Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson

by S. C. Gwynne

  And now he was prepared to do what he could to stop the imminent horror. His chosen form of activism was characteristic of the man: prayer. He would pray. He would petition God, and God would stop the madness. When he had thought about it some more it occurred to him that he could do even more than that. So he went to the Reverend White with a proposal. “Do you not think that all the Christian people of the land,” he asked White, “could be induced to unite in a concert of prayer to avert so great an evil? It seems to me that if they would thus unite in prayer, war might be prevented and peace preserved.” Jackson believed in the power of prayer; now he was proposing to harness the entire nation to that power, a gigantic, country-sweeping petition sent up to God: a national day of prayer to overturn the political idiocies of the past half century. White encouraged him, and Jackson did what he could to make it happen. Since none of his correspondence on the subject has survived, we don’t know how far he got with the plan. We do know that other Christians in other churches, perhaps sharing his sense of desperation, had proposed the same thing. He pursued it as best he could, writing letters to clergymen in the North and South. His name eventually appeared on several communications from Northern churches supporting the day of prayer.16 The event never came to pass. Jackson prayed ardently over it anyway. When he was called on in church to lead prayers, the wish he invariably expressed was “that God would preserve the whole land from the evils of war.”17

  That did not mean he was not fully prepared to do his duty when the orders came down from Richmond. His main regret, it seemed, was that he was losing his precious Sabbath, the day appointed for the march. On the eve of his departure, he had told Anna that he hoped that “the call to Richmond would not come before Monday,” which would allow him to spend the Sabbath quietly and “without any mention of politics, or the impending troubles of the country.”18 When those orders came anyway, Jackson knelt somberly with her in their bedchamber on Sunday morning. In a quavering voice he read from Corinthians and committed them both to the protection of God. “His voice was so choked with emotion that he could scarce utter the words,” wrote Anna. “One of his most earnest petitions was that, ‘if consistent with His will, God would still avert the threatening danger and grant us peace.’ ” Jackson still hadn’t given up. He was ready to die for Virginia and for the South, but he still did not believe God was going to let this happen.

  If Jackson could seem at times like a Quaker pacifist in a country that was lunging eagerly toward war, there was also a hint, in a letter written in January 1861 to his nephew Thomas Jackson Arnold, of a darker, more complex view. In it he repeated his desire to avert war, but added a qualifier that Arnold found so disturbing that he later edited it out of his own reverent biography of Jackson. “I am in favor of making a thorough trial for peace,” wrote Jackson, “and if we fail in this and the state is invaded to defend it with terrific resistance—even to taking no prisoners.”19 Taking no prisoners. That idea was well outside the mainstream of American political and military thought at the time; no one in a position of power on either side was seriously considering a “black flag” war in the spring of 1861. Jackson went on to say that if “the free states . . . should endeavor to subjugate us, and thus excite our slaves to servile insurrection in which our Families will be murdered without quarter or mercy, it becomes us to wage a war as will bring hostilities to a speedy close.”20 By that he meant making war so brutally expensive for both sides that they would quickly sue for peace. He meant instant, total war. Amid Jackson’s ardent peace prayers, these harder-edged, less charitable thoughts dwelt also.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE IMPERFECT LOGIC OF WAR

  Thus the contented, domestic man who did not want to leave his home to fight a war and, until the very last minute, did not think he would have to. In the end, he chose war because he believed Virginia had no choice and, like most people in the United States of America in the year 1861, Jackson’s first loyalty was to his home state.

  What, then, had sent the professor and his cadets marching down the hill on that pleasant spring day? The answer is maddeningly complex, partly because Jackson’s reasons for fighting had little to do with what had propelled the two sections into the war in the first place. Nor were they the same reasons the seven states of the lower South had seceded in late 1860 and early 1861. Virginia—with the most industry, the most manpower, and by far the most military talent in the Confederacy—had its own ideas, its own political logic, and its own destiny to fulfill. Jackson, quintessentially Virginian, must be seen in that light.

  What had driven the nation to the brink of war—as opposed to what Jackson and his VMI charges were thinking about that day—was a bitter and often bloody, half-century-long clash over the question of the expansion of slavery. For most of that time, the abolition of slavery in the states where it existed had been a marginal issue. Radical Northerners such as William Lloyd Garrison and Henry Ward Beecher advocated it; the mainstream of the Republican Party, including Abraham Lincoln, did not. But what Lincoln and Republicans and Free Soilers and abolitionists of various stripes in the North absolutely did agree on—and were prepared to risk a good deal to get—was the severe restriction, if not the complete prohibition, of slavery in the nation’s new territories and new states. All other political questions, such as those of states’ rights, protective tariffs, and a national banking system, were subservient to this primal, paradigm-shattering, nation-defining question. The antislavery zealot John Brown arose from its darker places, as did the tortured legal arguments of the Dred Scott case. The argument and eventually the war were thus about the future, not the past. They were about the failure, on a grand scale and drawn out over five decades, of Americans to agree on what to do with their westward-booming nation’s three prodigious land acquisitions—the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the annexation of the Oregon Territory from Britain in 1846, and the Mexican Cession that followed the Mexican-American War in 1848. Together these acquisitions had added more than 1.7 million square miles of territory to the United States of America, dwarfing the 375,000 square miles of the original thirteen colonies. They accounted for most of the land west of the Mississippi.1

  The moral and political debate entailed an inevitable calculus of power: whichever side, slave or free, added more states to its roster, the more its representational power grew, and with it the ability to determine the laws of the land. For the South, failure to add new states meant that its parochial interests would be slowly, surely, choked to death. For the North, failure meant living in a nation of slaves, a possibility made frighteningly real by the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857, ruling, in effect, that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in the territories. Neither outcome was remotely acceptable to the nation as a whole. The great political accommodations of the age—the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which prohibited slavery north of latitude 36'30" with the exception of Missouri; the Compromise of 1850, a package of bills that admitted California as a free state, allowed the New Mexico and Utah territories to decide the slavery question by popular vote, and preserved slavery in Washington, DC; and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened those territories to slavery based on popular vote, effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise—represented ever more shrill and ever more desperate attempts to level an unlevelable playing field.

  Those were the reasons the politicians, the statesmen, the newspaper editors, the lawyers, and the intellectuals went to war, anyway. But they did not explain why the average soldier fought. They were not the reasons Virginians such as Jackson and his cadets would have given for wanting to fight Yankees. Jackson had remained generally aloof from national politics. As a slaveholder, he was aware of the congressional debate over slavery in the territories, but not deeply versed in it. He was like many ordinary Virginians of his day: a moderate states’-rights Democrat who favored keeping Washington’s nose out of Virginia’s business and working within the Union to resolve differences. He had no ideol
ogy; he was a Virginian.2 The cadets he taught, moreover—part of that great mass of young men who would do most of the war’s fighting—would have had little understanding of the freakish political complexity of the Compromise of 1850, for example, which attempted to settle the question of slavery in what was essentially the entire American Southwest, plus California. Most would have been unable to parse the meaning of “states’ rights” in the federal Constitution, or fully grasp the reasons for the disastrous splintering of the Democratic Party in 1860—a carefully planned conspiracy intended to inspire Southern secession—which had guaranteed the victory of Abraham Lincoln.3 Virginians were not stupid; they just had more provincial and personal views of the world than the men who rode to battle in the halls of Congress.

  Nor were the Virginians inclined as a whole to buy the idea, hawked loudly by the states of the lower South, that Lincoln’s election meant that the federal government was going to free the slaves and forcibly mix the two races. Lincoln had denied this categorically in his inaugural address. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly,” he said on March 4, 1861, little more than a month before the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, “to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Neither Jackson nor most of his fellow citizens in Lexington believed that the war was about staving off the immediate abolition of slavery. By and large, they abhorred the idea of secession.

  What made Jackson and his cadets want to fight, amid all this swirl of rhetoric, belief, ideology, and implicit threat, were events much closer to home.

  • • •

  The first of those events was an invasion of the state of Virginia. It took place on October 16, 1859, a year and a half before the war’s official start, when the radical abolitionist John Brown and twenty-one of his followers seized the Federal arsenal at the river-junction town of Harpers Ferry in northern Virginia.4 Brown’s object had been to secure muskets and use them to arm local slaves. He then planned to start a guerrilla war whose object was to free all 491,000 slaves in Virginia.5 Having accomplished that, he would then head south, replicating his success in other states. The vision was vast, apocalyptic, and, on its face, ridiculous. The raid was so poorly organized that it looked like a planned martyrdom. Brown never made it out of Harpers Ferry, nor did he even appear to have a plan for escaping, let alone arming hundreds of thousands of slaves. His raiding party managed to kill seven townspeople and wound ten others. Then a group of eighty-six US marines under army colonel Robert E. Lee arrived from Washington, stormed the building where Brown and his men were barricaded, and put a fast and violent end to Brown’s gambit. Ten of the raiders were killed; Brown was captured and turned over to Virginia authorities, who, to avoid a lynching, brought him speedily to trial. On November 2, 1861, he was convicted of treason, conspiring with slaves to rebel, and murder, and sentenced to be hanged on December 2 in nearby Charlestown.

  Rumors, meanwhile, swept the countryside: armed abolitionists were on the march; slaves were rising up; antislavery radicals were coming to Brown’s rescue. None of it was true, but that hardly mattered. Brown’s attack had been implausible enough. What fresh horrors would now descend on the South? In the days following Brown’s sentencing, Virginia governor Henry A. Wise summoned some 1,500 Virginia militiamen to Charlestown. They were put under the command of Colonel Francis H. Smith, Jackson’s boss and the superintendent of VMI, who would supervise the execution itself.6 As additional security, Wise also ordered 85 cadets from VMI to Charlestown. In charge of them were Major William Gilham, commanding an infantry unit of 64 cadets, and Major Thomas J. Jackson, commanding an artillery unit of 21 cadets.7 On November 25 they traveled by stagecoach to Staunton and from there took trains to Washington and on to Charlestown. The Richmond Daily Dispatch called them “the best drilled troops on the ground.”8 Upon arrival, Jackson wrote his wife, Anna, that “there are about one thousand troops here, and everything is quiet.” He added that “seven of us slept in the same room.”9

  On the day of Brown’s execution, the cadets, armed and uniformed in gray trousers and red flannel shirts crossed by two white belts and looking quite dashing, were stationed near the scaffold. Jackson’s artillery unit was about forty yards in front of it.10 His two howitzers—light, short-barreled cannons that were likely loaded with canister, turning them into the equivalent of large, sawed-off shotguns—were ready to sweep the field. Jackson, who had been an artillerist in the US Army, attended to even the smallest details. He was ready for whatever might come. At 11:00 a.m. Brown was led to the gallows.

  One of the best accounts of what followed comes from Jackson himself, who recorded the event in a letter to his wife on the day of the execution. “He behaved with unflinching firmness,” wrote Jackson, noting that Brown “ascended the scaffold with apparent cheerfulness,” and, when asked if he wished to be signaled when the trapdoor was about to drop, “replied that it made no difference, provided he wasn’t kept waiting too long.” Jackson then described the death itself: “Brown fell through about five inches, his knees falling on a level with the position occupied by his feet before the rope was cut. With the fall his arms, below the elbows, flew up horizontally, his hands clinched; and his arms gradually fell, but by spasmodic motions. There was very little motion of his person for several moments, and soon the wind blew his lifeless body to and fro. His face, upon the scaffold, was turned a little east of south, and in front of him were the cadets, commanded by Major Gilham.” Jackson was clearly mesmerized by what he saw, fascinated by both the means of death and Brown’s stoic behavior. “I was much impressed with the thought that before me stood a man in the full vigor of health, who must in a few moments enter eternity. I sent up the petition that he might be saved. Awful was the thought that he might in a few minutes receive the sentence, ‘Depart, ye wicked, into everlasting fire.’ I hope that he was prepared to die, but I am doubtful. He refused to have a minister with him.”11

  Thus Jackson, a firm believer in the punishments of hell, had sent up a prayer for the salvation of the soul of John Brown, a condemned murderer whom Jackson saw—incorrectly—as a godless man. In fact, Brown, who had modeled himself on biblical patriarchs and believed he had been called by God to rid the world of slavery, was every bit as devout as Jackson.12 Jackson could not see him that way, of course. He considered Brown a murderer. It is noteworthy that the two men would later be compared by Northerners, who, in their attempt to understand Jackson’s character, found important similarities between them. And indeed, in the broadest sense, they were not altogether wrong. Both John Brown and Thomas Jackson were hard, righteous, and uncompromising men, religious warriors in the tradition of Oliver Cromwell, the ardently Christian political and military leader in the English Civil War. Both believed beyond doubt that God was on their side. Both believed that they were agents of God and that by killing the enemy they were doing His work. Jackson would have bridled at any such comparison. He saw murder—as opposed to killing men in an official war—as violating God’s law. Though his armies later sent many Yankee soldiers to their graves, there is never any evidence that Jackson, a stickler for duty and obedience, knowingly broke any law.

  What happened in the weeks and months after Brown’s trial and execution amounted to an almost instant revision of history, and it changed entirely the meaning of his raid in the minds of everyone in slave and nonslave America. The first perceptions of Brown and his attack on Harpers Ferry were easily categorized: he may have thought he was working to abolish slavery, but in fact he was delusional, perhaps even insane. And it followed that Brown and his cohort were only a tiny splinter group of radicals and did not represent the way most abolitionists in the North actually felt. That was certainly the quickly expressed view in the North. The antislavery Worcester Spy, in Massachusetts, called it “one of the rashest and maddest enterprises ever.” Archabolitionist William Lloyd Garrison thought that, though it might hav
e been “well intended,” it was also “misguided, wild, and apparently insane.”13

  But at his trial Brown had surprised everyone. He was not only coolly rational but also remarkably eloquent. “I deny everything but what I have all along admitted,” he said,

  of a design on my part to free the slaves. . . . Had I interfered in the manner which I admit . . . in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great . . . every man in this Court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment. This Court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever that men should do to me, I should do so even to them. . . . Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.14

  Brown’s words—and his self-possession in the courtroom—changed everything. These were not the words of a madman and a murderer, as Northerners now saw it, but of a principled religious man who insisted that his purpose had not been to incite rebellion but simply to arm slaves for their self-defense. The change of perception swept quickly through the nonslave states in the days following the trial. The day he was executed, church bells had tolled in many Northern towns and cities; guns fired salutes; sermons were preached on the purity and correctness of his motives; and people all over the North prayed for the soul of this martyr to liberty. Brown’s death was no longer an oddity. It was suddenly a sensation. Henry David Thoreau called him a “crucified hero.” William Dean Howells, a leading Northern intellectual, wrote that “Brown has become an idea, a thousand times purer and better and loftier than the Republican idea.”15 Everyone was suddenly talking about the grandeur and nobility of the man, the rightness of what he had done.