How Few Remain (20 page)

“Yes, sir,” the telegrapher said, and did.

Jackson nodded his thanks and left. The headquarters of Colonel Skidmore Harris, who had been in command in the northern Shenandoah Valley till Jackson arrived, were next door. Harris was a stringy, middle-aged Georgian who had commanded a regiment in Longstreet’s corps during the war. Without preamble, Jackson told him, “Colonel, I have taken away from this army the brigade of volunteer troops bound this way from Richmond.”

Harris’ pipe sent up smoke signals. “I’m sure you have good reason for doing that, sir,” he said, his tone suggesting Longstreet would hear about it in a red-hot minute if anything went wrong.

“I do.” Jackson went over to the map Harris had nailed up to a wall and did some explaining. When he was through, he asked, “Is everything now perfectly clear to you, Colonel?”

“Yes, sir.” Harris puffed on the pipe. “If the Yankees don’t take the bait, though—”

“Then the bait will take them,” Jackson said. “We shall advance at first light tomorrow, Colonel. Prepare your troops for it. I desire divine services to be held in each regiment this evening, that the men may assure themselves the Almighty favors our just cause. Have you any questions on what is required of you?”

“No, sir.” In meditative tones, Colonel Harris went on, “Now we get to see how the new loose-order tactics work out in action.”

“Yes.” Jackson was curious about that himself. Firing lines with men standing elbow to elbow and blazing away at their foes had taken gruesome casualties from the rifled muzzle-loaders of the War of Secession. Against breechloaders, which fired so much faster, and against improved artillery, they looked to be suicidal. On paper, the system the Confederate Army had developed to replace close-order drill in the face of the enemy looked good. Jackson knew wars were not fought on paper. Had they been, General McClellan would have been the greatest commander of all time. “Dawn tomorrow,” the general-in-chief reminded Skidmore Harris. He left before the colonel could reply.

That evening, as the soldiers prayed with their chaplains, Jackson prayed with his family. “Lord,” he declared on bended knee, “into Thy hands I commend myself absolutely, trusting that Thou grantest victory to those who find favor in Thine eyes. Thy will be done.” He murmured a favorite hymn: “Show pity, Lord. Oh, Lord, forgive!”

He slept in his uniform, as had been his habit during the War of Secession. Anna woke him at half-past three.
“Gracias, señora,”
he said. His wife smiled in the darkness. He put on the oversized boots he favored, jammed on his slouch hat, and went off to war without another word.

Long columns of men in new butternut uniforms and old-fashioned gray ones were already on the move north before the sun crawled over the Blue Ridge Mountains. Winchester was about twenty miles from Front Royal, the Yankee lines a few miles south of the town they’d taken. If not for those lines, he could have been in Winchester before sundown. He hoped to be there by then despite them.

One advantage of the early start was getting as far as possible before the full muggy heat of the day developed. Even on horseback, Jackson felt it. Sweat cut rills through the dust on the faces of the marching men. Dust hung in the air, too. It made gray uniforms look brown, but also let the Yankees, if they were alert, know his forces were advancing on them.

The men rested for ten minutes every hour, their weapons stacked. Otherwise, they marched. Field guns and their ammunition limbers rattled along between infantry companies. At a little past twelve, the soldiers paused to eat salt pork and corn bread
and to fill their canteens from the small streams near which they rested. After precisely an hour, they headed north again.

Just after they’d moved out, a messenger galloped up to Jackson from Front Royal and pressed a telegram into his hand. He read it, permitted himself a rare smile, and then rode over to Colonel Skidmore Harris. “The volunteers, Colonel, are threatening Winchester from the east, by way of both Ashby’s Gap and Snicker’s Gap,” he said. “They report considerable and increasing resistance in their front, which means the U.S. commander in Winchester has surely pulled men from in front of us in order to contest their advance. Having done that, he will find some difficulty in also contesting ours.”

Colonel Harris tilted back his head and blew a large, excellent smoke ring. “I’d say that’s about right, sir. They don’t have all
that
many more men than this army does—not enough to turn two ways at once and take on two forces our size.”

Had Jackson been in Winchester with a force not greatly inferior to the one attacking him, he would not have retreated in the first place. But that was water over the dam now. “Onward,” he said.

U.S. forces had dug a line of firing pits about half a mile south of Kernstown, a few miles below Winchester. Jackson smiled again, this time savagely. In the War of Secession, the Yankees had thrown him back from Kernstown. He’d waited more than nineteen years to pay them back, but the hour was at hand.

Their guns opened on his troops at a range of better than a mile and a half. His artillery swung off the roads and went into battery in the fields to reply. At the same time, his infantry deployed from column into line, moving with the drilled smoothness that showed how many times the regulars had bored themselves carrying out the maneuver on the practice field.

The line wasn’t much thicker than a skirmish line had been during the War of Secession. To a veteran of that war, it looked gossamer thin—until one noticed how many rounds the men were firing as they advanced, and how thick the black-powder smoke swirled around them. A division of soldiers in the earlier war would have shown no more firepower than this light brigade.

But the Yankees had breechloaders, too; their Springfields were a match for the Confederate Tredegars. Their commanding officer had left no more than a regiment and a half behind. Even so, Jackson feared for the first few minutes of the fight that the
Yankees, with the advantages of position and cover the defender enjoyed, would beat him at Kernstown again.

His men had less practice at advancing by rushes and supporting one another with fire than at close-order drill and at shifting into the looser formations from which they could attack. The galling enemy resistance served to concentrate their minds on the task at hand better than weeks of exercises might have done.

After close to an hour’s fighting, the first Confederate soldiers leaped down into the Yankee field works off to Jackson’s left. That let them pour enfilading fire along the length of the U.S. line. Once the position began to unravel, it soon disintegrated. U.S. soldiers in dark blue emerged from their trenches and fled back toward Kernstown. Confederate small arms and artillery took a heavy toll on them. More Yankees threw down their rifles and threw up their hands in surrender. Guarded by jubilant Rebels, they shambled back toward the rear.

“We have a victory, sir,” Colonel Harris said.

Jackson fixed him with a coldly burning gaze. “We have the beginnings of a victory, Colonel. I want the pursuit pressed to the limit. I want those Yankees chased out of Kernstown, out of Winchester, and back to Harper’s Ferry and Martinsburg. I want them chased across the Potomac—that part of West Virginia should never have been allowed to leave the state of Virginia—but I am not certain we can bring that off in this assault. Still, if we put enough fear in the U.S. forces, they will skedaddle. We’ll see how far they run.”

Harris stared at him. “You don’t want to just lick the damnyankees, sir,” he said, as if a lamp had suddenly been lighted in his head. “You want to wipe ’em clean off the slate.”

“Why, of course.” Jackson stared back, astonished the other officer should aim at anything less. “If they face us, the volunteer brigade will take them in the flank. If they face the volunteers, we shall take them in the flank. If they seek to face both forces at once, we shall defeat them in detail. Now let the thing be pressed.”

Pressed it was. The U.S. troops retreated straight through Kernstown; the locals clapped their hands when Jackson rode through the hamlet. The Yankees tried to make a stand at Winchester, but pulled out just before sunset. The racket of rifle fire coming from the east said the volunteers were at hand.

Their commander, a bespectacled fellow named Jenkins, rode
up to Jackson in the middle of a wildly cheering crowd in Winchester (though Jackson saw not a single colored person on the streets). “What do you want us to do now, sir?” he asked. “We’ve about marched our legs off, but—”

“Your men won’t fall over yet,” Jackson said. “We head north, as long as there is light. As soon as it grows light in the morning, we go on. Our task is to drive the foe from our soil, and I do not intend to rest until that is accomplished.” He drew his sword and pointed with it; dramatic gestures were all swords were good for these days, but dramatic gestures were not to be despised.

Jenkins looked as astonished as Colonel Harris had south of Kernstown, and then as exalted. He turned to his troops and cried, “You hear that, boys? You see that? Old Stonewall wants us to help him run the damnyankees clean out of Virginia. I know you’re worn down to nubs, but are you game?”

The volunteers howled like catamounts. The veterans of the War of Secession had already taught their younger comrades the fierce notes of the Rebel yell. Jackson waved his hat to thank the men for their show of spirit, then pointed with the sword once more. Through the shrill yells, he spoke one word: “Onward.”

    There were, Abraham Lincoln reflected, undoubtedly worse places in which to be stranded than Salt Lake City. Technically,
stranded
was the wrong word. He’d had several speaking engagements canceled because of the outbreak of war, and had decided to stay where he was till more came along. The Mormons who made up the majority of the population were unfailingly polite and considerate to him. Whatever he thought of their religious beliefs, they were decent enough and to spare.

Even so, he felt more at home among the Gentiles, the miners and merchants and bureaucrats who leavened the town and surrounding countryside. Most of them, especially the officials, were Democrats, but that still left them closer to his way of looking at the world than were the Mormons, who thought in terms of religion first and politics only afterwards.

“They wish we’d all go away,” Gabe Hamilton said at breakfast one morning at his hotel. “They wish we’d never come in the first place, matter of fact.” He popped a piece of bacon into his mouth, then turned to the waiter, whom he knew. “Isn’t that right, Heber?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Hamilton; I wasn’t listening,” Heber said blandly. “Can I get you and Mr. Lincoln more coffee?”

“Yes, thanks,” Hamilton told him, whereupon he went away. Sighing, the sharp little Gentile spoke to Lincoln: “What do you want to lay that every word he wasn’t listening to goes straight into John Taylor’s ear before the clocks chime noon?”

“I don’t know what Mr. Taylor is in the habit of doing of a morning,” Lincoln answered. “That aside, I’d say you’re likely right.”

“Or which of his wives he’s in the habit of doing it to, do you mean?” Hamilton said, winking. Mormon polygamy roused some people to moral outrage. It roused others to dirty jokes. So far as Lincoln could tell, it left no one not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints indifferent.

He said, “I am glad to have had the chance and taken the opportunity to have learned more about other aspects of the Mormons’ way of life while here. I did not know, for instance, that they formerly practiced what might be described as a communistic system during their earlier years in Utah.”

“You mean the Deseret Store?” Hamilton waited for Lincoln to nod, then went on, “I’d call it syndicalism myself. People brought their tithes to the store, and it sold what they brought to whoever needed it. The church—and that meant the government—kept some of the profit, too. Brigham Young didn’t die poor, Mr. Lincoln, I’ll tell you that. I expect you’ve seen the Lion House?”

“The long, long building where he housed his wives? One could hardly come to Salt Lake City and not see it.” Lincoln paused to eat a couple of bites of tasty ham. “I do thank you, by the way, Mr. Hamilton, for arranging lectures hereabouts to tide me over and help keep me going until other engagements come through.”

“Think nothing of it, sir, nothing at all,” Hamilton replied. “You’re educating the workers about labor and capital, and you’re educating everybody else about the war. I can’t think of anybody who’d know more about it who doesn’t wear stars on his shoulders.”

“The proper relation of labor to capital has concerned me since before the War of Secession,” Lincoln said, “nor has defining and, if need be, regulating it grown less urgent since the war. The Mormons seem to employ the strictures of religion to lessen its harshness, but I do not think that a solution capable of wider
application. The Mormons are the godly, pious folk we profess ourselves to be.”

“That’s a fact.” Gabe Hamilton’s eyes twinkled. “They won’t skin each other, exploit each other, the way capitalists do—or the way they do with Gentiles, come to that. What they skin each other out of is wives.”

He couldn’t leave that alone. Few of the Gentiles who lived in Utah Territory
could
leave it alone, from what Lincoln had seen. That was why Utah had several times failed of admission to the Union as a state. Although the Book of Mormon spoke against it, the Latter-Day Saints would not renounce polygamy, while those outside their church could not countenance it.

After looking around to make sure Heber the waiter was out of earshot, Hamilton said, “I’m just glad the Confederates have even less use for the Mormons than we do. If they didn’t, Utah would rise up right in the middle of this war, and that’s a fact.”

Remembering some of the things John Taylor had said at their supper meeting, Lincoln replied, “Don’t be too sure they won’t rise up on their own, taking advantage of our distraction with the CSA and with the European powers. I think President Blaine was shortsighted to pull the soldiers out of Fort Douglas here.”