by Bruce Catton
Standing between these two men, Lee could prevent a complete estrangement. He could assuage Johnston’s feelings when they were hurt, could call the man to time when necessary without making him feel that bumbling civilians were outraging blameless soldiers, and on occasion could deflect to himself complaints which otherwise would have gone direct to the President. Snubbed by McClellan, Mr. Lincoln once remarked that he would hold the general’s horse if that would help win the war; Jefferson Davis would never conceivably have said anything of the kind, but General Lee might have held the horse in his stead—or, more probably, might have seen the snub coming and found a way to smother it.
Lee’s position in all of this was difficult. He held a position which Mr. Davis had invented at a time when it seemed necessary to veto an act of Congress creating the position of general-in-chief: a necessity arising from Mr. Davis’s conviction that the President’s constitutional function as commander-in-chief must not be infringed upon by any such act of Congress. Lee had much authority and no authority, all at the same time. He was charged, “under the direction of the President,” with conducting the military operations of the armies of the Confederacy; his orders, in other words, were binding on one and all, but on matters of any consequence he could speak only at the President’s direction.2 Perhaps the most revealing measure of his capacity as a man is the fact that this spring, even thus limited, he found and used a device that confounded Mr. Lincoln, Secretary Stanton, General McClellan, and all of the Federal armies in the state of Virginia.
By the first of May, when McClellan was almost ready to open his bombardment at Yorktown and Johnston was almost ready to foil him by departing, the general Confederate situation in Virginia was desperate. On the peninsula, Johnston with 55,000 men faced an army approximately twice that large. At Norfolk, which was about to be abandoned, the Confederate Major General Benjamin Huger had 10,000 soldiers, who presumably would join Johnston; they were balanced by 12,400 Federals under old General Wool at Fort Monroe, who would eventually be put under McClellan’s command. In northern Virginia, from the Shenandoah Valley to the tidewater city of Fredericksburg, there were some 75,000 Federal troops in the separated commands of McDowell and Banks and in the Washington lines. In addition, Pathfinder Frémont had upwards of 17,000 scattered up and down the mountain valleys of western Virginia; he was beginning to pull them together and was contemplating a move south to break the railroad line that connected Virginia and Tennessee. To meet this immense array—which, for all anyone in Richmond knew, might at any moment be welded into one army—the Confederacy had 13,000 men under Brigadier General Joseph R. Anderson, below the Rappahannock watching McDowell; 6000 or more under Stonewall Jackson in the upper Shenandoah; 2800 under Brigadier General Edward Johnson west of Staunton, to keep an eye on Frémont; and 8500 under Major General Richard Ewell, poised at one of the gaps in the Blue Ridge, ready at need to join Jackson against Banks or to move east and join Anderson against McDowell. Since the Confederate authorities had a fairly accurate count on Federal strength, a simple exercise in addition was all anyone needed in order to understand the inadequacy of Confederate manpower in Virginia.
If the Federals had moved with speed, beginning in April, there would have been nothing for the Confederacy to do except call all of these detachments to Richmond, fold them into Johnston’s army, and prepare for a backs-to-the-wall fight at the gates of the capital. If McClellan had broken through the Yorktown lines in the first week of April and moved swiftly up the peninsula he would have forced his opponents to make such a concentration. The supposed threat to Washington would have disappeared, the bulk of the Federal forces would have joined McClellan, and the final showdown—the battle which, if won by the North, would have brought the war nearly to an end—would have taken place under conditions giving all the advantages to the Union.
It did not happen so. McClellan spent a month at Yorktown, and the month thus lost was a free gift to the Confederacy. Early in April, Mr. Lincoln warned McClellan that the Confederates “will probably use time as advantageously as you can,” and Lee set out to prove that Mr. Lincoln was correct. On April 25 he wrote to Stonewall Jackson, suggesting that “in the present divided condition of the enemy’s forces” a blow could be struck. Banks, thought Lee, would make a good target, and perhaps Jackson, Ewell, and Edward Johnson could join forces and hit him. Lee added: “The blow, wherever struck, must, to be successful, be sudden and heavy.” Jackson, who was just the man to see the possibilities in such a maneuver, proposed that Frémont’s hesitant advance be knocked back first and that Banks then be attacked, and on May 1 Lee authorized him to go ahead. The initiative, surrendered during the long siege operation at Yorktown, had been picked up by hands that would use it most effectively.3
It would be necessary to use it quickly. McClellan was coming up the peninsula, and if his progress looked slow in Washington it looked ominous enough to General Johnston, who knew perfectly well that if the Northerner were allowed to play the game in his own way the Confederacy would be beaten. McClellan would leave nothing to chance. He had not merely the stronger battalions, but also the great siege guns, the mortars, and the field artillery to blast any line of entrenchments to bits, and he would make no attack until he was prepared to use all of these assets to the full. Just before leaving Yorktown, Johnston had given Lee his pessimistic appraisal of the situation: “We are engaged in a species of warfare at which we can never win. It is plain that General McClellan will adhere to the system adopted by him last summer and depend for success upon artillery and engineering. We can compete with him in neither.”4 This judgment was realistic. McClellan’s plan would work, inevitably, provided he were given time enough to execute it; the one qualifying factor was that it was going to be a very slow process. If, by seizing the initiative, the Confederate strategists could rob the man of the unlimited time he had to have, something might be done.
Johnston continued to retreat, going at last all the way behind the Chickahominy and drawing his lines almost in the suburbs of Richmond, and the gloom which had pervaded the Confederate capital all spring became deeper than ever. President Davis was quite unable to find out when or where, or even whether, the army would offer battle; the Confederate government uneasily prepared to ship its vital papers out of the city; and bristling Robert Toombs, a strangely uninfluential brigadier in Johnston’s army, voiced his despair and his disgust with professional soldiers in an angry letter to Vice-President Stephens: “This army will not fight until McClellan attacks it. Science will do anything but fight. It will burn, retreat, curse, swear, get drunk, strip soldiers—anything but fight.” To round out the picture, he added: “Davis’s incapacity is lamentable.”5 Both Mr. Davis and General Johnston were uneasily aware that General McDowell was very likely to bring 40,000 men down to join McClellan in the near future, and they knew that if this host marched down to the Chickahominy from Fredericksburg the cause was lost.… And far off in the Shenandoah Valley, Stonewall Jackson put his troops on the road, heading east through a gap in the Blue Ridge, doubling back to Staunton, and disappearing entirely from the ken of all Federal patrols, scouts, and military thinkers.
The military planner who becomes lost in the fog of war rarely notices the onset of the fog. It comes on gradually, the sum total of many small uncertainties which hardly seemed worth a second thought. There is a little patch of mist here, another patch over yonder, a slow thickening of the haze along the horizon, the sky turning gray and sagging lower over the woods, sunlight fading out imperceptibly … and then, suddenly, the horizon has vanished altogether, there is fog everywhere, and the noises that come from the invisible landscape are unidentifiable, confusing and full of menace; at which point it is mortally easy to give way to panic and do one’s self great harm.
So it was with the Federals after the occupation of Yorktown. Little doubts came into being; seeming, at the time, of no great consequence; hanging in the air and waiting for some quick shock to jar all of them toge
ther into one disastrous uncertainty.
When the Confederates moved up the peninsula to get away from McClellan, the War Department in Washington tried to appraise the general situation, learning nothing to cause great uneasiness, learning indeed nothing at all for certain, sensing only that the Rebels were up to something. From his station in the North Carolina sounds area, where he had been exploiting the advantages gained by the occupation of Roanoke Island, General Burnside sent word that some of the Rebel troops in his front seemed to be moving north to Virginia. Peering across the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg, General McDowell reported that there appeared to be some sort of build-up of the Confederate forces in his front; it was rumored that Stonewall Jackson would appear before long to take over-all command. From the western mountain valleys, General Frémont sent word that Brigadier General Robert Milroy, commanding Frémont’s advance in the foothills thirty miles west of Staunton, was menaced by advancing Rebels led by Jackson in person. Banks reported that whatever Jackson was doing he had at least disappeared from Banks’s front. And, at Fort Monroe, Secretary Stanton, who was helping Mr. Lincoln capture Norfolk, picked up the rumor that the Confederate Army which had just left Yorktown would be reinforced and sent north to threaten Washington. He also heard that Jackson was to be reinforced.
There was not, in all of this, anything more than the mild uncertainty as to enemy movements and intentions which is normal in time of war. The Federal government reflected and went on with its plans. McDowell was to be strengthened for the projected advance on Richmond. Banks was to make certain that Jackson had actually departed, and having done so was to detach Shields’s division—the outfit which had beaten Jackson at Kernstown, earlier in the spring—and send it off to join McDowell at Fredericksburg. Banks then was to get his own troops back to a safer position. His advance guard was at the town of Harrisonburg, barely twenty-five miles north of Staunton; it must retreat, and Banks must concentrate at Strasburg, eighteen miles south of his main supply base at Winchester. If Jackson had gone a-roving, and if McDowell was going to march down to the Chickahominy, there was no need for the Federals to do anything in the Shenandoah Valley except guard the lower end of it.6
Everything was under control, and there were just two small areas of doubt: Jackson’s whereabouts and intentions, and the revival of Washington’s ancient fear that the Rebels were scheming to invade across the Potomac. Neither of these seemed very important; they were just there, two hazy spots in the landscape. If the two grew, blended into one, turned the haze into a real fog, there might be trouble. For the moment things looked serene enough.
Vanishing from the sight of Banks, Jackson moved roundabout to Staunton, where on May 5 he picked up the little force of Edward Johnson and got a telegram from General Lee, who filled him in on the situation as Richmond saw it. Lee had heard about Banks’s retreat, and he had drawn the proper deduction: Banks was sending troops to McDowell, which could only mean that McDowell was about to come down to join McClellan. The entire point of current Confederate strategy was to prevent this—the Confederacy’s sole hope for survival depended on it—and Jackson must do something effective and do it without the slightest delay. Lee’s telegram was explicit: “Object of evacuating Harrisonburg may be concentration at Fredericksburg. Watch Banks movements. If you can strike at Milroy do it quickly.”7
Do it quickly … the words Mr. Lincoln had been repeating over and over, all spring, all winter and all spring, all fall and all winter and all spring, without getting any especial response; used now by a general on the other side, directed to the one soldier of all soldiers who would understand and respond. (It is permissible to suspect that Mr. Lincoln would have found General Lee a good man to work with, if fate can be imagined as having put them on the same side.)
From Staunton, Jackson marched west to strike General Milroy. (Moderate confusion, quickly dispelled, developed when Washington, hearing that Jackson had been joined by a General Johnson, assumed that Joe Johnston was on the scene. For additional brief bewilderment, Milroy was near a town named McDowell, and Jackson’s plan to attack McDowell was translated into a plan to fall upon the general of that name.) Anyway, with perhaps 9000 men Jackson on May 8 appeared in Bull Pasture Valley, near this town of McDowell, and found that Milroy (who had been joined by a detachment under Brigadier General Robert C. Schenck, and who by now may have had 4000 men in all) was most belligerent. Outnumbered though they were, the Federals attacked Jackson’s position on a height known as Sitlington’s Hill, part of Bull Pasture Mountain; failed, were driven off, and at the close of the day retreated northward toward the town of Franklin, where Frémont had his headquarters and where he was trying to assemble a striking force. Jackson sent Richmond the slightly cryptic message that “God blessed our arms with victory at McDowell” and set out in pursuit.8
The pursuit was slow—nobody could move very fast on those atrocious mountain roads—and Jackson was never able to force his opponents to stand and give battle again. Probably he did not especially want to. It was Banks, not Frémont, who was really on Jackson’s mind, and, after following Milroy and Schenck for three days, Jackson left them to their own devices, wheeled his own column about, and got back to the Shenandoah Valley as rapidly as he could. He had done Frémont’s army no particular harm, but he had taken it out of the play. That was all that mattered.
When Jackson returned to the Shenandoah the Federal inability to see just what was going on grew slightly deeper. Jackson seemed to be coming down the valley, with evil designs on General Banks’s force, but nothing was quite certain except that Banks and his people were becoming anxious. Banks’s strength had been whittled thin. He had had to detach forces, earlier, to watch the upper Rappahannock, and now Shields and 11,000 men had marched out of the valley to join McDowell; when he reached Strasburg, Banks had no more than 8000 men, who were unhappy because they had to retreat. A retreat in hostile territory was no fun; one infantryman noted that every dooryard was full of “jeering men and sneering women,” and said there even seemed to be more dogs, all of them barking at Federal soldiers. (Some of the men asserted that secessionist-minded roosters perched on fence posts and crowed derisively.) Brigadier General Alpheus Williams, one of Banks’s division commanders, wrote to his daughter that “if the amount of swearing that has been done in this department is recorded against us in Heaven I fear we have an account that can never be settled.” Williams blamed the withdrawal on ignorant civilians in Washington, and mused darkly: “I sometimes fear that we are to meet with terrible reverses because of the fantastic tricks of some vain men dressed in a little brief authority.” Banks himself was disturbed. He had warned Stanton that the Confederates would undoubtedly concentrate against any small force left in the valley, and from Strasburg he wrote that Jackson’s return to the valley worried him: “I am compelled to believe that he meditates attack here.”9
The horizon was beginning to be a little blurred. Still, the situation did not seem really ominous. Shields and his men reached Falmouth, and McClellan was notified that McDowell’s host would march down to join him well before the end of the month. McClellan sent Fitz John Porter and the newly-formed V Corps off on a foray toward Hanover Junction, to clear McDowell’s path of Confederate infantry, and then anchored his right wing near Mechanicsville north of the Chickahominy to await the promised reinforcements. At the distant mountain town of Franklin, Frémont was trying to weld his somewhat mixed brigades into an army, taking the better part of two weeks for the job. Banks was at Strasburg, his forces drawn up in a defensive line astride the Valley Pike, the main road that came northeast from Staunton through Strasburg to Winchester. As far as Banks knew, Jackson was thirty miles away, at New Market; if the man planned to attack Strasburg, the Valley Pike was obviously the road he would use. To protect his flank against marauding guerrillas Banks had posted a thousand men under Colonel John R. Kenly at Front Royal, ten miles to the east, on the Manassas Gap Railway.
Now Jackson disappe
ared again. Screening his front with cavalry, he side-slipped to the east, crossing the Massanutten Mountain ridge and getting over into the valley of the South Fork of the Shenandoah, picking up General Ewell and Ewell’s 8000 men en route. On the night of May 22, Jackson had his entire force, thus increased to 17,000 men, in camp ten miles from Front Royal, with the massive bulk of the Massanutten ridge between himself and Banks. He was now on a direct road to the big Federal base at Winchester, with no one in his path but Colonel Kenly, who had no reason to suppose that Jackson was anywhere in the neighborhood. And over at Strasburg, Banks continued to gaze attentively to the southwest, waiting for Jackson’s advance to take solid form behind the shifting Confederate cavalry patrols on the Valley Pike.
