This is the eighth essay in an occasional series. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

Panorama of the Shenandoah Valley, looking east towards the Blue Ridge from Massanutten Mountain (click to enlarge)

Requiem for a Culture

Part 8: The Battle of Front Royal

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

— William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, Act I, Scene III (page 80 in the Vintage paperback edition)

The Shenandoah Valley was of major importance during the War Between the States. Not only was it the “breadbasket of Virginia”, it was also strategically significant for both sides. If controlled by the Confederacy, it was a threat to the Union, a potential spike sticking into the North’s right flank in western Maryland. As long as it was in the northern Valley, the Army of Northern Virginia could tie down Union troops across the Potomac and pose a potential threat to the western defenses of Washington D.C. If, on the other hand, the Valley were controlled by the Union, federal troops could deprive Virginia of much-needed foodstuffs and other supplies. Northern occupation of the Valley also hindered communications between Confederate forces on either side of the Appalachians.

For the above reasons, the Shenandoah Valley was a hotly-contested piece of real estate throughout the course of the war. Numerous battles were fought on its fertile soil, and various strategic locations changed hands multiple times during the fighting.

General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson won a series of important victories there for the Confederacy during the summer of 1862. As a counterpoint, when he ordered the ravaging of the Valley in July of 1864, Union General Ulysses S. Grant wrote:

If the enemy has left Maryland, as I suppose he has, he should have upon his heels veterans, militiamen, men on horseback, and everything that can be got to follow to eat out Virginia clear and clean as far as they go, so that crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their provender with them.

Union General Philip Sheridan carried out Grant’s orders by rampaging through the Valley in the summer of 1864, plundering livestock and provender and burning what his troops could not carry away. His actions were one of the reasons why General Lee’s troops were so close to starvation the following spring at the time of the surrender in Appomattox.

Rather than focus on those grim times, however, this essay will give an account of what was perhaps the greatest Confederate victory during the Valley Campaign of 1862: the Battle of Front Royal.

The Shenandoah Valley lies between the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east and the Alleghenies to the west. The two main forks of the Shenandoah River flow roughly north-northeast and join at Front Royal before emptying into the Potomac at Harper’s Ferry. To travel “up the Valley” is to move southwards; conversely, “down the Valley” means going north. Those descriptions seem counterintuitive, but such are the conditions imposed by geography.

The Valley lies entirely within the Commonwealth of Virginia except for a small portion at its northern end, which is in West Virginia. The ill-defined upper limits of the Valley are somewhere southwest of Roanoke, where the terrain rises to form the plateau of the Virginia Highlands.

I had relatives on both sides of the Blue Ridge, and spent a lot of time in the area when I was a small child, so when I eventually came to study the battles in detail, I was reading about places that I already knew well. The setting of those momentous events consisted of more than just lines on the map — it included places that were familiar to me. Those were mountains and valleys, rivers and roads and towns that I knew and loved.

In effect, a large part of the drama of the Civil War was thus performed in the front parlor of my psyche.

The map below shows the area where the Battle of Front Royal took place, in the central portion of the Shenandoah Valley:

Between Front Royal and Harrisonburg the Valley is divided by Massanutten Mountain, which itself is divided by Fort Valley in its northern half. At various times both Union and Confederate forces used a peak known as Signal Knob at the northern end of the western ridge to survey the terrain and gauge the strength of opposing forces.

The western and eastern ridges of Massanutten converge and close off Fort Valley about midway along the length of the mountain. At that point there is a gap crossed by a winding road leading east from New Market towards Luray. Nowadays this is the route followed by U.S. 211, but in 1862 it was a narrow track with innumerable switchbacks. You can see part of the modern road in the center of the photo at the top of this post, where it winds its way down the east side of the mountain towards Luray.

Keep those features in mind as you read the account of the battle, because they figure prominently in the audacious strategy devised by Stonewall Jackson.

In the early spring of 1862, Union forces commanded by Major General George B. McClellan had begun their campaign in eastern Virginia, with the aim of moving up the Peninsula and taking the Confederate capital, Richmond. At that time, Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley were under the command of Major General Nathaniel Banks. The Union high command determined that not all of Banks’ troops were required in the Valley, and most of them were removed to Washington D.C. to support the Peninsula campaign.

Stonewall Jackson was tasked with harassing Banks’ forces in the Valley in order to keep the troops pinned down there, preventing them from being transferred to the Peninsula. In a series of lightning moves, Jackson won several battles in widely separated parts of the Valley before turning his attention to General Banks.

Banks had garrisoned and fortified Strasburg, near the northwestern end of Massanutten Mountain, and stationed the bulk of his forces there, leaving a relatively small detachment under Col. John Reese Kenly at Front Royal, near the northeastern end of the mountain.

As General Jackson’s forces moved down the western Valley towards Strasburg, he devised an ingenious plan to deceive General Banks with a small decoy force while the main body of his troops crossed Massanutten Mountain and mounted a flank attack at Front Royal.

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