by John Waugh
The Shenandoah had to be under federal control to make the march on Richmond work. So in late February McClellan launched an invasion of the Valley as a prelude to the larger event. A force under Major General Nathaniel Banks, a Massachusetts politician inexperienced in war, entered the Valley on February 22 to try to wrest back what Jackson had taken earlier in the winter.
By February 24 Banks had occupied Harpers Ferry. Two days later he was in Charles Town with more than thirty thousand soldiers. As the month ended he was cautiously advancing toward Winchester twenty-two miles up the Valley, where Jackson waited with little more than five thousand men.
On the first day of March, Joseph E. Johnston wired orders to Jackson. Since Johnston was confronted with McClellan’s huge army, twice the size of his own, preparing to take Richmond, he didn’t want that army to be any bigger than it already was. Now that Banks was in the Valley, Johnston wanted him to stay there. His orders therefore were for Jackson to employ Banks’s invading force in such a way as to keep it in the Valley. Jackson must stay near enough to Banks to keep him from reinforcing McClellan, yet not so near as to be compelled to fight and to risk defeat.16
Jackson would obey, of course, but with one important mental reservation. He didn’t intend to avoid provoking a fight if the opportunity arose.17 Jackson’s young staff officer, Sandie Pendleton, would go even further than that. “If we do not drive Banks discomfited from the Valley, if the men will only rally as they should to the rescue … I am no true prophet.”18
So on March 6 when Banks’s advance appeared four miles from Winchester, Jackson formed a line in front of his fortifications and offered battle. Banks, wanting none of it, paused and stepped back. On March 11 Banks inched his left cautiously to Berryville ten miles east of Winchester and Jackson again drew up his little army and waited all day for an attack. None came. This was maddening to Jackson. If Banks wouldn’t attack him then he would attack Banks—he preferred it that way anyhow. At a council of war with his commanders that evening, Jackson proposed an attack on Banks before daylight the next morning. His commanders voted against it.
So much for councils of war. Jackson would never hold another one. He would attack anyhow. But then he found that his army had already retired without orders and was five miles from Winchester on a slow withdrawal—too far to recall for a night march and attack.
Sometime after midnight Jackson was seen by one of his soldiers, alone by the side of the road bending over a dying campfire. Jackson stood there for a while warming his hands, apparently in deep meditation and as silent as the glow that played over the embers. Finally he drew his faded cap closer over his brow, mounted his horse, and rode slowly away toward the south.19
Banks occupied Winchester the next day, March 12; Jackson was then in Strasburg. As Banks followed, Jackson backed down the Valley farther still to Woodstock and then to Mount Jackson. All of this pleased McClellan, who was about to take his legions to the Peninsula. Jackson was apparently not going to fight, and McClellan was satisfied that the Valley could be held with a token force. He ordered Banks to cross the Blue Ridge and entrench part of his army at Manassas, part near Front Royal, and part near Strasburg, with a detachment at Winchester to keep an eye on things. This should handily protect both Washington and that part of his army now moving toward Fredericksburg, and take care of Jackson at the same time.
McClellan either had not observed Jackson carefully enough at West Point or had forgotten how dogged he was. He had never taken his classmate for clever. But Old Jack did not follow scripts, particularly federal scripts. He was biding his time, keeping his cavalry commander, Turner Ashby, in perpetual contact with the federal advance—flushing out its pickets, peering into its camps, and reporting what it was up to. When Ashby advised Jackson on the evening of March 21 that Banks had evacuated Strasburg and was pulling troops out of the Valley wholesale, Jackson wheeled and began marching his little army rapidly back toward Winchester. Banks must not be allowed to leave the Valley.20
Banks was, in fact, anxious to entrain for Washington. He now believed he could safely leave matters in the hands of Brigadier General James Shields in Winchester long enough to go there and come back. Nothing important seemed to be happening. The withdrawal east of the Blue Ridge was under way and reconnaissance had told them Jackson would retire from the Valley without a fight. This made sense. That is what they would have done in his place. Banks had no idea, as he prepared to leave for Washington, that Jackson was at that moment doing the unexpected—rolling toward Winchester looking to make trouble.21
In Winchester, Shields was having some mild misgivings. Ashby was causing him fits and they had even had some hard skirmishing that evening. Shields had taken a shell fragment in the shoulder and was now in bed with a broken arm. But even so, it looked to him like the Confederates had only a small cavalry force in the field. It was unlikely Jackson would be venturing so far from his base of support. But still …22
The tenacious Ashby had concluded that the Union army was withdrawing in a big way. All his looking and prying had convinced him of it. So he had sent word to Jackson on the twenty-first that all but four of the Union regiments had left for the north and the rest seemed about to follow.
Jackson arrived at Kernstown three miles south of Winchester at about 1:00 p.M. on March 23, his troops weary-legged from the twenty-five miles he had driven them over the past day and a half. He planned to bivouac for the night. It was Sunday and he hated to fight on the Lord’s Day, and his troops could use the rest. On further examination, however, he found that the position he had taken south of Kernstown could be seen by the enemy and that it would be dangerous to wait. The Federals now knew he was there and they could be reinforced overnight. He decided to attack immediately, even though it was Sunday and late in the day.
Lying in bed in Winchester, Shields knew one thing Jackson didn’t. Ashby, who wasn’t often wrong about such things, was wrong about the number of troops Shields still had. Although the withdrawal across the Blue Ridge was under way, Shields could still muster some seven thousand men at Winchester, far more than the four regiments Ashby thought he had.23
Jackson disliked hitting any enemy square on if he could avoid it, so he feinted toward Shields’s right center, then hit him on the right flank. But something didn’t seem quite right; it wasn’t turning out to be so easy. It all became clear when Sandie Pendleton, who had been out reconnoitering, returned to report the terrible truth: there were at least ten thousand Yankees out there, not just four regiments.
Jackson was painfully aware that about the best he could muster was 3,500 men. “Say nothing about it,” he told Pendleton, “we are in for it.”24
It got hot and heavy in a hurry. Jackson couldn’t remember ever having heard such a roar of musketry.25 Many of his soldiers were hearing this same musketry, and worse, the thunder of cannon, for the first time in their lives. One of them described the first shell he ever heard four months earlier as a “hark from the tomb.” When it had all ended at Kernstown and the battle was done and he was still alive, the same soldier thought gratefully: “Mother, Home, Heaven are all sweet words, but the grandest sentence I ever heard from mortal lips was uttered this evening … ‘Boys, the battle is over.’ ”26
Before it was over, about dusk, Jackson had fought gamely and lost. But he thought he ought to have won. Indeed, he thought he was on the verge of winning until Brigadier General Richard Garnett, commanding his old Stonewall Brigade, abruptly withdrew without orders. Garnett’s men had run out of ammunition and he had—wisely, everybody but Jackson thought—decided his position was untenable. That did it; Jackson was beaten. He could do nothing then but pull back.
Flush with rage, he clapped Garnett under arrest and relieved him of command. Jackson was convinced that if the Stonewall Brigade had just held on another ten minutes—giving them the bayonet, throwing rocks, anything—the Union army would have given it up and retired.
Despite his anger and frustrati
on, Jackson could take some satisfaction from events as he bedded down that night. He had lost the battle, but won the day. Banks, hearing the uproar behind him, had turned around at Harpers Ferry and come back. The troops that were being withdrawn were also returned. McClellan wasn’t going to get the reinforcements he had been counting on.
In his report of the battle Jackson wrote: “Though Winchester was not recovered, yet the more important object for the present, that of calling back troops that were leaving the valley, and thus preventing a junction of Banks’ command with other forces, was accomplished.… though the field is in possession of the enemy, yet the most essential fruits of the battle are ours.”27
Jackson not only felt that way; he acted that way. His pullback from Kernstown was sullen but unhurried. When he reached Mount Jackson he halted on the other side of the North Fork of the Shenandoah and set up headquarters in the front parlor of the hospitable home of the Reverend Anders Rudolph Rude, and acted as if he planned to stay awhile. He stayed three weeks.
Banks was in no hurry to pursue this pest; he had swatted it, but it still might have sting left. He didn’t begin following Jackson until April Fools’ Day, a week after the battle at Kernstown. On that day he put his army out on the turnpike with bayonets glinting in the early spring sun to see what he could see. What he saw was Turner Ashby again.
Ashby was a first-rate nuisance. Being the rear guard was his thing. He was at his best when operating in that no-man’s-land between the friend’s rear and the enemy’s advance, at the head of his raucous and undisciplined cavalry. He was like a deranged boxer, dancing in and out and about, jabbing and pulling back, weaving and dodging. He was taunting and insolent, thrusting his chin forward to invite his adversary’s best shot, then whirling away just before the blow landed. The contour of the Valley lent itself to such antics. There was an excellent artillery position around every bend in the road. Ashby would set up his highly mobile battery of guns on one of these and open fire on the head of the federal column as it marched into view. The column would halt and bring up a battery of its own. After exchanging a few shots, Ashby’s guns would limber up and gallop to the next convenient position and repeat the exercise.28
This was ludicrous, because at any time Banks with his superior force could have plowed at will over Ashby, battery and all. Working this way in the enemy’s immediate front was nerve-racking for Ashby’s artillerymen, “service both active and arduous,” said one of them, “full of alarms, hardships, and excitement.”29 For every other Confederate, however, it was reassuring. “I never slept more soundly in my life than when in sight of the enemy’s camp-fires, with Ashby between us,” said the adjutant of the Second Virginia, “for I knew that it was wellnigh impossible for them to surprise him.”30
For Colonel George H. Gordon of the West Point class of 1846, now in command of Banks’s advance, swatting Ashby was a little like trying to pin down the Scarlet Pimpernel. Catch them, he ordered, pointing to Ashby’s illusive cavalry.
“I can’t catch them, sir,” his own cavalry commander would explain, “they leap the fences and walls like deer: neither our men nor our horses are so trained.”31
This whirligig of artillery brawling and picket-stalking continued until Banks reached Mount Jackson and pulled into view of Jackson’s main army at Rude’s Hill. On April 17, when Banks began to crowd him, Jackson thanked the Reverend Doctor Rude and his daughters for their hospitality, indicated he would be moving on, and set his army in motion toward Harrisonburg. He arrived the next evening, and there at about dusk in a driving rain he called for Henry Kyd Douglas.
Not yet twenty-four, Douglas was by his own description a “boy soldier,” with hair as black as his coat.32 He had been raised around Harpers Ferry and Shepherdstown in western Virginia. When the war came in 1861 he became a private in Colonel Jackson’s brigade at Harpers Ferry. In July when Jackson, promoted to a brigadier, had stood like a stonewall at Manassas, Douglas, promoted to a company orderly sergeant, stood with him. By August, Douglas, a lawyer by education, was a junior lieutenant, and by April 1862 he was a captain on Jackson’s staff—“one of your wide awake, smart young men,” Jed Hotchkiss called him.33
What Jackson now wanted Douglas to do was to take a night ride over the Massanutton to the vicinity of Culpeper on the Rappahannock River line, sixty miles away, with a message for Major General Richard S. Ewell. So young Douglas, having no clear idea how to get there, galloped away into a stormy night as dark as Erebus.34
Jackson had had a lot of time to think at Rude’s Hill. He would think some more over the next few days as he took his little army around the base of Massanutton Mountain to Conrad’s Store in front of Swift Run Gap on the Blue Ridge.
Why Jackson went there was not immediately clear to the casual observer. It was true that from there he held Banks in check; any aggressive move the Union general might make now could bring Jackson in an instant across the Massanutton and onto his rear. But at the same time Jackson had taken himself out of the Valley he had been assigned to protect—an unsettling strategy, it seemed, to the people of the Valley. Sandie Pendleton attempted to explain it in a letter to his mother. “Leaving the Valley in order to protect it is singular,” he confessed, “but bids fare to be efficacious.”35 Not even Pendleton, however, knew exactly what his chief had in mind or whether it would work. Nobody did.
Jackson’s immediate task had been to press Banks as closely as circumstances would justify, and he had settled in at Rude’s Hill with that in mind. When Banks had marched into Ashby’s view across Stony Creek, Jackson had fallen back, hoping to draw him up the Valley after him. But he was not convinced he could lure Banks much beyond Mount Jackson. Jackson believed that if Banks could be attacked and defeated at some point, that would even more emphatically retard McClellan’s movements on the Peninsula. One thought he had, which he shared with Robert E. Lee in Richmond, was the possibility of getting behind Banks’s rear at either New Market or Harrisonburg. Jackson wrote Lee that he intended to lie quietly at Swift Run Gap for a few days to see if Banks might make a move in some direction that would permit him, with the blessing of Providence, to attack his advance and drive back his entire force. If that failed perhaps Banks could at least be induced “to follow me through this gap, where our forces would have greatly the advantage.”36
But the circumspect Banks gave him neither opportunity, and by the end of April Jackson’s thinking had turned toward more active alternatives. He saw three possibilities, all three involving Ewell, whose division on the Rappahannock had been put at Jackson’s disposal. Jackson summarized these three alternatives to Lee on April 29: He could leave Ewell at Swift Run Gap to watch Banks, while he moved rapidly back into the Valley to attack the Union force then threatening Confederate Brigadier General Edward (“Allegheny Ed”) Johnson near Staunton. Then he could deal with Banks. Or in consort with Ewell he could hit Banks’s detached force between New Market and the North Fork of the Shenandoah, and if successful drive him back down the Valley. Or he could pass down the South Fork of the Shenandoah by another route and threaten Winchester via Front Royal. With any of these plans or a combination of them he intended, particularly if Lee could spare some reinforcements, to make life miserable for Banks. Of the three plans he preferred the first, after which he could turn on Banks without having to contend with anybody else.37
Whatever he decided to do, Ewell was the key. Without Ewell’s eight-thousand-man division none of the plans would work. Ewell was to be his accomplice. That is why he had sent Douglas out into the dark and stormy night. He had to have Ewell.
The
Odd Couple
Only a Providence with a lively imagination could have concocted any such partnership as Stonewall Jackson and Richard Ewell. No odder couple existed in the Confederate army, or any army.
Jackson in the spring of 1862 was thirty-eight years old, and looking as little like a general as the day he entered West Point wearing his homespun. A young lady who s
aw him at a prayer meeting in Winchester admitted he was “right nice looking—though not much like a general in appearance.” She had supposed, therefore, that what he looked like didn’t matter, but “it’s the head that makes all.”1 When one of his foot soldiers first saw him, he thought it hardly possible that it was the general; he looked more like a “crank.”2 “Such a dry old stick too!” said another.3
The Jackson that met the eye was a near six-footer topped with a rust-colored head of wavy or curly hair, and a full beard. He had a small sharp nose and thin pallid lips that were generally clamped relentlessly shut. The eyes that looked out from this face were kindly, but unflinching and steely blue-gray, and troubling him now when he tried to read under artificial light. The lower part of his face was leathery and tanned from exposure. Although usually wooden in expression, his face, under certain circumstances, could be highly animated and the mouth very mobile. It could also light up with that same sweet smile his classmates at West Point remembered. His voice, in giving commands, was either low and drawling, or high, piping, and querulous, depending upon the situation. His forehead was high, broad, and white under his cap. However, the cap, given him by his wife, was generally on and was sunburnt yellow—worn with its visor pulled down so far over the eyes that Jackson had to keep his chin upthrust to see both friend and foe.
He was well put together, although he tended to be somewhat sway-backed and sprung in the knees. The angular body was clothed in a uniform of a style to match the cap—dingy, faded, and “sun-embrowned.”4 Like the cap, it had begun life in a brighter hue, but had been transmuted by time and hard use. The coat was seasoned in the soil of his beloved Valley and nearly out at the elbows. He had worn it in rain and under scorching sun, slept in it, ridden in it, and fought in it. On his legs he wore big cavalry boots reaching to the knees.
