WINCHESTER
Jackson’s troops were miserable in the night, huddling in the rain, having forgotten victory and Yankees as well, except for the spoils which came in with skulkers and Negro camp servants from the battlefield.
Soon after midnight, the first troops were ordered to prepare for the march once more, and straggled into formations; but it was to require long, costly hours before all was ready for the road. At any rate, there was no need for the buglers on this dull, roaring, wet morning, nor for the familiar flies, either. One of the recruits had lately written his family:
“When we open our eyes in the morning we find the canvas roofs and walls of our tents black with them. It needs no morning reveille then to rouse the soldier.… The tickling sensations about the ears, eyes, mouth, nose … will awaken a regiment of men from innocent sleep to wide-awake profanity more promptly than the near beat of the alarming drum.”
The men whom Jackson drove in pursuit of the enemy were still under his strict discipline, willing, orderly, ready to fight, but worn by yesterday’s exertions and the long marches of the month, which were now beginning to tell. Most of them were volunteers, with the familiar contempt for the drafted men who were sprinkled through the ranks; but the latter were striving desperately to win acceptance, and morale was thus high.
In the darkness, sergeants of the Louisiana regiments bawled out in French, to the continuing wonder of Jackson’s Virginia mountain men. One Rebel had shouted: “That-there furriner calls out er lot of gibberish, and them Dagoes maneuvers like hell beatin’ tanbark—jest like he was talkin’ good sense!” The Creoles were among the first on the road that morning.
There were few aristocrats and slaveowners in these ranks. Most of them were from little towns and villages, tenants and laborers. But, as everywhere in the army, there was conflict between gentleman and commoner. One corporal had exploded when challenged by his officer for violation of a camp rule: “God damn you, I own niggers up the country!” And another, ordered under arrest, had cried, “I’ll not do it. I was a gentleman before I joined your damned company and by God you want to make a damned slave of me!”
The seat of learning, such as it was, lay in the Rockbridge Artillery, whose First Company boasted four Masters of Arts, twenty graduates of Washington College, and some forty students from Washington and the University of Virginia. More typical were the North Carolina troops. In one company, thirty-six of sixty had signed muster rolls with their X; in another, fifty-four of one hundred were illiterate. The average was 40 per cent who could neither read nor write.
All could understand Old Jack this day, or thought they could; and, before dawn, going slowly in the road, halting, waiting, moving on again, they advanced from Front Royal toward the enemy.
After daylight, as if to increase their burdens, hail fell from the murky sky. A burial party had just sloshed in from its muddy chore when the storm broke.
Jackson had ironclad rules about the marching of his men, but today neither he nor any man could put them into effect. In the bad weather and confusion, conflicting reports from the front, and the weariness of the men, it was absurd to think of marching fifty minutes in each hour, halting smartly to stack arms at each resting spot, with a brief hour for lunch. On most marching days, Jackson sought to hurry them, up and down the columns, with his familiar “Close up, men. Hurry up. Close up.” General A. R. Lawton, who became intimately familiar with him in battle, was to describe Jackson’s state of mind, as he rode past his lean columns:
“He had small sympathy with human infirmity. He was a one-idea-ed man. He looked upon the broken down men and stragglers as the same thing. He classed all who were weak and weary, who fainted by the wayside, as men wanting in patriotism. If a man’s face was as white as cotton and his pulse so low you could scarcely feel it, he looked upon him merely as an inefficient soldier and rode off impatiently. He was the true type of all great soldiers … he did not value human life when he had an object to accomplish. He could order men to their death as a matter of course.”
Through the previous night, and on this unpleasant Saturday morning, he had devoted himself to the problem of hurling his men against the enemy. Once Jackson had determined to march so as to check any possible maneuver of General Banks’s, he puzzled out for himself the moves he must make—with as little help as possible from the staff. Even so, those officers were busy, including the sedate chief, the Reverend Dabney, who was by now clad in regulation Confederate gray, and was no longer embarrassed when he appeared in camp with his rolled umbrella and tall beaver hat and frock coat. (The men had a habit of screeching at the reverend, “Get on out of that bee gum. We see your feet’s amoving.”)
One of the night’s most voluble, blasphemous laborers was Major John Harman—Old John—the brassy-voiced quartermaster, who was all but carrying Jackson’s columns on his back over the poor Valley roads, heaving forward with his work gangs and squads of impressed soldiers the stupendous loads of ammunition and supplies. He had spent his civilian life as master of a line of drays and stagecoaches, and he knew the country as well as his work. Even in Jackson’s command he was a power unto himself, defiant of restricting authority, though devoted to the commander and the sacred calling of Yankee extermination. Tonight the lines were strung out for more than twenty miles behind the army, the heavy trains at the mercy of the elements in the boggy roads.
Just before daylight, Jackson held a brief conference with Ewell, whose forces were to continue as the army’s vanguard. Jackson had puzzled for hours over the character of Banks as it related to the map of the rugged country about them and the move he was now likely to make. But of all this, not a word to Ewell.
Ashby with his cavalry was to strike for Middletown at daybreak. And here Jackson was forced to reveal to Ewell more than a glimpse of his plans, for he had decided during the night to make a change in command. He had admired the hell-for-leather charge of Lieutenant Colonel Flournoy and his Virginia troopers about Cedarville, for the daring of that thrust had won the day for him. But he reasoned that a veteran like Brigadier General George H. Steuart of the Marylanders, with more than ten years in the old cavalry, would make better use of the mounted troops.
Thus Jackson told Ewell that he was placing two of his cavalry regiments under Steuart, and ordered them to depart soon after Ashby, striking for Newtown, a point just above Middletown.
General Taylor was to follow with his brigade, ready for action. Jackson’s main force was behind, but would come up as soon as possible. The entire command, in short, was to concentrate on the route from Strasburg northward to Winchester, in hope that the Federals would choose that alley of retreat.
Jackson went with the vanguard, in a curious, impatient humor. Taylor assigned about one hundred men of the Louisiana Tigers to go with him, and they began to outdistance the larger column. Jackson no longer plagued the marching officers with commands to hurry forward. Instead, this morning, he seemed unsure of himself, and, when he reached Cedarville, sat by the road, looking as if he feared to leave the bridges which might offer Banks the chance to escape through Manassas Gap, if the Federal could summon courage for that bold move. At about nine o’clock Jackson had word from Steuart: Banks was preparing to leave Strasburg.
Soon, with a battery of artillery and the gay Tigers of Rob Wheat at his heels, Jackson rode within sound of firing. It was not yet heavy, but it came through screens of woodland which filled this Valley almost as far as the turnpike to Winchester. The Tigers went up and were caught in the skirmishing. Prisoners told Jackson that he was facing a part of the Twenty-ninth Pennsylvania, and that a handful of New England cavalry—the First Maine and First Vermont—were fighting a delaying action. Halts became frequent, and the Federal carbines took their toll as the column pushed on.
At last Jackson looked over fields and their stone fences to Middletown and a stunning spectacle, for as far as he could see, north and south along the pike, was a dust canopy, and beneath it flowed the dark column of the enemy, in full retreat toward Winchester. Jackson and his vanguard had taken six hours to cover the seven miles to Middletown. Banks was already ahead of him. How far, he could not yet know. But he did not hesitate.
Before he knew whether he faced overwhelming infantry, or simply a wagon train on the move, Jackson dashed forward with his few men. The guns went to work, blazing from behind a fence. A party of Ashby’s wild cavalry cut the procession at the right, at the edge of the town, and Jackson saw the enemy train in convulsions. It broke in a thousand places, with wagons turning out, and small parties of men turning back on one another. Those who were able fled. Ashby went to the north, driving remnants of the enemy ahead of him. Smoke began to mount as Federals sought to burn their stores, but the Rebels were too quick. The Tigers were soon at the looting, diving in and out of the wagons like practiced despoilers, though at the approach of General Taylor they ceased and went sedately into line.
Jackson could not know that there was already failure in the road to the north of him, that the experiment with Steuart was not working out as it should. Steuart had cut this same long column, at Newtown, but in small force, and was even now being driven off at the appearance of a relief party sent by Banks.
Jackson had no time for reflection, for a strange, broken, confusing battle was developing, as his men rounded up parties of the enemy and probed north and south, meeting tiny knots of resistance. Then, at a little after noon, Federal cavalry thundered into Middletown, two thousand strong, with a couple of guns behind. Their commander halted at first glimpse of the chaos along the road, but waved his men into a trot, and they came with drawn sabers.
Jackson’s head was turned for this moment. He was off in the fields placing a couple of artillery pieces so as to cut off the Federals at the north. Kyd Douglas summoned Jackson’s bodyguard, which the General had evaded, and these men crouched behind a stone wall at the roadside. Someone dragged a wagon across the pike. Near by, artillery trained batteries on the solid blue column of horsemen, and Taylor’s Louisianans, now coming up, charged at a run. The village became a slaughter pen whose sight was to remain a memory with Jackson for life.
The Union riders dashed into storms of flying metal; at the close quarters none could miss the massed targets, and, in a screaming of horses and men flailing in the trap, the Federal cavalry disintegrated.
Jackson had returned to look at the scene, and, months later, when he made out his report, the vision of it crept in:
In a few moments the turnpike, which had just before teemed with life, presented a most appalling spectacle of carnage and destruction. The road was literally obstructed with the mangled and confused mass of struggling and dying horses and riders.
The Confederates found more of the pitiful novice cavalrymen in the gory roadway, boys who had died strapped to their saddles, their antique breastplates torn with shell. The sight sickened even young Douglas, who confessed to a regret that he had ordered the slaughter.
The rear guard of the cavalry, now frightened and confused, milled in the roadway, turning as if to go back to Strasburg. At that instant Turner Ashby rode up, the swaggering cavalry chief on a sweat-gleaming black stallion, who within reach of Douglas and Jackson whipped out his saber, spurred the horse and sailed over the fence. He drove up the road, charging with his blade the two hundred or more enemy cavalrymen. Douglas thought he rode to certain death, but the sight of the reckless horseman seemed to demoralize the Federals. They fled with Ashby’s sword beating about at their rear, tumbling more than one man to the ground. The flight broke in many directions. Ashby trotted back with a squad of prisoners herded before him.
Jackson turned on Ashby in an attempt at reprimand. “Ashby, you risk the success of the army with such foolish exposure—you must remember who you are, man.”
Douglas grinned, and the cavalryman almost dared it, hearing in the commander’s voice the reluctance with which he denounced such bravery. Jackson turned from the scolding with a sheepish expression on the long cheeks.
The General was now forced to an instant decision amid perplexing signs. To the south was the smudge of burning magazines and stores at Strasburg, fired by the Federals; to the north the enemy wagon train was disappearing. There was the frenzy of chase on every hand, as survivors of ruined wagons ran for safety. But where was Banks’s infantry? If it was behind the cavalry, and still to pass Middletown, Jackson must call up his main force and prepare for battle; if the bulk of the enemy force had gone north, then pursuit must be hurried. Jackson ordered a number of townspeople brought to him for questioning, and from their stories concluded that the regiments of Banks had moved toward Winchester. He turned into the Valley Pike, pushing up his artillery and Taylor’s brigade.
Through the afternoon he continued the slow, halting push until now, riding in fading daylight, he was less than a dozen miles from Winchester, still passing the litter of the Federal army at the roadside: wagons intact and ruined, Bibles, kettles, blankets, playing cards, letters, photographs, canned food, song-books. It was the debris of a panic-stricken opponent.
Jackson was in a hopeful mood despite the escape of the enemy for the second day in succession. He looked forward to greater booty ahead, confident that his cavalry was playing havoc with the head of the Federal wagon train.
As he went to the north he stopped but once, to dismount and take a cracker from a Federal wagon, brushing half-heartedly at its unclean surface, and he rode, crunching the hard bread, like a Quixote on a slow-moving Rosinante, though utterly unaware that some of his classical-minded staff had compared him to the comic Spanish knight.
A fresh disappointment met him at the village of Newtown. He approached the place convinced that Banks, if he reached Winchester at all, would limp in without a wagon train, and thus be ready for the kill.
Jackson already planned the coup.
The rising growl of an artillery duel startled him, and he urged Sorrel into a gallop. He found two guns of the Rockbridge Artillery engaging the enemy at the village. The guns, he saw, were without infantry support.
His artillery chief, Colonel Stapleton Crutchfield, was in a rage over a wasted opportunity. He shouted his explanation to Jackson:
Ashby’s men had fallen upon the leading section of Banks’s train here and with a few wild shots had thrown it into flight. The wagons of sutlers were among the stores and were crammed with luxuries. The undisciplined troopers could not then be driven forward to strike the enemy. They turned aside by the hundred, to eat, or take horses, some of them swarming away like gypsy bands, leading stolen horses by the reins. Some infantrymen had come up at last, but when they sighted the wagons it was all over with them as well.
They went to the looting, and the guns were left without support. The running fight from Middletown had brought confusion, the advance was slowed and dissipated. Even now, as he sought Ashby, Jackson could find only fifty of the troopers; their commander was forced to admit that the rest had flown. It was to be weeks before some returned from their homes, where they had taken the horses.
Jackson had the looters driven from the wagons, but there was little time to deal with undisciplined men; the General made a mental note to have these troops punished in one of his strange morale-building ways: they were no longer to march in the van of the Army of the Valley.
Men grumbled behind his back at manifestations of his concern for the wagons: “Damned old wagon-hunter don’t care for our bellies—all he’s looking is his durned lemons.” There were many who referred to him thereafter by a wry nickname: Lemon Squeezer.
Even his rage this evening did not prevent his remarkable and familiar gesture when an officer called a joke to him: Stonewall replied by throwing back his head with an exaggerated snap and gaping his mouth in a silent, tight-lipped mask of laughter.
The approach of the Stonewall Brigade drove the Federal artillery from the road, and as darkness fell the route-step battle became a nightmare for the weary troops. The Federals fought their rear-guard action with skill. There were frequent halts while skirmishers turned out to unroll a new line of battle. Each volley from the front threatened panic, and the leaders were driven back upon the column. Many veterans were to speak of the night as the most trying experience of the war; casualties were few, but the action was constant, and halts continued until dawn. In each brief halt, the troops sought rest. Men fell asleep holding to their muskets. Hundreds fell away in the darkness.
Jackson rode with Taylor for much of the way. The young officer overheard the conversation between Jackson and Old John Harman, when the quartermaster came up to report. Harman said the army’s wagons were far back in the valley and that a bad road blocked his every effort to move them up.
There was quick anxiety in Jackson’s voice.
“The ammunition wagons?”
“All right, General. They’re here. I put double teams on them and brought them through.”
A sigh of relief. “Ahhh.” As if Jackson had no concern for other supplies.
Taylor sought to make a joke of it, saying to Harman, “Never mind the wagons, John. There are stores aplenty in Winchester, and the General has invited me to breakfast there tomorrow.”
Taylor felt a quick, restraining hand on his sleeve, a warning from Jackson, who feared to tell anyone the least of his plans, and could not understand the jest. Remembering, Taylor wrote: “Without physical wants himself, he forgot that others were differently constituted, and paid little heed to commissariat, but woe to the man who failed to bring up ammunition. In advance his trains were left behind. In retreat he would fight for a wheelbarrow.”
It was a remarkable group which rode about Jackson—the commander and his staff, in the forefront of an army in night fighting, passed wagons put to the torch by the Federals, which would signal the people of Winchester of Jackson’s coming. Of the riders with Stonewall, only Ashby was alert, stiffly erect; this swarthy man with something of the Arab about his face was called the Black Knight by the younger officers. There was an unnatural grimness in him, understood only by those who knew of his vow to avenge the death of his brother at Federal hands. Sandie Pendleton, as always when sleepy, was irritable and snappish; Colonel Crutchfield, one of the army’s leading devotees of sleep, muttered his disgust: “This is uncivilized.” Dr. Hunter McGuire, the surgeon, said nothing, lost in his concern for his Winchester home. Douglas gave his attention to remaining awake.
Fire flashed through the night, almost in their faces. Horses reared. Yankee skirmishers had ambushed them, lying behind a wall as Jackson’s party came. These men fled, to make another stand in the night. Jackson was sitting with some cavalry when a volley came. The horsemen reined in.
“Charge them! Charge!” Old Jack yelled. And when the riders broke for the rear under another volley, all but riding down Jackson, his thin voice rose even higher in anguish: “Shameful! Did you see anybody struck, sir? Did you see a man hurt? Surely they need not have run, at least until they were hurt?”
The way became easier until Kernstown, a village where Jackson had fought once before—tonight there was only a skirmish there. Officers came to Jackson frequently now, asking for a respite. Jackson refused to halt the column for the night. At last, long after 1 A.M., Colonel Sam Fulkerson found Jackson:
“General, if I may be permitted to make a suggestion, I think the troops had better be rested for an hour or so; my men are falling by the roadside from fatigue and loss of sleep. Unless they are rested, I’ll not be able to put up more than a thin line tomorrow.”
Every time his command halted, this officer said, it left dozens of men behind, fallen asleep in fence corners and brush heaps.
Jackson did not cease to resist even then, though he was exceptionally fond of this brigade commander.
“Colonel, I do not yield even to you in my feeling for these gallant men. But I am obliged to sweat them tonight, sir, so that I can save their blood tomorrow.
“Just south of Winchester there is a line of hills—they must not be occupied by the enemy artillery. Our people must be there, and by daylight. I will give you two hours’ rest.”
When the order was passed, the men fell into the road.
Jackson agreed to leave Fulkerson’s men behind, and to take forward his own old brigade; but when he saw the men drop in their tracks, he changed his mind. The entire army fell asleep. Jackson himself was almost the lone exception.
He dashed off a note to Ewell, who read it up front, on a parallel road, within sight of Federal pickets. It was only a rough sketch of the roads, streams and woods of country surrounding Winchester. In heavy outline was drawn the position of the troops of Banks, as well as Jackson’s own position on the pike. Under this drawing was the laconic message:
“Attack at daylight.”
With his orders finished, Jackson took over the guard. Men who stirred in sleep saw him. He stood in front of the sleeping vanguard, without a coat to protect him from the heavy dew. For about an hour he stood—and could bear it no longer. He woke his officers and passed the word to march.
Jackson’s task this Sunday was simple, but by no means easy. He was confident that Ewell, with his troops on the road from Front Royal to the east, would come in on his right as he stormed the town. He suspected that Banks would have taken the commanding heights, and that would mean serious fighting.
The men were weary, but they went forward. They crossed a stream called Abraham’s Creek when it was scarcely daylight, with the stars fading over them, and approached the hills. Jackson was one of the first to see shadowy figures of Federals on the slopes.
The timing was perfect. Ewell, with his one brigade and ten guns, swept down on the Federal positions just as Jackson was giving General Charles Winder his unmistakable orders: “You must occupy that hill.”
The skirmish lines fanned up the slope, here and there driven back by savage blasts of artillery fire. Jackson’s guns came up, and for half an hour challenged the heavier Federals. Many batteries were blasted; some of the Rockbridge guns remained in place until their wheels were gone, and the horses dead, and few men were left to serve the hot barrels. But in the end the Union guns were overcome. It was Taylor’s men who finished them off.
Jackson first heard Ewell throw his men forward just as the sun was driving the mist from the field. There the First Maryland and the Twenty-first North Carolina were out front; the General then advanced his own brigade, and asked Douglas to take him to General Taylor. When he reached the Louisianan, the hot artillery duel was at its peak, and the Federal gunners, ever alert, had taken position by a stone wall running perpendicular to Jackson’s position.
As Jackson rode through, the men began to cheer, but the order was passed quieting them, so that the enemy would not be signaled of the coming assault. The men then took off their hats, and Jackson removed his as well. The officers interpreted this as a touching tribute, but Douglas noted that the General drew the keen, searching glances of the privates, who sought in his face the signs of coming trouble.
Jackson greeted Taylor.
“General, can your brigade charge a battery?”
“It can try,” Taylor said.
“Good. It must. Get the men forward.” He pointed out the guns which were tearing holes in his infantry columns and beating down his own artillery. Taylor said no more. He took the men over the creek, and as they came onto the slope they walked into a shallow depression, where they were fully exposed to the enemy cannon above them. Men dropped in their files.
Taylor saw Jackson riding beside him and shouted that this was no place for the commander. Jackson went on as if he had not heard him. He was apparently unaware that he was under fire.
Taylor saw men ducking and darting in his column and shouted, “What the hell are you dodging for? If there’s any more of it, you’ll be halted under this fire for an hour.” The men straightened up a bit and stormed forward.
Jackson halted to put a hand on Taylor’s shoulder. “I’m afraid you’re a wicked fellow.”
Taylor’s brigade swarmed into the open and the sun fell upon it; watching officers would recall the scene, a stirring picture of men walking in cadence under fire, halting to drive a party of cavalry from their flank, and then going on behind bright bayonets.
Taylor, many years later, said that his most vivid memory was of a bluebird swooping across the field, bearing a worm in its beak. The sight of the charging Rebels shook the men on the crest, and Jackson’s tactics now promised success. Ewell had struck and held on the right, and the blow at the flank, after serious early losses by the Confederates, was beginning to panic the enemy. The artillery Jackson had placed in the open was for the most part in ruins—one battery had been abandoned, surrounded with bodies, its survivors crouching in safety to the rear, while Federal shells blasted at the forlorn guns. But not for long.
Taylor’s charge was a novel spectacle to the Army of the Valley; the troops went in perfect order, with Taylor riding in their front like a toy horseman with a charmed life. The men went upward into musket fire with casualties along the length of the lines, but the brigade did not falter. About halfway up the slope, when the watching army expected to hear orders to fire, Taylor coolly called for a charge, and the men jumped forward over the rocky ground and reached the crest. Now the Federals fled in earnest and the ridge was in Confederate hands.
In the final moments of that charge, coming from everywhere—back on the pike, where massed reserves waited, and in the low ground where Ewell’s North Carolinians and Marylanders had been driven back, and in the charging Louisiana ranks—there rose a tremulous, quavering, ear-splitting cry. It was the first Rebel Yell from the Army of the Valley.
It seemed to startle the commander—almost as much as did the final victorious drive of the Louisiana troops—who were now joined by the Stonewall Brigade, and the men of General Arnold Elzey, who had been lying down out of the fire, in reserve. At last, all of Jackson’s ten thousand infantry charged in mass.
The General seemed astonished by the rapidity with which the victory had swung to him. He sent Douglas across the fields: “Order forward the whole line. The battle’s won.”
The men of Taylor and Winder went past at a trot, and Jackson forgot himself. He waved his old cap over his head, shouting like a child. “Very good! Now let’s holler!” The roar of the army swept down into Winchester, where the Federals were in headlong flight.
An officer pressed close to the General, evidently with the idea of restraining him, but Jackson only yelled joyously, “Go back and tell the whole army to press forward to the Potomac!”
At sight of Taylor, Jackson was again seized by emotion but did not speak. He leaned from his saddle and grasped the hand of the young Louisianan, wringing it with savage strength, grinning that glint-eyed grimace that the army was to see often in battle.
It was seven thirty in the morning, and Jackson went into a frenzy organizing the last chase of Banks. He had little assistance. The enemy, going back in order at first, had broken as the ranks passed through the town, and now there was a landscape of fleeing bluecoats, stretching to the horizon. The few Confederate infantrymen who were near enough to the enemy dropped to shaking knees and fired, but if they inflicted damage, Jackson could not see it.
He sought the cavalry, but there was none. He had seen no considerable body of horsemen since the early morning; he supposed most of Ashby’s men were still missing, just when the great opportunity of the war called for them. General Steuart had two regiments of the Virginia riders, just a few hundred yards away on Ewell’s front, but where were they?
Jackson shouted in exasperation, and perhaps stronger language than Preacher Dabney was to recall: “Never was there such a chance for cavalry! Oh, that my cavalry were in place!” This bitterness was to be reflected in his official report, when he lamented the switch in command, from Flournoy to Steuart. He was swept into the town by the army.
Someone suggested artillery be brought against the Federals, and the General shouted the order for all possible guns to be brought up, and on they came, a few rickety, battle-worn guns, dragged by exhausted horses which panted on the incline. Beside them came more of the infantry, scarcely able to walk, living on the strength of delirious excitement. The army clustered about the town, where buildings sent up towers of smoke, as Federal stores burned. Jackson pressed on, though women, children and old men literally besieged him as he appeared in the streets. He went toward the river, thirty-five miles away, which was, in his mind, the border of his country, and into which he thought he must drive the enemy.
He got five miles north of Winchester, with his few cannoneers more weary at each step and horses falling in their harnesses, until at last his guns were alone, without support. In fear of ambush, he was forced to halt pursuit, but he made one last effort and called for mounted volunteers to chase the enemy. When he saw the pitiful spectacle of the handful of men astride the worn-out horses, even Jackson gave up. It was only in this moment, after three days of the most punishing grind, that Jackson seemed to take into account the condition of his army, which he had worn to the limit of its endurance.
Just two hours after Jackson turned from the pursuit with a scowl, the fresh regiments of General Steuart came pounding by, raising a magnificent dust, on the trail of the enemy who could not now be overtaken; had Steuart been on time, Jackson would have wiped out, rather than defeated, the army of Banks, and perhaps have sent the Massachusetts commander to Richmond as a trophy.
Sandie Pendleton, whom Jackson had sent with peremptory orders to bring Steuart forward, came to headquarters with a maddening report: He had found the cavalrymen at ease, their horses munching clover, just a little over two miles away. Steuart stood on army regulations. He would take orders only from his immediate superior. Jackson could have no cavalry until General Ewell ordered him forward. He forced Pendleton to gallop two more miles to find an astonished Ewell and return with an order to advance. Steuart then had assembly calls played, and the cavalry belatedly, uselessly, went toward the Potomac.
The cavalry drove as far north as Martinsburg, twenty-two miles away, but had no chance to hit at the Federals; they brought back loot from abandoned magazines, and shiny new U.S. saddles and bridles appeared in the Jackson camp. There was also much-needed material—ammunition, medical supplies, food. The enemy crossed the Potomac after dark, at Williamsport, by use of the ford, ferry and pontoons.
Jackson enjoyed the remainder of the Sabbath by calling at the manse where he and his wife had stayed most of the previous winter with the Reverend James Graham and his family. He went to services in one of the brigades, too, and still found time to have his staff set up headquarters in the Taylor Hotel. He forced himself to his usual observation of Sunday, though he had regrettably been obliged to do battle that day. He waited until Monday to write his formal order to his troops, in which he recounted the events of a month past, praised his men, and then wrote of his own feelings:
But his chief duty, and that of the army, is to recognize devoutly the hand of a protecting Providence in the brilliant successes of the last three days—which have given us the results of a great victory without great losses—and to make the oblation of our thanks to God for His mercies to us and our country in heartfelt acts of religious worship.
He set aside the day for prayer and rest. He then wrote to his wife:
My Precious Darling, an ever-kind Providence blest us with success at Front Royal on Friday, between Strasburg and Winchester on Saturday, and here with a successful engagement on yesterday. I do not remember having seen such rejoicing as was manifested by the people of Winchester.… Our entrance was one of the most stirring scenes of my life.… Time forbids a longer letter, but it does not forbid my loving my esposita.
Jackson had literally wrecked a Federal corps. Banks belittled his own losses, but reports showed they were severe—about 40 per cent of his force. Jackson had burned or seized hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of supplies, including 9,300 small arms, 2 cannon, and countless wagons. He had taken three thousand prisoners.
The Confederate losses were insignificant: 68 killed, 329 wounded, 3 missing.
Jackson could not know the reactions he had set off in the North, which were unchecked for several panic-stricken days even by the soaring rhetoric of Banks, who began to issue victory bulletins as he crossed the Potomac:
It is seldom that a river-crossing of such magnitude is achieved with greater success.… There were never more grateful hearts than when we stood on the opposite shore … we had not suffered an attack or a rout, but had accomplished a premeditated march of near 60 miles in the face of the enemy, defeating his plans, and giving him battle wherever he was found.
Banks did not deceive Washington. President Lincoln wired General McDowell, canceling plans to send his troops to Richmond and ordering, instead, a detachment of twenty thousand hurried to the Shenandoah, to trap Jackson.
Newspaper headlines screamed of the defeat of Banks and warned that Jackson was about to fall upon Washington. The Government took over railroad lines; a new reserve corps of fifty thousand was created to defend the capital city; in a single day almost five hundred thousand volunteers pledged themselves to enter the army. The panic waned in a day or two, and calm returned to housewives who had burned and thrown away kitchen supplies and utensils, and jumpy military commanders who had destroyed arms. It was, after all, only some faraway maneuvering in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Still, McDowell was prevented from joining the Richmond expedition, and many of his finest troops were hustled to the west.
Jackson sent a quiet report to Richmond. Its familiar theme: “God has blessed our arms.”
After dinner the staff gathered, happy but weary, and for an hour or more Jackson listened, seldom speaking, to the talk of the young officers. Fresh newspapers were brought in from Richmond, where contraband dealers had got them through the lines, and though the General no longer read any newspapers, out of disgust with the liberties they took with him and the truth, he asked Sandie Pendleton to read him the worth-while news.
Pendleton browsed through the flimsy sheets, reading dispatches from the fighting fronts; and the staff found the war all but unrecognizable in those paragraphs.
“Here’s an amusing thing in the New York Mercury,” Pendleton said. “It will help you digest your dinner, General.”
Jackson grinned. “Go on, Captain, let’s hear it, if it will make us laugh at all.”
“The life and character of the rebel General, Stonewall Jackson,” Pendleton began.
Jackson got to his feet. “I don’t want to hear that. Not at all.”
“It is only a parody, General. Hold on a minute. There is nothing objectionable—you will enjoy it.” And as the General sat, uncertainty on his face, Pendleton read: “He traces his ancestry to Jack, the giant-killer … no mortal man, his abstemiousness enables him to live for a fortnight on two crackers and a barrel of whisky.”
There was more about the curious traits of his character, moral, mental and religious, and a humorous account of his wild boyhood. The General grinned more broadly, and was finally roaring with the others. Douglas remembered it as the loudest laugh of Jackson’s career, but it was the last time, the staff recalled, that the General ever gave an ear to press comments on him.