Whether he was simply responding to orders from General Beauregard, or sought to be in the vanguard of those acquiring a unique ability to communicate, by approving the selection of men from subordinate units, General Longstreet demonstrated his appreciation for new military technology. Handled as a "classified" project, both Union and Confederate officials "in the know" were eager to capitalize on a visual signal system developed in the 1850s by Assistant Surgeon (Captain) A.J. Myer just before the war. Although Myer, a New Yorker, remained with the North, his assistant in proving the system to the U.S. War Department and Congress, E. Porter Alexander, a young West Point graduate of promise, sided with his native Georgia and the Southern cause. Commissioned a captain of engineers in 1861, he was ordered by President Jefferson Davis to set up a signal system for General Beauregard in the Centreville-Manassas area of Northern Virginia. Beauregard, in turn, ordered a few men be selected for training by Alexander. They were destined to become the cadre of a promised "Signal Corps," a novel concept in history. Among those selected to learn the system (which used a waved flag or, at night, a torch) was Jacob Hite Manning, a 34 year-old farmer from Loudoun County, Virginia.
     Married and the father of three when Virginia seceded - and despite being "middle-aged" for that era -- Manning had promptly enlisted as a private in the "Loudoun Guards," of Leesburg, a pre-war volunteer unit that became Company C of the 17th Virginia Infantry Regiment, a unit serving under Longstreet's command. Coming from old Valley stock, as shown by his maternal namesake, German pioneer Jacob Hite, Manning was a grandson of The Rev. Mr. Nathaniel Manning and his wife, Mary Hite. He stood 5' 11" and had blue eyes, dark hair, and a light complexion. In 1855, he had married a local girl, Catherine E. Dowell (1836-1909), daughter of Colonel Conrad and Matilda Dowell of "Woodbine." His education may have been limited to local resources, but it was evidently adequate to meet Alexander's requirement for literacy on the part of his trainees. Manning subscribed to the oath required of those admitted to "the secrets" of the signal system and entered into training. Detailed to Alexander, the trainees were stationed along the Potomac and elsewhere in Northern Virginia for practice "on-the-job."
     Alexander's critical warning message at Manassas, flagged from "Signal Hill" to the Stone Bridge in July 1861 to call attention to a flanking move, stirred action in Richmond to formalize a signal corps. Congress acted in April 1962, but limited the size to ten captains and ten sergeants, with privates to be detailed from the ranks as needed. The War Department implemented this action in a general order the following month, and attached the organization to the Adjutant and Inspector General's department. Almost as it was being implemented, it was recognized to be unrealistically small for the conflict taking shape, so 21 additional officer billets (a major as senior, plus twenty lieutenants) were provided in the fall of 1862, along with twenty additional signal sergeants, a total of 61 officers and sergeants. Priority for selection was given to Alexander's trainees, and among them was Private J.H. Manning, whose performance was rewarded with a commission as one of the initial ten captains in May 1862. Until the closing months of the war, his service was linked to General Longstreet as Chief Signal Officer (CSO).
     Attached to McLaws' division in August 1862, Manning missed the September Harper's Ferry operation and the battle of Sharpsburg (Antietam) due to illness. Granted a week's leave in late November, he returned to Longstreet for the battle of Fredericksburg in December, while suffering greatly from rheumatism. Spring saw General Longstreet (with Hood and Pickett and his signalmen) conducting detached operations in the Suffolk area of southeastern Virginia. Thus they were absent from Chancellorsville, where "Stonewall" Jackson was struck down by "friendly fire."
     As Longstreet's Chief Signal Officer, Captain Manning normally had at least one Signal Sergeant as his assistant, and at least one subordinate signal officer. His unit - "Manning's signal corps" - probably comprised approximately 12-15 detailed men. (During the Gettysburg campaign, where Signal Lieutenant Eli Duvall served with him, assigned to Hood's division, Manning claimed forage for 20 horses.) In his report of the Gettysburg campaign, General Longstreet cited his signal officer for using his turpentine-burning signal torches to light the hazardous night crossing of the Potomac back to Virginia.
     With the fall, 1863, detachment of Longstreet and two of his divisions (McLaws and Hood) from the Army of Northern Virginia to reinforce the Army of Tennessee under General Braxton Bragg, Longstreet elected to take Manning and a portion of his signal corps with him. Arriving for the battle of Chickamauga, Manning's signalmen went on to provide visual observation reports and communication at Chattanooga, where on Lookout Mountain, Longstreet was often personally at the side of his signalmen. (Accurate signal station reporting of enemy advances was dismissed by General Bragg, but Longstreet defended his men, noting to Bragg that "they had been about two years in that service, and had not made such mistakes before." Nor did they in that case, as Bragg was to learn.) Signal support continued in the siege of Knoxville and later in East Tennessee. Returning with General Longstreet's detached forces to the Army of Northern Virginia in April 1864, Manning was with the general and his party in The Wilderness on May 6, when "friendly fire" struck Longstreet in an eerie repeat of Jackson's wounding the year before. Colonel Sorrel, Longstreet's chief of staff, tells of Captain Manning boldly riding forward alone, extending his arms in signaling to identify the group as friends. While Longstreet was recuperating, Manning was sent, around August 1864, to establish a signal station at Front Royal, communicating with a vital signal post overlooking Strasburg in the Valley and affording "back-door" communication to Richmond by a line of signal stations south to the telegraph line. Thus the stage was set for Manning's final chapter in military service.
     In October 1864, with Longstreet's return, Captain Manning was ordered by General Lee to report to Colonel Mosby. The reason for this exceptional assignment to an officer not entitled by rank to have a signal officer can only be speculative. But for Captain Manning, it was a return to "home turf" and proximity to his family. Two of his young children had died during the war; his wife had fled to the home of her parents; mail between husband and wife had been smuggled through enemy lines. In one of the last actions involving Mosby's men, near Hamilton (or "Harmony," the Quaker settlement outside of Leesburg) on 21 March 1865, Manning, fighting with Captain Glascock's Company D, was shot in the knee. It was a serious wound - he was flat on his back when the surrender at Appomattox took place, and unable to apply for his parole until a month later, May 8, at Harper's Ferry.
     The next decade was difficult for the crippled veteran. Settling in a house in Leesburg, he sought to buy grain and sell fertilizer, then opened a limestone quarry and built a kiln. Even as his family grew, depression in 1872 brought financial ruin; in 1874 he was wiped out and went to Texas, where his wife owned large acreage left to her by her father. Manning's attempt to raise cattle was wiped out again by a depression. Returning to Virginia, his sister bought and gave him 165 acres near Sterling. As the rigors of field service and stress weighed upon him, his general health deteriorated, J.H. Manning succumbed on 13 March 1891 at the age of 63. He was buried in Leesburg's Union Cemetery, where his wife joined him, surrounded by their children, in 1909.

© 2007 - Contributed by David Winfred Gaddy, Tappahannock, VA

For For further details on the signal system employed by both North and South, please visit the Signal Corps Association, 1860-1865 at http://www.civilwarsignals.org on the Internet.

     In addition to references to Capt. Manning and signal operations in James Longstreet's Manassas to Appomattox: Memoirs of the Civil War in America; The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies…; and the "Compiled Service Records" of Captain Manning in the National Archives, the above account draws from extensive research by the writer, including correspondence with family members. Manning's assignment to Mosby is amplified in William A. Tidwell, with James O. Hall and David Winfred Gaddy, Come Retribution: the Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln (1988).