First Winchester: Jackson Sends Banks Running

Winchester, Virginia changed hands as many as seventy-two times during the Civil War by one historian's count, which says everything about its position at the northern gateway of the Shenandoah Valley. The first major battle fought here, on May twenty-fifth, eighteen sixty-two, set the pattern for what the town would endure over the next three years.

By the spring of eighteen sixty-two, Stonewall Jackson had been running up and down the Shenandoah for months, fighting a campaign designed not to capture ground but to pin down Union armies and prevent them from reinforcing the major offensive against Richmond. His immediate target was Union General Nathaniel Banks, a Massachusetts politician turned general who had set up a strong defensive position south of Winchester.

Jackson outflanked Banks by moving through the Massanutten Mountain gap, capturing Front Royal to the east on May twenty-third, and threatening to cut off the Union retreat. Banks recognized the danger and pulled back toward Winchester. Jackson's men followed, harassing the Union columns the whole way north. At dawn on May twenty-fifth, Jackson attacked Winchester itself with sixteen thousand Confederates against about sixty-five hundred Federals.

The battle lasted three hours. Banks' army broke. Nearly one third of his force became casualties as the Union troops fled north through the streets of Winchester toward the Potomac River. Jackson's men entered the town to a scene described by residents as the most jubilant in Winchester's history. Confederate General Richard Taylor later wrote that the streets were one mass of cheering, screaming women and children.

The panic rippled all the way to Washington. President Lincoln himself was alarmed enough to redirect Union forces toward the valley rather than Richmond. Jackson had achieved the campaign's central objective: with sixteen thousand men, he had paralyzed more than fifty thousand.