What happened at the First Battle of Kernstown?
On 23 March 1862, acting on a cavalry report that only a small Union force remained at Winchester, Stonewall Jackson attacked near Kernstown and ran into Shields’s whole division, led that day by Colonel Nathan Kimball. After hours of fighting on Sandy Ridge the Confederates ran low on ammunition and retreated. It was Jackson’s only defeat, yet it alarmed Washington enough that Lincoln kept troops in the Shenandoah Valley and near the capital that McClellan had counted on.1
Stonewall Jackson lost only one battle in his two years of Confederate service, and he lost it on a Sunday just south of Winchester, Virginia. Kernstown was a tactical defeat that still did what his superiors wanted, and it opened the Shenandoah Valley Campaign that made his name.2
Who won the First Battle of Kernstown and why?
The Union won the battle. Kimball’s division held Pritchard’s Hill, fed fresh regiments onto Sandy Ridge and drove Jackson’s outnumbered, exhausted brigades from the field at dusk. The Confederates won the campaign: the attack convinced Lincoln that Jackson was stronger than he was, and troops meant for McClellan’s drive on Richmond were kept back.3
Background: holding the Valley
In the spring of 1862 the Union’s main effort was General George B. McClellan’s campaign against Richmond, and the Shenandoah Valley was a side theater. Jackson commanded the Confederate forces there. His orders from his superior, General Joseph E. Johnston, were to keep the Union troops in the Valley from moving east to join McClellan.4 › The Seven Days Battles, 1862
He had very few men to do it with. The National Park Service puts Jackson at barely 4,000 at Winchester against some 20,000 under Major General Nathaniel Banks; Encyclopedia Virginia and the American Battlefield Trust write of 38,000 Union soldiers gathered for the advance into the northern Valley. On 11 March, faced with overwhelming numbers, Jackson gave up Winchester and fell back south, while still looking for a chance to strike.5
The chance seemed to come within days. Banks began to send part of his army east, toward Washington and McClellan. Shields’s division went south after Jackson, pushed as far as Woodstock without catching him, and was back at Winchester on 19 and 20 March. Shields reported that Jackson had left the Valley, and Banks sent Alpheus Williams’s division east and set out for Washington himself on the 22nd, leaving Shields alone at Winchester.6
Armies and commanders
Jackson’s little army consisted of three infantry brigades under Brigadier General Richard Garnett, who commanded Jackson’s own old Stonewall Brigade, and Colonels Jesse Burks and Samuel Fulkerson, with artillery and Colonel Turner Ashby’s 7th Virginia Cavalry. Henderson, Jackson’s biographer, describes the men as brave but not yet seasoned soldiers.7
Their commander was thirty-eight. Born in 1824 at Clarksburg in what is now West Virginia, Thomas J. Jackson had graduated from West Point, fought in the Mexican War and then taught at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. At the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861 his brigade’s stand had earned him the name “Stonewall”.8 › The First Battle of Bull Run, 1861
On the Union side, Shields’s division had three brigades under Colonels Nathan Kimball, Jeremiah Sullivan and Erastus Tyler, with cavalry and a strong artillery. The division had only just changed hands: its first commander, Frederick Lander, had died on 2 March, and Shields had taken over days later. On 22 March, in a skirmish with Ashby south of Winchester, Shields was wounded by a shell fragment, and command on the field passed to Kimball.9
The strength of the two sides is given differently in every account. Jackson reported 3,087 infantry present, of whom 2,742 were engaged, with 290 cavalry and 27 guns, 18 of them in action. Shields reported that his force did not exceed 7,000: 6,000 infantry, 750 cavalry and 24 guns. Modern counts run from 3,500 Confederates against 6,352 Union troops (Encyclopedia Virginia) to 3,800 against 8,500 (American Battlefield Trust), with the National Park Service at about 3,700 against 7,200 engaged.10
The commanders’ decisions
Each general misread the other. After the skirmish of the 22nd Ashby told Jackson that only four regiments of infantry, with some guns and cavalry, remained at Winchester and that even these were about to leave; local people who had been inside the Union lines said the same. In fact Shields had kept most of his division out of sight, and his whole force was still there.11
Jackson hurried north, and his tired brigades reached the field early in the afternoon of the 23rd after two days of hard marching, with many men left behind along the road. He first meant to rest them and attack the next morning, but, as he explained in his report, the Federals could see his troops, and reinforcements might come up in the night, so he decided to fight at once. He did not like doing it on the Sabbath: in a letter to his wife he wrote that he had felt it his duty, and hoped never again to be so placed.12
Kimball had his own problem: a wounded superior. From his bed in Winchester, Shields sent orders to push the enemy away, sure that only Ashby’s cavalry stood in front. By his own account, Kimball concluded that Shields did not understand the situation and decided to stay on the defensive on good ground, asking for reinforcements instead. The American Battlefield Trust agrees that he was right to wait, since Shields’s information was always out of date by the time it arrived.13
The battle, in phases
Morning: Pritchard’s Hill. At about nine on the morning of Sunday, 23 March, Ashby’s cavalry, with a battery and four companies of the 2nd Virginia Infantry sent ahead to support him, opened the battle near the hamlet of Kernstown. Kimball gathered his troops and guns on Pritchard’s Hill, a knoll just west of the Valley Pike that made an outstanding defensive position, and the Union artillery there drove off Ashby’s attempts to get around the flank. Sullivan’s brigade, by Kimball’s account, held the line east of the road.14
Afternoon: the turning march. Jackson judged an attack on Pritchard’s Hill unwise. Leaving Burks’s brigade near Kernstown, he sent artillery and his other two brigades, Garnett’s and Fulkerson’s, west to Sandy Ridge, a wooded rise that outflanked the Union position. The columns crossed open, muddy fields under the fire of the Union guns and reached the woods. When his aide Sandie Pendleton reported that they might be facing as many as 10,000 men, Jackson told him, as both the National Park Service and Encyclopedia Virginia quote it: “We are in for it.”15
Four o’clock: the fight at the wall. Kimball sent Tyler’s brigade, five regiments, to meet the move, and at about four it ran into the Confederates on the ridge. Halfway across a clearing ran a stone wall; Fulkerson’s men reached it first and poured a heavy fire into the Union line as it came out of the woods. The Union attack stalled in front of it.16
For well over an hour the two lines fought at close range. The Stonewall Brigade came up on Fulkerson’s right and Jackson fed in the regiments he had on the ridge, but he could only hold the line. The National Park Service writes that Tyler was saved only by Kimball’s reinforcements and the guns on Pritchard’s Hill; Henderson quotes Shields’s own admission that the struggle had for a short time been doubtful.17
Turning point: the wall is given up
By half past four the fight on the ridge had become a stalemate, but Kimball still had reserves, and he fed them in: most of his own brigade and part of Sullivan’s, drawn from the left of the line. The Confederates, already outnumbered, had committed every man they had on the ridge. By about six most of the troops behind the wall were out of ammunition and worn out.18
Seeing fresh Union troops coming, Garnett ordered the Stonewall Brigade to fall back while it could still retreat in order. He did it on his own responsibility, without orders from Jackson, and the units beside him had to follow. Jackson, who had been watching another part of the field, was furious and tried to rally the men, but the line could not be restored. For some of the Confederates the withdrawal turned into a flight.19
Two fresh regiments, the 5th and 42nd Virginia, came up too late to counterattack and instead covered the retreat from behind a wall and a stretch of timber. By Kimball’s own account his men pushed forward with cheers as the sun went down; a Union officer of the 14th Indiana remembered that they advanced in disorder as great as the enemy’s. Nightfall ended the fighting, and the Confederates fell back to Newtown, a few miles south.20
Counting the losses
The official returns, as printed in Battles and Leaders and by Henderson, give Union losses of 118 killed, 450 wounded and 22 missing, 590 in all, and Confederate losses of 80 killed, 375 wounded and 263 missing, 718 in all; the American Battlefield Trust uses the same totals. Encyclopedia Virginia counts 574 Union and 737 Confederate casualties, and the National Park Service about 575 and nearly 740.21
Many of the Confederate missing were taken prisoner. Henderson writes that the Union cavalry rounded up two or three hundred men cut off in the retreat, and Encyclopedia Virginia lists 286 Confederates captured or missing. In his first message to Johnston, Jackson admitted the loss of one piece of artillery and three caissons.22
Aftermath and consequences
The Union pursuit was cautious. Kimball’s men caught up with the Confederate rear guard near Middletown on the 24th, but Banks hurried back to the field, took charge and decided to wait for reinforcements, and Jackson withdrew up the Valley. Williams’s division, already on its way east, was called back to the Valley.23
The real result came in Washington. The Lincoln administration, always anxious for the capital, believed Jackson’s force to be much larger than it was. Blenker’s division was sent from McClellan to western Virginia, and McDowell’s corps, some 37,000 men by Henderson’s count and 40,000 by the American Battlefield Trust’s, was kept back to cover Washington instead of sailing for the Peninsula. On 4 April Banks and his corps were given a separate command, the Department of the Shenandoah.24
In this sense, as the National Park Service puts it, Jackson’s defeat accomplished what Johnston had wanted. Jackson himself saw it that way at once. “Though the battle-field is in the possession of the enemy,” he wrote in his report, “yet the most essential fruits of the victory are ours.” The Confederate general John D. Imboden wrote later that the fight had given the Federals a taste of Jackson’s fighting qualities that stopped the withdrawal of their troops from the Valley.25
Jackson came back. Reinforced by Richard Ewell’s division, he struck west into the mountains and won at McDowell on 8 May; on 23 to 25 May he beat Banks at Front Royal and Winchester and drove him back toward the Potomac; and on 8 and 9 June he defeated the Federals at Cross Keys and Port Republic.26
Legacy and memory
Jackson blamed Garnett. He relieved him of command, placed him under arrest and framed charges for a court-martial, which met briefly in August 1862 and was then suspended by the campaign; Garnett went back to duty and was killed in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg in July 1863. Encyclopedia Virginia calls the charges spurious and says they hurt the morale of the Stonewall Brigade, whose men liked Garnett; the National Park Service judges that retreat was the right decision. Henderson, Jackson’s admiring biographer, agrees that Garnett had no right to retreat without orders, but notes that his four regiments had lost under a fifth of their men when he gave the order.27 › Stonewall Jackson
Kernstown also showed how Jackson would fight. He threw most of his force into a turning movement against the enemy’s flank and, though beaten, left the Union high command looking over its shoulder at the Valley. Henderson calls it a blow struck at the right place and the right time, by no more than 3,000 bayonets; Encyclopedia Virginia says it set the stage for the successful Valley Campaign that followed.28 › The Commanders of the American Civil War
Visiting the battlefield today
The Kernstown Battlefield Association, an all-volunteer nonprofit, owns and preserves the battlefield on the Pritchard-Grim Farm south of Winchester.29
