He slept in his uniform, as had been his habit during the War of Secession. Anna woke him at half-past three. "Gracias, senora," he said. His wife smiled in the darkness. He put on the oversized boots he favored, jammed on his slouch hat, and went off to war without another word.
Long columns of men in new butternut uniforms and old-fashioned gray ones were already on the move north before the sun crawled over the Blue Ridge Mountains. Winchester was about twenty miles from Front Royal, the Yankee lines a few miles south of the town they'd taken. If not for those lines, he could have been in Winchester before sundown. He hoped to be there by then despite them.
One advantage of the early start was getting as far as possible before the full muggy heat of the day developed. Even on horseback, Jackson felt it. Sweat cut rills through the dust on the faces of the marching men. Dust hung in the air, too. It made gray uniforms look brown, but also let the Yankees, if they were alert, know his forces were advancing on them.
The men rested for ten minutes every hour, their weapons stacked. Otherwise, they marched. Field guns and their ammunition limbers rattled along between infantry companies. At a little past twelve, the soldiers paused to eat salt pork and corn bread and to fill their canteens from the small streams near which they rested. After precisely an hour, they headed north again.
Just after they'd moved out, a messenger galloped up to Jackson from Front Royal and pressed a telegram into his hand. He read it, permitted himself a rare smile, and then rode over to Colonel Skid-more Harris. "The volunteers, Colonel, arc threatening Winchester from the east, by way of both Ashby's Gap and Snicker's Gap," he said. "They report considerable and increasing resistance in their front, which means the U.S. commander in Winchester has surely pulled men from in front of us in order to contest their advance. Having done that, he will find some difficulty in also contesting ours."
Colonel Harris tilted back his head and blew a large, excellent smoke ring. "I'd say that's about right, sir. They don't have all that many more men than this army does-not enough to turn two ways at once and take on two forces our size."
Had Jackson been in Winchester with a force not greatly inferior to the one attacking him, he would not have retreated in the first place. But that was water over the dam now. "Onward," he said.
U.S. forces had dug a line of firing pits about half a mile south of Kernstown, a few miles below Winchester. Jackson smiled again, this time savagely. In the War of Secession, the Yankees had thrown him back from Kernstown. He'd waited more than nineteen years to pay them back, but the hour was at hand.
Their guns opened on his troops at a range of better than a mile and a half. His artillery swung off the roads and went into battery in the fields to reply. At the same time, his infantry deployed from column into line, moving with the drilled smoothness that showed how many times the regulars had bored themselves carrying out the manoeuvre on the practice field.
The line wasn't much thicker than a skirmish line had been during the War of Secession. To a veteran of that war, it looked gossamer thin-until one noticed how many rounds the men were firing as they advanced, and how thick the black-powder smoke swirled around them. A division of soldiers in the earlier war would have shown no more firepower than this light brigade.
But the Yankees had breech-loaders, too; their Springfields were a match for the Confederate Tredegars. Their commanding officer had left no more than a regiment and a half behind. Even so, Jackson feared for the first few minutes of the fight that the Yankees, with the advantages of position and cover the defender enjoyed, would beat him at Kernstown again.
His men had less practice at advancing by rushes and supporting one another with fire than at close-order drill and at shifting into the looser formations from which they could attack. The galling enemy resistance served to concentrate their minds on the task at hand better than weeks of exercises might have done.
After close to an hour's fighting, the first Confederate soldiers leaped down into the Yankee field works off to Jackson 's left. That let them pour enfilading fire along the length of the U.S. line. Once the position began to unravel, it soon disintegrated. U.S. soldiers in dark blue emerged from their trenches and fled back toward Kernstown. Confederate small arms and artillery took a heavy toll on them. More Yankees threw down their rifles and threw up their hands in surrender. Guarded by jubilant Rebels, they shambled back toward the rear.
"We have a victory, sir," Colonel Harris said.
Jackson fixed him with a coldly burning gaze. "We have the beginnings of a victory, Colonel. I want the pursuit pressed to the limit. I want those Yankees chased out of Kernstown, out of Winchester , and back to Harper's Ferry and Martinsburg. I want them chased across the Potomac-that part of West Virginia should never have been allowed to leave the state of Virginia-but 1 am not certain we can bring that off in this assault. Still, if we put enough fear in the U.S. forces, they will skedaddle. We'll see how far they run."
Harris stared at him. "You don't want to just lick the damnyan-kees, sir," he said, as if a lamp had suddenly been lighted in his head. "You want to wipe 'em clean off the slate."
"Why, of course." Jackson stared back, astonished the other officer should aim at anything less. "If they face us, the volunteer brigade will take them in the flank. If they face the volunteers, we shall take them in the flank. If they seek to face both forces at once, we shall defeat them in detail. Now let the thing be pressed."
Pressed it was. The U.S. troops retreated straight through Kernstown; the locals clapped their hands when Jackson rode through the hamlet. The Yankees tried to make a stand at Winchester, but pulled out just before sunset. The racket of rifle fire coming from the east said the volunteers were at hand.
Their commander, a bespectacled fellow named Jenkins, rode up to Jackson in the middle of a wildly cheering crowd in Winchester (though Jackson saw not a single colored person on the streets). "What do you want us to do now, sir?" he asked. "We've about marched our legs off, but-"
"Your men won't fall over yet," Jackson said. "We head north, as long as there is light. As soon as it grows light in the morning, we go on. Our task is to drive the foe from our soil, and I do not intend to rest until that is accomplished." He drew his sword and pointed with it; dramatic gestures were all swords were good for these days, but dramatic gestures were not to be despised.
Jenkins looked as astonished as Colonel Harris had south of Kernstown, and then as exalted. He turned to his troops and cried, "You hear that, boys? You see that? Old Stonewall wants us to help him run the damnyankees clean out of Virginia. I know you're worn down to nubs, but are you game?"
The volunteers howled like catamounts. The veterans of the War of Secession had already taught their younger comrades the fierce notes of the Rebel yell. Jackson waved his hat to thank the men for their show of spirit, then pointed with the sword once more. Through the shrill yells, he spoke one word: "Onward."
There were, Abraham Lincoln reflected, undoubtedly worse places in which to be stranded than Salt Lake City. Technically, stranded was the wrong word. He'd had several speaking engagements canceled because of the outbreak of war, and had decided to stay where he was till more came along. The Mormons who made up the majority of the population were unfailingly polite and considerate to him. Whatever he thought of their religious beliefs, they were decent enough and to spare.
Even so, he felt more at home among the Gentiles, the miners and merchants and bureaucrats who leavened the town and surrounding countryside. Most of them, especially the officials, were Democrats, but that still left them closer to his way of looking at the world than were the Mormons, who thought in terms of religion first and politics only afterwards.