Kernstown, First

On March 23, 1862, Confederate and Union soldiers clashed near Winchester and in Frederick County, Virginia, in an engagement that opened Maj. Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's Shenandoah Valley campaign during the American Civil War.

Jackson hoped to keep Union troops pinned down in the Valley rather than let them slip away to reinforce operations elsewhere; those forces answered to Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks. Acting on faulty information, Jackson believed he faced only a modest detachment led by Col. Nathan Kimball. In truth, he was up against an entire infantry division more than double the size of his own command. His cavalry struck first but was thrown back, prompting him to send in a small brigade of infantry as support. Jackson then tried to swing his remaining two brigades around the Union right flank by crossing Sandy Ridge. This maneuver ran into resistance from Col. Erastus B. Tyler's brigade, and once Kimball's men arrived to bolster Tyler's position, the Confederate line broke and Jackson's troops fell back. The Union side did not press its advantage with any meaningful chase.

Though the fighting itself ended in a Confederate loss, the outcome served Southern strategic interests: it kept Union troops tied up in the Shenandoah Valley instead of freeing them to join the push toward Richmond during the Peninsula Campaign. Coming after the earlier engagement at Hoke's Run, this fight at Kernstown stands as arguably the second of the few defeats Jackson suffered.

Background

Jackson's men had been pulling back toward the southwestern reaches of the Valley, a movement meant to shield the flank of Johnston's army as it retreated from the Centreville-Manassas region toward Richmond. Had this cover not been provided, Banks and his Federal troops could have pushed through gaps in the Blue Ridge to strike at Johnston directly. Winchester fell under Banks's control by March 12, 1862, shortly after Jackson had pulled his troops out and ambled 42 miles up the Valley Pike toward Mount Jackson. Then, on March 21, word reached Jackson that Banks intended to divide his command, sending two divisions, one led by Sedgwick and the other by Williams, back near Washington so that additional Union forces could join McClellan's push against Richmond via the Peninsula. Shields and his division remained behind at Strasburg to hold the lower Valley, though reports suggested his men were pulling back toward Winchester. Banks himself planned to depart the region entirely on March 23.

Johnston had instructed Jackson to keep Banks from leaving the Valley altogether. Reversing course, Jackson pushed his exhausted troops through one of the war's harshest marches, covering 25 miles northeast on March 22 and reaching Kernstown by the following morning after another 15. Ashby's cavalry clashed with Union forces that same day, the 22nd, and during the fighting Shields took a wound to the arm from artillery shrapnel, breaking the bone. Even injured, he directed part of his command south of Winchester while sending a brigade north, creating the impression that the area had been given up. In truth, he stayed close by, keeping himself in reserve.

Command on the field passed to Kimball, who moved the Second Brigade and additional troops along the turnpike. Although Shields had called for a pursuit of the Confederate horsemen, Kimball instead positioned sixteen cannon and eight hundred foot soldiers along the high ground of Prichard's Hill in a defensive stance. Meanwhile, Confederate sympathizers in Winchester gave Ashby faulty intelligence, claiming Shields had left behind only four regiments and a handful of guns, roughly three thousand men, and that these forces were set to march toward Harpers Ferry come morning. Normally dependable in his scouting, Ashby failed this time to confirm the account before relaying it to Jackson. Trusting the information, Jackson advanced boldly northward with a division that had shrunk to about three thousand men through straggling, not realizing he was about to face a Federal force nearing nine thousand strong.

Battle

Sunday morning, March 23, brought Jackson's men marching up from Woodstock, and by about eleven o'clock they stood before Union lines at Kernstown. Though a devout man who ordinarily shunned fighting on the Sabbath, Jackson never let that scruple stop him when he saw a chance worth taking, and this occasion proved no exception. Writing to his wife afterward, he explained his thinking: he believed duty required the attack, since putting it off until morning risked ruin. Looking back, he considered it the wisest course open to him under the circumstances, however painful it felt at the time, and he prayed never to face such a choice again. In his view, both necessity and mercy demanded that his troops fight that day. He reflected that soldiering sometimes forces an officer, if he means to succeed, to act against what his conscience tells him is wrong.

Without scouting the ground himself first, Jackson dispatched Turner Ashby to stage a diversionary strike against Kimball's men along the Valley Turnpike. Meanwhile his main body, consisting of Col. Samuel Fulkerson's brigade and Brig. Gen. Richard B. Garnett's Stonewall Brigade (the unit Jackson himself had first commanded), pushed against Union guns positioned on Pritchard Hill. When Fulkerson's leading troops were thrown back, Jackson shifted his plan, aiming instead for the Union right some two miles to the west along Sandy Ridge, ground that looked empty of enemy troops. Success there would let his men travel the ridge's length and slip behind Union lines, cutting off retreat toward Winchester. Kimball responded by sending Col. Erastus B. Tyler's brigade westward to block this, but Fulkerson's soldiers won the race to a stone wall overlooking a clearing on the ridge. From that high ground, Jackson's aide Sandie Pendleton got a good look at the Union force assembled against them and judged their number at 10,000. When he passed this along, Jackson's only response was, "Say nothing about it. We are in for it."

By roughly four in the afternoon, Tyler moved against Fulkerson and Garnett in an unusual battle formation known as close column of divisions: a brigade front only two companies wide, backed by forty-eight companies stacked in twenty-four ranks, spanning about 75 yards across and 400 yards deep, a shape that made command difficult and gave little punch up front. Despite being outnumbered, the Confederates held on for a time, pouring volleys into the attackers from behind the stone wall. Once Jackson grasped how large the opposing force truly was, he committed Col. Jesse Burks's brigade, kept in reserve until then, but by the time it reached the field near six o'clock, Garnett had already exhausted his ammunition and withdrawn the Stonewall Brigade, leaving Fulkerson dangerously uncovered on his right. The Confederate line dissolved into panic, and Burks's arriving troops were swept up into the retreat rather than able to stem it. Jackson attempted to halt the rout himself, shouting at one fleeing soldier, "Where are you going, man?" When the man answered that his cartridges were spent, Jackson ordered him back to fight with the bayonet, but the soldier paid no attention and kept fleeing. For his part, Kimball made no serious effort to chase down the beaten Confederates.

That evening, camped by the Valley Pike, Jackson sat at a fire with a cavalryman who remarked, half in jest, that word had spread of a retreat, though it seemed the retreat had gone the other way. Jackson, a man rarely given to humor, simply answered, "I think I am satisfied, sir."

Aftermath

The numbers tell a lopsided story in one sense: 590 Union men fell, wounded, or vanished into captivity (118 dead, 450 injured, 22 taken or unaccounted for), while Confederate losses climbed higher still to 718 (80 dead, 375 injured, and 263 captured or missing).

Yet the victors had reason for unease. Lincoln, rattled by Jackson's boldness and the danger it posed to the capital, dispatched Banks back into the Valley with Alpheus Williams's division in tow. Worried that Jackson might push westward and threaten Maj. Gen. John C. Frémont, the president also pulled Brig. Gen. Louis Blenker's division away from McClellan's Army of the Potomac to bolster Frémont's forces. This episode prompted Lincoln to reconsider whether McClellan had left Washington adequately defended while the Peninsula Campaign unfolded, and he concluded the answer was no. As a result, he kept Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell's corps stationed near the capital rather than letting it continue south toward Richmond in support of McClellan's advance. McClellan would later insist that being deprived of these troops cost him his chance to seize Richmond. In this way, the shuffling of Union resources triggered by Jackson's defeat at Kernstown, the single loss of his military career, ended up handing the Confederacy a strategic gain. What followed in the rest of the Valley Campaign was a string of rapid marches and five triumphs against numerically stronger Union forces spread across three separate armies, feats that made Jackson the most celebrated Confederate commander of the war, a status he held until Lee's own reputation eventually eclipsed his.

Jackson himself would not own any blame for the setback. He instead placed Brig. Gen. Richard B. Garnett, commander of the old Stonewall Brigade, under arrest for pulling his men back without waiting for orders to do so. That withdrawal came only after the brigade had absorbed the heaviest Union fire and taken the largest share of Confederate losses, and it left Fulkerson's Brigade exposed on its right flank, forcing that unit to retreat as well and touching off a wider panic. Brig. Gen. Charles S. Winder took over command in Garnett's place. It was not until the following September, during the Maryland invasion, that Lee ordered the charges against Garnett dismissed, though the stain of the court-martial lingered for Garnett more than a year, until death found him at Gettysburg in Pickett's Charge.

The Valley would see fighting again in 1864, when a second engagement took place at Kernstown as part of that year's campaigns.