The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  Shields’s advance, in fact, was closer than that. Jackson was prepared to mount his horse early that morning to visit Ewell’s command, which had camped a few miles back, across the river toward Harrisonburg at a place called Cross Keys. Jackson discovered that Shields was nearer than he thought when the small cavalry detachment he had sent out to fix the Union position came rushing back in what he thought to be disgraceful disorder, with Shields’s cavalry pursuing.38

  For a brief moment Shields’s advance seized the south approach to the bridge over the river and Jackson narrowly missed becoming the war’s most celebrated prisoner. As one Yankee soldier said, they had him “in a box with the lid on, but he kicked the bottom out and got away.”39

  Jackson’s intent had been to hold off Frémont at Cross Keys and fight the main battle against Shields at Port Republic. But Frémont and his congregation had opened fire on Ewell at Cross Keys in earnest. The Fifteenth Alabama stepped forward to detain them until things were more nearly ready. Arnold Elzey had picked the defensive ground and Ewell had found it wisely done. Now with Brigadiers Trimble on the right, Elzey in the center, Steuart on the left, Taylor in reserve, and the First Maryland as usual thrown forward, the services commenced.

  The First Marylanders could take pride in this fight at Cross Keys, because it was Maryland-made, Maryland-manned, and Maryland-led. All the brigadiers commanding were Marylanders, and Ewell was “more than half one.”40 All afternoon they fought, Ewell being pushed back for a time, but recovering all of his lost ground by evening. When at about sundown the First Maryland ran out of ammunition and was ordered to the rear to clean up and refit, it was about over.

  Frémont had fought all afternoon and gotten nowhere. But when an optimistic message arrived from across the river from Shields that he thought “Jackson is caught this time,” Frémont celebrated that prospect by suspending operations for the day, with plans to renew them tomorrow. Maybe Shields was right and tomorrow would be the first day of a better workweek.41

  Jackson had spent most of the day at Port Republic waiting for Shields, and listening to Ewell working the Sabbath at Cross Keys. He had assumed that the assault on the bridge that morning was the precursor of a full-scale attack from Shields. But when it never came, Jackson decided to attack instead first thing the next morning.

  At dawn on the ninth—another beautiful early summer day—Jackson called Ewell across the river, and Ewell came, bringing his entire command except Trimble’s brigade and part of another, which he left in front of Frémont. The Pathfinder wasn’t wanted at this party—at least not by Jackson, and at least not just then.

  Shields would have preferred for Frémont to be present, but he would do his best without him. Neither was Shields personally present, but it became apparent by midmorning that his best, in the person of Brigadier General Erastus Tyler and his two brigades, was pretty good; he was turning out to be a handful. So Trimble was also called across the river and the last thing Frémont saw as the last Confederate crossed over was a sight he had seen too much of already—another bridge burning and falling into the river in front of him. For him it was to be a short workday.

  For Jackson the day was to be as rewarding as all the others had been. “Delightful excitement,” he told Taylor as that general approached with his Louisiana brigade.42 Before the day ended, Jackson had hit Tyler often enough with such ferocity that the federal force had finally buckled and retreated. Jackson, who knew he had been in a fight, had won another one—or as he preferred, the Higher Power had.

  “General,” he said to Ewell, laying his hand on his chief lieutenant’s arm, “he who does not see the hand of God in this is blind, Sir, blind!43

  Shields didn’t see much there except a perfect plan for Jackson’s destruction gone wrong. In Washington, a frustrated Abraham Lincoln saw the futility of any further effort to bag Jackson and called the whole thing off. Shields was ordered to withdraw to Luray, and Frémont started back down the Valley.44 Jackson took his little army on up the road to Weyer’s Cave where his men could praise God, see some stalactites, and wait for whatever strategy might next issue from under that little faded cap.45

  * * *

  Jackson’s unlikely dash down the Valley and up again became an immediate military classic, and made him a legend in his time. North and South he was now looked at with either adulation or disgust, but in both cases with respect. Here was a magician “who could disappear and reappear so suddenly and unexpectedly, and while making such audacious marches right into the jaws of his powerful enemies, deliver such fearful blows and get out whole.”46

  John B. Jones, a rebel war clerk in Richmond, had exulted as he saw the Valley campaign beginning. “There is lightning in the northwest,” he told his diary. “Jackson … is sweeping everything before him.” Nor was he surprised. The year before, when Jackson had gone to Richmond with the VMI cadets, Jones had seen something unusual in their professor. “I hope he will take the field himself,” he had written then in his diary, “and if he does, I predict for him a successful career.”47

  Not only was Jackson making a prophet of John Jones, he was making a believer of Mary Chesnut in Columbia, South Carolina. She wrote in her diary in early June: “Down here we sleep securely, with the serenest faith that Stonewall is to flank everybody and never to be flanked himself.”48

  This is what Jackson had done in this one busy month and a half in the Valley: By quick and strategic movements, forced marches, deceptive maneuvering, effectual fighting and, of course, mystification of both friend and enemy, he had covered 650 miles, taken 3,500 prisoners, and captured 10,000 muskets and nine rifled guns and so many of Banks’s quartermaster stores that everybody was now calling that hapless general “Commissary Banks.” With 17,000 troops Jackson had fought four pitched battles, six formal skirmishes, and numerous minor actions—all victories. The victories were a bonus; they had not been the primary goal. The goal had been to distract, confuse, check, discomfit, confound, and prevent. He knew he could not defeat the forty thousand Union troops that were eventually turned loose upon him. But he could keep them from combining, and he could detain them in the Valley while Johnston and Lee dealt with his classmate, McClellan, on the Peninsula in front of Richmond. That had been his duty. And he had done it, one of his soldiers said, “with the mathematical accuracy and resistless force of a Corliss engine in motion.”49 It is perhaps not too much to say that what he did in the Valley had saved Richmond 120 miles away.

  Richmond was appropriately grateful. Jefferson Davis wired him on June 4 that “the army under your command encourages us to hope for all which men can achieve.” Lee, whose opinion Jackson valued most highly—next to the opinion of Providence—told the Confederate secretary of war what Jackson would most likely have wanted to hear. Of a Jackson plan to attack Shields, Lee had said: “He is a good soldier, I expect him to do it.” After Ashby was killed and Lee was considering names for a likely new cavalry commander to send Jackson, he told the secretary, “We must aid a gallant man if we perish.” To Jackson himself Lee wrote on June 8, “I congratulate you upon defeating and then avoiding your enemy. Your march to Winchester has been of great advantage, and has been conducted with your accustomed skill and boldness.”50

  But from down the Valley another Virginian of a different stripe, the Union staff officer, David Strother, was disgusted with the whole thing: “From what I can learn here,” he growled into his diary in early June, “Jackson is gone beyond pursuit. Thus culminates this disgraceful affair, the most disgraceful to the Federal armies that has occurred during the whole war. I am utterly humiliated to have been mixed up in it.”51

  Richard Ewell felt a lot different now about Jackson. The fanatic was as maddening as ever about never telling him anything of his plans. And Ewell never saw one of Jackson’s couriers approach without expecting an order to storm the North Pole.52 But what is eccentricity anyhow, if not common to all humanity? That is how Ewell’s older brother, Benjamin, felt about it a
s he watched his younger brother’s partnership with Jackson ripen in the Valley. The elder Ewell was himself a West Point graduate and a staff officer with Joseph Johnston. In his view, “most of us are in the estimation of our best friends more or less eccentric. So Taylor and Ewell thought Jackson, and so Taylor thought Ewell and so Ewell thought Taylor, and I have no doubt that if Jackson’s mind hadn’t been full of more important matters he would have thought so of Ewell and Taylor.”53

  So what if Jackson was an enthusiastic fanatic? What if Ewell looked like a woodcock, swore like a magpie, and said strange things? What did it matter? Loony or not they had worked a military miracle together in the Valley. Ewell had shone with nearly the radiance of Jackson himself. While he did not have to show it under Jackson, Ewell’s tactical eye was thought to be nearly as keen as his commander’s. But Ewell was a hands-on general; he couldn’t shake all those years as a company commander on the Indian frontier. He longed to fight with the skirmish line. On two occasions in the Valley, when Jackson was temporarily absent from the front, Ewell had summoned Taylor to watch things while he rushed immediately out among the skirmishes where some sharp work was going on, as oblivious of the bullets as Jackson ever was.54

  In many minds the campaign in the Valley was a Jackson-Ewell triumph. The rebel clerk John Jones in Richmond called Ewell Jackson’s “coadjutor … worthy of his companionship.”55 Even Lincoln, in several impatient dispatches to his Union generals in the Valley, referred to the Confederate force they were vainly chasing as Jackson and Ewell.

  The night following the final thunderbolt victory at Port Republic, Ewell was in an expansive mood. When the cavalryman, Colonel Thomas Munford, dropped by, Ewell invited him to stay for dinner. Afterward as they sat before the tent, Ewell turned to Munford and said in his quick, nervous way, “Look here, Munford, do you remember a conversation we had one day at Conrad’s Store?”

  Munford laughed and asked, “To what do you allude?”

  “Why, to old Trimble, to General Jackson and that other fellow, Colonel Kirkland, of North Carolina.” Ewell had in one way or another in the past slandered all three.

  “I take it all back,” Ewell said, “and will never prejudge another man. Old Jackson is no fool; he knows how to keep his own counsel, and does curious things; but he has a method in his madness; he has disappointed me entirely.”

  He went on to exonerate Trimble of overcautiousness, calling him as bold as any man at Cross Keys—a battle Trimble had largely won—and to praise Kirkland’s handsome behavior near Winchester.56

  Ewell had embarked on the Valley campaign thinking Jackson crazy; he had ended it thinking him inspired.57

  Jackson, near Weyer’s Cave, had yet another mission for Congressman A. R. Boteler. He wished him to return to Richmond and renew the request for the forty thousand troops with which to invade the North. He hadn’t given up the idea. He asked Boteler this time to make formal application. Boteler left Friday evening, June 13, and this time took the appeal directly to General Lee in his tent before McClellan on the Peninsula. Lee listened to him with the same courtesy with which he listened to everybody, and then said quietly, “Colonel, don’t you think General Jackson had better come down here first and help me drive these troublesome people away from before Richmond?”58

  Orders to Jackson along that line had already gone out. Lee had sent a message on the day of the battle at Cross Keys, ordering Jackson to prepare to come to Richmond. “Make your arrangements accordingly,” Lee told Jackson. Not a man to discourage creative improvisation, Lee had added: “But should an opportunity occur for striking the enemy a successful blow do not let it escape you.”59 And Jackson hadn’t.

  But now the time had come. The orders from Lee were imperative. Jackson had a clear duty. He must go. On June 17 he put his army on the road again, starting out, naturally, at night. And none of his soldiers knew any more about where they were going than the buttons on their coats.

  PART 5

  BROTHER

  AGAINST

  BROTHER

  High Hopes

  and

  Paranoia

  George McClellan arrived in Washington wearing his palms of victory from western Virginia on Saturday, July 27, 1861. Almost immediately the paranoia set in.

  There were a few days before it started. At first there was nothing but good will and high hopes. The Young Napoleon from the West was the only proven winner the North had produced so far in this young war, and he was borne into the capital on a triumphant tide of national adulation.

  It was difficult not to like McClellan. He was a man of extraordinary personal charm. His West Point classmates had been dazzled by him. Strangers instantly liked him. Those thrown much in his company unavoidably grew fond of him. His troops idolized him. He inspired deep personal affection and regard.1

  From the moment he arrived nearly everybody felt things would now be all right, that the army was in good hands, that the Union was saved. He went to work immediately with an exhaustless energy, wearing out aides, endearing himself to his soldiers, and doing what he did best—bringing organization and order out of chaos. Nobody whipped things into shape better than George McClellan. When he arrived, the Division of the Potomac—soon to be renamed the Army of the Potomac—was a beaten body of fifty thousand demoralized, disorganized troops still traumatized by their disaster at Bull Run. Within three months he would triple its size and hammer it into the most impressive and disciplined military machine ever assembled on the North American continent.

  Not everybody in Washington liked the idea of George McClellan, even though they might be charmed by him. Irvin McDowell, the former commander of the Potomac division and the hard-luck victim of Bull Run, was hardly overjoyed to see him. McDowell had been the adjutant at West Point when McClellan was a precocious teenaged cadet. Now this upstart had not only replaced him as head of the army in the East, but outranked him. McDowell was relegated to commanding a division in the young hero’s army. Joseph King Fenno Mansfield, with his shaggy white hair, beard, and timeless longevity, liked the arrangement even less. He commanded the District of Columbia troops and had been in the army since before McClellan was born. Now he was subordinate as well to this young comer from the West who was hardly half his age.2

  Some believed that McClellan’s triumphs in western Virginia, while laudable, were hardly worth all the hoopla and adulation. The three small skirmishes hadn’t proved conclusively his qualifications for battlefield command.

  The skeptical English journalist, William Howard Russell, called him “ ‘the little corporal’ of unfought fields,” but admitted that he was nevertheless “ ‘the man on horseback’ just now.” “Everyone,” Russell said with a suggestion of disgust, “is willing to do as he bids: the President confides in him, and ‘Georges’ him; the press fawn upon him, the people trust him.”3

  There were those who saw an arrogant streak coursing beneath all that youthful McClellan charm and glamor. Some of his critics said he was the only man ever born who could strut while sitting down.4

  But this was just nitpicking, little sinks of envy, discontent, and carping on the margins of McClellan’s enormous national popularity. He was in that late summer of 1861 the man of the hour, the savior-elect of the Union.

  He himself believed his press notices. He couldn’t resist writing Nelly, still in Cincinnati and pregnant, that he found himself in a new and strange position in Washington: “Presdt, Cabinet, Genl Scott & all deferring to me—by some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land. I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me—but nothing of that kind would please me—therefore I won’t be Dictator. Admirable self denial!”5

  When he visited the Senate to lobby for a bill giving him power to appoint as many aides as he pleased from civil and army life, he was moved by the attention of all those famous names. “I suppose half a dozen of the oldest made the remark
I am becoming so much used to,” he wrote Nelly. “ ‘Why how young you look—& yet an old soldier!!’ … They give me my way in everything, full swing & unbounded confidence. All tell me that I am held responsible for the fate of the Nation & that all its resources shall be placed at my disposal.” Outside the Senate chamber the crowd stared at him with curiosity and awe: their new national idol. He learned with a surge of quiet pride what they were saying of him in Richmond—“that there was only one man they feared & that was McClellan.”6

  In the warm glow of this head-turning esteem, North and South, McClellan in early August sent Abraham Lincoln a list of the resources he would need to save the Union. If the president wanted him not simply to win a peace and make an advantageous treaty—the ordinary object of war—but to crush a well-backed well-run rebellion, he must have an army of 273,000 men. He broke this down for the president: 250 regiments of infantry—225,000 troops—100 field batteries of 600 guns and 15,000 men, twenty-eight regiments of cavalry with 25,500 men, five engineering regiments of 7,500 troops, and a strong supporting naval force. He envisioned a monstrous one-time offensive against the Confederates in Virginia and a merciless push in the West, with a strong movement on the Mississippi. His basic idea was to crush the enemy in one massive, rebellion-ending battle. That was going to take manpower and money—a lot of both. But in his view it was the only way to deal with the situation.7 It must be done “En grand,” he explained to Nelly. “I flatter myself,” he told her, “that Beauregard has gained his last victory.”8 He didn’t intend to have any Bull Runs on his record.

  It was at about this time that the paranoia set in. Lincoln’s two young secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, were to call it “a strange and permanent hallucination upon two points”—first that he was vastly outnumbered by the rebels, and second, that he was also outnumbered by his own government, and that both of these enemies were hostile and seeking his destruction.9