Day 82. May 21, 1862.
82
bred in them a thoroughgoing self-satisfaction, the most complete blindness….
May Wensday 21 1862
Quite cloudy and this morning. We were routed up early this morning and we have to march this morning early. Somewhat wet last night. We got all our things loaded up. The wagon train Artillary and Infantry all went in the advance and the Shields Division was some 5 miles long. We got started in at 10½ oclock. We left the Orange & Alexandria* Rail Road Cattett Station. We marched through a country that is woren out and laying out in the land is very thin & sandy and not very productive. The old woren out land is growen up with pine and brush. We came 15 miles. Biovacked in the wood. We haulted at 11oclock at night. I was very tired and woren out very much
*The Orange & Alexandria Railroad– repeatedly destroyed & rebuilt– was of extreme strategical importance to both sides, & the sole link between Richmond & D.C. The men in this five mile long group snaked their way across the desolate land for 12 hours. He doesn’t note speed, but it doesn’t seem they walked very fast.
Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command Volume 1 Douglas Southall Freeman Scribner, 1942 P. 692
“The Orange and Alexandria traversed the Rappahannock on a high bridge, served Culpepper Court House, passed the Rapidan River and ran, via Orange, to Gordonsville. There it met the Virginia Central. This line, starting at Richmond, ran on an arc to the North, crossed the Richmond, Fredericksburg Railroad at Hanover Junction and went on to Gordonsville and thence to Charlottesville, Staunton and beyond.
P. 682-683
Still another feature of the Virginia railroads that might have an influence on military operations was the absence of any continuous line down the Shenandoah Valley. From the East, the Virginia Central penetrated that region and, passing Staunton, turned southwestward to the Alleghenies. By way of the pass at Thoroughfare, the Manassas Gap Railroad led into the Valley at Strasburg and thence southward to Mount Jackson. Still a third railway ran from Harpers Ferry to Winchester. The B. & O. crossed the lower Valley via Martinsburg. All these lines strategically were useful, but, even in the worst emergency, they could do little to expedite the movement of troops from Staunton to Harpers Ferry. For that grim business, reliance had to be placed on the legs of youth. If war were waged North of Harpers Ferry, and the Valley were used as a line of supply, then wagon trains must groan over more than 110 miles of highway.”
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 58
“7a.m. 60; 2p.m. 84; 9p.m. 75. Falling mist.”
Make Me a Map of the Valley: The Civil War Journal of Stonewall Jackson’s Topographer Jedediah Hotchkiss P. 47
“Wednesday, May 21st.
It is rumored the enemy is advancing.
A fine warm day.
Was arrested on account of my blue dress.”
How the South Could Have Won the Civil War: The Fatal Errors That Led to Confederate Defeat Bevin Alexander P. 61
“At New Market, the army had no idea where it was going, as Jackson said nothing. On the morning of May 21 the men moved north through New Market expecting that they were marching direct on Strasburg. Just at the edge of the village, however, Jackson quietly turned the head of the column to the right– up the long, sloping road leading over Massanutten Mountain to Luray. The Rebel army had turned completely away from Banks and was marching eastward.”
Taylor was as mystified as any of the men in the army. “I began to think,” he later wrote, “that Jackson was an unconscious poet, and an ardent lover of nature, who desired to give strangers an opportunity to admire the beauties of his valley.”
Jackson’s strategy became much clearer to the soldiers when, hours later, the army filed into the Luray Valley and found Ewell’s soldiers waiting. In one swift maneuver Jackson had concentrated all of the Confederate troops in his command. With the unified army he turned north toward Front Royal. Now the soldiers realized that the combined force, 17,000 men, was going to fall on the Union flank and rear. The Louisiana Brigade’s march to New Market had been intended to deceive Banks; Jackson had also used Turner Ashby to create a cavalry screen.
The deception had worked. In Washington and at Banks’s headquarters at Strasburg, complete calm and confidence reigned. On the night of May 22, neither Secretary of War Stanton nor Banks had the faintest suspicion that Jackson had passed beyond Harrisonburg. The Union leaders, including Lincoln, were confident that things were going well. The Confederates had not followed up the attack on Frémont. McClellan was boasting of imminent success. Lincoln, reassured by Jackson’s apparent retreat, had allowed Shields to march his division to join Irwin McDowell. And McDowell, with a portion of his troops, had already crossed the Rappahannock River and was beginning to move beyond Fredericksburg. Lincoln and Stanton, expecting the imminent fall of Richmond, were to leave for Fredericksburg the next day.”
Army Life According to Arbaw: Civil War Letters of William A. Brand 66th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Edited by Daniel A. Masters P. 63-64
Catlett’s Station, on Orange & Alexandria, Railroad
“A view of the country through which we have passed has removed a prejudice against this portion of Virginia and really enchants one who beholds for the first time the vast and living view spreading out from the Blue Ridge toward the Potomac. I had expected to find a flat and somewhat marshy plain when I entered the “Old Dominion,” but I was mistaken and soon led to believe that such a country, as it is, deserves well to be a subject theme of poems as well as the homes of our illustrious dead. The first view we have of “Old Virginny” is grand and continues one magnificent picture until we come to the flat country near this place. There are few hills but regular and rolling lands covered with their spring verdure and May flowers. Fresh spring water abounds, there being scarcely a place where 100 steps will not bring you to a fine, clear running stream. The soil is very rich and produces fine crops, though there are many places where the soil had given out from continued cultivation and large farms abandoned.
Wealth and poverty dwell here side by side. The wealthy farmer, owning his thousands of acres, possesses and uses a power to crush to the earth his poverty-stricken neighbors. On such farms as I have mentioned are usually found six or seven white families who are extremely poor and kept so. The will of the rich man on the hill is the only law they bow before, and low is their obeisance. Whatever wages the one desires to pay, the other is bound to receive and the value of the laborer’s services is estimated by the corresponding value of slave labor and its results. The children of these serfs (for I cannot call them else) are reared in ignorance. There are no schools, and the poor whites are compelled by their masters to vote down every attempt to organize schools of any description. And this is the boasted freedom our country rejoices over!
The slavery of the Negro makes the master aristocratic, and the aristocracy of the slave master makes slaves of white men. The influences of slavery fall more severely on the poor white man in the South than it does on a portion of the Negroes. The house servants are generally of a very intelligent set; sufficiently so at least to carry on conversation on this war in a much better humor than the more intelligent white owner. They are well fed and well clothed and to look at them as they appear behind the master’s chair at dinner or in any occupation around the house, but few would judge hastily of the evil effects of slavery upon the Negro and condemn the institution on account of inhumanity to the black race. But step outside the mansion door and take a peep into the Negro quarters! See the poor ignorant wretches living away their earthly time in an extensive and well-ordered hell. Go out into the fields and see the lazy overseer, the master’s pimp of hell, with his lash and his sweet faithful temper, then judge harshly and well.
Along the route of our march there are extraordinary evidences of the Southern Confederacy. The scrip issued by the Treasurer is refused, and no Southern paper will be received in payment of any dues. The total absence of all men capable of bearing arms is proof that their soldiers are all in the field. The people are heartsick and all greatly desire peace at any price.”
THE ARMIES RETURNING (excerpt)
“May 21.—Saw General Sheridan and his cavalry to-day; a strong, attractive sight; the men were mostly young, (a few middle-aged,) superb-looking fellows, brown, spare, keen, with well-worn clothing, many with pieces of water-proof cloth around their shoulders, hanging down. They dash’d along pretty fast, in wide close ranks, all spatter’d with mud; no holiday soldiers; brigade after brigade. I could have watch’d for a week. Sheridan stood on a balcony, under a big tree, coolly smoking a cigar. His looks and manner impress’d me favorably.” Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 769
The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 77-78
“To be noticed, too, is that, even at the best and fullest, the idea of social responsibility which grew up in the South remained always a narrow and purely personal one. The defect here was fundamental in the primary model. The Virginians themselves, if they had long since become truly aristocratic, had nevertheless never got beyond that brutal individualism—and for all the Jeffersonian glorification of the idea, it was brutal as it worked out in the plantation world—which was the heritage of the frontier: that individualism which, while willing enough to ameliorate the specific instance, relentlessly laid down as its basic social postulate the doctrine that every man was completely and wholly responsible for himself.
I have before painted the common white as being immensely complacent. But the planters—both nouveaux and Virginian—if anything, outdid him. The individualistic outlook, the lack of class pressure from below, their position as captains against the Yankee, the whole paternalistic pattern in fact, the complete otherworldliness of the prevailing religious feeling, and, in the nouveaux, the very conviction that they were already fully developed aristocrats—all this, combining with their natural unrealism of temperament, bred in them a thoroughgoing self-satisfaction, the most complete blindness to the true facts of their world.
And so, even when they were most sincere in their sense of responsibility to the masses, they began, with an ingenuousness that might have been incredible elsewhere, by assuming their own interest as the true interest of the common white also—gave him advice, told him what to think, from what standpoint. Outside of two or three exceptions, such as William Gregg of South Carolina, hardly any Southerner of the master class ever even slightly apprehended that the general shirtlessness and degradation of the masses was a social product. Hardly one, in truth, ever concerned himself about the systematic raising of the economic and social level of these masses. And if occasional men like my Irishman kept free schools for their neighborhoods, these same men would take the lead in indignantly rejecting the Yankee idea of universal free schools maintained at the public charge—would condemn the run of Southern whites to grow up in illiteracy and animal ignorance in the calm conviction of acting entirely for the public good.
P. 60
The nouveaux would not, in fact, be content merely to imitate, merely to aspire, to struggle toward aristocracy through the long reaches of time, but whenever there was a sufficient property, they would themselves immediately set up for aristocrats on their own account.
Thus baldly put, it seems a feat in unreality impossible to human vanity at its most romantic limit. And so it might have been, indeed, if it had not been for the great whip of the conflict with the Yankee.
That conflict, as has been said before me, was inevitable. And not only for the reasons known to every reader of American history, but finally and fundamentally for the reason that it is not the nature of the human animal in the mass willingly to suffer difference—that he sees in it always a challenge to his universal illusion of being the chosen son of heaven, and so an intolerable affront to his ego, to be put down at any cost in treasure and blood.
P. 65
So it went. Was it the part of aristocrats in the nineteenth century also to exhibit a noble culture? Was this an essential part of the legend with which the Yankee was to be put in his place? The nouveaux, the Virginians, all the South in fact, would join in asservating and believing, that Southern culture outran not merely the Yankee’s but even that of mankind as a whole, represented perhaps (they did sometimes seem to interpolate a barely perceptible perhaps) the highest level ever attained.”
the Shields Division was some 5 miles long….
Very commendable says Jackson, eyes of an alligator at night shining sheik. Many don’t know he got himself 12,419 prisoners at one point. Harpers Ferry, or the Battle for Maryland Heights, September 1862. Largest capture of U.S. soldiers until WWII. So many captured the War Department cut in half the number for newspapers. For what could not be found there. Headlines like“We Have Learned Only Of The Following” before they ran out of even wallpaper for newsprint, the rose & purple flowers, the red & pink floral patterns. To state the matter shortly: from the start, both sides snatched their conclusions from thin air because an informed populace was a dangerous populace. Just like today, this much has not changed, the size of your knowing wrapped up in what appears in the size of white butcher paper, suspended in its mass the size of a human ribcage. Or pixels, 01010101. Reality becomes smaller & smaller like a future fluorescent bulb already flickering out.
For now, the Union Army marches several days for nothing then comes right back. Was this to meet Lincoln? Likely. Jackson with his double-switch-back-tricks simultaneous to Union movement. He had an uncanny instinct for how to move forward. He was like a six pound Papillon or a Pit Bull on angel dust. You can see now why the Rebels lost the war: as long as he was around they had a fighting chance. A mouth like a viper fish. I picture him with that tom cat smell, someone on a lucky streak who can’t leave the table, a pinky skull ring pointed outward, smoke rings floating around his greasy hair at a 4am Harrah’s high stakes poker table, sliding forward a piece of eight, the last of his chips. Entranced.
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