The Quartermaster by Robert O'Harrow

Author:Robert O'Harrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER 25

“Vast in Quantity”

Events now offered conflicting evidence about which side was winning. Confederate armies dominated battle after battle through grit, sacrifice, superior leadership, and daring. The brash cavalry officer Jeb Stuart became so confident about the superiority of his men that he personally taunted Meigs after capturing a telegraph station. “To Quarter Master Gen. Meigs, Washington—In future you will please furnish better mules,” he wrote in a telegram. “Those you have furnished recently are very inferior.”

Clearheaded leaders on both sides knew that day by day, even as the accounts of their victories were being written, the Confederacy was losing ground in the logistical war. Stoddard, one of Lincoln’s secretaries, later described this dynamic: “As [rebel] resources are to be rightly counted, every battle he fights brings him near his final defeat.” Lee’s strategy reflected this reality. He had to balance the need for battlefield victories against the search for new supplies, while also keeping an eye on political developments that might turn the tide. Lee understood the success of the Confederacy depended not primarily on waning supplies or battlefield victories, but “on his army’s influence on the minds of civilians,” one historian wrote. At the ebb of the Peninsula Campaign, he moved north and west. His scouts and informants learned that McClellan was finally leaving Harrison’s Landing. The Union general aimed to join forces with Major General John Pope, whom Lincoln had named head of the new Army of Virginia.

Lee wanted to get at Pope before that combination could occur. He moved swiftly and secretly toward Virginia’s Piedmont region, and then worked in concert with Jackson’s forces. They skirmished with Pope at the Rapidan River and thereafter as Union forces retreated across the Rappahannock. On August 24, Jeb Stuart’s cavalry mounted a daring night attack at Catlett’s Station. The horsemen not only captured Union soldiers but also found Pope’s baggage and a dispatch book. Lee then made a series of audacious decisions that created new threats to the North. He divided his army of fifty-four thousand in two and ordered Jackson to take twenty thousand men on a rapid forced march into Pope’s rear. Lee told Jackson to cut the rail line to Alexandria and disrupt Union communications.

Jackson’s three hardened divisions had grown used to his extraordinary demands. Now he told them to leave behind their haversacks in order to speed their march. They hustled all night long, going some thirty miles to Manassas Junction. On their arrival, they saw evidence of what the fight against the North really entailed. Packed warehouses, overloaded railcars, and long lines of barrels held one of the great stores of supplies brought into the field during the war. Fifty thousand pounds of bacon, a thousand barrels of salt pork, hills of flour; jellies, coffee, and tea; piles of uniforms, new boots, and rifled muskets; toothbrushes and candles. “The hungry, threadbare rebels swooped down on the mountain of supplies at Manassas like a plague of grasshoppers,” one historian of the war wrote.

As they frolicked,

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