Not only did Judah P. Benjamin, the unmilitary lawyer who held the post of Secretary of War, assume to interfere with Jackson's dispositions of his troops without consulting Jackson; his arrogance had an even more astounding manifestation. Jackson was acting in the valley under the command of his superior officer, General Joseph E. Johnston, who had sent him thither, who trusted him implicitly, and who very wisely and properly left to his trained skill and well-approved judgment every detail of a campaign, the general purport of which was all that even Johnston, as commanding general, responsible for results, assumed the right to dictate to such a man as Jackson. Benjamin, the lawyer Secretary of War, was so far ignorant or negligent of those forms and courtesies of military life upon which military success very largely depends that he sent his order directly to Jackson, instead of sending it, as common courtesy and all military usage properly required, through Jackson's commander, General Johnston. This seriously endangered results and it was an affront to Johnston which that officer would have been fully justified in resenting with his own resignation. It was something far worse than an affront. It was an impertinent interference with Johnston's military plans as well as with Jackson's—an interference of ignorance with the activities of knowledge which might easily have defeated operations of the utmost consequence.
It seems incredible, but it is a fact, that General Johnston, the officer at that time charged with the supreme command in Virginia, never knew or heard of the order of the Secretary of War to Stonewall Jackson, utterly disorganizing his plans and directing him to surrender all that he had painfully achieved of strategic advantage, until Jackson's letter to Governor Letcher, tendering his resignation in righteous resentment of the interference and in despair of accomplishing worthy results under such conditions, came to General Johnston in the regular course. For Jackson was far too well educated a soldier to send his letter, even though it was personal and was addressed to the Governor of Virginia, otherwise than through his regular military superiors.
Upon reading that letter and its inclosed communication to the Secretary of War and learning for the first time of Benjamin's interference with Jackson's operations, General Johnston sought to save to the Confederacy the inestimable services of his great lieutenant. He wrote to Jackson as follows:
My Dear Friend:—I have just read with profound regret your letter to the Secretary of War asking to be relieved from your present command, either by an order to the Virginia Military Institute or the acceptance of your resignation. Let me beg you to reconsider this matter. Under ordinary circumstances a due sense of one's own dignity, as well as care for professional character and official rights, would demand such a course as yours. But the character of the war, the great energy exhibited by the government of the United States, the danger in which our very existence as an independent people lies, require sacrifices from us all who have been educated as soldiers. I receive my information of the order of which you have such cause to complain from your letter. Is not that as great an official wrong to me as the order itself to you? Let us dispassionately reason with the government on this subject of command, and if we fail to influence its practice, then ask to be relieved from positions the authority of which is exercised by the War Department while the responsibilities are left to us.[6]
I have taken the liberty to detain your letter, to make this appeal to your patriotism, not merely from warm feelings of personal regard but from the official opinion which makes me regard you as necessary to the service of your country in your present position.
[6] The italics are inserted by the author of this work to emphasize the peculiar stupidity that on both sides in the war permitted ignorance to overrule knowledge and self-assumption to dominate skill. This particular interference came near depriving Lee of the superb genius of Stonewall Jackson as Halleck's interference well nigh lost Grant to the Federal army.
General Johnston's appeal to Jackson to continue in the service in spite of the ignorant, embarrassing, and grossly ill-mannered interference with his operations by the Secretary of War, was supported by a multitude of letters and appeals from statesmen, citizens, generals and common soldiers—many of the latter being men of high social and political distinction who had enlisted in the ranks in a war that all regarded as their own, but whose enlistment had in no wise invalidated their right to speak with authority as representative citizens.
Governor Letcher went at once to the War Department to plead with Secretary Benjamin for the saving of Stonewall Jackson's genius and devotion to the Confederate cause. Benjamin so far yielded as to hold open the question of Jackson's resignation. He had not intended to provoke that. It is doubtful that he would have dared it. He had not intended anything, indeed, except to impress his own authority upon the army. When he understood how great a loss Jackson would be to the cause, and how narrowly his own grossly irregular interference with Jackson had missed compelling the resignations of Beauregard, Johnston, and a host of others in high and low position, Mr. Benjamin became placative in an extreme degree.
In the meanwhile he had sacrificed all that Jackson's energy and genius had accomplished in the Valley and had discouraged the army in a degree and to an extent for which no later efficiency could by any possibility atone. Until Benjamin interfered with him Jackson was master of the Valley, and of all that its possession signified, by virtue of his painful endeavors to achieve that highly desirable result by means of arduous campaigns in snow and sleet and slush and mud. If he had been let alone Jackson would have been in undisputed command of the upper Potomac country; he would have had Maryland and southern Pennsylvania thenceforth always at his mercy; and with reinforcements that might at any moment have been sent to him he would have been in position to threaten Washington in a way possibly to compel the instant withdrawal of McClellan's army from Richmond and the recall of McDowell's from Fredericksburg.
As it was, it was left to Lee to achieve those purposes in much more arduous ways and at cost of great and otherwise needless battles, involving the loss of human lives by tens of thousands, where but for ignorant interference no considerable loss at all would have been necessary.
Let us make this matter clear. If Jackson had been let alone in the Valley, of which he had made himself complete master, his way would have been easily open to the region in rear of Washington. With the opening of the spring of 1862 practically the whole of Johnston's army, then still at Manassas and Centreville, together with the troops at Richmond reinforced from the seaboard and the South, could have been pushed by the valley route into Maryland, threatening Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and the North. If that had been done McClellan would not have been permitted by his government to advance up the Peninsula. His entire force would have been held at Washington or sent northward and westward to meet the Confederate advance. It would have been Washington, the Federal capital, and not Richmond, the seat of Confederate government, that was besieged.
But the interference of a civilian war department spoiled the program and made a mess of the campaign. It resulted in a siege of Richmond which sorely discouraged not only the Confederates but also their friends in Europe who were struggling to secure the South's recognition as an independent power. It rendered necessary the Seven Days' battles presently to be considered, and the campaign against Pope, as damaging and depleting preliminaries to a campaign of aggression which, but for the War Department's interference, would have been undertaken with the full force of the Confederate army, unimpaired by the losses of nearly a dozen battle conflicts.