Searching for Stonewall Jackson Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Ben Cleary

  Cover design by Jarrod Taylor. Cover photograph by Getty. Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: July 2019

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Cleary, Ben (Ben C.), author.

  Title: Searching for Stonewall Jackson : a quest for legacy in a divided America / by Ben Cleary.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Twelve, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018048735| ISBN 9781455535804 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781549119910 (audio download) | ISBN 9781455535798 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Jackson, Stonewall, 1824–1863. | Confederate States of America. Army—Biography. | Generals—Confederate States of America—Biography. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns.

  Classification: LCC E467.1.J15 C55 2019 | DDC 973.7/3092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048735

  ISBNs: 978-1-4555-3580-4 (hardcover), 978-1-4555-3579-8 (ebook)

  E3-20190606-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. The Soundtrack of Southern Victory

  2. After the Battle

  3. All Things Work Together

  4. Fearful Odds

  5. Icicles of Blood

  6. An Insubordinate Frenzy

  7. A Dazzling Glimpse

  8. Following the Footsteps

  9. Spirits of the Place

  10. God Blessed Our Arms

  11. An Unconscious Poet

  12. A Talent for Retreat

  13. The Lion’s Mouth

  14. A Lost Battlefield

  15. The Dead Thick as Blackbirds

  16. Their Backs to the Mountain

  17. The Tired Man

  18. Men Falling Continually

  19. Bloody Ground

  20. The Prize Within Their Reach

  21. A Melancholy Field

  22. Leaving Richmond

  23. Jackson Is with You!

  24. A Strange, Mysterious Splendor

  25. A Trail of Cemeteries

  26. A Brief Pursuit

  27. The Fortunes of War

  28. The Most Deadly Fire

  29. The Certainty of Death

  30. Pain and Happiness

  31. War So Terrible

  32. A Piece of Gold Braid

  33. Moss Neck and Belvoir

  34. The Fallen Sword

  35. Let Us Cross over the River

  Afterword

  Photos

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Bibliography

  Endnotes

  To my wife, Catherine, and my son, Alexander—

  In gratitude for their love and support

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  CHAPTER 1

  The Soundtrack of Southern Victory

  It was supposed to be the battle that would end the war. Lighthearted congressmen and other Washington dignitaries drove out in their carriages to the Virginia countryside to see the show. The summer weather was uncharacteristically temperate. July 21, 1861, was the perfect day for a picnic.

  Irvin McDowell’s Union army made a leisurely progress to the battlefield, falling out for berry picking and discarding such weighty impedimenta of war as packs and even cartridge boxes. Their objective was Manassas Junction, a strategic railroad hub a few miles behind Bull Run: a slow, mostly shallow stream with a formidable southern bank where the Confederates were waiting. Each side had the same plan: Attack the enemy’s right flank.

  McDowell’s actually worked. Feinting to his left near the spot where the Stone Bridge crossed the stream, he sent his attacking force around like a powerful right hook, crossing Bull Run to the northwest, then driving the Confederates southeast over the rolling Piedmont hills.

  General Thomas J. Jackson was behind Bull Run on the Confederate right, waiting to participate in an attack that never materialized. Acting on his own, without orders, he moved toward the sound of the guns.

  The northern Virginia traffic wasn’t half bad. It only took one click for me to get through most of the lights on 234, the developer road that runs from I-95 northwest to Manassas. The site of the war’s first big battle was also the first stop in my quest to gain a deeper understanding of Stonewall Jackson. I’ve been fascinated with him for years, ever since I found out he marched down the road in front of my house. An incredible fighter, complex and contradictory, he’s a puzzle I’ve never completely put together. I’d recently been asked to write a book about him. I relished the task.

  I stopped at the town’s small museum, parking in the shade before going inside to check out the exhibits and ask directions to Manassas Junction.

  Inside, the fighting’s aftermath leapt out at me more than anything about the battle itself. Battles, actually—there were two on almost exactly the same field. First Manassas in July 1861; Second in August 1862. Jackson was a major player in both.

  In one exhibit, local resident Marianne E. Compton wrote about coming back into her house, which had been turned into a field hospital: “All the lower part of the house was filled with wounded. We walked through a lane of ghastly horrors on our way upstairs. Amputated legs and arms seemed everywhere. We saw a foot… lying on one of our dinner plates.”

  “You see that?” A young mother near me pointed out a cannonball to her pre-kindergarteners. “Your granddaddy used to find those and roll them down the driveway.” Then, more to herself than to her kids: “I guess he should have saved them.”

  I purchased a Manassas fridge magnet. Neither the cashier nor the docent knew the location of the junction. Less than a mile away, the reason for the town and the reason for the battle—it was like a tour guide in Rome not knowing the location of the Coliseum.

  “Lived here all my life and never been to this museum,” the young mother told them as I was leaving.

  “Look out for your left, your position is turned,” Captain Edward Porter Alexander had signaled Colonel Nathan “Shanks” Evans when he saw a strong marching column crossing Bull Run at Sudley Ford.1 Evans interposed his small—900-man—force in front of 20,000 advancing Federals, buying time but ultimately being beaten back, as were other holding actions by Brigadier General Barnard Bee and Colonel Francis S. Bartow. The Confederates retreated from Matthews Hill, over Buck Hill, and up Henry House Hill, outnumbered and dispirit
ed.

  Jackson, on the Confederate right, moved here and there in response to confusing orders from the excitable General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, the “Hero of Sumter,” who shared command with General Joseph E. Johnston. Finally intuiting that the fight was elsewhere, Jackson marched his 2,800 men to Henry House Hill, arriving there around noon. Southerners retreated past him as he placed his men behind the crest of the hill, an ideal defensive position.

  General Bee rode up. “The enemy are driving us!” he told Jackson.

  “Then, sir, we will give them the bayonet.”

  The shade had moved from my car, but the heat that came out was only moderately ovenlike when I opened the door. Perfectly evocative of the battle: a mere eighty degrees, mild for a Virginia summer, and a great day for the spectators who had come out from D.C. to watch the saucy Rebels get whipped.2

  As I drove I reflected on the young mother’s grandfather and his cannonballs, and on all the other stories I’d heard about exploding Civil War ordnance. A history teacher at the high school near my house lost a couple of fingers when he was drilling out a shell to remove the powder so he could sell the artifact through the mail. He was lucky: In 2008, a relic hunter named Sam White lost his life when a shell he was disarming exploded, sending shrapnel into him and into the porch of a house a quarter of a mile away.3

  Like the cannonballs, long-dormant issues had become explosive because of the recent murder of nine African American parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. The massacre was particularly horrifying because the victims had opened their hearts to their attacker by welcoming him into their Bible study. The killer, Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, had been photographed with the Rebel flag. A national outcry arose to eradicate it, and other symbols of the Confederacy, from public life. Confederate statues were vandalized. Some officials called for them to be razed or relocated. In New Orleans, Mayor Mitch Landrieu said the first step was to declare them a public nuisance.

  I turned on WPFW, “Jazz and Justice Radio,” out of D.C. A talk show host asked her audience what they thought about the Charleston congregation forgiving the murderer. Her listeners wanted nothing to do with it.

  “I’m tired of these people hiding inside their churches!” said one.

  “We’ve got to be more militant!” asserted another. The host asked her to elaborate but she hung up.

  I turned off the radio, distressed by thoughts of the tragedy as well as by the fact that a subject I loved—Confederate military history—had become a pawn in the culture wars.

  I found an intriguing historic site near an elementary school and parked to look around.

  The Jennie Dean Memorial was where the Manassas Industrial School for Colored Youth had stood until some fifty years ago. Civil War and African American historical sites are often as close geographically as the intertwining issues posed by both. Dean, a former slave, was an educator and church founder who died in 1913. I explored the five-acre site, looking at photos and models of spacious, handsome buildings endowed by Northern philanthropists, wondering if demolishing them had been politically motivated—local officials eradicating a source of black pride and symbol of interracial cooperation—or simply a necessity because of structural decay.

  As I was getting ready to leave, I discovered a historic marker about Manassas Junction. With its map in my head, I walked to the tracks.

  Railroad ties are shorter apart than a full stride, so you have to take mincing steps if you walk on them, or stumble along on the big stones of the roadbed if you don’t. I alternated between mincing and stumbling, my awkward strides echoing my attempts to make sense of the issues surrounding Jackson, slavery, and the Civil War.

  Slavery was the cause of the war. It was a terrible institution. But for most Confederates, protecting their homes and families was a far more powerful motivator. There was nothing abstract about it—“home” often meant their actual houses. To relate just one incident: When Captain Edward Stevens McCarthy of the Richmond Howitzers was killed by a sharpshooter during the Battle of Cold Harbor in 1864, his “men broke down utterly and sobbed like children.” His cousin procured an ambulance and carried the body to the family home in Richmond, about a dozen miles away. After he returned, he sent word to the captain’s two brothers. They walked into town, attended the funeral, “and walked out again to their posts the same night.”4

  As a teacher, I dealt with the legacy of slavery, first in the Richmond public schools, then in juvenile prisons. Every day I confronted its consequences, the result of the segregation and poverty into which slavery had evolved. These ranged from the merely sad (an elementary school teacher confiding that most of the inner-city students I took on a field trip had never left their neighborhoods) to the truly horrifying—an incarcerated young man talking about how he was traumatized when he saw his first dead body, a drug dealer splayed over an alley fence, but after he saw another, and another, and another, it didn’t even faze him: “I just keep on steppin’.”

  And here was the junction, the two tracks coming together. It looks like nothing much today, just as it looked like nothing much in 1861. I took some photos with my phone while recalling a quote from historian Bruce Catton: “This war went by a queer script of its own, and it had a way of putting all of its weight down on some utterly unimportant little spot that no one had ever heard of before—Shiloh Church, or Chancellorsville, or some such—and because armies contended for them, those place names became great and terrible.”5 He was writing about Cold Harbor, a nondescript crossroads near where I live northeast of Richmond, but what he said applied equally to Manassas: just a place where a couple of railroads came together, and where thousands of men died.

  I started back to my car, suddenly worried about railroad detectives and Homeland Security—the junction is still an important part of national infrastructure—at the same time thinking I was ridiculously paranoid. The yard crew moving cars with the Norfolk & Southern switch engine paid me absolutely no attention. I was just some old white guy out where he shouldn’t be.

  What Jackson did at Henry House Hill was inspired. Other units rushed in to stop the Union charge but only slowed the Federals briefly until they were rolled up like the rest. The retreat turned into a rout, and Bee, Bartow, and the others spilled past Jackson and his men on the far side of the hill. There, somewhat protected from Union muskets and artillery, he waited for the Federals to come to him.

  After his conference with Jackson, Bee went back to his men: “There stands Jackson like a stone wall! Let us resolve to die here, and we will conquer. Rally behind the Virginians!”

  Like so much else about Jackson, the statement is controversial. Some historians say Bee spoke other words. Others contend he spoke out of annoyance rather than admiration: Jackson was anchored like a wall on the field, not coming to his aid. It’s impossible to know—Bee was mortally wounded shortly thereafter. The salient point is that Jackson emerged from First Manassas as “Stonewall.” And in truth, “the most famous nickname in American military history” is only partially apt. While Jackson could certainly hold a position, he became far more famous as the war went on for moving quickly and quietly, then suddenly striking from a point where he was least expected—more like the snake in the stone wall than the wall itself.

  Coming onto the field, Generals Johnston and Beauregard took in the situation. They began reorganizing the confused soldiers they encountered and placing them in line with Jackson. Jackson himself rode slowly and confidently along his line, seemingly unconcerned that he was an easy target for the fire that had most of his men lying “flat as flounders”6 on the ground. “Steady men, steady,” he kept repeating. “All’s well.”

  Among Jackson’s many eccentric habits was his tendency to lift an arm into the air. This started at West Point with the belief that one arm was heavier than the other. To remedy it, “he would occasionally raise his arm straight up, as he said, to let the blood run back into his body, and so relieve the excess
weight.”7 By the time of the war, the habit seems to have become associated with prayer, the uplifted limb amplifying and focusing his petitions, a broadcast antenna pointing toward heaven.

  While talking to artillerist John D. Imboden, Jackson thrust his arm into the air. A moment later he caught a bullet or piece of shrapnel, and brought his bloodied hand down, the middle finger shattered.

  “General, you are wounded,” exclaimed Imboden.

  “Only a scratch, a mere scratch,” Jackson said. He wrapped his injured finger in a handkerchief and resumed riding quietly along his line.8

  Confederate resistance, anchored by Jackson, continued to stiffen. The Southerners were aided by a curious lack of aggressive follow-through from Union general McDowell. For a few vital hours he did almost nothing to cement the victory that he strongly believed was within his grasp.9

  The fighting raged back and forth. General Bee was mortally wounded. Bartow was wounded slightly and had his horse shot out from under him. Undaunted, he obtained another horse. “Boys, follow me!” he shouted, waving his cap over his head. He was shot again and died moments later in the arms of a fellow officer.

  McDowell decided to apply more artillery pressure to Jackson’s part of the line. He sent two Union batteries forward to try to fire into the Confederates from the flank. Federal captains James B. Ricketts and Charles Griffin advanced and took up a position close to the Southerners and dueled with Jackson’s artillery. Then Captain Griffin bravely but foolishly moved his guns even closer. James Ewell Brown—“Jeb”—Stuart was nearby. He sent word back to Jackson of their vulnerable proximity.

  Jackson reacted with one of his characteristic expressions: “That’s good! That’s good!” He gave the word for Stuart to attack the battery. Stuart’s horsemen charged into the infantry supporting the guns. The Federals broke and ran. Another Southern regiment, the 33rd Virginia, charged the artillery. In this early stage of the war, these Confederates were wearing blue. Confusion bought them time and contributed to the success of their assault. The guns were captured! But the Confederates couldn’t hold them. The batteries would be captured and recaptured three times before the fighting was over.