(1) Jackson’s boyhood home: Orphaned at the age of seven, Jackson was sent to live with six bachelor uncles, a step-grandmother, and two aunts at prosperous Jackson’s Mill in mountainous western Virginia (now West Virginia). The main residence (left) was one of the finest houses in the region.
(2) Jackson’s sister, Laura Jackson Arnold: They were orphans and extremely close friends growing up. After the war started Laura became an ardent supporter of the Union cause and cut all ties to her brother. They never reconciled.
PROLOGUE
On the brilliantly clear afternoon of June 19, 1862, in the second year of the great Civil War, a well-dressed, bespectacled Confederate congressman with a trim beard named Alexander Robinson Boteler stood on a platform at the train station in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was on war business, traveling under the personal orders of General Robert E. Lee. He had just arrived from Richmond, having made the seventy-mile journey by rail across the blossoming, river-cut hills of the Piedmont country. Now, as he gazed about him, Boteler realized that something quite unusual was happening. The normally sleepy college town of Charlottesville, he observed, “was in a fever of excitement.” There was noise and commotion everywhere, though to no particular purpose. Some sort of large-scale military movement was under way, but no one, neither citizens nor soldiers, could say exactly what it was. Theories abounded. A dozen empty trains had passed mysteriously through the station earlier that day, all headed west, toward the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley.1 None had returned. A cordon of gray-uniformed soldiers had virtually sealed the town off from the outside world—for security reasons, presumably—though what knowledge any of its citizens could possibly have imparted to the enemy was hard to say. All anyone knew was that whatever was taking place was a very large secret. Lee’s orders to Boteler, in fact, had simply been to “stop at Charlottesville and await orders,” which seemed as cryptic as everything else that was happening that day.2
Boteler thought he knew what was happening—he was one of perhaps five people on earth who could make that claim—and, watching the excitement build around him in the warm spring air, he had a clear sense that he stood at one of the pivot points of the war. “Great events,” as he put it later, “were on the gale.”3 He was in a position to know. He was a new breed of Southern politician, spawned entirely by the exigencies of war. A former US congressman from western Virginia, he had been one of the last representatives from a Southern state to abandon the Union, and then had promptly been elected to the First Confederate Congress. Soon he was wielding power in a way he never had in Washington—indeed, in a way that had never been done before in American politics or anticipated by the men who had designed the country’s democratic systems. Genial, persistent, and charismatic, Boteler acted as liaison between Confederate armies in the field and the capital at Richmond. He moved easily between the two worlds, an insider in both. He occupied himself with issues of military supplies and munitions, with the devastations of war on the towns in his district, even of the movements of Union armies. He had become a sort of wartime public relations officer and courier, the link between the generals and the politicians.
That was the work he was performing that day on the train platform in Charlottesville. But he was doing it now under more perilous conditions than the new Confederate nation had ever experienced. The Richmond he had left that morning was a changed city, a shaken city where it seemed that, if all hell was not yet breaking loose and full panic not quite abroad in the city’s streets, both soon would be. In spite of the Confederacy’s conviction—bordering on absolute certainty—that the war would be brief, relatively bloodless, heroic, and victorious, the new nation suddenly found itself on the brink of an undreamed-of disaster. Just east of Richmond spread the campfires of an enormous Union army. With 120,000 soldiers, it was the largest military force in the Western Hemisphere and one of the greatest concentrations of sheer firepower in human history.4 Its sole purpose, pursued doggedly through the mud and swollen streams of the York-James Peninsula for more than three months, was to conquer and occupy the city of Richmond. Confederate troops, some 50,000 of them under General Joseph E. Johnston, had fallen steadily back to the capital in a soggy, dispiriting retreat, fighting rearguard actions but unable to challenge the enemy’s crushing numerical superiority.
And now that same Union army, under the guidance of the estimable General George B. McClellan, had bivouacked so close to Richmond that its soldiers could hear the city’s church bells. Measured in raw military muscle, the confrontation was a grotesque mismatch: 65,000 Confederates (including the city’s defense force) with inferior weaponry against this moon tide of blue-coated troops equipped with the most sophisticated martial hardware in the world. Worse still, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia was now commanded by a man with at best a shaky reputation as a fighter: Robert E. Lee. He had assumed command of the army just two and a half weeks before, succeeding the wounded Johnston. Though he was a veteran of the Mexican-American War, had once held the job of superintendent at West Point, and was admired within military circles, this new war had already demonstrated with cruel clarity that dusty military laurels were no guarantee of victory. In the fifth month of the war, Lee had lost a campaign at Cheat Mountain in western Virginia, where his retreat had earned him the nickname Evacuating Lee. He had other less than flattering sobriquets, too. Officers who considered him a bit fussy and cautious for army work called him Granny Lee. The soldiers who had obeyed his orders to dig breastworks around Richmond in anticipation of McClellan’s attack—finding this an inglorious task for men whose purpose was to stand up and fight—had dubbed him the King of Spades. He had spent most of the war in an office in Richmond as a sort of glorified military sidekick to the West Point–educated Jefferson Davis, a former US secretary of war who had himself fought in Mexico.5
The Confederate capital, moreover, was more than just the seat of government. It represented a huge component of the South’s industrial and financial might. Its Tredegar Iron Works were the largest of their kind in the South, supplying half of all artillery in the Confederacy, much of its munitions, and most of its locomotive-building capacity. Its warehouses had become the main source of military supply for the war’s eastern theater. Richmond was also the source of Confederate currency and the repository of the gold that backed it. The government was so worried about this that, as McClellan’s army had muscled closer to the city, the Treasury’s gold reserves had been loaded onto a special train whose boilers held a full head of steam at all times, ready to depart at short notice. Without the gold, Confederate dollars were worthless, and if they were worthless, then the Confederate government would be unable to pay for its war.6 Preparations had already been made to ship military papers and government archives to Columbia, South Carolina, while Virginia legislators had voted to burn Richmond rather than surrender it to the Yankees.7 As though to underscore just how close Richmond was to falling, President Davis had sent his wife and children south, to Raleigh, out of harm’s way.8
Northern newspapers were already crowing about what seemed certain victory. The math was inescapable. And citizens of the North could now, finally, after fourteen bloody and frustrating months of war, look forward to Richmond’s fall with grim satisfaction, and comfort themselves that a long overdue moral lesson was about to be administered to the traitorous enemy. “It is believed in town,” wrote Washingtonian Elizabeth Blair Lee to her husband in the Union navy, “that Virginia will be evacuated without a fight.”9Others were convinced that the war itself would be over by July Fourth. As panic and resignation seeped through the streets of Richmond, many Southerners seemed to be of the same mind. “I am ready to sink with despair,” wrote Jefferson Davis’s niece to her mother on May 7.10
It was in this explosive climate that Alexander Boteler had made his train trip west from Richmond. On the platform, he heard the scream of an engine and then watched in some amazement as an unscheduled eastbound train “came thundering into the station,” as he later put it, and groaned to a stop, trailing great clouds of smoke. The train was a bizarre sight, so overloaded with Confederate troops—some two thousand of them jammed inside the cars and on their roofs—that, as Boteler observed, they “seemed to cover them all over like a cluster of bees.”11
Then he spotted, amid the roar and the hubbub on the station platform, the lone figure seated on a bench in the postal car, behind the tender. Considering what the man looked like, it was amazing that Boteler—or anyone else, for that matter—noticed him at all. He wore a tattered, faded, and mud-flecked uniform whose shoulders had been bleached yellow by the sun, large artillery boots, and a soiled cap pulled down across the bridge of his nose so that much of his face was obscured. His hair was long and his beard unkempt.12 He was what most of the thousands of people who saw him and later recorded their observations might have called nondescript.
The distinction was his coat’s star-emblazoned collar. The rumpled man was a major general in the Confederate army. His name was Thomas J. Jackson, though most Southerners already knew him as Stonewall, a nickname he had earned at the Battle of Manassas, eleven months earlier. Boteler was, in fact, a part-time member of Jackson’s staff. Since the beginning of the war, he had been the general’s political eyes and ears in Richmond. He was Jackson’s PR man, Jackson’s courier and factotum, Jackson’s lobbyist, and Jackson’s political confidant, and it was on Jackson’s behalf that Boteler ran most of his errands, including several direct appeals to the legislature.13 He had been instrumental in getting Jackson appointed to his command in the first place. And he was even now carrying a personal letter for Jackson that Robert E. Lee had given him the night before.14
Jackson recognized Boteler, waved him aboard, and the two men shook hands. Jackson asked him if he had a pencil and paper. Boteler replied that he did. “Then sit down please,” Jackson said, “and write as I shall dictate to you.”15 For the next few minutes, while the overstuffed train rested at the platform, and the citizens of Charlottesville tried in vain to understand exactly what they were seeing, Jackson spooled out a string of high-speed orders, dictating details of the complex eastward transfer of his 18,500-man army by train and by road, a sort of layered, hopscotching mechanism and a method of troop transfer new to the ways of war in North America.
Jackson finished, and said good-bye to Boteler, who stepped back onto the platform. The train slipped away from the station, vanishing amid swirls of smoke into the rolling forest of the Virginia Piedmont. An hour later, at the junction town of Gordonsville, the same train startled troops from the 4th North Carolina Regiment, who were on guard duty at the time. They had been told nothing about a troop train bearing several thousand soldiers, heading east. “This arrival came on us like a thunderclap,” wrote one in a letter. “There is some important movement on hand but no one can even surmise what it is.”16 They were even more surprised when, a few moments later, they received another astonishing piece of information in the form of the “very ordinary looking,” “shabbily dressed,” yet unmistakable officer whose face flashed by them in the windows of the train.17
The reason that the soldiers had known nothing about their commander’s whereabouts and intentions was because great pains had been taken, under Jackson’s strict orders, to conceal them. His own generals had no idea where he was. They complained loudly about it, too, unable to understand how such absurd levels of concealment could possibly advance the cause of the Confederacy. Two days before, Jackson had instructed his cavalry chief to send all dispatches directly to him—thus bypassing all normal channels of command—and also to meet him secretly, specifying only that “I will be on my horse at the north end of town” and asking that the officer “not inquire after him” since he did not want his own soldiers to know where he was.18 His own top lieutenant, General Richard Ewell, had been under the false impression that his army was moving north, and when he received his orders they merely told him to march in the direction of Charlottesville, his ultimate destination unknown.19 Jackson’s peculiar deceptions had worked brilliantly on the enemy, too: the Union army’s best intelligence placed him with up to forty thousand men at five separate locations within a hundred-mile radius, one of which was at, or near, the Potomac River boundaries of Washington, DC.20 Until Boteler saw the train pull in, even he had had no idea exactly where Jackson and his army were. And of course the common soldier, as usual, knew nothing at all. “I do not know whether we are going to march north, south, east, or west, or whether we are going to march at all,” complained one of them who was camped in the area, “and that is about all I will ever know of Jackson’s plans.”21
But at least one thing was certain. Something very big was under way. Jackson was going east.
• • •
It is a matter of record that, a mere fourteen months earlier, the man everyone from Charlottesville to Washington was so breathlessly concerned about had been an obscure, eccentric, and unpopular college professor in a small town in rural Virginia. He had odd habits, a strangely silent manner, a host of health problems, and was thought by almost everyone who knew him to be lacking in even the most basic skills of leadership. To call him a failure is probably too harsh. He just wasn’t very good at anything; he was part of that great undifferentiated mass of second-rate humanity who weren’t going anywhere in life. And yet on that bright June day in Charlottesville the oddball science teacher had just completed a military campaign in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley that made him the most famous military figure in the Western world. In a matter of months he had undergone a transformation of such speed and magnitude that it stood out in a war that made a specialty of such changes. Ulysses S. Grant, the most famous of these war-induced transformations, was a washout from the army and a failure in business. When the war began he was employed as a clerk in his father’s leather store in Galena, Illinois. William Tecumseh Sherman, a failed banker who had landed at a tiny military academy in Louisiana, was another. Jackson’s rise to fame, power, and legend was every bit as deep and transfiguring as that of the two Union generals. But it happened much faster, and his ascent was much steeper.
His metamorphosis began in the first year of the war, with his brilliant performance in the Confederate victory at Manassas. But it was rooted mainly in an extraordinary campaign that had begun on March 23 and ended on June 9, 1862. What Jackson did in those seventy-eight days, in a small and dazzlingly beautiful theater of war bounded by mountain ranges on either side, redefined the conflict and made him the most celebrated field commander in the war. Though the particulars of each battle or skirmish could be quite complex, their significance, seen collectively, was strikingly clear and simple. Using a combination of speed, deception, and sheer audacity, Jackson, with 17,000 men (and often far fewer), had taken on and beaten Union forces that, though never united, totaled more than 52,000. He marched his men at a pace unknown to soldiers of the day, covering an astounding 646 miles in 48 days, fighting five major battles, and skirmishing almost daily. He made flashing strikes in unexpected places, falling on the enemy from behind mountain ranges and out of steep passes. With his small force he had driven four Union armies from the greater part of the Shenandoah Valley, inflicting 5,000 casualties, capturing 3,500 prisoners, an immense quantity of stores and supplies, and seizing 9,000 small arms. He had evaded a massive pincer movement designed by Abraham Lincoln himself to catch him. Then, in the most stunning maneuver of all, he had turned on both jaws of the pincer—two Union armies—and beaten them in succession. In a war where the techniques of marching and fighting were being reinvented almost literally hour by hour, Jackson’s intelligence, speed, aggression, and pure arrogance were the wonders of North and South alike. They were the talk of salons in London and Paris.
Jackson’s success was all the more striking because it had come amid so many Confederate defeats, just as that feeling of despair that Jefferson Davis’s niece described had begun to descend on the entire beleaguered South. Confederates had lost major battles that spring at Shiloh and Forts Donelson and Henry in Tennessee. New Orleans had surrendered. Most of Kentucky and Tennessee were lost, as was part of the Carolina coast. News of what Jackson had done in the valley was rolling off Southern presses at the very moment that McClellan’s giant army was shouldering its way up the York-James Peninsula toward Richmond. Jackson’s victories not only drove the enemy from a large part of Virginia; his successes had also frozen in place and then diverted another army, some 40,000 troops camped near Fredericksburg, Virginia, that had been ready to move against Richmond.22 If those troops had arrived on the city’s undefended west side—complementing the 120,000 on the east—Richmond would have had little choice but to surrender. That had been the Union’s grand plan, and Jackson had laid waste to it. In that sense, he had already saved Richmond, or at least he had bought it time. More than anything else, perhaps, he had given Southern morale a tremendous lift in its darkest hour; he had shown that an undermanned Confederate army could outmarch, outmaneuver, and outfight much larger and better equipped Yankee forces. He had even proven—the math works out almost perfectly—the old Southern chestnut that one rebel was worth at least three cowardly Yanks. (That ratio was probably not random or accidental: in the larger war, some 2.1 million Union soldiers eventually took up arms against 880,000 Confederates.23)
By the time Jackson passed through Charlottesville that day, a mere ten days after the closing battle of his valley campaign, Confederate papers were already hailing him as the new national idol. The Richmond Whig asserted that “he wears the sword of the Lord of Gideon” and proclaimed that “he has been . . . chawing up Yankees by the thousands as if they were so many grains of parched popcorn.”24 The Richmond Daily Dispatch called him simply “The Hero of The War,” hailing him as a “decisive genius” and comparing his “rapid marches, profound calculations, [and] energetic attack” to the legendary Italian campaign of Napoléon Bonaparte.25 The North, meanwhile, had gotten the notion that Jackson was a Southern version of the abolitionist John Brown, a man who worshipped a grim, Old Testament God of vengeance, a holy warrior who wielded a strange and powerful influence over his men. Some said he was simply a remorseless killer, nearly as hard on his own troops as he was on the enemy. But no one really knew. Not yet. Jackson, the dusty, rumpled man on the train, was still almost completely shrouded in mystery.
He was traveling east by train that day because Robert E. Lee, a man with whom he would soon develop a partnership that changed the course of the Civil War, had summoned him. And because Lee was about to launch a hazardous—many would have deemed it suicidal—attempt to drive McClellan’s army away from the gates of the capital, and he wanted Jackson in its vanguard. Though it would take several days for this closely guarded information to spread through the rank and file, the reaction when it came was one of almost delirious joy. “Jackson is coming!” was the rumor that swept through the Confederate regiments in front of the city.26 “In our sultry, squalid camps along the Chickahominy,” wrote one soldier who was bivouacked in the swampy lowlands east of Richmond, “the news had reached us of the brilliant Valley campaign, and in the midst of destitution and depression and doubt, with the enemy at the very gates of the capital, [Jackson’s victories] read like a fairy tale. . . . With feverish interest we devoured the accounts of rapid marches, of sudden appearances where least expected, which had frustrated every combination of the enemy.”27 To them, Jackson’s movement east with his vaunted Army of the Valley meant that he was coming to save Richmond, which meant that he was coming to save the Confederacy. And the soldiers of the beleaguered Army of Northern Virginia believed to the bottom of their ragged, malnourished rebel souls that he was going to do precisely that.