This Great Struggle (21 page)

The government had seen this crisis coming months before and had tried to head it off in ways that were not always wise. One had been to offer to allow troops to reenlist in other branches of the service or to reorganize their companies, electing new officers. The result was at least the temporary disorganization of a number of regiments in exchange for an entirely inadequate number of reenlistments. By early April the Confederate congress was ready to take the final radical step. On April 9 it passed the first national conscription act in American history, a remarkable exercise of central power on the part of a government whose post hoc defenders would claim had been contending for state rights and limited government. One week after its passage, Davis signed the bill into law.

The Confederate conscription law required military service of every white man in the Confederacy between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five while allowing a drafted man to avoid service if he hired a non–draft-eligible substitute to go in his place. The following week the Confederate congress passed additional legislation providing exemption from the draft for various classes of persons—those necessary to the war effort, such as employees in iron foundries, and those necessary to civilian life at home, such as physicians, druggists, ministers, and teachers. The exemption of educators led to a sudden significant increase in the number of small schools throughout the South.

The draft would eventually reach into many southern homes to snatch away men who had not previously enlisted, but its real targets were the men who were already with the colors. They too were subject to mandatory military service, and the army knew just where to find them. In effect, the conscription law extended their terms of service for the duration of the war. Many expressed bitterness at this in their diaries and letters. They seethed at the unfairness and the loss of freedom, but most remained in the ranks and would continue to fight fiercely in every battle. The soldiers were not the only ones whom the new policy rankled. Some southern politicians raised the hew and cry of the infringement of state rights and civil liberties, but they were in the minority. Most Confederates, including most members of the Confederate congress, were willing to put up with whatever infringements of state rights or civil liberty might be necessary in order to win the war.

McClellan was nearly ready to open fire with his heavy siege guns when on May 3 Johnston quietly withdrew his army from the Yorktown entrenchments and took up his retreat toward Richmond. Union troops entered York-town the following day. Once again both commanders in chief were dissatisfied, Lincoln that McClellan had delayed for a month in front of Yorktown and then let Johnston escape, Davis that Johnston had abandoned Yorktown before he had to and done so precipitously enough to lose more supplies and valuable cannon.

On a rainy May 5, elements of the pursuing Army of the Potomac bumped up against a rear guard of Johnston’s army under Major General James Longstreet (West Point, 1842) near the old Virginia colonial capital at Williamsburg. The Confederates had previously built a chain of small forts across the peninsula there, though several of them remained incomplete, and the Confederate troops who were now to defend them were unfamiliar with their layout. In a confused battle fought partially in the woods; partially in plowed, muddy fields; and entirely in a steady drizzling rain, troops of two of McClellan’s most aggressive division commanders, Joseph Hooker (West Point, 1837) and Philip Kearny, clashed with Confederate divisions under Longstreet and his West Point classmate Daniel H. Hill, an irascible North Carolinian who happened to be Stonewall Jackson’s brother-in-law. Each side scored some small successes, and the Confederates withdrew at the end of the day, to the satisfaction of all concerned.

In the days that followed, Johnston, with his fifty-five thousand men, continued to retreat more rapidly than Davis would have liked, and McClellan, with just over one hundred thousand men, continued to follow more slowly than Lincoln would have liked. Much to Davis’s chagrin, Johnston’s retreat exposed the Confederate naval base at Norfolk. Much to Lincoln’s chagrin, McClellan made no move to take it. So Lincoln and Stanton took a steamer down to the peninsula and, acting behind the front lines where McClellan’s and Johnston’s armies confronted each other, directed troops to make the necessary movements to take Norfolk. It was the simplest of military operations but was perhaps as close as any sitting U.S. president has ever come to directing military operations in the field.

The fall of Norfolk left the
Virginia
without a home. She had made a couple of sorties since the great battle of March 8 but only to try to lure the
Monitor
into engaging her on the Confederate side of the water. She had not again ventured among the Union fleet, now well prepared and supported by
Monitor
. In that sense, the U.S. Navy had succeeded in containing her, but the Rebel ironclad had absorbed most of the navy’s attention within the Chesapeake area, depriving McClellan of the naval gunfire support he had wanted. The capture of Norfolk removed this thorn in the side of the Union effort on the peninsula.

Weighted down with armor and with her main deck almost flush with the surface of the water,
Virginia
was not at all seaworthy. Her captain’s choices were therefore to steam out into Hampton Roads again and fight to the finish, or else to abandon his ship and destroy her to prevent her falling into the hands of the enemy. James River pilots suggested a third possibility. If
Virginia
were divested of all her guns and much of her armor, she might be able to ascend the James to where Confederate forts just below Richmond offered at least temporary safety. He decided to try, but several miles up the river, the
Virginia
stuck fast, and it became clear that the James did not have enough water to float her even in her lightened condition. With Union forces approaching and no means of fighting them, the captain opted to abandon ship and set fire to the
Virginia
. Like her second victim, the
Congress
, she exploded when the flames reached her magazines, two months and three days after her combat debut.

JACKSON’S SHENANDOAH VALLEY CAMPAIGN

Jackson and his division were still out in the Shenandoah Valley. Johnston, who theoretically commanded all Confederate troops in Virginia, wanted him to come to the peninsula at once. That was in keeping with Johnston’s overall concept that every available man should be concentrated in front of Richmond at the earliest possible day. In Richmond itself, Davis was letting Lee oversee the action in secondary areas like the Shenandoah Valley while he focused his own attention on the critical situation on the peninsula and his increasing frustration with Johnston’s unwillingness to stand his ground and give battle to the enemy. Lee had a somewhat different concept from that of Johnston with regard to the proper use of Jackson’s division. He would want it for the direct defense of Richmond eventually, but first he thought it might be of more service in the valley.

Jackson thought so too and had been arguing as much in his recent dispatches to Johnston and to the Richmond authorities. Because Johnston was busy on the peninsula and not always easy to contact, Richmond—and in this case that meant Lee—took a more active role in directing operations in the Shenandoah than would otherwise have been the case. In response to Jackson’s claim that if left in the valley and reinforced he could accomplish major results for the cause of the Confederacy, Lee persuaded Johnston to modify his orders. The large division of Major General Richard S. Ewell was soon on its way to the valley and Jackson’s command.

With Ewell’s division and his own, Jackson launched one of the war’s most famous campaigns of rapid maneuver. The Shenandoah Valley was threatened by Federals approaching from two directions. Jackson needed to remove those threats and then create a situation in the valley that would prompt Union authorities to divert troops away from the current offensive against Richmond. One threat was from a Union force under Brigadier General Robert Milroy, advancing through western Virginia and threatening to enter the valley through one of the gaps in the Allegheny escarpment. Milroy was the advance guard of the command of John C. Freémont. A powerful political general was not such an easy thing to get rid of, and often removing him from one theater of the war meant introducing him into another. After removing Freémont from Missouri, Lincoln had assigned him to the mountains of western Virginia, as perhaps the place he could do the least damage. Opposing the advance of Milroy’s six thousand Federals were about 2,800 Confederates under Brigadier General Edward Johnson.

The other threat to Confederate control of the Shenandoah Valley was from the Union force under the command of Major General Nathaniel P. Banks, a political general who was a former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and, more recently, governor of Massachusetts. He had been gingerly following Jackson’s retreat up the valley since the Battle of Kernstown but had completely lost contact with the Rebel force. Having reached Harrisonburg, he informed Washington that Jackson had left the valley for good and requested that his own force be ordered to march to join McClellan outside Richmond where the real action was going to take place. Washington ordered away one of his two divisions but left him with the other to guard the now apparently empty Shenandoah Valley.

Jackson left Ewell’s 8,500 men to watch the clueless Banks while with the rest of his command, now numbering 7,200 men, he marched into the Alleghenies to team up with Johnson against Milroy. They met the Yankees on May 8 near the village of McDowell, and though the Federals fought well and the Confederates took more casualties than their foes, Jackson was victorious. He pursued the retreating Federals a few miles and then turned back to deal with Banks, taking most of Johnson’s troops with him.

Banks, who now had only about six thousand troops in his own command, found himself facing Jackson, who, together with Ewell, now had seventeen thousand. The Union commander began a rapid retreat northward down the valley with Jackson in hot pursuit. Banks turned and prepared to make a stand at Strasburg, but on May 23 Jackson outmaneuvered him and captured the Union outpost at Front Royal a dozen miles to the east, capturing seven hundred Federals and abundant supplies. With his position turned, Banks resumed his retreat down the valley to Winchester, another eighteen miles north of Strasburg. The day after the mishap at Front Royal, Lincoln canceled McDowell’s orders to join McClellan and ordered him instead to march west for the Shenandoah.

With that, the most strategically important goal of Jackson’s Valley Campaign had been accomplished. A major formation of Union troops had been diverted from McClellan’s campaign on Richmond to the less strategically significant Shenandoah Valley. After the avalanche of Union victories in the West, the fall of Richmond might have been the additional push that was needed to topple the Confederacy by completing the demoralization of its people. The loss of the Shenandoah Valley would not have been helpful to the Confederacy, but the loss of Richmond could perhaps have been fatal.

Yet there were reasons why the capture of Richmond was very difficult to achieve. One was the Shenandoah Valley itself, which slanted from the remote hinterland of Virginia at its upper (southern) end to a place well within striking distance of Washington, Baltimore, and Harrisburg at its lower (northern) end. The valley was a vast granary for the Confederacy that could always provide supplies for Confederate armies passing through it or operating out of it and its eastern wall, the towering Blue Ridge, screened from easy observation of scouting Union cavalry on the piedmont whatever the Confederates might be up to inside it. Until something was done about it, the valley would provide an ever ready resource for skillful Confederate generals to overturn the best plans of their Union counterparts in Virginia.

Another reason why it was difficult to take Richmond was the proximity of Washington, which always had to be defended at all costs and where there were politicians, including the usually wise Lincoln, who might sometimes be baited into unwise interference in military operations in Virginia. And Jackson had baited Lincoln, not frightened him. The president was, as always, not prone to alarm about the safety of Washington, but he was enticed by the prospect of Jackson’s army just eighty miles west-northwest of the national capital. His orders to McDowell were aimed not at saving Washington but at getting behind Jackson and trapping him. At the same time Lincoln issued those orders, he also ordered Freémont to march east. If all went well, McDowell and Freémont would meet in the valley somewhere south of Jackson, who would then be trapped. It was a promising prospect for the Union, but capturing Richmond would have been better.

Back in the valley, Jackson was not yet finished with Banks. Pursuing him to Winchester, Jackson attacked on May 25, breaking Banks’s lines and driving his troops back through the town, where civilians, including a number of women, fired at them and pelted them with whatever objects they could lay their hands on. Losses in killed and wounded were about equal, three hundred Union to four hundred Confederate, but an additional 1,700 Federals were captured or missing. Jackson was in ecstasy, urging his men on to pursue the Yankees all the way to the Potomac.

They very nearly did. By May 29 advanced elements of Jackson’s command were threatening Harpers Ferry, twenty-five miles northeast of Winchester and within sight of the Potomac. By that time it was clear that Union forces were closing on Jackson as Lincoln’s trap threatened to snap shut. Jackson turned his troops south on May 30 and began a rapid march up the valley. His lead troops reached Winchester that night, but McDowell’s advance guard was already in Front Royal, only a dozen miles from where the Valley Pike, Jackson’s escape route, passed through Strasburg eighteen miles south of Winchester. Jackson’s reputation now began to work for him. The commander of McDowell’s lead division decided it would not be safe to advance any farther until the next division caught up and so called a halt at Front Royal while Jackson’s army, covering prodigious distances each day, marched by a few miles away. Freémont performed with his accustomed ineptness, moving slowly and allowing Jackson to get past him as well.