Shenandoah’s Civil War Connection: How Stonewall Jackson Used the Blue Ridge

Most visitors to Shenandoah National Park drive at least part of Skyline Drive, along the crest of the Blue Ridge, taking in views of the Shenandoah Valley. Few realize they're traveling along one of the Confederacy's most useful weapons in the Civil War.

A wall and a highway

From 1861 to 1865, Confederate armies used the Blue Ridge as a natural screen to hide their movements. The valley's geography helped too: running southwest to northeast, it carried Confederate armies heading "down" the valley toward Washington and Baltimore, while Union armies heading "up" it moved away from Richmond.

The mountains also held passes. Both sides used the big ones, such as Rockfish and Thornton gaps, but Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson was uniquely skilled at using lesser-known passes to move troops between the valley and the Piedmont unseen.

Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. Image from the National Park Service's article on Shenandoah's Civil War connection.

The 1862 Valley Campaign

Jackson had lived in Lexington, Virginia, before the war and knew the valley and its mountains well. The brigade he first commanded — later famous as the "Stonewall Brigade" — was drawn almost entirely from the valley and nearby mountains, and it formed the core of his army in 1862. Between late March and mid-June, his men marched more than 500 miles, fought six major battles and skirmished constantly, often on ground they had grown up on. Skyline Drive offers views of all six battle sites:

After Cross Keys and Port Republic, Robert E. Lee wrote to him on June 11: "Your recent successes have been the cause of the liveliest joy in this army as well as in the country."

June 1862: through Browns Gap to Richmond

Jackson withdrew into the mountains at Browns Gap and rested there three days, asking Richmond for 40,000 men to push down the valley, across the Potomac and toward Washington. His campaign had already pulled 40,000 Union troops under Gen. Irvin McDowell away from George McClellan's drive on Richmond. Lee sent him 14,000 reinforcements by rail — in full view of Union prisoners who, once paroled, carried the news to Washington, exactly as Lee and Jackson intended.

Back in the valley on June 12, Jackson sent cavalry ahead spreading word that he would soon march down the valley with 50,000 men or more. Both defeated Union generals, John Frémont and James Shields, kept retreating, and Frémont telegraphed Washington that day: "Jackson is heavily reinforced and is advancing."

On June 16, Lee asked Jackson to come east and strike the exposed right flank of McClellan's army north of the Chickahominy River. Shortly after midnight on June 18, Jackson's men left their camp near Weyer's Cave and began a secret, 120-mile march to Richmond over the Browns Gap Turnpike — a road begun in 1805 by Brightberry Brown and William Jarman.

A historic map of Browns Gap. Image from the National Park Service's article on Shenandoah's Civil War connection.

The deception held. On June 28, ten days after Jackson left, as his men were already fighting McClellan in the Seven Days Battles, Union Gen. Nathaniel Banks still believed "Jackson meditates an attack in the valley."

November 1862: through Fishers Gap to Fredericksburg

After the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862 — still the bloodiest single day in American history — Lee split his army, sending Jackson's newly formed II Corps up the Shenandoah Valley while the rest regrouped between Culpeper and Fredericksburg. When Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside's army appeared across the Rappahannock from Fredericksburg in mid-November, Lee wrote to Jackson on November 18: "I think it would be advisable to put some of your divisions in motion across the mountains."

Jackson had a route ready. On November 20 he told his lead division commander, D.H. Hill, to leave the Valley Pike at New Market and cross by Fishers Gap on the Gordonsville–New Market Turnpike, finished in the spring of 1853 along the Rose River — a more direct and better-hidden way east.

He knew the road thanks to his mapmaker, Jedediah Hotchkiss, who had joined him in March 1862 and been told to map "the Valley, from Harpers Ferry to Lexington, showing all the points of offense and defense." In early November, Hotchkiss rode the turnpike himself, writing to his wife on November 12 that it was "the crookedest road I have ever seen — 19 miles across — but the road is a fine one."

Hotchkiss's Sketch No. 105: from Culpeper Court House up the Gordonsville–New Market Turnpike past Dark Hollow Falls to Big Meadows and down into Page County. Image from the National Park Service's article on Shenandoah's Civil War connection.

On November 23, Lee wrote again that he did not see "what military effect can be produced by the continuance of your corps in the valley." On November 28, 1862, Hill's division led the corps over the mountain. The Staunton Spectator described brigades, artillery and wagon trains stretching "for miles and miles along the turnpike, up the mountain side, and far across the Page Valley," winding so that they "seemed moving in every possible direction."

Fishers Gap or Milam Gap?

Today Skyline Drive has both a Fishers Gap and, about three miles south, a Milam Gap. But the names once overlapped. Stephen Fisher's 216-acre land grant of August 4, 1778, described land "near Milam's Pass," and an 1894 sale of the same tract described it as "near what is known as Milam's pass or Milam's gap." Hotchkiss called the pass Fishers Gap in his orders but labeled it Milam's Gap on his maps. The confusion ended when the land was sold in 1931 to the Virginia State Commission on Conservation, which turned it over to the National Park Service for Shenandoah National Park.

Hotchkiss Map No. 17 labels the turnpike's pass "Milam's Gap." Image from the National Park Service's article on Shenandoah's Civil War connection.

Soldiers from these mountains

The park also preserves land many of Jackson's soldiers called home. John Weakley and Layton Sisk served in the 10th Virginia Volunteer Infantry, made up almost entirely of men from the valley and the Blue Ridge; their families placed memorial stones in the park's Cave Cemetery, which also holds a stone for artilleryman John I. (G.) Cave.

The Cave Cemetery. Image from the National Park Service's article on Shenandoah's Civil War connection.

Sources

Based on "Shenandoah's Civil War Connection," Shenandoah National Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Quotations are from Civil War–era letters, reports and newspapers cited in the article.