First Battle of Kernstown

Three miles south of Winchester, on a late-winter afternoon in eighteen sixty-two, Stonewall Jackson made the only serious mistake of his Confederate career, and accidentally won one of the war's most consequential strategic victories.

Jackson had been tasked with keeping the Union Army busy in the Shenandoah Valley so that it could not reinforce George McClellan's Peninsula Campaign against Richmond. In late March he learned that Union General Nathaniel Banks was preparing to send two of his three divisions east to join McClellan. Jackson decided to strike the rearguard he believed Banks was leaving behind.

On March twenty-third, eighteen sixty-two, Jackson sent roughly forty-two hundred men against what his cavalry had scouted as a small Federal detachment near the village of Kernstown. The scout was badly wrong. Jackson's men ran into an entire Union division of nine thousand under Nathan Kimball, more than double the Confederate force. The Confederates fought hard through the afternoon, but by evening they were nearly out of ammunition and forced to pull back without Jackson's orders, a breakdown of discipline that infuriated him. It was his only defeat as an independent commander.

But Washington did not see a Confederate defeat. What Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton saw was Jackson attacking, audaciously, when everyone assumed he was retreating. They panicked. They ordered Banks's corps to halt its eastward movement and return to the Valley. They withheld another corps that had been promised to McClellan. The Peninsula Campaign, deprived of the reinforcements it needed, stalled, and Richmond survived.

Jackson lost five hundred ninety Union soldiers to seven hundred eighteen Confederate casualties at Kernstown. But the ripple effects stretched all the way to the Confederate capital. A tactical defeat had produced a strategic masterpiece, and it launched the Valley Campaign of eighteen sixty-two that would make Stonewall Jackson's reputation permanent.