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CHAPTER XXVII
Jackson's Valley Campaign

No sooner had Lee come into command than he set out to change and reverse the existing conditions of the war. He was determined to drive McClellan away from Richmond, to put an end to siege operations that, if persisted in, must ultimately result in the capture of that city, and to transfer to some more distant point the scene of active hostilities. In other words, it was Lee's purpose to change a dispiriting defense into an all-inspiring offense, to raise McClellan's siege of Richmond and to institute in its stead operations that should put Washington upon the defensive.

To that end he began by strengthening his army. He deemed the time now ripe to adopt the plan which he had negatived as premature when Johnston had suggested it. He called to Richmond all the available forces that could be spared from the Southern coasts and elsewhere, swelling his army to 70,000 or 80,000 men.

This reinforcement did not indeed give him an army equal to McClellan's in numbers or in equipment, but it materially reduced the disparity between the two opposing forces and opened the way to a hopeful trial of conclusions in the field.

But there was, as already stated, a strong Federal force marching by way of Fredericksburg to join McClellan. It numbered more than 40,000 men and was under the very capable command of General McDowell. If that force should form a junction with McClellan the odds against Lee, in spite of reinforcement, would be decisive, and any attempt he might make to save the Confederate capital by offensive defense must fail.

Lee's first necessity, therefore, was to prevent McDowell's army of 40,000 men from joining McClellan before Richmond; his second purpose was to bring all his own forces to bear at that crucial point for a supreme effort to overthrow his adversary there.

He knew the excessive apprehension felt at the North for the safety of Washington city, and he played upon it with masterly skill. Ever since November, 1861, Stonewall Jackson had been in the Valley of the Shenandoah trying with a totally inadequate force to hold that region and upon occasion to inflict what damage he could upon the foe, especially by destroying a section of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad and of the Chesapeake and Ohio canal, upon which the Federal communications between the forces in West Virginia and the headquarters at Washington depended. Jackson had done some brilliant things in that quarter and had succeeded in detaining there a Federal force much greater than his own, which if set free to join McClellan would have made the Federal army before Richmond irresistible in its strength.

But inferiority of force was by no means the sorest difficulty that Jackson had contended with during all those months of winter marchings and fightings amid snowstorms. On the Southern as on the Northern side every really capable general was embarrassed by the ignorant and intrusive dictation of men in place above him. As Grant was paralyzingly dominated by Halleck's interference at every critical moment in his western campaigns, and as Farragut was restrained from obviously easy and supremely desirable achievement by the hand of ignorant authority in the Navy Department at Washington, so Jackson, in the Valley, found his military plans brought to naught by the interference of a civilian Secretary of War who, having authority, chose to use it in giving orders to Jackson's troops in the field without so much as consulting Jackson as to his reasons for posting them as he had done. Beauregard and Johnston at Manassas had encountered a like difficulty and had several times been upon the point of resigning their commissions in despair of achieving any worthy results under such conditions of ignorant and arbitrary control. Jackson was driven further and on the thirty-first of January, 1862, he wrote in despair to Governor Letcher of Virginia, asking that he be ordered back to his professor's chair in the Virginia Military Institute, and tendering his resignation as a major-general if such an order could not be given.

The circumstances were these. With great difficulty, at serious risk of defeat and by exacting a positively heroic endurance on the part of his men in marches through snow and sleet and mud, Jackson had conquered the strategic control of the region under his command from an enemy greatly outnumbering him. The strategic key to the position thus conquered was Romney and there Jackson had stationed Loring with a force strong enough to hold the place while keeping in touch with Jackson himself. This disposition rendered the valley, with all its strategic advantages, a secure Confederate possession and a military base from which it was easy to threaten or with reinforcements to assail Washington and the country north of the Potomac.

No sooner had Jackson by genius and heroic endeavor secured this advantage for the Confederate arms than the lawyer at the head of the War Department at Richmond assumed to undo his work by an order which Jackson obeyed as a soldier, but bitterly resented as a strategist baffled by the ignorance and arrogant assumption of his civilian superior officer. His letter to Governor Letcher which follows sufficiently explains the matter:

Winchester, January 31, 1862

Governor: – This morning I received an order from the Secretary of War to order General Loring and his command to fall back from Romney to this place immediately. The order was promptly complied with; but as the order was given without consulting me and is abandoning to the enemy what has cost much preparation, expense and exposure to secure, and is in direct conflict with my military plans, and implies a want of confidence in my capacity to judge when General Loring's troops should fall back, and is an attempt to control military operations in detail from the Secretary's desk at a distance,⁵ I have, for the reasons set forth in the accompanying paper, requested to be ordered back to the Institute and if this is denied me, then to have my resignation accepted. I ask as a special favor that you will have me ordered back to the Institute.

As a single order like that of the Secretary may destroy the entire fruits of a campaign I cannot reasonably expect if my operations are thus to be interfered with to be of much service in the field… If I have ever acquired by the blessing of Providence any influence over troops this undoing of my work by the Secretary may greatly diminish that influence.

* * * * *

I desire to say nothing against the Secretary of War. I take it for granted that he has done what he believed to be best, but I regard such a policy as ruinous.

Very truly your friend,

T. J. Jackson

Let the reader imagine if he can, a lawyer utterly unskilled in military affairs and completely unacquainted with even the topography of the valley, sitting in Richmond, and undertaking not only to direct the movements of troops in that region but to cancel and reverse the orders of Stonewall Jackson without so much as asking his opinion of a situation which that Napoleonic commander had painfully wrought out with inadequate means and in face of difficulties that might well have appalled even his resolute spirit. Such imagining will help to a comprehension of the peculiar difficulties at that time needlessly thrown in the way of the men to whom was assigned the task of conducting the war to a successful conclusion. The like thing was a familiar story on both sides at that period of the war, and it cost both sides many thousands of human lives and many millions of treasure.

These are not pleasant facts for the historian to record, but they must be set down if the story of the war is to be told with truth and in a fashion to be understood.

Not only did Judah P. Benjamin, the unmilitary lawyer who held the post of Secretary of War, assume to interfere with Jackson's dispositions of his troops without consulting Jackson; his arrogance had an even more astounding manifestation. Jackson was acting in the valley under the command of his superior officer, General Joseph E. Johnston, who had sent him thither, who trusted him implicitly, and who very wisely and properly left to his trained skill and well-approved judgment every detail of a campaign, the general purport of which was all that even Johnston, as commanding general, responsible for results, assumed the right to dictate to such a man as Jackson. Benjamin, the lawyer Secretary of War, was so far ignorant or negligent of those forms and courtesies of military life upon which military success very largely depends that he sent his order directly to Jackson, instead of sending it, as common courtesy and all military usage properly required, through Jackson's commander, General Johnston. This seriously endangered results and it was an affront to Johnston which that officer would have been fully justified in resenting with his own resignation. It was something far worse than an affront. It was an impertinent interference with Johnston's military plans as well as with Jackson's – an interference of ignorance with the activities of knowledge which might easily have defeated operations of the utmost consequence.

It seems incredible, but it is a fact, that General Johnston, the officer at that time charged with the supreme command in Virginia, never knew or heard of the order of the Secretary of War to Stonewall Jackson, utterly disorganizing his plans and directing him to surrender all that he had painfully achieved of strategic advantage, until Jackson's letter to Governor Letcher, tendering his resignation in righteous resentment of the interference and in despair of accomplishing worthy results under such conditions, came to General Johnston in the regular course. For Jackson was far too well educated a soldier to send his letter, even though it was personal and was addressed to the Governor of Virginia, otherwise than through his regular military superiors.

Upon reading that letter and its inclosed communication to the Secretary of War and learning for the first time of Benjamin's interference with Jackson's operations, General Johnston sought to save to the Confederacy the inestimable services of his great lieutenant. He wrote to Jackson as follows:

My Dear Friend: – I have just read with profound regret your letter to the Secretary of War asking to be relieved from your present command, either by an order to the Virginia Military Institute or the acceptance of your resignation. Let me beg you to reconsider this matter. Under ordinary circumstances a due sense of one's own dignity, as well as care for professional character and official rights, would demand such a course as yours. But the character of the war, the great energy exhibited by the government of the United States, the danger in which our very existence as an independent people lies, require sacrifices from us all who have been educated as soldiers. I receive my information of the order of which you have such cause to complain from your letter. Is not that as great an official wrong to me as the order itself to you? Let us dispassionately reason with the government on this subject of command, and if we fail to influence its practice, then ask to be relieved from positions the authority of which is exercised by the War Department while the responsibilities are left to us.⁶

I have taken the liberty to detain your letter, to make this appeal to your patriotism, not merely from warm feelings of personal regard but from the official opinion which makes me regard you as necessary to the service of your country in your present position.

General Johnston's appeal to Jackson to continue in the service in spite of the ignorant, embarrassing, and grossly ill-mannered interference with his operations by the Secretary of War, was supported by a multitude of letters and appeals from statesmen, citizens, generals and common soldiers – many of the latter being men of high social and political distinction who had enlisted in the ranks in a war that all regarded as their own, but whose enlistment had in no wise invalidated their right to speak with authority as representative citizens.

Governor Letcher went at once to the War Department to plead with Secretary Benjamin for the saving of Stonewall Jackson's genius and devotion to the Confederate cause. Benjamin so far yielded as to hold open the question of Jackson's resignation. He had not intended to provoke that. It is doubtful that he would have dared it. He had not intended anything, indeed, except to impress his own authority upon the army. When he understood how great a loss Jackson would be to the cause, and how narrowly his own grossly irregular interference with Jackson had missed compelling the resignations of Beauregard, Johnston, and a host of others in high and low position, Mr. Benjamin became placative in an extreme degree.

In the meanwhile he had sacrificed all that Jackson's energy and genius had accomplished in the Valley and had discouraged the army in a degree and to an extent for which no later efficiency could by any possibility atone. Until Benjamin interfered with him Jackson was master of the Valley, and of all that its possession signified, by virtue of his painful endeavors to achieve that highly desirable result by means of arduous campaigns in snow and sleet and slush and mud. If he had been let alone Jackson would have been in undisputed command of the upper Potomac country; he would have had Maryland and southern Pennsylvania thenceforth always at his mercy; and with reinforcements that might at any moment have been sent to him he would have been in position to threaten Washington in a way possibly to compel the instant withdrawal of McClellan's army from Richmond and the recall of McDowell's from Fredericksburg.

As it was, it was left to Lee to achieve those purposes in much more arduous ways and at cost of great and otherwise needless battles, involving the loss of human lives by tens of thousands, where but for ignorant interference no considerable loss at all would have been necessary.

Let us make this matter clear. If Jackson had been let alone in the Valley, of which he had made himself complete master, his way would have been easily open to the region in rear of Washington. With the opening of the spring of 1862 practically the whole of Johnston's army, then still at Manassas and Centreville, together with the troops at Richmond reinforced from the seaboard and the South, could have been pushed by the valley route into Maryland, threatening Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and the North. If that had been done McClellan would not have been permitted by his government to advance up the Peninsula. His entire force would have been held at Washington or sent northward and westward to meet the Confederate advance. It would have been Washington, the Federal capital, and not Richmond, the seat of Confederate government, that was besieged.

But the interference of a civilian war department spoiled the program and made a mess of the campaign. It resulted in a siege of Richmond which sorely discouraged not only the Confederates but also their friends in Europe who were struggling to secure the South's recognition as an independent power. It rendered necessary the Seven Days' battles presently to be considered, and the campaign against Pope, as damaging and depleting preliminaries to a campaign of aggression which, but for the War Department's interference, would have been undertaken with the full force of the Confederate army, unimpaired by the losses of nearly a dozen battle conflicts.

Jackson's services were fortunately saved to the Confederates. His position in the valley was impaired by the order of the Secretary of War, which he obeyed in spite of its destructiveness, and the results of his arduous campaign there were largely sacrificed to the fetish of official authority. But at any rate Jackson's energy and genius were not lost to the cause to which he was so ardently devoted. Johnston's appeal and a multitude of others that poured in upon him overcame the great general's reluctance to continue longer in a service in which crass ignorance was permitted to interfere with and destroy the results of military skill and heroic endeavor.

A week after his resignation was written Jackson, overwhelmed by appeals to remain in the service, wrote to Governor Letcher as follows:

February 6, 1862

Governor: – Your letter of the 4th inst. was received this morning. If my retiring from the army would produce the effect upon our country that you have named in your letter, I, of course, could not desire to leave the service, and if, upon receipt of this note, your opinion remains unchanged, you are authorized to withdraw my resignation unless the Secretary of War desires that it should be accepted. My reasons for resigning were set forth in my letter of the 31st ult. and my views remain unchanged; and if the Secretary persists in the ruinous policy complained of I feel that no officer can serve his country better than by making his strongest possible protest against it, which, in my opinion, is done by tendering his resignation, rather than be a willing instrument in prosecuting the war upon a ruinous principle.

This then was the situation. Stonewall Jackson, with a miserably inferior force, was holding the Valley throughout a long winter, and detaining there a Federal army, which, if it had been added to the main Federal force, would have made that force irresistible in numbers of men and guns. Toilsomely, and at cost of desperately hard marching and fighting, he had made himself master of the strategic position. He could now hold the Valley secure even with his inadequate force, and in the event of reinforcement he could threaten Washington in ways that must compel the diversion of decisive Federal forces from the march upon Richmond. His strategy had been masterly, his enterprise matchless, and his achievements astonishing in their completeness.

Just as these results were achieved a lawyer who happened to be Secretary of War, without any adequate knowledge of the military situation, without any skill in the art of war, without consultation with Jackson and even without sending his orders through Jackson's commanding officer, Johnston, assumed to order Jackson to undo all his work and withdraw his forces from points of commanding importance which had been won with difficulty and at cost of positively heroic sacrifice.

Is it any wonder that a war so blunderingly conducted by ignorant civilians on both sides was prolonged to four times the length it ought properly to have endured? Is it any wonder that under such ignorant direction the war cost scores of thousands of lives needlessly sacrificed by mismanagement, and hundreds of millions of needlessly expended treasure?

These details, which seem at first glance, to belong rather to biography than to history, are set forth here, precisely as those touching Grant's restraint from activity by Halleck and Farragut's embarrassment by a civilian Navy Department, are set forth in other chapters of this history, because they serve to show how the war was conducted on both sides in those early years. As influences that caused the prolongation of the struggle and added enormously to its cost both in precious treasure and in more precious human life, they have a historical meaning wholly out of proportion to their biographical significance.

Jackson remained in command in the Valley. He had a meager force, – usually less than one fourth that of his adversary, – and in spite of his activity in battle at Kernstown, Romney and the rest – his original plans having been brought to naught by the interference of the Secretary of War – he was slowly beaten back into positions that seemed to make of the Valley a Federal possession.

Then he turned about and by one of the most brilliant campaigns of all the war, reversed conditions, and made himself again master where he had seemed to be almost hopelessly on the defensive.

In preparation for that campaign he earnestly begged Lee for reinforcements – Lee being then in general command of the Confederate forces – and all that Lee could do was to assign to his command the little force under Edward Johnson west of Staunton, with the privilege of calling to his aid such troops as General Ewell had with him on the line of the Rappahannock, east of the Blue Ridge. His own immediate command, together with Ewell's and Edward Johnson's, amounted in all to a little less than 17,000 men, divided into three widely separated columns with the Blue Ridge and a whole day's march between his own position and that of his chief lieutenant. Opposed to him were Banks at Harrisonburg with 19,000 men, – or more than Jackson's total possible strength – Milroy and Schenck lying to the west of Staunton with 6,000 men and Fremont advancing from West Virginia with 9,000 more.

In brief, by concentrating all his widely scattered forces, Jackson could bring to bear upon his problem no more than 17,000 men at the very most, while he stood beleaguered by no less than 34,000, under generals who already held the greater part of the valley and seemed easily able to occupy the rest of it, including Staunton and the chief railroad lines, at will.

When Jackson definitely learned that he could have no other help than that of Ewell and Edward Johnson, he boldly planned to concentrate his 17,000 men and with them make war upon his 34,000 adversaries. His hope lay in secrecy and celerity of operation. His plan was to bring the three widely separated parts of his army together without the enemy's knowledge, and to hurl the whole like a thunderbolt against one after another of his enemy's divisions.

The largest of those divisions, – that under Banks's personal command at Harrisonburg – outnumbered Jackson's total force by all of 2,000 men, while the other two divisions were nearly enough equal to his own to make an assault upon either of them perilous. Moreover the geographical problem was such that Jackson could at no point bring all his inferior force to bear at once. He must always keep a considerable part of it detached and out of action, lest his adversary seize upon a position of commanding importance.

Nevertheless, this truly Napoleonic commander planned a campaign in which, with his 17,000 men, he should defend Staunton and destroy in detail his adversary's double numbers.

Thus began that campaign whose strategy has been called by a historian "massive thimble-rigging," because its success depended upon Jackson's ability to conceal his movements and make sudden appearances in quite unexpected places.

The season was highly unfavorable for rapid marchings. The roads were quagmires and the fields on either side of the highways were morasses. Sometimes it was impossible, even by the most heroic endeavors, to move the guns more than five miles in a day. Rain and mud offered obstacles immeasurably more obstinate than hostile battalions, but in spite of all, Jackson persisted.

His first purpose was to unite the force under his own immediate command at Swift Run Gap, with the troops under Edward Johnson at West View, west of Staunton and forty miles or more away. He began by ordering Ewell, with his 8,000 men, to cross the Blue Ridge from the east, and occupy Swift Run Gap. While Ewell was executing this movement Jackson, with his 6,000 men and with the purpose of deceiving his enemy, moved northward down the valley, turned eastward, crossed the mountains to their eastern side, and then by a circuitous route made his way back again westward across the mountains to join Edward Johnson west of Staunton. His purpose in all this was to convince his enemy that he was abandoning and evacuating the Valley and marching to join the Confederate forces defending Richmond.

He accomplished that deception perfectly, and so secretly was his return to the Valley conducted that the pushing of his column into Staunton astonished the Confederates there quite as much as it would have astonished the Federals if they had known of it, as they did not.

Ewell, had in the meanwhile, crossed the Blue Ridge and occupied the position left by Jackson in the Elk Run valley. Unfortunately for Jackson, that position must be held at all hazards, and so it was impossible for him, for the present at least, to add Ewell's 8,000 men to the meager forces with which he intended to assail the Federals farther west.

Thus Jackson's campaign was begun with only Edward Johnson's force, numbering a scant 3,000 men, and his own battalions, amounting to 6,000, or somewhat less. He had in all a force of about 8,500 men or perhaps a trifle more, with which to deal with Milroy and Schenck, who had 6,000 men at McDowell, the much larger forces of Fremont advancing from the west, and such reinforcements as Banks might choose to send to them from his army of 19,000 men at Harrisonburg.

A glance at a map of the Valley will show the reader clearly that in assailing Milroy and Schenck, Jackson in fact invited battle with all of Fremont's and Banks's forces – in other words, that with 9,000 men he risked and boldly challenged a conflict with no less than 34,000. But so careful and so masterly had his dispositions been that the chance of such a concentration against him amounted to scarcely more than zero. For Ewell with his 8,000 men was at Elk Run, and Ewell was an enterprising officer, greatly given to fighting upon the smallest provocation. Had Banks detached any considerable part of his force from the Harrisonburg position to aid Milroy and Schenck, Ewell would very certainly have moved to the conquest of Harrisonburg, and the success of such a movement would have meant of necessity the quick reconquering of the whole valley by the Confederates.

Reckoning upon this Jackson joined Johnson and together they fell upon the Federals at McDowell, where a small but severe battle ensued on the eighth of May, in which after four hours of determined fighting the Federals were driven from the field and compelled, during the succeeding night, to withdraw from their position at McDowell, and fall back, the Confederates closely pursuing them. The retreat lasted for several days and was marked by some picturesque incidents.

Schenck, though beaten in battle and driven into retreat, was still formidable and the fighting quality of his men had not been impaired. Jackson feared that the force retreating before him might be reinforced from Banks's strong army at Harrisonburg. In that case it would turn again and rend him. But the reinforcements, if sent at all, must be sent through certain narrow and heavily-wooded defiles, and to check their advance Jackson sent out detachments to obstruct those passageways by felling timber across them. He also asked the aid of the farmers in such work and right willingly they responded.

In the meanwhile Schenck protected his retreat from too close a pursuit by setting fire to the dense woods and literally stifling his enemy with smoke. Jackson's men found it sometimes impossible to go forward without actual suffocation and so Schenck gained time in which to effect his retreat.

The destruction of superb timber, the growth of fifty or a hundred years, which the operations of both the contestants involved, was only a small part of that waste which makes war the most costly of all human arbitraments.

Human lives are of course more precious in many ways than forest growths, but human life is easily and quickly reproduced, while a forest destroyed upon steep mountain sides is so much of God's good gift to man forever taken away.

Jackson had now completely accomplished his purpose of driving Schenck back upon Fremont. He had no desire to press on and bring about a battle with the united forces of the two in the difficult mountain country. He had effectually prevented a junction of Fremont or Schenck with Banks's army at Harrisonburg. He had prevented the capture of Staunton by the Federals, thus protecting the railroad connections of the Confederates, and he had kept between thirty and forty thousand Federal troops busy in the Valley, who might otherwise have been sent to reinforce McClellan.

Still more important, his operations had compelled the Federal Government to stop the advance of McDowell's army by way of Fredericksburg and thus to deprive McClellan, assailing Richmond, of a reinforcement which might have rendered his assault absolutely irresistible.

Jackson's next necessity was to unite his meager force with the column of Ewell which was posted at Elk Run for the double purpose of threatening Banks at Harrisonburg and standing ready to march at a moment's warning to the assistance of the beleaguered garrison at Richmond. It was the grandest of grand strategy that Jackson was engaged in, and it was directed by the masterful genius of Robert E. Lee, acting through and by the genius of Stonewall Jackson.

Milroy and Schenck had been dislodged from the positions that threatened Staunton. They had been driven westward. They had also been effectually cut off for the time at least from a possible junction with Banks. So Jackson decided to effect the speediest possible junction between his own force in the field and Ewell's command of 8,000 men at Elk Run valley, and with the force thus concentrated to assail Banks at Harrisonburg. He hoped by a precipitate movement to defeat Banks before Fremont, whose plans of campaign he had so greatly interfered with, could come to that general's assistance.

But Banks did not wait for Jackson. In face of the fact that his 19,000 men at Harrisonburg outnumbered the whole of Jackson's widely scattered forces, Banks retreated northward down the Valley as soon as Jackson began his campaign. On the first of May he evacuated Harrisonburg and slowly retired to Newmarket. There he lost more than half his force by the detachment of Shields with 11,000 men, who moved on May 12, by way of Luray and Front Royal to join the force at Fredericksburg, thus emphasizing that threat to Richmond which it was Jackson's function to divert.