days. Even so ardent a friend of McClellan as CHAP. XXI. the Prince de Joinville writes: The Federals had had the defensive battle they desired; had repulsed the enemy; but arrested by natural obstacles which perhaps were not insurmountable, they had gained nothing by their success. They had missed an de l'Armée unique opportunity of striking a blow.1 Campagne du Potomac. W. R. Vol. XI., Part I., But the next day and during the week that followed, the enterprise assumed so many difficulties that McClellan could not have been expected to pp. 130, 131. attempt it. The rains continued; the sluggish river became a wide-spreading flood; the ground, a mixed mass of clay and quicksand, afforded no sure standing-place for horse, foot, or artillery; most of the bridges were carried away; the army, virtually cut in two by the river, occupied itself in the arduous work of intrenching. General Lee, the ablest officer in the Southern Confederacy, his mind put entirely at ease in regard to an immediate attack upon Richmond, had leisure to devote himself to restoring the organization and morale of his army, and bringing from every side the reënforcements that he was to use with such effect a month later in the bloody contests from the Chickahominy to the James. 1"The repulse of the rebels at Fair Oaks should have been taken advantage of. It was one of those occasions which, if not seized, do not repeat themselves. We now know the state of disorganization and dismay in which the rebel army retreated. We now know that it could have been CH. XXII. 1862. CHAPTER XXII "STONEWALL" JACKSON'S VALLEY CAMPAIGN S we have said before, it was the intention of the Administration to dispatch the whole of McDowell's corps to reënforce McClellan, as soon as the situation in Northern Virginia would permit. Franklin's division was so dispatched, in ample time to have taken part in the operations against Yorktown, though General McClellan made no use whatever of that fine body of troops until Yorktown was evacuated. Preparations were vigorously made by the Government for the march of McDowell towards Richmond, and Shields's division, one of the best of Banks's army, was ordered to reënforce him. The most important results were expected from such an attack as an officer of McDowell's ability and zeal would have made upon the left flank of the Confederate forces in front of Richmond. It is one of the admitted misfortunes of the war that this attack was never made, and the question as to who was responsible for it has given rise to much discussion. A simple statement of the facts in the case, without imputation of ignoble motives in any quarter, seems the preferable way to treat this subject. It may be profitable for a moment to consider the character of that remarkable man, whose campaign in the CH. XXII. Shenandoah Valley produced this derangement of the plans of the Government. General Thomas Jonathan (commonly called "Stonewall") Jackson was by far the most interesting and picturesque figure in the Southern army. His brilliant successes and his early death enshrined him in the hearts of his associates as their foremost champion; while the intense religious enthusiasm which appeared in all his public and private utterances added the halo of the saint to the laurels of the hero. In what we shall have to say in regard to this singular character, we shall refer to no facts except those recorded by Confederate writers, and although we may not be able to accept all their conclusions, it cannot be contested that General Jackson was a man of extraordinary qualities, and a soldier whose successes were due no less to his abilities than to his good fortune and the mistakes of his adversaries. R. L. Dab"Life and nex Campaigns Thomas J. of Lieutenant-General Jackson," p. 16. Though connected with a family of fair standing in Virginia, his father died poor, after wasting his substance in drink and play; the boy grew up in the care of relatives, twice running away from the roof which sheltered him and returning "soiled, ragged, and emaciated by the ague." His early education was defective; he earned his living by hard labor, Ibid., p. 21. and for a time served as a rural constable until he accidentally received an appointment to the Military Academy at West Point. He is remembered by his contemporaries there as a slow, dull, unprepossessing youth, of great correctness of conduct and untiring industry in his studies. He served creditably in the Mexican war, and soon after it ended Dabney, p. 63. Ibid., p. 112. CH. XXII. resigned his place in the army and became a teacher in the Virginia Military School at Lexington, where he lived for ten years. He was not especially popular or successful as a teacher; his manner was lacking in tact, his character in flexibility. Had the war not come to call him forth to glory and the grave, he would probably have lived and died in that mountain village known only to his neighbors, to use Dr. Dabney's expression, "as a sincere, odd, weak man." We find in the writings of several of his eulogists, indications of singularities which border upon monomania. Colonel Fremantle says, on the authority of the Confederate General Slaughter, "When he left the United States service he was under the impression that one of his legs was getting shorter than the other; and afterwards his idea was that he only perspired on one side, and that it was necessary to keep the arm and leg of the other side in constant motion in order to preserve the circulation." But the war was his opportunity. There was not a quality of heart, mind, or temperament which he possessed that did not contribute to his success and his fame. Even his weaknesses ministered to his strength. He had been a sufferer from ophthalmia and could not use his eyes at night; he had therefore acquired the habit of reviewing mentally all the reading of the day, while sitting silent in the midst of his family with his face to the wall, and had thus gained a remarkable power of concentration of thought and memory of details. His digestion in his youth was feeble and capricious; he had for that reason accustomed himself to the utmost abstemiousness; and it was no sacrifice to Dabney, p. 101. him to share the meager fare of his soldiers on the CH. XXII. march. But the quality which gained for him much of his influence in the army, and which contributed most largely to that sentiment of devotion with which his memory is regarded in the South and in England, was his intense religious enthusiasm. Anything like it is rarely met with in modern times; we must go back to the ages of unquestioning faith, to Philip II., to Torquemada, to find a parallel to it. He believed himself to be under the immediate and partisan protection of his Creator; he believed, and his biographer thinks the belief perfectly reasonable, that Heaven helped him plan his campaigns and battles; his Creator was ever present to his mind, in his own image as good a Southerner, as earnest a hater of the Yankees, as stern a fighter, as himself. He conversed with Him constantly; he interpreted literally the injunction to "pray without ceasing." "When we take our meals," he would say, "there is the grace. When I take a draught of water, I always pause, as my palate receives the refreshment, to lift up my heart to God in thanks and prayer for the water of life. Whenever I drop a letter into the box of the post-office, I send a petition along with it for God's blessing upon its mission and upon the person to whom it is sent. When I break the seal of a letter just received, I stop to pray to God that He may prepare me for its contents, and make it a messenger of good. And so of every other familiar act of the day." A great part of his time in the saddle was passed in the act of prayer. A hundred times a day he would be seen to throw his right hand aloft and to move his Ibid., p. 106. |