Shenandoah 1862

Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign

Peter Cozzens

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780807898475
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

One of the most intriguing and storied episodes of the Civil War, the 1862 Shenandoah Valley Campaign has heretofore been related only from the Confederate point of view. Moving seamlessly between tactical details and analysis of strategic significance, Peter Cozzens presents a balanced, comprehensive account of a campaign that has long been romanticized but little understood. He offers new interpretations of the campaign and the reasons for Stonewall Jackson's success, demonstrates instances in which the mythology that has come to shroud the campaign has masked errors on Jackson's part, and provides the first detailed appraisal of Union leadership in the Valley Campaign, with some surprising conclusions.

CHAPTER 1
THIS WAR IS A FARCE

Stonewall Jackson was angry. With “no other aid than the smiles of God,” his brigade of Virginians had blunted the Federal advance and turned the fortunes of battle at First Manassas. But the rout of the Yankee army galled him as an empty triumph. The Confederate commanders, Gen. Joe Johnston and Gen. Pierre G. T. Beauregard, seemed content simply to hold the ground Jackson had won them. Fretting about at a field hospital just after the battle, Jackson unburdened himself on the surgeon who attended his broken finger. “If they will let me,” he declared, “I’ll march my brigade into Washington tonight!”

No one let him. As July slipped into August 1861, the Confederate army of 41,000 men sank into torpor in camps around the hamlet of Centreville, just twenty miles from the defenses of Washington, D.C. An inept commissary department and uncertain railroads kept the troops hungry in a rich harvest season. Measles and chronic diarrhea laid low thousands. The liberal granting of furloughs thinned the ranks in equal measure. A shortage of arms—the chief of ordnance had only 3,500 muskets, mostly antique flintlocks, on hand—impeded recruiting.¹

Both the army and the civilian population of the South had expected that Johnston and Beauregard would advance after First Manassas at least as far as Alexandria. Sanguine spirits predicted the capture of Washington, D.C., and the defection of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri to the Confederacy. Some, beguiled by victory, considered the war all but over. A Virginia chaplain at the front recalled meeting a high-ranking officer just returned from Richmond who assured him: “We shall have no more fighting. It is not our policy to advance on the enemy now; they will hardly advance on us, and before spring England and France will recognize the Confederacy, and that will end the war.”²

Stonewall Jackson disagreed. He argued that only by carrying the fight vigorously onto Northern soil could the South expect to prevail. Delay was fatal. “We must give [the enemy] no time to think,” he wrote his wife Anna. “We must bewilder them and keep them bewildered. Our fighting must be sharp, impetuous, continuous. We cannot stand a long war.”³ Confederate inactivity after First Manassas was not simply a terrible blunder, Jackson believed, but also a dangerous repudiation of the will of God. In His divine providence, the Lord had given the Southern people a rare opportunity for securing the fruits of independence through decisive action in His name. “If the war is carried on with vigor,” Jackson assured Anna, “I think that, under the blessing of God, it will not last long.” Despite his deeply felt fears, both temporal and eternal, Jackson’s sense of official propriety sealed his lips. When asked why the army did nothing, Jackson told his subordinates, “This is the affair of the commanding generals.”⁴

Unknown to Jackson, the commanding generals also were impatient to strike a decisive blow, the more so as spies in Washington told them a reinvigorated, and hugely superior, Federal army under Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan might at any moment move against them. But without more arms and men, Johnston was loathe to advance beyond Fairfax Courthouse. At Johnston’s request, President Jefferson Davis visited army headquarters on September 30 to review the situation. For two hours Davis, Johnston, Beauregard, and Maj. Gen. Gustavus W. Smith pored over maps and shuffled through ordnance and troop-strength reports. “No one questioned the disastrous results of remaining inactive through the winter,” recalled Smith. “The enemy were daily increasing in number, arms, discipline, and efficiency. We looked forward to a sad state of things at the opening of a spring campaign.”

Johnston pleaded for help. “Mr. President, is it not possible to increase the effective strength of this army and put us in condition to cross the Potomac and carry the war into the enemy’s country? Can you not by stripping other points to the last they will bear, and even risking defeat in other places, put us in condition to move forward?”

How many more men would they need? Sixty thousand, said Johnston and Beauregard; fifty thousand, thought Smith. Out of the question, retorted Davis; the whole country demanded protection and arms and troops for defense. The generals were unrelenting. Better to risk almost certain defeat on the north side of the Potomac than watch the army waste away during the winter, at the end of which the terms of enlistment of half the force would expire. But Davis was adamant. Reinforcements were impossible; there was no course but to “await the winter and its results.” As heartsick as his generals, Davis suggested a partial blow somewhere in the theater, perhaps a quick strike across the Potomac near Williamsport, Maryland, or Harpers Ferry, Virginia.⁵

Unaware that the issue had been decided, Jackson called on General Smith, who lay sick in his tent. Jackson apologized for disturbing him, but he had come on a matter of “great importance.” Smith bade him proceed. Sitting himself on the ground at the head of Smith’s cot, with a confidence perhaps borne of his October 7 promotion to major general in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States, Jackson offered up his war strategy. With his army of raw recruits, McClellan dare not make a move until spring. Now was the time to draw troops from other points and invade: Cross the Upper Potomac, seize Baltimore, destroy the factories of Philadelphia and play havoc with Pennsylvania, take and hold the shores of Lake Erie. It could all be done, expounded Jackson. We could live off the land; make “unrelenting war amidst their homes, force the people of the North to understand what it will cost them to hold the South in the Union at the bayonet’s point.” Smith must persuade Johnston and Beauregard of the correctness—and righteousness—of his vision.

Smith shook his head. Impossible, nothing he might say would do any good. But he must, countered Jackson. No, answered Smith, and to explain his reluctance he offered to “tell Jackson a secret.”

“Please do not tell me any secret. I would prefer not to hear it.” But Jackson must know. President Davis had ruled out an offensive; the South would wait for McClellan’s advance, or for European recognition, as the case might be.

The passion left Jackson. “When I had finished,” recalled Smith, “he rose from the ground, shook my hand warmly, and said, ‘I am sorry, very sorry.’ Without another word he went slowly out to his horse, a few feet in front of my tent, mounted very deliberately, and rode sadly away.”⁶

UNION BRIGADIER GENERAL Frederick W. Lander was a restless spirit. Strong and fond of sports, Lander as a young man had parleyed an engineering degree from Norwich University into an assignment as a civil engineer on the Northern Pacific Railway survey of 1853. At home on the frontier, Lander returned to the Northwest the following year to lead a surveying expedition from Puget Sound to the Mississippi River. Over the next four years, he roamed the West as superintendent and chief engineer of the Overland Wagon Road, fighting Indians and bears in about equal measure, and earning from admiring Blackfoot guides the nom de guerre of “Old Grizzly.” By the end of the decade, Lander had participated in five transcontinental surveys. When not challenging nature, he dabbled in poetry, writing with the same force and vigor that characterized his railroad work. In 1860 he married Jean Margaret Davenport, an acclaimed British actress.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Lincoln administration appointed Lander a civil agent and sent him on a confidential mission to Governor Sam Houston of Texas, with authority to order Federal troops in the state to support the governor. Later, as a volunteer aide on the staff of General Mc-Clellan, Lander distinguished himself in the engagements of Philippi and Rich Mountain. That won him a commission as a brigadier general of volunteers and command of a brigade in Brig. Gen. Charles P. Stone’s Corps of Observation near Poolesville, Maryland, across the Potomac River from a small Confederate force at Leesburg, Virginia.⁷

Lander shared Jackson’s yearning for action. In early October he traveled to Washington to lobby for a new assignment. Ambushing Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward as they left the White House one evening, Lander promised the president he could do great things if granted a special force. With a handful of good men—loyal Virginians, whom he would raise himself —Lander would strike south and erase the “cowardly shame” of Bull Run, or die trying. Watching the rugged brigadier march off, a bemused Lincoln quipped to Seward: “If he really wanted a job like that, I could give it to him. Let him take his squad and go down behind Manassas and break up their railroad.”

The commanding general of the army, Winfield Scott, took Lander more seriously. On October 13 he offered Lander, whom he once called the “great natural American soldier,” command of a newly created Department of Harpers Ferry and Cumberland, which embraced a 120-mile stretch of the strategically critical Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Thirty miles of the line cut through hostile territory.⁸

Lander accepted the assignment. He returned to Poolesville just long enough to tender his resignation from McClellan’s moribund army, then hurried back to the War Department to consult with Scott. Confederate cavalry and local militia had burned railroad bridges and torn up much of the track in Virginia, but Lander was confident that he could reopen the line quickly.

Affairs in western Virginia certainly seemed propitious of success. Mc-Clellan’s successor to departmental command, Brig. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, had swept poorly led Southern forces eastward toward the Allegheny Mountains. Reinforced and united under Maj. Gen. Robert E. Lee, the Confederates maintained a tentative presence in the Great Kanawha Valley, which Rosecrans threatened to disrupt. Nearer to Lander’s new department, Brig. Gen. Benjamin F. Kelley commanded a brigade of Ohio and loyal Virginia regiments at Grafton in what was called the Railroad District of Rosecrans’s department.⁹

Kelley was within striking distance of Romney, Virginia, a village of five hundred with an importance far beyond its humble size. From Romney, the excellent Northwest Turnpike ran east forty miles to Winchester, which was key to the Confederate defense of the Lower Shenandoah Valley. Romney was the principal town of the fertile South Branch Valley. Wide meadows on either side of the South Branch of the Potomac River yielded large crops of corn and offered ideal pasturage for cattle. Tucked among a patchwork of ridges, ravines, and low mountains on the east bank of the South Branch, Romney not only controlled the valley, but it also commanded the sixty-mile length of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad most critical to Lander’s new department. From Romney, the Confederates could reach the track in a short day’s march. But with Romney in Federal hands, marauding Confederates would be hard pressed to operate against the railway. Lander understood this, and he urged General Scott to order Kelley to seize Romney and assume command of the Department of Harpers Ferry and Cumberland until Lander arrived. Scott complied, and on October 22 Lander repaired to his District of Columbia home to prepare for his new post.¹⁰

An unexpected clash the previous day involving his old brigade interrupted Lander’s plans. General Stone had taken his Corps of Observation across the Potomac to do battle with a Confederate force at Ball’s Bluff. In the ensuing fiasco Col. Edward D. Baker, a close friend of President Lincoln, was killed and the surviving Union troops were stranded. That evening a War Department courier delivered a short telegram from McClellan to Lander’s E Street home ordering the general to return to his former command. Lander set out at once and the next morning took command of two thousand Federal troops on the Virginia shore at Edwards Ferry, ten miles downriver from Ball’s Bluff. Lander was hit early in the day’s fighting. A Rebel bullet smashed into his left leg, boring his bootstrap deep into the calf muscle. Refusing aid, Lander hobbled about in agony until the fight was over. A surgeon then cleaned bits of boot leather from the gaping hole, pronounced the wound “not at all dangerous,” then remanded Lander to the care of his wife. Spitting epithets over the poor planning and wasted sacrifice of life that characterized Stone’s sorry little campaign—“This war is a farce,” he told a friend, “bloodless nerves ruin the roast”—Lander rode painfully back to his district home to convalesce. While he laid abed, his chief patron, General Scott, retired, and George McClellan replaced him as commanding general of the Northern armies. McClellan wanted a quiet winter. Undoubtedly concerned that the impetuous Lander would bring on a battle to reopen the Baltimore and Ohio as soon as he was healthy, McClellan terminated his new military department.¹¹

INACTIVITY WAS ANATHEMA to Stonewall Jackson. Rebuffed in his calls for an offensive, Jackson devoted himself to improving his brigade, already the most efficient in Johnston’s army. Other commands melted away, as troops took leave in large numbers to visit family or harvest crops, but Jackson granted no furloughs. His devotion to duty was absolute, and he expected nothing less from his officers and men. When Col. Kenton Harper of the 5th Virginia appealed to Jackson in late August for emergency leave to visit his terminally ill wife, he met with a harsh rebuke. “General, my wife is dying! I must see her!” implored Harper. A look of sadness betrayed Jackson’s inner struggle, but he held firm. “Man,” he asked Harper, “do you love your wife more than your country?” Harper’s answer was a letter of resignation.¹²

Hypocrisy can sometimes catch the best of men unawares. While Colonel Harper journeyed home to Staunton to bury his wife, Mary Anna Jackson was on her way to Centreville to visit her husband. General Jackson commandeered an ambulance to meet her at the Manassas railhead, whisked her off to church services with the Stonewall Brigade, and then set her up in a farmhouse near headquarters. While Jackson drilled his brigade incessantly, Anna reveled in army life, entertaining high-ranking callers and generally enjoying her role as belle of the ball. Four times a day, in ninety-minute blocks, Jackson had the brigade on the parade ground. Their firm stand at Manassas had earned the Virginians and their commander the sobriquet “Stonewall.” But tenacity on the defense was but one ingredient of military success; now they would learn to march and attack as one. Said an early Jackson biographer: “Shoulder to shoulder they advanced and retired, marched and countermarched, massed in column, formed line to front or flank, until they learned to move as a machine, until the limbs obeyed before the order had passed from ear to brain, until obedience became an instinct and cohesion a necessity of their nature.” Amid the general apathy that had descended on the army, Jackson’s men worked hard. When not drilling, they stood inspection, policed their camps, or picketed the perimeter. “Every officer and soldier,” affirmed Jackson, “who is able to do duty ought to be busily engaged in military preparation by hard drilling, in order that, through the blessing of God, we may be victorious in the battles which in His all-wise providence may await us.”¹³

It was not only his men who learned. Ever a close student of war, Jackson reflected on his actions at First Manassas, and from them derived tactical principles to guide him in the campaigns ahead. As a young lieutenant of artillery in the Mexican War, Jackson had learned how to deploy artillery to its best advantage. Running his section up to the walls of Chapultepec, far in advance of the infantry, Jackson had given shot for shot with the heavy guns of the castle until support reached him. His feat of daring inspired an assault that carried the works and won the battle. Just as the daring of a few well-served cannons might inspire the infantry, so too could their capture demoralize the ranks, as happened when Jackson’s Virginians mowed down the gunners and horses of Ricketts’s and Griffin’s regular batteries at Manassas.

Jackson’s ideas regarding the role of infantry were as aggressive as his artillery tactics. “I rather think,” he said after First Manassas, “that fire by file [independent firing] is best on the whole, for it gives the enemy an idea that the fire is heavier than if it was by company or battalion [volley firing]. Sometimes, however, one may be best, sometimes the other, ac...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• SHENANDOAH 1862
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• MAPS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 THIS WAR IS A FARCE
• CHAPTER 2 DAUGHTER OF THE STARS
• CHAPTER 3 THEY AIN’T RIGGED OUT LIKE UNCLE SAM’S MEN
• CHAPTER 4 THE DAM[N] TRIP
• CHAPTER 5 OUR TRUE POLICY IS TO ATTACK
• CHAPTER 6 IS NOT WAR A GAME OF RISKS?
• CHAPTER 7 BE CAREFUL NOT TO BE CAUGHT
• CHAPTER 8 DANGERS CLOSE US ROUND ON EVERY SIDE
• CHAPTER 9 WE ARE VERY HARD PRESSED NOW
• CHAPTER 10 KEEP THAT ARMY IN THE VALLEY
• CHAPTER 11 WE ARE IN FOR IT
• CHAPTER 12 IT SEEMS VERY MUCH LIKE MURDER
• CHAPTER 13 GENERAL JACKSON WAS COMPLETELY TAKEN IN
• CHAPTER 14 VACILLATION IS OUR NAME
• CHAPTER 15 NOW WE’LL HAVE WAR IN EARNEST
• CHAPTER 16 A COUNTRY TO FIGHT FOR
• CHAPTER 17 GOD BLESSED OUR ARMS WITH VICTORY
• CHAPTER 18 ON YOUR COURSE MAY DEPEND THE FATE OF RICHMOND
• CHAPTER 19 GO IT, BOYS! MARYLAND WHIP MARYLAND!
• CHAPTER 20 WE MUST CUT OUR WAY THROUGH!
• CHAPTER 21 THIS IS A CRUSHING BLOW
• CHAPTER 22 ATTACK AT DAYLIGHT
• CHAPTER 23 A QUESTION OF LEGS
• CHAPTER 24 I WAS NEVER SO RELIEVED IN MY LIFE
• CHAPTER 25 SAVE THE BRIDGE AT PORT REPUBLIC
• CHAPTER 26 THE PRESERVATION OF OUR ARMY DEPENDED ON US
• CHAPTER 27 I HAVE LOST CONFIDENCE IN FRÉMONT
• CHAPTER 28 ALL HAS GONE WRONG TODAY
• CHAPTER 29 THE GAME COCK OF THE VALLEY
• APPENDIX: THE OPPOSING FORCES IN THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY CAMPAIGN
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX