This Great Struggle (25 page)

On August 9 Pope’s lead corps under Banks collided with Jackson in what came to be known as the Battle of Cedar Mountain. Banks drove forward aggressively, and at first it appeared that he might finally get the better of his old Shenandoah nemesis, who was not conducting the battle particularly skillfully. Tactics were not Stonewall’s forte, but once all of his troops arrived on the battlefield, especially the large division of the hard-hitting A. P. Hill, Jackson had a two-to-one advantage in numbers and forced Banks to withdraw.

Theoretically Lee’s position should have been a very dangerous one. With McClellan’s army thirty miles southeast of Richmond and Pope’s one hundred miles northwest of it, Lee should have been compelled to keep major forces guarding both directions. As Lee saw it, that was not the case. He had taken McClellan’s measure during the Seven Days, and he believed he had little to fear from that callow young man. He therefore decided he could afford to leave only the smallest of forces to guard the peninsula approach to Richmond and take almost his entire army to suppress Pope. Davis expressed some misgivings about such an audacious course but allowed it out of confidence in Lee, whose reputation was fast becoming the rock on which all of Confederate morale and Confederate nationalism rested.

In fact, Lee’s situation was even safer than he realized. On August 3 Halleck ordered McClellan to withdraw his army from the peninsula and transport it back up the Chesapeake to Alexandria for operations in northern Virginia. Unwilling to abandon his great campaign against the Confederate capital and perhaps sensing the movement as a first stage in the transfer of the units of his army, one by one, to Pope’s Army of Virginia, McClellan protested the move and did not get his troops under way until August 14. For a prolonged period during mid-August, McClellan’s army, the largest the Union possessed, would be in a position neither to threaten Richmond from the southeast nor to aid Pope on the Virginia Piedmont.

THE SECOND BULL RUN CAMPAIGN

By mid-August Lee had joined Jackson north of Gordonsville along with the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia. Outnumbered, Pope fell back across the Rappahannock. Lee tried to move around Pope’s flank, but the Union general skillfully maneuvered sideways to keep the river, swollen by recent rains, between himself and the larger Confederate army. For three days, Pope matched Lee move for move, and the frustrated Confederate general could get nowhere. Then on August 25 Lee dispatched Jackson with about one-third of the Army of Northern Virginia’s infantry, together with Major General James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart (West Point, 1854) and all of its cavalry, to swing wide and fast to the west of Pope’s army, get behind him, and strike at his supply line, the Orange & Alexandria.

This sort of maneuver was what Stonewall did best, and Pope, who was apparently taking his own advice about looking “before us, and not behind,” did not realize what was happening to him until Jackson’s men on August 27 captured his supply depot at Manassas Junction. The ill-fed Confederates held high carnival amid the mountains of foodstuffs stockpiled there and then destroyed what they could not carry off. Jackson took up a strong defensive position along an unfinished railroad grade just west of the old Bull Run battlefield, overlooking the Warrenton Turnpike near the village of Groveton, and waited for Pope to react.

“Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear,” Pope had told his troops six weeks before. By August 27 it was clear to Pope that at least Stonewall Jackson and a large segment of the Confederate army were lurking in the rear. Jackson’s destruction of his supply line would have forced Pope to fall back in any event, but the aggressive Union general hoped that he could take advantage of the situation to trap and destroy Jackson’s wing of the Army of Northern Virginia. Pope’s withdrawal from the line of the Rappahannock necessarily released Lee to cross the river. This was exactly what Lee had intended to accomplish by Jackson’s turning movement, forcing Pope back off the river and allowing Lee to get across it so that he could bring on a showdown battle with the outnumbered Union army somewhere north of it. He immediately put his large wing of the army, under the immediate command of Longstreet, on the march following Jackson’s route to join Stonewall in the Union rear.

Pope mistakenly believed that Jackson was near Centerville and ordered his own army to concentrate on that place. As one of his divisions marched up the Warrenton Pike on the evening of August 28, Jackson decided it was time to attract Pope’s attention somewhat more and gave the order for his troops to attack. Because the individual brigades of the Union division were strung out at long intervals, the fight that evening, which came to be known as the Battle of Groveton, pitted Ewell’s division of Jackson’s command, with 6,200 men, against little more than a single brigade of Federals, aided by a couple of regiments from the next brigade on the road, for a total Union strength of 2,100 men.

The Union brigade in question was the only brigade of western men fighting in Virginia, three regiments from Wisconsin and one from Indiana, under the command of Union-loyal North Carolinian John Gibbon (West Point, 1847), who had insisted that they wear the regulation dress uniform of the U.S. Army, with an almost knee-length uniform frock coat and a flat-topped, broad-brimmed black felt hat, encircled by a sky-blue wool hat cord and adorned with a small brass French-horn infantry pin in front and with the brim pinned up on the left side. The rest of the Union army preferred the more comfortable sack coat and kepi or forage cap, but Gibbon’s boys soon learned to wear their regulation hats and coats with pride and gloried in being called the Black Hat Brigade until they earned another title.

On this August evening at Groveton, they faced what was for most of them their first combat and slugged it out at close range in the open field with Ewell’s entire division, giving as good as they got. When darkness put a stop to the fighting, the battle had been a draw, and about one in every three men who had taken part in it was shot. Among the wounded was Ewell, whose shattered leg had to be amputated.

Once again Pope misinterpreted the intelligence he received, guessing that Jackson must have been in retreat from Centerville and that the clash with Gibbon’s brigade had blocked his way. Jubilantly Pope concluded that he had Stonewall dead to rights and needed only to press on rapidly the next day and close in for the kill. He ignored other reports reaching him that day from the West. There an outlier of the Blue Ridge formed a range of hills known locally as Bull Run Mountain. The road Jackson had used to turn Pope passed through Bull Run Mountain at Thoroughfare Gap. That same August 28, Lee’s own wing of the Army of Northern Virginia had pushed through the gap against the feeble resistance of a single poorly handled Union division. Bull Run Mountain had been the last obstacle in the way of Lee’s reuniting with Jackson, which was now all but assured to happen within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, with ominous portent for the still oblivious Pope.

One bright spot in the outlook for Pope was that troops from the Army of the Potomac were finally beginning to join him, having come by ship up the Chesapeake from Harrison’s Landing to Alexandria and then marched overland from there. Porter’s Fifth Corps was on hand, as was the Third Corps under Major General Samuel Heintzelman (West Point, 1826). Two more corps, Franklin’s Sixth and Major General Edwin V. Sumner’s Second, had already landed at Alexandria, but McClellan would not let them advance to join Pope, citing vague concerns about their inadequate artillery and supply wagons. Less than three weeks earlier McClellan had written to his wife, “Pope will be badly thrashed within two days & . . . they will be very glad to turn over the redemption of their affairs to me. I won’t undertake it unless I have full & entire control.” Even as the battle was beginning in earnest on August 29 McClellan had advised Lincoln that it might be best “to leave Pope to get out of his scrape, and at once use all our means to make the capital perfectly safe.”
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Beginning on the morning of August 29, Pope hurled his troops in one assault after another at Jackson’s lines. The fighting was desperate, and sometimes Jackson’s troops were on the verge of giving way, but each time they somehow rallied and held on. Lee, with Longstreet’s twenty-eight thousand men, moved into position on Jackson’s right, extending forward from the end of Jackson’s line so as to threaten Pope’s left flank. Union cavalry had brought reports of Longstreet’s approach, but by this time Pope had made up his mind about the situation and was not going to be confused by facts. At first he refused to believe that Longstreet was present. Then he maintained that the larger Confederate force was on the field only for the purpose of covering the retreat of the full Confederate army, which he continued to insist was an ongoing effort.

When his assaults on the twenty-ninth failed to bring victory, Pope renewed his attacks on the thirtieth and continued them throughout most of the day. Finally, when Pope’s army was exhausted and out of position from a day of fierce attacks that had once again come very close to success, Lee launched Longstreet’s wing of his army in a giant flank attack that crumpled the left end of Pope’s line. As the two armies struggled across the Bull Run battlefield where Union and Confederate had met thirteen months before, Henry House Hill once again became a key terrain feature, this time stubbornly held by Union troops to cover the retreat of the rest of the Army of Virginia northward across Bull Run. In the twilight, Pope’s army made an orderly fighting retreat. It was a contrast with the undignified scramble of the previous summer, but it was still a retreat. Union casualties for the battle came to about ten thousand men, while Lee’s losses were nearly as great at just over nine thousand.

Lee was by no means finished with Pope and sent Jackson swinging around the retreating Army of Virginia in another turning movement aimed at cutting Pope off from Washington and completing the destruction he had escaped at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Pope blocked Jackson in a September 1 clash at the hamlet of Chantilly. An inconclusive fight in the midst of a summer thunderstorm, Chantilly allowed Pope to complete his retreat to the fortifications around Washington. Lee had won a famous victory, but he had failed in his purpose of destroying Pope’s army. Perhaps he could take comfort in reflecting that Pope was, in any case, “suppressed.”

LEE MOVES NORTH

Lee’s victories in the Seven Days and at the Second Battle of Bull Run had changed the momentum of the war in Virginia and shifted the scene of the fighting from the outskirts of Richmond north about one hundred miles to the outskirts of Washington. Of far greater importance, they had sent Confederate morale soaring, raised the Confederate image abroad, and discouraged the North. Lincoln sadly transferred Pope to Minnesota to deal with a Sioux uprising there, and with even greater sadness weighed the significance of reports he received that McClellan, Porter, and perhaps other officers of the Army of the Potomac had deliberately withheld needed support from Pope in hopes that he would experience a defeat. Porter would later be courtmartialed and dismissed from the army for failing to obey one of Pope’s attack orders during the battle, though the case would remain controversial for a generation and be overturned by the next Democrat to take the White House, Grover Cleveland, in 1886.

In having a desire to see Pope defeated, McClellan was, if anything, guiltier than Porter, but McClellan seemed to be, for the moment at least, indispensable. The army was dispirited, possibly too demoralized to fight effectively against an enemy whose aggressiveness seemed to know no respite. Lincoln believed that the only way to restore confidence and high morale in units of the Army of the Potomac was to restore them to McClellan’s command. On September 2, Lincoln gave him command of all the Union forces in northern Virginia and Maryland. The three corps that had composed the Army of Virginia would henceforth be incorporated into the Army of the Potomac, to which the Ninth Corps was shortly added, fresh from its amphibious successes on the southern coast.

Lee’s victories had affected foreign opinion as well and nowhere more than in Britain, where the government and many others within the landed gentry and wealthy mercantile classes had been none too well disposed toward the United States, which was their chief transatlantic rival and which the more perceptive of them could see was bound to surpass their country in power and greatness—if nothing happened to derail its growth. Now the British were closer than ever to outright recognition of Confederate independence. That summer U.S. ambassador to Britain Charles Francis Adams had learned that a ship under construction at the John Laird Sons and Company yard in Birkenhead was in fact intended for the Confederate navy. Acquired through the efforts of Confederate agent James Bullock, the vessel had been built in deep secrecy as hull number 290, a suspiciously sleek and powerful-looking bark-rigged ship with auxiliary steam power, then launched and christened the
Enrica
. Officials in the United States tried to get the British government to enforce its neutrality laws and seize the vessel, but before the British authorities acted, the mysterious
Enrica
had slipped out of port and rendezvoused at the island of Terceira in the mid-Atlantic with a Confederate supply ship that equipped her with eight cannon. With Confederate officers and a crew composed largely of Englishmen, she went into commission as the Confederate States Ship
Alabama
, a cruiser that would over the course of the next two years destroy millions of dollars worth of northern shipping. Historians still argue as to whether the British authorities deliberately dragged their feet in order to allow the
Alabama
’s escape from their waters, though after the war Britain paid the U.S. government an indemnity of more than fifteen million dollars. For now, though, the appearance of the Confederacy’s swift new commerce raider served to underscore the apparently increasing British sympathy for the slaveholders’ republic.