Terrible Swift Sword (44 page)

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 Fremont'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 un-influential 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 York-town. 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 together 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 Fremont sent word that Brigadier General
Robert Milroy, commanding Fremont'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 whch 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 round about 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
Fremont 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 Fremont, 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 Fremont'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, Fremont was trying to
weld his somewhat mixed brigades into an army, taking thi; 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 mail 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 Colonfi John R. Kenly at Front
Royal, ten miles to the east, on the Manassas Gap Railway.

Now Jackson
disappeared 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.

Then
Jackson struck, and the blow disrupted the entire Federal strategic plan in
Virginia.

On May 23 he drove suddenly down on
Colonel Kenly, sweeping through Front Royal, capturing Kenly and most of his
men, pausing long enough to pick up prisoners and captured goods, and then
moving straight on for Winchester. As Banks had supposed, Jackson was going to
move along the Valley Pike; the trouble was that he was going to reach it
eighteen miles in Banks's rear.

Fugitives from Kenly's shattered command
brought the news to Strasburg that night, and there was nothing Banks could do
but order an immediate retreat. Evacuating his lines, he set off for
Winchester, pushing a bulky wagon train along with him, and Jackson swung his
leading elements toward the west to strike the ungainly column on the march,
hoping to break it and destroy Banks's army outright. He came close to success,
but not quite close enough, one difficulty being that his infantry was almost
exhausted. These Confederates had been marched hard, the last few days—not for
nothing did Jackson's infantry bear the unofficial title of "foot
cavalry" —and the weather was hot and their feet were sore, and they knew
nothing about the high strategy involved; as they struggled along, constantly
goaded to move more rapidly, they complained bitterly that Jackson was
"marching them to death to no good end." Banks just managed to escape
destruction, reaching Winchester and drawing a defensive line to check the
pursuit.
¹⁰

He escaped destruction but he could do no
more than that.

On May 25, Jackson attacked the Federal
line at Winchester and broke it, and Banks's shattered army continued its desperate
flight to the Potomac. Temporarily, at least, a good part of the army was
disorganized, and although a measure of order was restored once the battlefield
was left behind, the retreat was little better than a rout. Jackson pressed
hard, trying to force one more battle and turn retreat into destruction, but
his men were exhausted, and the cavalry which had screened him so well tarried
in Winchester to loot the rich stores the Federals had abandoned. Banks got
away, reached the Potomac at Williamsport, and got his frazzled army across the
river to safety. Jackson accepted the situation, moved his own army up to the
outskirts of Harper's Ferry, and let his men pause for breath. A perfectionist,
he regretted that any of the Federals had escaped, and he wrote grimly:
"Never have I seen a situation when it was in the power of the cavalry to
reap a richer harvest of the fruits of victory."
¹¹
But if the
harvest seemed incomplete it was nevertheless extremely rewarding.

Jackson's soldiers suddenly realized that
the general whom they had accused of marching them to death had been leading
them to a dazzling triumph, and their confidence in him rose high, along with
their pride in themselves. The people of Winchester looked on them as saviors
and gave them
8
hysterical
greeting, seeming to be "demented with joy and exhibiting all the ecstasy
of delirium." From the captured Federal supply dumps the needy
Confederates could acquire unimaginable riches, which one man tabulated
breathlessly "Brand new officers' uniforms, sashes, swords, boots, coats
of mail, india rubber blankets, coats and boots, oranges, lemons, figs, dates,
oysters, brandies, wines and liquors, thu choicest hams and dried meats and
sausages, all the contents of a large city clothing establishment and
miscellaneous grocery and confectionery."
¹²
All in all, it
was a great day in th; morning.