Apart from its brilliant incidents which cannot be here related in detail Jackson's Valley campaign had thus far completely accomplished its strategic purpose. It had detained Fremont and Schenck with 15,000 men in the mountains when McClellan needed them before Richmond. It had kept Banks busy and finally had driven him out of the Valley and into a position from which he could render no assistance to the Federal armies anywhere. Finally it had so greatly alarmed the authorities at Washington that they completely diverted McDowell's 40,000 men from McClellan's reinforcement, sending the major part of that force upon the fruitless errand of destroying Jackson and employing the rest of it in the direct defense of Washington.
All this was precisely what Robert E. Lee had planned and intended, and it was perfectly accomplished. If larger space is here given to an account of this campaign than the size and direct importance of its battles would seem to justify, it is because of the tremendous strategic consequences of the operations involved. Jackson's activity made possible not only Lee's superb campaign of dislodgment against McClellan, but all the stupendous campaigning that followed, including the overthrow of Pope at Manassas, the invasion of Maryland, the battle of Antietam, the Fredericksburg battle and the later Chancellorsville and Gettysburg.
The story of all that will follow in later chapters. In the meanwhile, it is pleasant to record here one step forward in civilization which was made during this campaign and the author of which, Dr. Hunter McGuire, deserves remembrance for his humanity. Until that time, and indeed for long afterwards, surgeons in charge of hospitals full of wounded men, upon falling into the enemy's hands, were treated as prisoners of war. After every battle, therefore, the surgeons of a retiring army, in charge of wounded men from both sides, must make a hard choice. They must either abandon their patients—many of whom were in desperate need of immediate surgical attention, or they must submit themselves to the rigors and sufferings of a military imprisonment, precisely as if they had been taken in battle. As a result of this peculiar barbarism of war the wounded—by the flight of their surgeons—were often left unattended at the critical moment that meant to them the difference between life and death. Many precious lives were needlessly sacrificed to this barbaric military practice.
At the battle of Winchester Jackson captured all the Federal surgeons in charge of the field hospitals there, but instead of sending them to Belle Isle or Andersonville or Libby Prison, he acted upon the suggestion of his medical director, Dr. Hunter McGuire, and released the doctors unconditionally upon the rational and humane ground that surgeons do not make war, and ought not to be subjected to war's pains and penalties, and upon the still more rational and humane ground that it is needful for the care of the wounded on both sides that surgeons shall be permitted to remain at their posts until surgeons on the other side can replace them, regardless of army movements and without fear of being sent to a loathsome prison as a punishment for their faithfulness to their merciful duty.
This step forward in the amelioration of war's horrors was not generally followed up until two years later when, during the tremendous struggle of 1864, General Lee and General Grant, acting upon their own humane impulses and with no authority except the confidence of each that his acts would be approved, agreed that surgeons in charge of wounded men should not be made prisoners of war, but should be subject only to such temporary detention as might be necessary to prevent them from carrying tidings of strategic importance across the lines.
It was Dr. Hunter McGuire who first offered this suggestion in behalf of humanity, and it was Stonewall Jackson who first took the responsibility of acting upon it. To their memory history should accord honor for it.
Jackson's Valley campaign had completely accomplished its chief purpose. It had thrown the War Department at Washington into a panic which is reflected in the dispatches of President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton sent about that time. Neither McClellan nor McDowell regarded the situation in any such serious light as that in which it was viewed by Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Stanton. McClellan and McDowell were trained and educated soldiers, Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Stanton were civilians. The two soldiers perfectly understood that while Jackson had driven Fremont back into the West Virginia mountains and had chased Banks to and across the Potomac, he could not with his meager force—now reduced to less than 15,000 men—sanely cross into Maryland or without madness undertake a serious campaign against Washington. They knew Jackson to be a perfectly sane man, and hence they did not expect him to undertake either of those crazy operations. They were agreed in thinking that the proper course was for McDowell to push on to Richmond and join McClellan there before Jackson could add his force to Lee's.
If they had been permitted to do this, McClellan's force before the Confederate capital would have been sufficient, within three or four days, to overpower all conceivable opposition and to capture Richmond.
But Lee knew how almost insanely the administration at Washington dreaded every threat against that city or the country north of it, and he had successfully counted upon that absurd nervousness to enable Jackson, with 16,000 or 17,000 men, to neutralize McDowell's army of 40,000 in the great game then being played for the possession of Richmond. He had made a zero of Fremont and Schenck in the problem. He had converted Banks's army into a Potomac river-picket guard, and he had compelled McDowell's 40,000 men to remain inactive as a garrison defending Washington.
Never in all the war was so small a force as Jackson's made to neutralize so large a force. By the simple virtue of Lee's masterful strategy and Jackson's extraordinary capacity in execution, 17,000 men occupied 65,000 and kept them completely out of the decisive struggle. And as if to add emphasis to the situation, the 17,000 who had thus paralyzed three or four times their number, were themselves brought upon the field before Richmond in time to play their full part in the critical and decisive actions from which their previous activity had excluded so great a number of their opponents.