The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (89 page)

Not that he was not kept busy with other matters growing out of this one. The North was in turmoil. “Intelligence from various quarters leaves no doubt that the enemy in great force are advancing on Washington,” Stanton wired the governors of thirteen states, asking them to send him whatever militia they could lay hands on. Three others were told, “Send all the troops forward that you can immediately. Banks is completely routed. The enemy in large force are advancing upon Harpers Ferry.” Recruiting offices were reopened. The railroads were taken over to provide speedy transportation for reinforcements before the capital was beleaguered. Rumors spread fast on Monday, so quickly had Sunday’s bolt come tumbling. The New York
Herald
, whose morning edition had carried an editorial captioned “Fall of Richmond,” replaced it with a report that the whole rebel army was on the march for the Potomac. Harried by congressmen and distraught citizens, Lincoln hoped that his opponent in the Confederate seat of government could be given a hard time, too. To McClellan in front of Richmond went a wire: “Can you get near enough to throw shells into the city?”

The Young Napoleon was scarcely in a mood to throw anything at anybody: except possibly at Lincoln. When he first got the news that McDowell would not be joining him just yet, after all, his first reaction was, “Heaven save a country governed by such counsels!” On second thought, however, he could see at least one benefit proceeding from the panic in the capital: “A scare will do them good, and may bring them to their senses.” But the President wired on Sunday that the enemy movement was “general and concerted,” not merely a bluff or an act of desperation—“I think the time is near,” he wrote, “when you must either attack Richmond or else give up the job and come to the defense of Washington”—McClellan reacted fast. The last thing he wanted in this world was to return to “that sink,” within reach of “those hounds.” Replying that “the time is very near when I shall attack,” he added that he disagreed with Lincoln’s appraisal of Confederate strategy: “The object of the movement is probably to prevent reinforcements being sent to me. All the information from balloons, deserters, prisoners, and contrabands agrees in the statement that the mass of the rebel troops are still in the immediate vicinity of Richmond, ready to defend it.”

Lincoln knew how to translate “very near” and also how to assess McClellan’s estimates as to the strength of an enemy intrenched to his front; he had encountered both before. Just now, though, his attention was distracted. On Tuesday, May 27, he received from Frémont a message that alarmed him: not because of what it said, but because of the heading, which showed that the Pathfinder had moved north instead of east. “I see that you are at Moorefield,” Lincoln wired. “You were expressly ordered to march to Harrisonburg. What does this mean?” Frémont replied that it meant the road leading east from
Franklin was “impossible,” that he had swung north to pick up food for his men, who otherwise would have starved, and that he was obeying instructions to “relieve Banks” in the best way he saw fit: by marching on Strasburg. “In executing any order received,” he declared, “I take it for granted that I am to exercise discretion concerning its literal execution, according to circumstances. If I am to understand that literal obedience to orders is required, please say so.”

The reply threw Lincoln into much the same state as when he flung his hat on the floor at Fort Monroe, three weeks ago. Frémont now had seventy miles to march instead of thirty. However, McDowell was closing in fast from the east, and Jackson was still reported near Harpers Ferry. There was plenty of time to cut him off, if the troops marched on schedule. On May 30 Lincoln sent two wires, one to Frémont: “You must be up in the time you promised,” the other to McDowell: “The game is before you.” Three days later he had Stanton give them both a final warning: “Do not let the enemy escape you.”

For once, Jackson—“the game,” as Lincoln styled him—was exactly where the Federal high command had him spotted: at Charles Town, with his infantry thrown forward to demonstrate against Harpers Ferry, seven miles away. Though he had known for two days now of the forces moving east and west toward a convergence that would put 35,000 soldiers in his rear, nothing in his manner showed that the information bothered him at all. After setting Monday aside for rest and prayer, in compensation for another violated Sabbath, he had come on by easy marches, driving the enemy not merely “toward the Potomac,” as Lee had suggested, but to and beyond it. While the reassembled cavalry was pressing northward down the Valley pike, through Martinsburg and on to the Williamsport crossing, the infantry took the fork that branched northeast to Harpers Ferry. It was all rather anti-climactic, though, even lackadaisical, compared to what had gone before, and on the 28th—the day he was warned of the movement that threatened to cut off his retreat—he ordered his troops to resume the prescribed four hours of daily drill. Howls went up from the ranks at this, but the howls availed the outraged soldiers no more than did the complaints of the staff that the present delay would result in utter ruin. If Jackson was oblivious to the danger in his rear, they certainly were not. Once more they called him crack-brained, and one young officer muttered darkly:
“quem Deus vult perdere, prius dementat.”

There was no middle ground for confidence where Stonewall was concerned; you either trusted him blindly, or you judged him absolutely mad. That was the obverse of his method, never better illustrated than now. It was true that he had already wrung every possible psychological advantage from his present exposed position, which he knew was growing more perilous by the hour, but there were other considerations.
He had 2300 unparoled prisoners on his hands, each of whom could be exchanged for a southern soldier now in a northern prison camp, and near Winchester his chief of transportation was assembling a double line of wagons eight miles long, loaded with a wealth of captured goods, including 9000 badly needed rifles, mostly new, and invaluable medical equipment shut off from the Confederacy by blockade. All this took time, but Jackson was determined to give the grinding column of spoils and captives a head start up the Valley turnpike before he attempted to bring his army out of the two-jawed trap about to snap shut in its rear.

On May 30, when the long train started rolling south, there were even more urgent reasons for the army to follow in its wake at once. Intelligence reports placed the advance of McDowell’s column within a day’s march of Front Royal and Frémont’s about the same distance from Strasburg, both of which places were more than forty miles in Jackson’s rear. Banks had been reinforced at Williamsport and presumably was about ready to take the field again, tamping the Confederates into the grinder that would be created when Frémont and McDowell met in the shadow of the northern face of Massanutton Mountain. Nothing in Stonewall’s manner expressed concern, however, when he emerged from his tent this Friday morning. After receiving a delegation of Charles Town ladies who called to pay their respects, he rode toward Harpers Ferry and watched some desultory skirmishing. When a shower of rain came up, he stretched out under a tree for shelter and presently fell asleep.

He woke to find A. R. Boteler, a Valley congressman who had volunteered for duty on his staff, making a sketch of him. Jackson studied it, then remarked: “Colonel, I have some harder work than this for you to do, and if you’ll sit down here now I’ll tell you what it is.… I want you to go to Richmond for me; I must have reinforcements. You can explain to them down there what the situation is here.” Boteler replied that he would be glad to go, but that he was not sure he understood the situation: whereupon Jackson outlined it for him. “McDowell and Frémont are probably aiming to effect a junction at Strasburg, so as to cut us off from the upper Valley, and are both nearer to it now than we are. Consequently, no time is to be lost. You can say to them in Richmond that I’ll send on the prisoners, secure most if not all of the captured property, and with God’s blessing will be able to baffle the enemy’s plans here with my present force, but that it will have to be increased as soon thereafter as possible.” If Boteler thought the general wanted to use those reinforcements merely to help stand off the various columns now converging on him, he was much mistaken—as he discovered from what Stonewall said in closing: “You may tell them, too, that if my command can be gotten up to 40,000 men a movement may be made … which will soon raise the siege of Richmond and transfer
this campaign from the banks of the Potomac to those of the Susquehanna.”

Riding south with all the speed he could manage—by rail to Winchester, by horseback to Staunton, by rail again to Richmond—the congressman-colonel arrived to find that the eastern theater’s first major engagement since Manassas, eighty miles away and ten full months ago, had been fought at the city’s gates while he was traveling. With his back to the wall and the choice narrowed to resistance or evacuation, Johnston at last had found conditions suitable for attack.

In point of fact, despite his fondness for keeping the tactical situation fluid—in hopes that his opponent would commit some error or be guilty of some oversight and thereby expose a portion of the blue host to destruction—Johnston really had no choice. With McDowell poised for a southward advance, a junction that would give the Federals nearly a three-to-one advantage over the 53,688 Confederates drawn up east of Richmond, not even evacuation would assure the salvation of Johnston’s army, which now as always was his main concern: McClellan would still be after him, and with overwhelming numbers. The only thing to do, he saw, was to strike one Mac before the other got there. Besides, the error he had been hoping for seemed already to have been committed. McClellan’s five corps were unequally divided, three north and two south of the Chickahominy. Normally a sluggish stream, not even too broad for leaping in the dry months, the river was greatly swollen as a result of the continual spring rains, and thus might serve to isolate the Union wings, preventing their mutual support and giving the Confederates a chance to slash at one or the other with equal or perhaps superior numbers. Johnston would have preferred to attack the weaker south-bank wing, keeping Richmond covered as he did so; but this would not only leave McDowell’s line of advance unblocked, it would probably also hasten the junction by provoking a rapid march from Fredericksburg when McClellan yelled for help. By elimination, then, Johnston determined to strike down the north bank, risking uncovering Richmond for the sake of wrecking McClellan’s right wing and blocking McDowell’s advance at the same time.

He had his plan, a product of necessity; but as usual he took his time, and kept his counsel as he took it. Least of all did he confer with the President, afterwards explaining: “I could not consult him without adopting the course he might advise, so that to ask his advice would have been, in my opinion, to ask him to command for me.” The result, with the Federals a rapid two-hour march away, was a terrible strain on Davis. Unable to get the general’s assurance that an all-out defense of the city would be attempted, he never knew from day to day which flag might be flying over the Capitol tomorrow. May 22, riding out the
Mechanicsville turnpike with Lee, he found few troops, no fortifications, indeed no preparations of any kind, as he wrote Johnston, for blocking a sudden Union drive “toward if not to Richmond.” Two days later Johnston came to town for a conference, but he told his superior nothing except that he intended to be governed by circumstances. To make matters worse, while he was there the Federals seized Mechanicsville, five miles north, just as Davis had predicted. Not only was this an excellent location for a hook-up when McDowell made his three- or four-day march from Fredericksburg, but now there was nothing at all to stand in the way of such an advance, Johnston having instructed Anderson to fall back from the line of the Rappahannock.

Two days later, May 26, while he was reviewing the situation with Lee, the President’s anxiety over Johnston’s undivulged intentions was so obviously painful that Lee proposed, “Let me go and see him, and defer this discussion until I return.” When he was gone a dispatch arrived from Jackson, who broke his silence with an outright shout of joy. “During the past three days,” it began, “God has blessed our arms with brilliant success.” Banks had been routed and Stonewall was in pursuit, “capturing the fugitives.” Whether this would have the intended effect of frightening the Union high command into holding back McDowell remained to be seen, but the news was a tonic for Davis, arriving as it did at the very crisis of his concern. Presently Lee returned, to be heartened by this early yield from the seeds of strategy he had sown in the Valley and to deliver tidings that bore directly on the subject of the President’s anxiety. Johnston at last had announced his decision to attack. Intended to crumple McClellan’s right wing, which brushed the purlieus of the city, the strike would be made on the 29th.

That was Thursday; today was Monday. Davis braced himself for the three-day wait.