Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (94 page)

They would need this pride to keep them going, for even harder marching and fighting lay ahead. The truth of his predicament having dawned on him, Banks retreated at top speed from Strasburg to his base at Winchester twenty miles north. Jackson's tired troops pressed after him on May 24, slicing into Banks's wagon train and capturing a cornucopia of supplies. Banks's main body won the race to Winchester, where they turned to fight. At foggy daybreak on May 25, some 15,000 rebels assaulted 6,000 Yankees on the hills south and west of town. After some sharp fighting the Federals broke and streamed northward for the safety of the Potomac thirty-five miles away. Ashby's undisciplined cavalry had disintegrated into looters, plundering Union camps or leading captured horses to the troopers' nearby homes. Without cavalry and with worn-out infantry, Jackson could not pursue the routed blue-coats. Nevertheless his victories at Front Royal and Winchester had reaped at least 2,000 prisoners, 9,000 rifles, and such a wealth of food and medical stores that Jackson's men labeled their opponent "Commissary Banks."

Jackson's campaign accomplished the relief of pressure against Richmond that Lee had hoped for. When Lincoln learned on May 24 of Jackson's capture of Front Royal, he made two swift decisions. First he ordered Frémont to push his troops eastward into the Valley at Harrisonburg, from where they could march north and attack Jackson's rear. Second, he suspended McDowell's movement from Fredricksburg toward Richmond and ordered him to send two divisions posthaste to the Valley to smash into Jackson's flank. Both McClellan and McDowell protested that this action played into the enemy's hand. It was "a crushing blow to us," McDowell wired Lincoln. "I shall gain nothing for you there, and shall lose much for you here."
³
Nevertheless, McDowell obeyed orders. Back to the Valley he sent James Shields's division, which Banks had sent to him only a few days earlier. McDowell himself followed with another division. Sitting in the War Department telegraph office in Washington, Lincoln fired off telegrams to the three separate commands of Frémont, Banks, and McDowell, hoping to move them like knights and bishops on the military chessboard. But his generals moved too slowly, or in the wrong direction. Instead of crossing into

3
.
CWL
, V, 232–33.

the Valley at Harrisonburg, Frémont found the passes blocked by small enemy forces and marched forty miles northward to cross at a point northwest of Strasburg. This angered Lincoln, for it opened the way for Jackson's
16,000
to escape southward through Strasburg before Frémont's 15,000 and Shields's 10,000 (with another 10,000 close behind) converged on them from west and east.

That was precisely what happened. After the battle of Winchester, Jackson had marched to within a few miles of Harper's Ferry to give the impression that he intended to cross the Potomac. On May 30 his force was nearly twice as far from Strasburg as the converging forces of Frémont and Shields. Nothing but a few cavalry stood in the way of the Union pincers. But a strange lethargy seemed to paralyze the northern commanders. Jackson's foot cavalry raced southward day and night on May 30 while the bluecoats tarried. The rebels cleared Strasburg on June 1 and slogged southward while Frémont and Shields, finally aroused, nipped at their heels. For the next few days it became a stern chase, with Frémont pursuing Jackson on the Valley pike and Shields trudging southward on a parallel course east of Massanutten Mountain. Ashby's cavalry burned four bridges to delay Union pursuit. Several rear-guard cavalry fights took place, one of them resulting in the death of Ashby, who had become a romantic hero in the South. Jackson kept pushing his men to the edge of collapse. They won the race to the only undamaged bridge left on the Shenandoah River, at Port Republic near the south end of the Valley where Jackson had launched his epic campaign five weeks earlier. During those weeks Jackson's own division had marched more than 350 miles (Ewell's had marched 200 miles) and won three battles. Now they stopped to fight again.

On June 8, Frémont's troops advanced against Ewell's division stationed three miles north of Port Republic near the tiny village of Cross Keys. Frémont handled this attack poorly. Although outnumbering Ewell by 11,000 to 6,000, he committed only a fraction of his infantry to an attack on the Confederate right. After its repulse, Frémont settled down for an artillery duel that accomplished nothing. Reacting to this feeble effort, Jackson made a typically bold decision. His army of 15,000 was caught between two enemy forces whose combined strength he believed to be at least 50 percent greater than his own. The safe course was retreat to the nearest defensible pass in the Blue Ridge. But the two Federal armies under Frémont and Shields were separated by unfordable rivers, while Jackson's troops held the only bridge. On the night of June 8–9, Jackson ordered Ewell to leave a token force confronting

Frémont and march the rest of his division to Port Republic. Jackson intended to overwhelm Shields's advance force and then face about to attack Frémont. But the stubborn resistance of Shields's two brigades at Port Republic frustrated the plan. Three thousand bluecoats held off for three hours the seven or eight thousand men that Jackson finally got into action. The weight of numbers eventually prevailed, but by then Jackson's army was too battered to carry out the attack against Frémont, who had remained quiescent during this bloody morning of June 9. Both sides pulled back and regrouped. That night Jackson withdrew to Brown's Gap in the Blue Ridge.

Jackson's Valley campaign won renown and is still studied in military schools as an example of how speed and use of terrain can compensate for inferiority of numbers. Jackson's army of 17,000 men had outmaneuvered three separate enemy forces with a combined strength of 33,000 and had won five battles, in all but one of which (Cross Keys) Jackson had been able to bring superior numbers to the scene of combat. Most important, Jackson's campaign had diverted 60,000 Union soldiers from other tasks and had disrupted two major strategic movements—Frémont's east Tennessee campaign and McDowell's plan to link up with McClellan's right wing before Richmond. Jackson's victories in the Valley created an aura of invincibility around him and his foot cavalry. They furthered the southern tradition of victory in the Virginia theater that had begun at Manassas. Summarizing the Valley campaign, a rebel private wrote: "General Jackson 'got the drop' on them in the start, and kept it."
⁴
The soldier meant this in a military sense, but it was equally true in a psychological sense. Stonewall became larger than life in the eyes of many northerners; he had gotten the drop on them psychologically, and kept it until his death a year later.

Lincoln's diversion of McDowell's corps to chase Jackson was probably a strategic error—perhaps even the colossal blunder that McClellan considered it. But if Union commanders in the Valley had acted with half the energy displayed by Jackson they might well have trapped and crippled Jackson's army. And even if McDowell's corps had joined McClellan as planned, the latter's previous record offered little reason to believe that he would have moved with speed and boldness to capture Richmond.

4
. Robert G. Tanner,
Stonewall in the Valley: Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's Shenandoah Valley Campaign Spring 1862
(Garden City, N.Y., 1976), 259.

II

Rising a few miles north of Richmond, the Chickahominy River flows southeast until it empties into the James halfway down the Peninsula. The Chickahominy became an important factor in the defense of Richmond. Normally sluggish and shallow, the river had swollen to a raging torrent during the abnormal May rains. It bisected the ring of Union troops closing in on Richmond. McClellan had placed more than half of his army on the north side of the Chickahominy to protect his base of supplies and to hook up with McDowell's expected advance from the north. Several makeshift bridges threatened by the flooding river provided the only links between the two wings of McClellan's army.

Waiting nervously in Richmond while McClellan readied his siege artillery, Jefferson Davis prodded a reluctant Joseph Johnston to launch some kind of counterstroke. Johnston finally decided to attack the weaker Union left wing south of the river. Reinforcements from North Carolina had brought his strength to nearly 75,000 men. A torrential downpour on May 30 seemed providential to the Confederates, for it washed out most of the Chickahominy bridges and gave southern troops numerical superiority over the two isolated Union corps south of the river.

But from the beginning of Johnston's planned early-morning attack on May 31, things went wrong. A misunderstood verbal order caused James Longstreet to advance his oversize division on the wrong road where it entangled parts of two other divisions and delayed the attack until midafternoon. When the assault finally went forward it did so disjointedly, one brigade at a time, because of poor staff coordination. The Confederates managed to drive the Union left a mile through the crossroads village of Seven Pines, about seven miles east of Richmond. On the Union right, however, the leather-lunged commander of the 2nd Corps, sixty-five-year old Edwin "Bull" Sumner, got one of his divisions across the Chickahominy on swaying bridges with ankle-deep water coursing over them and brought the rebel left to a bloody halt in the dusk near the railroad station of Fair Oaks. Next day, indecisive fighting sputtered out as additional Union reinforcements from across the Chickahominy forced the Confederates to yield the ground they had won the first day.

Seven Pines (or Fair Oaks, as the Yankees called it) was a confused battle, "phenomenally mismanaged" on the Confederate side according to Johnston's chief of ordnance.
⁵
Most of the 42,000 men engaged on each side fought in small clusters amid thick woods and flooded clearings where wounded soldiers had to be propped against fences or stumps to prevent them from drowning in the muck. If either side gained an advantage it was the Federals, who inflicted a thousand more casualties (6,000) than they suffered. The most important southern casualty was Joe Johnston, wounded by a shell fragment and a bullet through the shoulder on the evening of May 31. To replace him Davis appointed Robert E. Lee, who recognized the futility of further fighting by breaking off the engagement on June 1.

When Lee took command of the newly designated Army of Northern Virginia, few shared Davis's high opinion of the quiet Virginian. "Evacuating Lee," sneered the
Richmond Examiner
in recollection of his West Virginia campaign, "who has never yet risked a single battle with the invader." Across the way, McClellan voiced pleasure at the change in southern command, for he considered Lee "cautious and weak under grave responsibilty . . . likely to be timid and irresolute in action."
⁶

A psychiatrist trying to understand what made McClellan tick might read a great deal into these words, which described McClellan himself but could not have been more wrong about Lee. The latter ignored criticism and set about reorganizing his army for a campaign that would fit his offensive-defensive concept of strategy. Lee's first actions emphasized the defensive. He put his soldiers to work strengthening the fortifications and trenches ringing Richmond, which earned him new derision as "the king of spades." But it soon became clear that Lee's purpose was not to hunker down for a siege. On the contrary, he told Davis, "I am preparing a line that I can hold with part of our forces" while concentrating the rest for a slashing attack on McClellan's exposed right flank north of the Chickahominy.
⁷

Lee knew that this flank was "in the air" (unprotected by natural or man-made obstacles such as a river, right-angle fortifications, etc.) because a remarkable reconnaissance by Jeb Stuart's cavalry had discovered the fact. Twenty-nine years old, Stuart had already won modest

5
. Edward P. Alexander quoted in Clifford Dowdey,
The Seven Days: The Emergence of Robert E. Lee
(New York, 1964), 4.

6
.
Examiner
quoted in Hudson Strode,
Jefferson Davis: Confederate President
(New York, 1959), 220; McClellan quoted in Foote, Civil
War
, I, 465.

7
. Dowdey,
The Seven Days
, 132.

fame in the war but had an insatiable appetite for more. Dressed in knee-high cavalry boots, elbow-length gauntlets, red-lined cape with a yellow sash, and a felt hat with pinned-up brim and ostrich-feather plume, Stuart looked the dashing cavalier he aspired to be. He was also a superb leader of cavalry, especially in gathering information about enemy positions and movements. In this as in other tasks assigned to the cavalry—screening the army from enemy horsemen, patrolling front and flanks to prevent surprise attacks, raiding enemy supply lines, and pursuing defeated enemy infantry—the rebel troopers were superior to their adversaries at this stage of the war. Having grown up in the saddle, sons of the Virginia gentry quite literally rode circles around the neophyte Yankee horsemen. When Lee told Stuart on June 10 that he wanted a reconnaissance to discover the strength and location of the Union right, Stuart was ready.