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

by S. C. Gwynne

  The reaction of Southerners to such Northern expressions of sympathy was horror mixed with disbelief that their brethren could possibly wish upon them the fate that Brown had planned. To Southerners and particularly to Virginians, whose state had been invaded, Brown was a terrifying figure, the dark, avenging side of the antislavery movement that had been on view for five years in the bloody civil war in Kansas—where Brown and his Free State volunteers had murdered five men in 1856. He had, after all, intended to arm slaves and set them free, which presumably meant setting them upon their masters, which meant that people in Connecticut and Massachusetts were now endorsing the violent deaths of white men, women, and children all over the South. “This mad attempt by a handful of vulgar cutthroats, and its condign punishment,” wrote the Reverend Robert Lewis Dabney, an important Presbyterian leader in the South and later chief of Jackson’s staff, “would have been a very trivial affair to the Southern people, but for the manner in which it was regarded by the people of the North. Their presses, pulpits, public meetings and conversations, disclosed such a hatred of the South and its institutions, as to lead them to justify the crime, involving though it did the most aggravated robbery, treason and murder; [and] to exalt the bloodthirsty fanatic who led the party, to a public apotheosis.”16

  Those sentiments were replicated all over the South, and the complaints became more grievous as more became known about the wealthy Northern benefactors who had helped Brown finance his enterprise. Wrote Henry Kyd Douglas, a Virginian and another member of Jackson’s staff in the war: “There is nothing in the history of fanaticism, its crimes and follies, so strange and inexplicable as that the people of New England, with all their shrewdness and general sense of justice, should have attempted to lift up the sordid name of that old wretch and . . . to exalt him among the heroes and benefactors of this land. . . . Why they should have sent him money and arms to encourage him to murder the white people of Virginia is beyond my comprehension.”17

  Though some Northern politicians tried to blunt the effect of the Northern response, the damage—and it was very deep, emotional damage—had been done. The reaction to the event now loomed larger than the event itself. “The Harper’s Ferry invasion has advanced the cause of disunion more than any event that has happened since the formation of the government,” wrote the Richmond Whig and the Richmond Enquirer under a single byline. “Thousands of men who, a month ago, scoffed at the idea of a dissolution of the union . . . now hold the opinion that its days were numbered.”18 In Jackson’s letter to his nephew in January 1861, in which he had put forward the disturbing idea of a “black flag” war, his pointed reference—“if the free states . . . excite our slaves to servile insurrection in which our Families will be murdered without quarter or mercy”—was to John Brown’s raid. It had apparently changed Jackson’s way of thinking about his Northern brethren, too.

  • • •

  Still, Jackson had remained—like the town of Lexington—“strong for the Union.” Indeed, most of the state of Virginia, in spite of this new sense of vulnerability, remained in favor of the Union. But all this would change, with astounding speed, over the course of three days in the month of April 1861.

  There had been a sort of giddiness in the air anyway that winter and spring. Lincoln’s election on December 20, 1860, had prompted the immediate secession of seven Southern states: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Society in the Old Dominion and other “border” states trembled with anticipation, of what nobody quite knew, though perhaps it was simply the possibility of moral clarity, after so much political bombast. Whatever the cause, an odd sort of social intoxication seemed to grow in direct proportion to the bitterness and fatalism of the political debate, and it took the outward form of happiness. “The winter of 1860–1861 was with us one of unprecedented gaiety,” wrote Confederate memoirist Charles Minor Blackford of the town of Lynchburg, though he could have been describing many other Virginia towns. “The spirit of fun and frolic seemed to take possession of our people both young and old, and for months entertainments were given. Party after party succeeded each other in rapid succession.”19 Though Virginia remained within the Union, secession flags were being raised all across the state, including on the campuses of VMI and Washington College. In one instance, Major Jackson had discovered a piece of cloth hanging from a flagpole where the American flag usually hung. It turned out to be a crude secession flag with the words “Hurrah for South Carolina” written in shoe blacking. Jackson ordered it removed.20 Public debates had, meanwhile, grown more and more strident: Jackson’s father-in-law, for example, Dr. George Junkin, president of Washington College, was strongly critical of anyone who supported secession. He became a fixture at the increasingly common public gatherings, once arguing that secession was “the essence of all immorality.”21

  The issue of secession came to a head for Lexington—and for Jackson—on the evening of April 13. VMI cadets who supported secession marched from campus into town, where they were greeted by a hostile, overwhelmingly pro-Union crowd consisting mostly of members of a local militia company.22 There was some pushing and shoving, and a few threats were issued; but peace held, and the secessionists soon hoisted their fifteen-star flag of the Southern Confederacy, with the motto “Union of the South,” from a pole erected near the courthouse.23 Speeches were made, including several by VMI faculty members.24 Pleased with its success, the secessionist group started to disperse. The Unionist group stepped forward and raised the Stars and Stripes on its own pole. But the cadets had managed, the night before, to sabotage the pole, which snapped and fell. The cadets cheered.

  At that point, the mood of the assembled crowd changed. Taunts were made, blows exchanged.25 An intoxicated militiaman drew a revolver and knife on several cadets. When one cadet returned to the institute and announced that cadets were being assaulted by Unionists, “the effect was instant and magical,” wrote former cadet Charles Copland Wight. “Everyone rushed for his gun and a cartridge box and then all rushed pell mell for town.”26 Almost two hundred of them arrived, loaded their muskets, fixed bayonets, and prepared to charge the militiamen, who seemed fully prepared to stand their ground.

  Into the incipient battle now strode Colonel Francis H. Smith, the school’s superintendent, along with several faculty members, including Jackson. He insisted that he was their commander and that if they were going to fight it would be under his command. With Jackson’s help, he managed to stop them and persuade them to return to their barracks. It is unclear exactly what Jackson did, but according to the local Presbyterian minister, were it not for his intervention, “blood would have been shed.”27 When the cadets got back to the institute, still in high spirits, Smith berated them for being “unwise and unsoldierly.” Then two other professors stepped forward with their own, more gentle remarks. As they spoke, however, cries went up through the hall—no one was sure if they were serious or joking—for “Old Jack” to address the crowd. Considering who Jackson was, what the cadets apparently thought of him, and the gravity of the situation, it was a strange request. Still, Smith seemed to think it was a good idea, too. He turned to Jackson, who was seated next to him. “I have driven the nail in,” he said, “but it needs clinching. Speak with them.”

  To the surprise of many of the cadets, Jackson mounted the rostrum. For those who witnessed it, what happened next was an astounding transformation, one that many would talk about for decades to come. “Military men make short speeches,” Jackson began, in a tone of voice unfamiliar to his charges, “and as for myself I am no hand at speaking anyhow.” There was something about his voice that caught the cadets’ attention, a hint that the man on the rostrum was no longer their eccentric professor, a man they sometimes called Tom Fool, the object of teasing and jokes around the institute. Jackson continued: “The time for war has not yet come, but it will come, and that soon. And when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.”


  That was all. Draw the sword and throw away the scabbard. Perhaps it was the simplicity of those words, or their saber-thrust directness. But as Jackson turned and stepped to his seat, the room, until now tense and murmurous, erupted in a series of cheers, one after another, that rang through the barracks. The force of his words—their sheer implausibility—had shocked and dazzled the young men. Instead of the awkward physics teacher, what they saw before them was a soldier and, watching his flashing eyes and intent expression, they were reminded of those stories of the Mexican-American War they had heard. “Hurrah for Old Jack!” they shouted, themselves amazed that they were hurrahing the eccentric major, and continued shouting it long after the meeting was dismissed. And they never forgot it. Fifty years later, one of them wrote, “The thrilling effect of those words is felt by the writer to this day. They touched the heart of every boy who heard them, and men now gray will tell of the enthusiastic cheers which drowned all further speeches.”28

  Now the tide of secession and war began to sweep in quickly. What settled the matter for Virginians—with the same galvanizing speed with which the attack on Sumter had united the North—was a proclamation, issued on April 15 by Abraham Lincoln, calling on the states that had not seceded to provide 75,000 troops “to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union,” and also “to execute the laws of the Union, [and] suppress rebellions.” Virginians knew what this meant: armed coercion. It meant that 2,340 sons of Virginia (the state’s quota) were going to be used as a military force against the sons of Georgia and Texas and other Confederate states. If Lincoln was calling for war on the Confederate States of America, the subtext was also clear: these troops would be used against any state that left the Union.

  The reaction in Virginia was swift and, this time, sure. Governor John Letcher, a pragmatist who had opposed secession, now cabled furiously back to Washington on the sixteenth. “I have only to say that the militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purposes as they have in view,” he wrote. “Your object is to subjugate the Southern states, and a requisition made upon me for such an object . . . will not be complied with. You have chosen to inaugurate civil war.”29

  On April 17, Virginians learned that their militia had already been dispatched to seize both the federal armory at Harpers Ferry and the enormous naval yard at Norfolk. That same day the state convention voted 88 to 55 to secede from the Union (though Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley voted 12 to 5 against secession).

  If the cadets who marched to Richmond with Thomas Jackson four days later had been asked why they were doing it, few would have replied that it was because of their convictions about slavery, or their beliefs about state sovereignty or any of the other great national questions that had been debated for so long. They would have told you then—as most of Stonewall Jackson’s soldiers in the army of the Confederate States of America would have told you later—that they were fighting to repel the invaders, to drive the Northern aggressors from their homeland. That was why Virginia went to war. The great and complicated political reasons for secession, thundered about in Congress and in the state legislatures, were not their reasons, which were more like those expressed by a captive Confederate soldier, who was not a slaveholder, to his puzzled Union captors. “I’m fighting because you’re down here,” he said.30 To Jackson, Lincoln had launched a war of aggression against sovereign states. That was why he fought, why he believed that God could not possibly be on the side of the aggressor. The Northern response to John Brown’s raid had proven beyond a doubt the North’s malign intent. Now, finally, soldiers were coming. “Had [Lincoln] not made war upon the South, Virginia would not have left the Union,” wrote William Thomas Poague, who would fight as a gunner under Jackson, and whose view was typical of Virginians in the war. “The North was the aggressor. The South resisted her invaders. History will vindicate her course.”31

  CHAPTER THREE

  FATE INTERVENES

  They traveled north, thirty-eight rough miles through the green brilliance of the Shenandoah spring, through drifts of dogwood blossoms so thick they looked like snow on the ground. At Staunton they took a special train east, crossing the Blue Ridge Mountains and then dropping down across the river-and-stream-crossed plateau of the Piedmont country, watching as the flawless farms, timbered hillsides, and swelling meadows floated by in the windows of the train. Though none of them could have known it then, this was one of the last glimpses they would ever get of the old South, a place as yet unvexed by war and unmarked by the ravages of sprawling, rapacious armies. That was all to come. Soon it would be impossible to find even a small corner of Virginia that had not been deeply scarred. When Major Thomas J. Jackson and his 176 charges arrived on the night of April 22, 1861, Richmond, a steepled brick city of forty thousand that rose sharply from the banks of the James River, was already in the embrace of this great change.

  The city, in fact, was swarming with recruits. They had been streaming in, day and night, since Virginia’s secession. They were conspicuous for their almost complete lack of understanding of military methods and protocols, their fondness for alcohol, their idiosyncratic and often brilliantly colored uniforms, their plumed and sashed commanders, and the atrocious and obsolete weapons they carried—when they carried them at all.1 Many had ancient smoothbore flintlocks that literally could not have hit a barn door at fifty paces. Some carried butcher knives, as though those might be enough to frighten the Yankees back to Maine or Ohio. They were undiscouraged: they marched and countermarched, bivouacked where they could, and looked for someone in authority who could somehow make sense of all this or tell them where they ought to go.

  Into this happy swirl of confusion came Jackson and his cadets, arriving unheralded at the Richmond station. They were desperately needed. Soldiering, as it turned out, was all about drilling and discipline and such inconveniences as adherence to a strict schedule. The cadets, as it happened, knew something about these things. (The usual repository of such skills, the militias, were relics of a bygone era, more like social clubs than functioning military units; though they were supposed to perform three perfunctory drills a year, few did even that.2) Jackson delivered his charges to the Virginia authorities, who put them briefly on review, then put them immediately to work instructing the new recruits. They were just boys, really. But they looked crisp and soldierly and possessed specialized knowledge that was suddenly critical to the war effort—often to the annoyance of the volunteers and militiamen, many of whom saw indignity in the whole idea. “To get up at dawn to the sound of fife and drum . . . to be drilled by a fat little cadet, young enough to be my son, of the Virginia Military Institute, that, indeed, was misery,” wrote a thirty-three-year-old recruit. “How I hated that little cadet!”3 (The cadets would eventually train some 15,000 recruits that year in Richmond.4)

  Having done his duty, Jackson was now curiously adrift, without a command. No new orders had awaited him on his arrival. No one in authority had any immediate plans for him. This was despite the fact that, of 1,200 West Point graduates who were fit for military service at the beginning of 1861, only 300 were in the South, and thus in great and immediate demand in a new country that was planning to repel an invader.5 Overlooked, too, were Jackson’s regular army credentials—four years in the service, including a brief, distinguished stint in the Mexican-American War—that ought to have been highly valued in the chaotic, protomilitary world of Richmond. Jackson left no record of his reaction to this apparently deliberate oversight, though he cannot have been pleased. It appeared that, in some parts of the Southern hierarchy anyway, his reputation as an eccentric martinet had preceded him.

  While he harbored plenty of ambition and earnestly believed he could help the Confederacy’s war effort, he was not the sort of man to push himself on state politicians. “He knew that the estimate formed of his powers by the major part of the people and the authorities was depreciatory,” acknowledged his friend and late
r chief of staff Robert Lewis Dabney. “But he disdained to agitate, or solicit for promotion.”6 His fate, he believed, was in God’s hands, as was the whole of this incomprehensible war, and he preferred to leave it that way.

  Jackson managed to make himself useful anyway. Duty was duty, after all. He volunteered to be an artillery drillmaster, joining other former US Army officers on a training ground at Richmond College.7 His immediate supervisor was the flamboyant John B. Magruder, who had been Jackson’s commander in the Mexican-American War. For the next two days, Jackson, rejoined by twelve of his cadets, instructed recruits in the rudiments of artillery.

  But there was no getting around it. Jackson was, for the moment, lost in the crowd. And a bumptious, jostling crowd it was in that unruly spring, jammed with self-seekers and self-promoters and name-droppers and people with political connections who were clamoring for colonelcies or captaincies or whatever they fancied. “He was not the recipient of any special attention,” wrote one officer who met Jackson at camp. “[He] was very quiet and reticent, having little to say to anyone.”8 Jackson’s dress, especially amid the plumage of the militia officers, was plain verging on shabby, starting with his weather-beaten cap. “From its faded looks it would be fair to judge that he bought it when he became a member of the faculty in 1851,” wrote his friend John Lyle. “His blue cloth coat had no advantage of the cap in smartness of appearance and was, no doubt, of the same age . . . a stranger would not have picked out the man in the faded blue uniform.”9 In these early days Jackson was the man everyone expected him to be: plain, shy, tight-lipped, polite to everyone yet never eager to chat or make small talk; a modest man of apparently modest talents who smiled but never laughed.10