Shenandoah Valley campaign (1862), mobile campaign waged by the heavily outnumbered ‘Stonewall’ Jackson to protect the ‘breadbasket’ of Virginia, which also fatally disrupted Union strategy in the east. The valley lies between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny mountains and is formed by the north and south forks of the Shenandoah river, which flow north-east on either side of the Massanutten mountain, until they join near Front Royal and run into the Potomac river through a deep ravine at Harpers Ferry, an important Union railway junction and arsenal. For the strategic implications see Confederate States Army.
During the winter Jackson, displaying his trademark fanaticism, marched a corps west of the Alleghenies through pro-Union west Virginia. Soldiers deserted in droves and many senior officers became convinced he was insane. Of a paper strength of 13, 750 only 5, 400 were present in early March, but Jackson had found in Ashby a charismatic local irregular cavalry commander and along with local militia drafts he acquired a brilliant cartographer who knew the valley intimately.
The situation facing the Confederacy was ominous. The Union blockade had begun to bite and coastal areas were being lost, the army in the west was in retreat and had lost Nashville, but above all Jackson's West Point classmate McClellan had assembled and polished an army of 150, 000 around Washington to strike at Richmond. In a situation analogous to that of Grant at Fort Donelson, Jackson was to deliver good news to a leadership badly in need of it.
He began by assaulting Shields, who was holding Winchester while the rest of Banks's army of the northern Shenandoah redeployed east of the Blue Ridge. Although repulsed at Kernstown on 23 March, the attack deepened the concerns Lincoln entertained that McClellan's plan to take Richmond by a seaborne invasion up the Jamestown peninsula would leave Washington exposed. This had resulted in the detachment of troops to armies under McDowell (covering Washington), Banks (in the valley), and Frémont (west of the Alleghenies). Jackson did not cause this dilution of Union strength, but his campaign was to keep these armies from operating in concert, while depriving the peninsular campaign of the overwhelming numerical superiority McClellan felt he required.
He did this by marching his troops so rapidly over such long distances that they called themselves his ‘foot cavalry’, while by achieving local numerical superiority he multiplied his troops in the minds of the bemused Union commanders. When McClellan disengaged after Kernstown, Washington believed he was abandoning the valley and detached Shields to join McDowell for an advance on Richmond from the north. Jackson redeployed to the south-west, defeating Frémont's advance guard at McDowell on 8 May, and then marched back up the northern Shenandoah turnpike towards Banks, well entrenched at Strasburg.
On receipt of urgent if initially contradictory orders from Lee and Johnston, resolved by an insubordinate appeal to the former over the head of the latter, his priority became to prevent further reinforcement of McDowell by Banks, and to draw troops away from the two-front advance on Richmond. To achieve this he cut across the Massanutten and the southern Shenandoah in mid-valley to join Ewell's Corps. The combined force of perhaps 17, 500 drove between the two Union armies, taking the vital river crossings at Front Royal on 23 May and manoeuvring Banks out of Strasburg. They fell on the Union rearguard and defeated Banks at Winchester on 25 May, drove him north across the Potomac, and then seized Harpers Ferry, sending shock waves to Washington.
By now, without changing his austere and secretive leadership style, Jackson's apotheosis was at hand. After he arrested the commander of his old brigade for disobedience at Kernstown, his officers learned not to second-guess his orders. Ewell wryly commented: ‘I never saw one of Jackson's couriers approach without expecting an order to assault the North Pole.’ But he would have done so, and his men would have believed it possible if they knew ‘Old Jack’ thought it was. The alchemy of command turned a ragged rabble of ill-equipped, often unshod, and always hungry and tired individualists into a proud army which delivered performances that in their wildest dreams few generals in history have asked, still less expected, of their men.
Lincoln, at the time acting as commander of the armies, reversed McDowell's advance on Richmond and detached Shields's 20, 000 to return to the valley in an attempt to trap Jackson's army in the north by a mid-valley pincer movement in combination with Frémont from the west. The results of this were uniformly disastrous for the Union in Virginia. Instead of facing armies converging on two fronts, Johnston was left to deal only with McClellan, who had furthermore rendered his right wing vulnerable by overextending it to link up with McDowell. On 31 May-1 June the Confederates attacked and halted McClellan's advance at Seven Pines, a setback made all the more significant when Johnston was severely wounded and replaced by the far more aggressive Lee.
Back in the Shenandoah, Jackson had to scramble to extract his army from Union encirclement, prevented by his earlier precaution of fortifying the Allegheny passes, which forced Frémont to march well to the north before entering the valley, where Ewell hit him at Strasburg, buying further time. But at the end of the first week of June Jackson turned to face Frémont's and Shield's armies, which together greatly outnumbered him, advancing on either side of the south fork of the Shenandoah at the southern end of the valley, with a reinforced Banks advancing in support. A Union breakthrough would have put them behind the already outnumbered Lee.
At the battles of Cross Keys and Port Republic on 8-9 June, the Union armies were defeated in detail by Ewell and Jackson and retreated up the valley. Freed to join Lee, the Army of the Shenandoah and its exhausted leaders performed poorly during the Seven Days battles, but it was largely thanks to their efforts that by then a near-certain Confederate defeat had been averted.
Bibliography
- Tanner, Robert, Stonewall in the Valley (Mechanicsburg, Pa, 1996)
— Hugh Bicheno
