Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

It was the most grueling of the forced marches for which Gen. Stonewall Jackson was justly famous — 56 miles in 36 hours across the rolling Virginia Piedmont. To move faster, at the beginning his men were ordered to “unsling knapsacks.” They were going to live off the land. But the land didn’t offer much to sustain 23,000 Confederates. On the second day, remembered a South Carolina soldier, Berry Benson, “My only food…was a handful of parched corn and three or four small sour green apples.”

But it was worth it. On the evening of Aug. 26, 1862, Jackson captured Bristoe Station on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad about 40 miles west of Fredericksburg, cutting the Union supply line. Not only that, he now stood between John Pope’s Union Army and the Federals’ main supply depot at Manassas Junction. His soldiers could not only re-sling their knapsacks — they could fill them, too.

Manassas Junction was lightly guarded by a token force of Federal soldiers under the command of Capt. Samuel Craig of Pennsylvania. One of Jackson’s lieutenants, Brig. Gen. Isaac Trimble, gleefully proposed taking it with two picked regiments, the 21st North Carolina and the 21st Georgia: “Give me my two Twenty-ones and I’ll charge and capture hell itself! ”The combative, ambitious Trimble — he had confided to another officer that after the next battle he would be “either a major general or a corpse”— got the go-ahead from Jackson, who later sent Jeb Stuart’s cavalry along as well.

Rumors of Confederate guerrillas had reached Captain Craig, who deployed his men but was himself asleep when the first of his pickets were attacked around midnight by Stuart’s horsemen. The Confederates backed off, lulling the Federals into thinking it was a false alarm. They found out the truth shortly thereafter when Trimble’s men came on “like an avalanche.” Union soldiers fled; the Confederates swept ahead, capturing some 300 prisoners — plus a cornucopia of supplies so incredibly rich as to defy description. “It would be impossible to tell the variety of provisions and other goods we found here,” Benson wrote. The Confederate general A.P. Hill reported two miles of railroad cars. Pvt. John H. Worsham of the Stonewall Brigade wrote of “vast storehouses filled with everything to eat, and sutler’s stores filled with all the delicacies, potted ham, lobster, tongue, candy, cakes, nuts, oranges, lemons, pickles, catsup, mustard, etc.”

Dawn revealed the full extent of the treasures. Stuart’s cavalry helped themselves. “The quantity of booty was very great,” Heros von Borcke of Stuart’s staff wrote, “and the amount of luxuries absolutely incredible. It was exceedingly amusing to see here a ragged fellow regaling himself with a box of pickled oysters or potted lobster; there another cutting into a cheese of enormous size, or emptying a bottle of champagne; while hundreds were engaged in opening the packages of boots and shoes and other clothing, and fitting themselves with articles of apparel to replace their own tattered garments.”

“Fine whiskey and segars circulated freely,” elaborated the South Carolinian J.F.G. Caldwell, “elegant lawn and linen handkerchiefs were applied to noses hitherto blown by thumb and forefinger, and sumptuous underclothing was fitted over limbs sunburnt, sore and vermin-splotched.”

Trimble placed guards over the stores. When the Stonewall Brigade marched in from Bristoe, hungry soldiers pushed past these sentries, whose numbers were strengthened to push the men back. A bloodless, intra-Confederate battle began. In a flanking maneuver, some of the famished soldiers discovered a commissary depot. According to John O. Casler of the Stonewall Brigade,

I soon found, in one corner of the second story, a room full of officers’ rations and several soldiers supplying themselves with coffee, sugar, molasses, etc. When we had appropriated all that we could carry, we found a barrel of whiskey, which we soon tapped; but as our canteens were full of molasses, and our tin cups full of sugar, we had nothing to drink out of. We soon found an old funnel, however, and while one would hold his hand over the bottom of it, another would draw it full. In this way it was passed around.

Hill’s soldiers followed the Stonewall Brigade. Sounding personally affronted, General Trimble wrote in his report: “It was with extreme mortification that, in reporting to General A. P. Hill about 10 o’clock, I witnessed an indiscriminate plunder of the public stores, cars, and sutler’s houses by the army which had just arrived, in which General Hill’s division was conspicuous, setting at defiance the guards I had placed over the stores.”

Long-range shelling from a Union battery interrupted the festivities. It would have to be silenced — along with its probable accompanying Federal infantry. Around 9,000 Confederates were sent eastward to meet the threat, first from New York soldiers under Col. Gustav Waagner, next from a New Jersey brigade under Gen. George Taylor. Unbeknown to each other, they had both been sent to retake the junction from what was assumed to be a small force of Confederate guerrillas.

Waagner wisely retreated when he discovered the “guerrillas” outnumbered him about nine to one. Taylor was less perceptive. He deployed his regiments in a line of battle that the Confederates remembered as a “grand sight,” until it was ripped apart by shot and canister from 28 cannons along with massed volleys from Confederate infantry. The Federals came on, brave and too inexperienced to realize just how extensively they were outmanned and outgunned.

Here Jackson did an uncharacteristic thing. He ordered his men to cease firing and rode out in front of the line waving a white handkerchief, calling on the Yankees to surrender. In response, a New Jersey infantryman fired his musket at the general. Jackson turned back. The uneven contest continued, turning into a rout a few minutes later. Hundreds of Union soldiers were killed or wounded.

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By the time the Confederates returned from their victory, the junction warehouses had settled into a somewhat more orderly scene. Stores were now being officially distributed, and each man was ordered to take four days of rations. The order was obeyed, after a fashion. “What do you think they did?” Worsham wrote. “Begin to eat. Oh no. They discussed what they should eat and what they should take with them…I know one that took nothing but French mustard, filled his haversack and was so greedy he put one more bottle in his pocket. This was his four days’ rations, and it turned out to be the best thing taken, for he traded it for meat and bread, and it lasted him until we reached Frederick City” — 10 days later.

That evening Jackson ordered his men to destroy what could not be carried away. “All the storehouses and depots were filled with straw and hay,” von Borcke wrote, “and combustibles were also placed in forty-six railway cars, which had been pushed closely together…Just as the sun was disappearing behind the range of distant hills, the flames were rising from a hundred different points of the plain.”The sight, he continued, was one of “strange mysterious splendor.”

South Carolina’s Benson remembered sleeping in an open field the night before, huddled together with other soldiers to keep warm. He contrasted that with the night of Aug. 27: “Now we had blankets, and the whole field was lit up by burning cars. Shells and ammunition boxes were bursting in the flames, the pieces every now and then dropping amongst the sleeping men. But the chance of getting hit kept nobody awake.”

For now the men could relish their loot. “The appearance of the marching columns was novel and amusing,” recalled Jackson’s youthful staff officer Henry Kyd Douglas.“Here one fellow was bending beneath the weight of a score of boxes of cigars, smoking and joking as he went, another with as many boxes of canned fruits, another with coffee enough for a winter’s encampment, or perhaps with a long string of shoes around his neck, like beads.” Jackson, austere even amid such bounty, withdrew, but allowed his men their fun. He could likely foresee the coming cataclysm at Bull Run, a rematch even bloodier than its predecessor battle a year before.

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Sources: Edward Porter Alexander, “Fighting for the Confederacy”; Susan Williams Benson, ed., “Berry Benson’s Civil War Book: Memoirs of a Confederate Scout and Sharpshooter”; Heros von Borcke, “Memoirs of the Confederate War for Independence”; Henry Kyd Douglas, “I Rode With Stonewall”; Douglas Southall Freeman, “Lee’s Lieutenants,” Vol.2; “Robert E. Lee,” Vol. 2; G.F.R. Henderson, “Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War,” Vol. 2; John J. Hennessy, “Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas”; James I. Robertson Jr., “General A.P. Hill” and “Stonewall Jackson”; John H. Worsham, “One of Jackson’s Foot Cavalry.”

Ben Cleary is a writer and teacher in Mechanicsville, Va.