  15. Situation at the close of action, August 29, 1862.

  {Robert E. Lee, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, by Douglas Southall Freeman, copyright © 1934, 1935, by Charles Scribner’s Sons, copyright renewed 1962, 1963, by Inez Godden Freeman. All rights reserved.}

  The reason lay in the very heart of Lee’s personality, the mysterious factor that so often outweighed his skill and audacity, as well as in the bravery of his ragged, poorly supplied troops. Although a thriving cottage industry has grown up, particularly but not exclusively in the South, to eradicate Lee’s mistakes and turn him into a kind of military secular saint, the real man was not always right, and his generalship was often hampered by his reluctance to enforce his will on his own generals.

  Lee possessed every quality required of a great general except the ability to give a direct order to his subordinates and ensure that it was obeyed. He inspired love, admiration, and respect, but not fear. He was not lacking in willpower—he could move an entire army to undertake things that required terrible sacrifices and suffering—but good manners and a remarkable dislike of personal confrontation often hindered the execution of his plans. Of course, as Field Marshal Helmuth Karl von Moltke remarked, “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy,” but Lee again and again left matters to his corps commanders once battle was engaged, and hesitated to give them a direct order to do what he wanted them to.

  The bond between Lee and Jackson, despite the latter’s poor showing in the peninsula campaign, came about in large part because Jackson never argued with Lee, and seemed able to divine what Lee wanted with only the barest and politest of suggestions on Lee’s part. This was not the case with James Longstreet (called “Old Pete” by his fellow West Pointers), who was stubborn, argumentative, and determined to get his own way—Longstreet was not exactly deaf to Lee’s charm, ideas,
or suggestions, but unlike Lee he enjoyed an argument and always sought to win one. Longstreet respected Lee but did not worship him and did not hesitate to make a case for what he himself wanted to do—indeed, he was still making it, more stubbornly than ever, in 1896, when he published his memoirs of the war. He disagreed with Lee not just about tactics but about the whole strategy of the Confederacy, and was not shy about expressing his opinion.

  This does not mean that the war would have been won had Lee accepted Longstreet’s advice—nothing is that simple—but it does mean that Lee, knowing what Longstreet thought, should, if they disagreed, have exerted his authority over the man in whose command he had placed half of his army. Jackson could be trusted to do what Lee wanted him to do on August 29 at Second Manassas, but Longstreet dug in his heels and refused. More important, Longstreet learned what he had no doubt always suspected, which was that Lee would stop short of giving him a direct order and relieving him of his command if he did not obey it; and Lee learned that he would put up with Longstreet’s insubordination and not call his bluff. Never mind who was right and who was wrong; this was not a good lesson for either man to learn.

  Giving Lee full credit for saintly patience, there might have been nothing wrong with his hearing Longstreet out and then telling him to obey orders—there was no need for Lee to imitate Napoleon’s cold fury, as when he told Ney at Waterloo, “Monsieur, vous m’avez perdu la France!”* But at Second Manassas Longstreet declined to attack three times, and Lee let him get away with it, although Longstreet understood perfectly well what Lee wanted him to do—in his own words, “General Lee was inclined to engage as soon as practicable, but did not order.” This, in terms of the battlefield, is lawyers’ talk. If Longstreet knew what Lee wished, he should not have needed a direct order; at the same time, if Lee noticed Longstreet’s reluctance, and he certainly did, it was his duty as commander in chief to give Longstreet a direct order to attack at once or relinquish his command.