FRONT ROYAL
May twenty-third dawned in unseasonable warmth, and by midmorning the distances of the Valley country shimmered with heat. Jackson’s columns suffered despite the shade of the almost unbroken forests of Luray which swept upward on either side of the army, along the mountain spurs. The eastern Valley lay quiet, rich with bird song, and beginning to steam under the brilliant sky. There was nothing to signal the opening of a bold bid by the little army of Jackson, whose aim was no less than the expulsion of the Federal host from the Shenandoah.
Jackson had divulged nothing, as usual. He had prayed, and sent his bidding to Ewell: “Let us, relying upon God, prepare for attacking Banks.…” The commander had spent the night in the open, and near-by troops had heard singing from his headquarters as he worshiped with some of his numerous preachers. One of the hymns was a favorite of the General’s: “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.” The orders issued to the infantry seemed dull and routine: The column to continue to the north, Ewell’s division leading, just as before. Jackson was busy with the cavalry, however. He called Ashby back from Strasburg in the northwest, where he had been blinding General Banks for several days. Ashby was to cross the rough foothills of the Massanuttons and come into Jackson’s front, to cut the road and telegraph between Front Royal and Strasburg.
Munford with the Second Virginia was cutting the railroad bridges to the east of Front Royal, and yet another cavalry patrol was cutting the wires linking the town with Washington. It was not long after the sun rose that Jackson, unknown even to all of his staff, had insured the isolation of Front Royal from the world, just as if he were a surgeon preparing to remove some malignant growth.
The troops paced on through the morning. Since McDowell, they had been hurried 120 miles, but they now seemed fresh. They were also undetected by the enemy, whose latest information placed Jackson sixty miles to the southwest lying quietly in front of Banks.
Some of the final orders of the night past were a bit disturbing, especially to the private soldiers, whose nose for bloodshed was infallible: Knapsacks to be left behind. Not a tent to be allowed. While the men were debating the seriousness of these orders, Jackson handled a complaint from a chaplain, a Catholic priest who declared that he could not hold services without the privacy of a tent. Jackson permitted this single exception to his order.
Ewell had spent the night just ten miles from Front Royal, and he now got orders from Jackson which enlightened him as to the commander’s intentions. The column was abruptly wheeled off the main road into town, which was exposed at the foot of river cliffs and under Union guns. The men went eastward over rough country to a ruder track called the Gooney Manor Road, which entered Front Royal from the south.
The troops at last learned the identity of their intended victims—the Federal First Maryland, which held the town, the bridges and approaches. Ewell halted the column to call up his own First Maryland, under Colonel Bradley Johnson. The troops, who had lately joined complaints against harsh regulations as to enlistees, now stepped through at swagger step, and men resting by the roadside cheered them as they went to the front. Noon drew near.
At Strasburg, General Banks, the Union commander, was oblivious to the gathering storm before his outpost. With the assistance of meddlers from Washington who blithely moved his troops by telegraph as if they were chess pieces, Banks had managed to spread himself thin, so that he lay in ideal condition for crippling attacks. He was himself lulled to sleep.
In Washington, the rebellion was so nearly over, it seemed, that recruiting offices had been closed, and the capital abandoned itself to unofficial celebration. Banks complained, in fact, that there was little prospect of his seeing action, much as he relished the scent of burning powder.
He had been stripped of the forces of General Shields, now out of the Valley. The troops he had left to him were placed in an almost perfect triangle, the base of which lay across the northern face of the Massanutton range.
Banks himself held the western end of the triangle at Strasburg, with its southward-facing trenches and huge piles of stores. He had sixty-four hundred men posted in that town. The eastern end, at Front Royal, was manned by the one thousand troops of Colonel John R. Kenly, with a couple of cannon. The northern tip was Winchester, where 1,450 Federal troops held the position.
Kenly had not been inactive at Front Royal, though he was severely limited. He had sent into the Luray Valley a patrol of horsemen and infantry, which had captured a single Confederate. From this prisoner, Kenly learned that Rebel columns were expected—a report which was lost on Banks, who disregarded it and even ordered to Strasburg the few horsemen of the little expedition. Front Royal was thus left blinded.
Kenly had thrown his pickets a mile and a half south of the village, with two infantry companies in support. Another company guarded a railroad at some distance from the town, and the bulk of his force, six companies, lay in camp near the big wagon bridge. Two companies of the Twenty-ninth Pennsylvania lay between the forks of the Shenandoah to cover the railroad bridges. The only artillery on hand was good—a pair of Parrott ten-pounders, superior in range and accuracy to Confederate smooth-bores. Kenly, though more alert than his superiors, was not uninfected by their lassitude; it seemed incredible that he could be struck by any other than a tiny guerrilla force. Most of his men drowsed in a siesta.
At 1 P.M. the Confederate advance appeared on heights south of Front Royal, and officers halted the leading troops, which spread in formation, still hidden from the Federals. They were the First Maryland of Johnson’s, and the Louisiana Tigers under Major Rob Wheat. They waited while General Ewell and his staff examined the country.
The tents of the enemy were plain on the river bottom, and smoke went up from their fires. Immediately at hand was the outlying Federal picket. A couple of men slumped in the shade, but only one figure was in full view—a young sentry stretched beneath a rail shelter, who rose on an elbow and stared, at first in curiosity, as four horsemen appeared on the slope above him: Generals Ewell, Taylor, Steuart and Edward Johnson. Despite their impressive uniforms, he did not appear alarmed for several moments. He at last came to his feet, fired at the riders and turned to flee. Other blue-clad men ran behind him.
The sentries fled in vain, for a group of Jackson’s horsemen cut them off at the rear and captured the entire post. The cavalry reached these men only seconds before the first companies of the Maryland regiment pounded past, on their way to charge the village. The muskets set Federal drums to throbbing, and bugle calls rang in the little valley.
Jackson was some distance away, riding toward the scene with Kyd Douglas and others of his staff. Douglas saw a woman in a white dress running desperately from the town and into a ravine, as if to hide from those in the village. Douglas went out to meet her; she waved a bonnet to him, and when he came near she astonished him by calling out his name. He recognized her as Belle Boyd, a tall, somewhat long-faced brunette with prominent teeth. Douglas took her to the General. The young woman panted, red-faced.
“I knew it must be Stonewall when I heard the guns,” she said. “Their force is small—just the Maryland boys and some guns and cavalry. Their guns cover the railroad bridge, but not the wagon bridge. Charge now, and you will get them all. Goodbye, and give my love to the boys.” She was off.
Jackson stared after her, beginning to smile as she called back to Douglas, “If you see me in the town, remember, you haven’t seen me today.”
General Taylor watched the meeting in surprise and, as the woman talked, saw that Jackson not only trusted her, but that her information was not new to him. Taylor’s Valley education had commenced in earnest. He wrote of the scene:
“Jackson was possessed of these facts before he left New Market; but, as he never told anything, it was news to me, and gave me an idea of the strategic value of the Massanutton [the mountain range they had just crossed and flanked]—pointed out, indeed, by Washington before the Revolution. There also dawned on me quite another view of our leader than the one from which I had been regarding him for two days past.”
Isabelle Boyd, just past her eighteenth birthday, was already celebrated as a Confederate spy. She had shot, and allegedly killed, a Federal soldier who had insulted her in the family home at Martinsburg. Two months before she had been arrested and taken to Baltimore as a spy, only to be released.
She was the daughter of a Martinsburg storekeeper who was now a private in the Second Virginia of the Stonewall Brigade, an attractive, if not handsome, girl of high spirits. She was educated at Mount Washington Female College in Baltimore, but had more lately been given to passing secret messages to Turner Ashby and to stealing, and sending to the South, guns and swords of Federal troops. She had been under constant suspicion, but today had stolen past the Front Royal sentries—though when she appeared in the open, pickets fired at her, and artillery was turned in her direction.
There was little time now for reflection upon the attributes of the commander or his spies; the Confederate vanguard was already under heavy fire in Front Royal. From the hill, Jackson saw the opening scenes of a brief pitched battle: Federals streamed across the meadows out of the town, to take up a strong position on the road to Winchester. Women and children called and waved in joy from the houses of the town, and some danced on the porches as the freed Negroes and Federal soldiers ran past them. Cannon began to roll. Jackson was reassured by what he saw: the position was clearly indefensible before a determined attack. But at this moment his front ranks were being cut down. He took over direction of the assault.
The Marylanders and the Tigers drove down from the east, jogging through the streets of Front Royal; they had a vicious few moments in driving a knot of Federals who had taken post in a hospital building, and as they ran on, a number of gray-clad bodies lay in the sunshine. The action boiled on into the road to Winchester. There the rifled Federal guns were driving men to cover and ripping apart formations. Some of Ewell’s guns, brought up in haste, were outranged, and there was a frantic search for better cannon. It developed that the entire division carried only three rifled cannon, and while these were being dragged from the rear, the infantry suffered.
The infantry fanned out like veterans; there was a frontal assault, and, with precise timing, the Sixth Louisana flanked the enemy by crossing one of the rail bridges, and others of Taylor’s brigade swept wide to the west, in a second flanking movement. The guns were in danger from the Rebel advance, and Colonel Kenly became anxious. Within moments he saw a band of Confederate cavalry already across the bridge of the Shenandoah’s South Fork. If it reached the North Fork as well, his only means of escape was gone. His men fired their last rounds at the charging Marylanders in their front, then went at a run, following their guns in rapid retreat. Several companies of the Federals began firing their camp, and tents, stores, wagons went up in sheets of flame and white smoke. The retreating enemy fired two bridges, and on their heels came the men of Jackson.
The General yelled until he was hoarse, urging men forward. Louisianans and Virginians did not hesitate. They drove across the smoking bridges almost on the heels of the Yankees, and a company plunged into the rain-swollen stream, ordered to extinguish the flames at the opposite end of the bridge; two or three men who could not swim were drowned, but the troops pushed on. Cavalry hammered overhead. Among the first horsemen was Jackson, who emerged soot-covered, his beard and uniform singed. Men burned their hands flinging burning brands from the bridge into the water. The chase formed up.
Jackson found pitifully little support, but in a fury hastened his handful of horsemen forward. He soon had them beyond the smoke screen laid by the burning enemy camp, and for a few moments the river was dark with swimming horses. The Sixth Virginia went up with Jackson. It was then too late, for the General rode to an eminence and saw below the long blue column of Kenly, almost running toward safety on the Winchester road. His opportunity for annihilation was gone.
The General groaned, “Oh, what an opportunity for artillery. Oh, if my guns were here!” He snapped to a staff officer, “Get to the rear and order up every rifled gun and every brigade in the army. Hurry!”
The Sixth Virginia dashed ahead of him toward the enemy. Ewell joined Jackson, to watch the impending clash of horsemen and the mass of well-armed infantry. The Virginians went in like centaurs. They swiftly brushed aside a screen of New York cavalry, and sent to the rear the frightened town boys, who were actually strapped to their saddles and wore breastplates. The Virginians left them far behind and slashed at the writhing end of the Federal column, now strung out for two miles along the road.
At first there was murder of the horses and riders at the village of Cedarville, for the Virginians drove in four abreast, at top speed, crowded between rail fences, and the volleys cut down the first ranks. Then the horses threshed in and were bayoneted, and men speared. But the men on foot could not long bear it; companies broke into bits, and men who had been tearing down rail fences to give them room to receive the Rebel infantry now fled. The units were surrounded by swooping horsemen, slashed with sabers, dropped by revolver fire, and harried until the last of them went into rout, through orchards and down creek banks. Their commander was himself cut down with deep wounds. The big guns were soon given up; one went into Rebel hands on the ground, and another was dragged some distance up the road, where two enterprising Rebels spotted it, borrowed farm horses from a near-by field and dragged it home.
Jackson had stayed near the front most of the time. Once two horsemen in his path heard his angry shout: “Get out of the way of my men!”
Jackson and Ewell shouted lavish praise.
“I have never seen such a charge of cavalry,” Jackson said.
“The most gallant passage at arms I ever saw,” Ewell shouted.
They watched the first prisoners coming in. More than six hundred were captives, including all the artillerymen of the post. The Federals had 32 dead and 122 wounded. Jackson’s forces had lost 11 dead, 15 wounded.
In the crowded town, Kyd Douglas came upon Belle Boyd, pink-cheeked from her recent run. She greeted him as if the meeting were a delightful surprise and pinned a rose on his lapel.
“Remember that it’s blood-red,” she said, “and that it’s my colors.”
The final stroke, delivered at Jackson’s order in the moment when the opportunity seemed gone, had been delivered by 250 Virginia horsemen. One of the prisoners said they had estimated the furious band of pursuers at three thousand. The Virginians had paid a price, for two of their most promising leaders—Captains George F. Sheetz and John Fletcher—were dead.
Jackson seemed satisfied with the day’s work but pressed his investigation of the artillery’s troubles with a scowling face, and, when he had found his error, made plans to improve his methods. He had a group of young riders as his orderlies during the battle, recruits from one of Ashby’s undisciplined troops. In the midst of the fighting, when he had sent back for his big guns, he told one of these boys to urge the artillerymen to come in quickly over the well-used main road into the town rather than over the rough track the infantry had taken. The boy disappeared, not to be heard from again; the guns were hauled forward laboriously, painfully slow, over Jackson’s original path, and much time had been lost. The General resolved that henceforth he would use a picked corps of orderlies who were worthy of his trust, so that he would not again lose his chance to blow to bits his cornered enemies.
Jackson gave his men little time to care for the dead and wounded, or to glut themselves on the captured stores. He sent them to sleep early and forbade them to light fires in the exposed places.
He went into the lowlands where the fogs now rose, to sit by a fire with General Taylor. He told the Louisianan they would march together in the morning, but said little else. Taylor, tired and upset by the death of friends, was quiet. “I fancied he looked at me kindly,” Taylor wrote, “and interpreted it into an approval of the conduct of the brigade.”
Jackson sat for hours, without speaking, his gaze lost in the fire. Taylor thought he might have been praying as he laid plans to overtake the shattered wing of the army of Banks, and to fall upon that commander himself.
When he was interrupted, the news was good. Ashby, ranging far up toward Winchester, had captured two locomotives, and Jackson already had all of Kenly’s wagons.
He also had a problem to ponder: What would General Banks do now, since his flank had been turned? The General made clear his thinking in one of his rare, but careful, records:
In the event of Banks leaving Strasburg he might escape toward the Potomac, or if we moved directly to Winchester he might move via Front Royal toward Washington. In order to watch both directions, and at the same time advance upon him if he remained at Strasburg, I determined, with the main body of the army, to strike the turnpike near Middletown.
But no one knew of his decision to move to this halfway point on the Winchester road. Even Ewell, as yet, knew nothing of tomorrow’s plans.
Just twelve miles away to the west, at Strasburg, Banks gave a curious demonstration of a man of war whose courage and caution were hopelessly, and dangerously, mixed. By four in the afternoon, Banks had a report of the attack at Front Royal, but he did little about it, pushing out a regiment with two guns to make an investigation. He still entertained the thought that Front Royal had been struck by a small raiding party, since he knew Jackson to be far away from that spot, on the word of his most clever spies. By nightfall, Banks was persuaded that something more serious was afoot. He wired Stanton in Washington: “5,000 Rebels have driven Kenly back to Middletown. This force has been gathering in the mountains, it is said, since Wednesday.”
But this did not seem to alarm Banks. He sat, amid the vast stacks of army stores he had gathered in the village, as if there were no prospect that he might be cut off.
General G. H. Gordon, a veteran who had been at West Point with Jackson, now undertook to point out to Banks the danger of their position. Gordon went to headquarters after supper and spent some hours in explaining that Banks had a compelling duty to retreat toward Winchester.
“You must get together all the possible stores, General, and load the sick and wounded, and destroy what we can’t carry,” Gordon said. He made his pleas in vain.
Soon Banks was advised of the return of the regiment he had sent toward Front Royal, and he got the report: All roads leading toward the Rebel positions were closed tight. A cavalry screen lay everywhere. Still Banks did not take action.
Gordon tried him further: “It is not a retreat, General. It’s a perfectly honorable military movement to avoid being cut off, to keep your stores and your wounded from falling to the enemy.”
That seemed to sting Banks, and the dignified politician, becoming angry, rose rapidly to his feet.
“I must develop the force of the enemy! By God, Sir, I will not retreat! We have more to fear from the opinions of our friends than the bayonets of our enemies!”
“That is not a sound military reason to occupy a false position,” Gordon said.
He walked through the Federal camp, now at 11 P.M., seeing that everything was as usual. The sutlers were still cadging the dollars from the troops with their sharp bargains, and traveling actors raising tumults of laughter in their tented stalls. There was music, and laughter, and the army seemed determined to stay up through the night. Gordon thought to himself as he went to his tent: Tomorrow will see some merriment—Jackson.
Gordon took steps to save his own troops and had them packing their baggage wagons through most of the night; they were soon on the road to Winchester, and safety. He had a start of some hours on the rest of the army, it developed.
At midnight the situation became unmistakable, even to Banks. One of the survivors of Front Royal puffed into camp with the news: Kenly was dead, his command cut to pieces, the First Maryland decimated, the cavalry vanished. The Rebels were from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand strong—and already well on their way to Strasburg.
There followed some confusing messages to Washington, and then Banks, upon hearing the name of Jackson, jumped into furious action. He hustled his command northward toward Winchester, aware that Jackson was somewhere in his path.
Before dawn the weather broke, and a hard rain fell upon the armies.