Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson
Page 15
On April 12, unbeknownst to French, Jackson summoned and interrogated a dozen enlisted men in his office. He promised the interviewees that nothing would happen to them, then proceeded to ask them detailed questions about what they had seen. Where had French and Julia been observed walking together? At what hour? Had anyone seen or heard of any immoral conduct? Had one of them witnessed, through an open window, the two of them together on the captain’s bed? Jackson’s questions could be quite specific, too. When one enlisted man denied having seen the two on a bed together, and said he had only seen “a foot” in the room, Jackson wanted to know if the legs were “bare or covered” or belonged to a man or a woman. Thus it went, the young first lieutenant grilling the reluctant, deeply uncomfortable men. As a criminal investigation, it was a notable failure. A few of the men had seen French walking with the girl, that was all.
Sensing the peril of their position, the men immediately told their sergeant what had happened, and the sergeant, sensing the peril of his position, immediately told French. And French exploded. The next morning he placed Jackson under arrest for conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. He then called in the men who had spoken with Jackson, asked them in detail what had been said, and, for good measure, called in another eight to ask them if they had heard any such assaults on his character. This, too, turned up little of note. Some of the men acknowledged seeing the two together, though they had observed nothing improper. Several of the men acknowledged hearing the story that the “major had taken her for himself” but had treated it as a joke. In any case, no one had seen anything.
Jackson, meanwhile, had concluded that French was at least guilty of unbecoming conduct and proceeded to draw up charges. While he was working on them, he was visited by company surgeon Jonathan Letterman (later to become the medical director of the Army of the Potomac), who begged him to withdraw his accusations because of the pain they would cause French’s popular and likable wife. Jackson listened to him, and his eyes filled with tears. “Inflicting pain on her was agony to him,” wrote his brother-in-law D. H. Hill. “But his conscience compelled him to prosecute the case.”7 In other words, his strong sense of the righteousness of his actions overrode the fact that he was potentially destroying French’s marriage and his career at the same time.
On Sunday, April 13, Jackson sent a letter to Tampa asking for release from arrest and calling for a “Court of Inquiry” on French’s behavior.8 The next day, Jackson filed formal papers. His charge carried four “specifications,” roughly: (1) that French and Julia had had intimate relations; (2) that they had taken improper walks together; (3) that they had taken a walk together outside the fort; and (4) that it was common knowledge among Julia’s prospective suitors that he had “cut them out.” The language Jackson used showed his evident contempt for French, whom he portrayed as a harsh and dishonest man who was “not to be believed as speaking the truth, when his interest in his opinion requires him to speak falsely.” French retaliated by firing off a letter that same day, defending himself from “so malicious a slander and falsehood,” pointing out the innocence of his actions, and asserting that none of the men in the garrison had witnessed anything improper. French wanted Jackson court-martialed. He reminded his superiors that Jackson, feeling wronged, had “adopted the system of non-intercourse, vulgarly styled ‘cutting’ on the ground that he was deprived of his rights,” and cast doubt on Jackson’s motives. French wrote:
Foiled thus in his attempts to have my official conduct reprehended, he altered his course, and descending into the purloins of the camp he has changed his attacks to a charge upon me and my family, but so blindly and upon ground so absolutely untenable that finding himself without a support in proof, he wished to escape from the consequences of his act and be allowed to retire unscathed upon a plea of “a sense of duty.” 9
What happened next was odd, since it was Jackson, not French, who had the weaker case. French started to unravel. He began to see conspiracies where none existed, and began a hunt for informants. On April 16 he accused Second Lieutenant Absalom Baird of conspiring with Jackson to undermine French’s authority, and he placed Baird under arrest. (He would eventually file charges against all of his officers.) He filed eight court-martial charges against Jackson. “When Major Jackson is brought to trial for his outrageous conduct,” he wrote, “the evidence which I will bring before the court will cover him with the infamy he deserves.”
Even odder, all this hysteria and supposed moral calumny at Fort Meade received an ice-cold welcome in Tampa. The new commander there, General David Twiggs, who had been forced to read through many pages of charges and countercharges, found it all preposterous and a waste of his time. He told the two officers to stop what they were doing, to forget the issue, and to resume normal business. He had no intention of dealing with any of it. Jackson immediately accepted Twiggs’s order and sent no further grievances to Tampa.
French, meanwhile, could scarcely believe that he was not going to be allowed to refute the charges against him. Unhappy with Twiggs’s ruling, he applied to General Winfield Scott himself, citing “this most extraordinary case of outrage.” Again, he was turned down flat. French, even more convinced of a large conspiracy, brought charges against surgeon Jonathan Letterman and Lieutenant Amos Beckwith for improper conduct, and court-martial charges against a noncommissioned officer for his role in Jackson’s investigation. Twiggs, in Tampa, considered French now so far out of control that, on October 1, he relieved him of command and transferred him to Fort Myers. But the mortally offended French was not finished. In March of the following year, still trying to rescue his reputation from what Jackson had done to it, he appealed for redress directly to the secretary of war. This finally exhausted the patience of General Twiggs, who relieved French of command at Fort Myers. He also wrote a career-damaging reaction to French’s behavior. French, he said, “has preferred charges successively against all the officers serving under his orders, and has shown himself incapable of conducting the service harmoniously at a detached post.”10
Jackson, meanwhile, seemed not only unscathed by what had happened—he doesn’t even mention it in his correspondence—but was also, quite happily, on his way to a new life. While French was drowning in anger and shame and frustration, Jackson, immune from regret, was busy making other plans. On February 4, before the disputes with French began, he had received an unsolicited letter from Colonel Francis H. Smith, superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, asking for permission to place his name in nomination for the job of professor of natural and experimental philosophy and instructor of artillery.
Jackson’s name had come up in the unlikeliest of ways. Smith, who had been having trouble hiring a new professor, had consulted his friend D. H. “Harvey” Hill, a professor at nearby Washington College in Lexington. Smith, desperate for a new candidate, had handed Hill a copy of the Army Register and asked him to recommend someone. Hill perused it, then came to the name of the young officer he had met in Mexico, Tom Jackson. Hill recalled how Captain Taylor had described Jackson as a man who would “make his mark,” and how Jackson’s heroism at Contreras and Chapultepec had confirmed precisely what he had said. Hill pointed to the name, at the top of page 278.11 As luck would have it, one of Jackson’s relatives was a member of the school’s board.
Jackson, who had agreed enthusiastically to put his name in nomination, was offered the job at VMI in the first week in April and decided immediately to accept it. The timing is interesting, because by the time he brought his charges against French, he had the job offer in hand. He had only to keep his mouth shut, depart on his furlough, then resign and take the job. Instead, by bringing charges, he put that job, and his future happiness, at considerable risk. Either a lengthy court of inquiry or his own court-martial trial might well have prevented Jackson from taking the job, which required his presence in Lexington on July 1. And French did, in fact, suspend the April 14 orders granting Jackson his requested leave—which was for no
w his only way out.
All of this would suggest that Jackson, as a soldier and a Christian, truly believed that he had no choice but to do what he did. His tears when explaining his position to Letterman were authentic, as was the sympathy he later expressed to the officer to whom he was denying leave to be with his ill and dying family members. Jackson always possessed an absolute sense of what he was required to do—a personal code that was not always convenient for those around him.
Jackson departed Fort Meade, and Florida, forever on May 21, 1851, after forty-three days under arrest. He left behind him a dysfunctional garrison still seething with anger and suspicion. There is no record that he ever gave it a second thought. He later explained, according to his friend Robert Dabney, that “while campaigning was extremely congenial to his tastes, the life of a military post in times of peace was just as repulsive; that he perceived the officers of the army usually neglected self-improvement and rusted, in trivial amusements, at these fortresses.”12 To his sister he wrote cheerfully, “Good news. I have been elected Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy in the Virginia Military Institute, and you may expect me home in the latter part of June.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
A HIGHLY UNUSUAL MAN
When Major Thomas J. Jackson, known to most of his friends as Tom, reported for duty at VMI on August 13, 1851, he was twenty-seven years old. By most accounts and photographic evidence he was, if not exactly handsome, a reasonably good-looking young man. He was tall. At just under six feet, he was nearly five inches taller than the average American male of the era. He weighed about 170 pounds. He wore his medium-brown hair short, in the military style of the day, and sported side-whiskers that extended nearly to the bottom of his chin—another army affectation. He had a wide forehead; a sharply defined, aquiline nose; a small, firm mouth; and strikingly transparent gray-blue eyes. When he walked onto the campus of VMI to watch a cadet parade and drill, he wore his very best outfit: a double-breasted blue frock coat, tapered white pantaloons, immaculate white gloves, a new kepi cap, and artillery boots—all in all, the very picture of a young West Point graduate and Mexican-American War hero about to assume an important professorship.
Except that none of it quite worked. The kepi, for one thing, was oddly positioned, pushed a bit too far forward, so that instead of looking jaunty, or stylish, it seemed somehow awkward. And even casual observers could not miss Jackson’s newly blacked boots. Worn outside his pantaloons, they were both enormous and highly visible. One could only speculate—and many did—on the size of the feet they must have housed. When he walked, in those unnaturally long strides that reminded one of his friends of “a dismounted horseman,” the gigantic boots were even more noticeable.1 Even among the large crowd that had assembled to watch the cadets, Jackson stood out. There was something about him, then and later, whether in full prewar dress or in his later customary dishevelment, that was inescapably conspicuous. His welcome to the Virginia Military Institute, before anyone knew who he was or even that he had officially arrived, came in the form of a taunt, shouted by one of the cadets, aimed directly at him, and heard by everyone on the parade ground: “Come out of them boots!” the cadet yelled. “They are not allowed in this camp.”2 As it happened, that ill-mannered shout was an appropriate beginning to the most important and character-defining decade in Jackson’s life. It signaled the trials that this terribly earnest and very different young man was going to face, both at VMI and with the wider public.
The Lexington he encountered in 1851 was a handsome, mountain-bracketed town of sturdy brick and clapboard homes and soaring church steeples built on an elevated ridge at the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley. It was a place of high, sculpted hills and miniature valleys within valleys, picturesque farms, clear rivers, and mountains that loomed up on either side of the town and were capped with snow in the winter: the Blue Ridge to the east, the Alleghenies to the west. The valley, which ran in a southeast-to-northwest line from Roanoke to the Maryland border, had been settled in the 1700s by Scots-Irish and German settlers who had migrated from Pennsylvania and pushed southward along the forks and tributaries of the Shenandoah River. They had built a world that was utterly different from the land east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. That was old-line, tidewater Virginia country, very English, very Episcopal, with roots going back to the earliest days of American settlement. In the valley people spoke with a different accent, worshipped differently, and put on, as they viewed it, fewer airs. They were mostly middle-class farmers and merchants, exemplary, upwardly mobile Americans of the era: hardheaded, hardworking, practical, devout, and not at all fancy. Their beliefs tended toward the dissenting Protestantism of Luther and Calvin. And they valued education almost as highly as they did their religion. It was said that the Scots-Irish settlements in the valley, in the words of one resident, “were noted for three things: churches, academies of learning, and distilleries.”3 (The latter provided the valley’s surfeit of pastors with material for many temperance sermons.) Unlike tidewater Virginia, there were few large plantations and very little conspicuous wealth, though there was hardly any poverty, either.
Lexington, staunchly Presbyterian, Scots-Irish, and dominated by Washington College and the Virginia Military Institute, was very much of that valley. It was also, like most towns in that area, built on a very small scale. The 1850 census revealed 1,743 souls; of these 1,105 were white, 552 were slaves, and 86 were free blacks.4 Even Lexington’s leading institutions were small: VMI had only 5 professors and 117 students when Jackson arrived. Washington College, virtually across the street, had only five professors and a few hundred students.5 The colleges were the center of the town’s social world, and Jackson, VMI’s new professor of natural and experimental philosophy and a highly eligible bachelor whose Mexican-American War exploits had preceded him into the town (his Florida exploits, fortunately, had not), was in the midst of it, whether he liked it or not. Lexington was an intensely social place, where its residents, in all seasons, constantly paid social calls on one another and liked throwing parties. And it was in this small, narrowly circumscribed world—so profoundly different from West Point or the regular army, where he had spent the previous eight years—that Jackson’s unusual personality came into full view.6
To people who met him socially, his most striking trait was his silence. Where others might expect a minimum of social chatter, a casual comment, a piece of common small talk about the weather, or a small de rigueur politeness, he was often determinedly quiet. When he did speak, he could be maddeningly literal. A visiting Englishman, discussing history, once said to him, using a typically British prefix, “You remember, Major, that at this point Lord Burleigh was Queen Elizabeth’s great counselor,” Jackson immediately interrupted him, saying, “No, I don’t remember, for I did not know it.”7 When later asked whether he understood that the man’s saying “you remember” was just a figure of speech, Jackson said, “I am quite aware that he did not intend to gauge my knowledge of history. But nothing would have induced me to make the impression on him that I knew what I did not.”8 Similarly, when someone used the term “you know” in casual conversation, again, as a mere figure of speech, Jackson would frequently interrupt to say that he did not know.
He refused to go along with the most routine conventions of everyday conversation. He would not say that he wished that any circumstance was different than it was, meaning he could not bring himself to wish that it were warmer, or less windy, or even that some accident had not happened. If someone said, “Don’t you wish it might stop raining?,” he would reply with a quiet smile, “Yes, if the Maker of the weather thinks it best,”9 thus instantly killing the conversation. He would not acknowledge that he envied anyone, for any reason. He would not engage in flattery of any kind, even to give an idle compliment to a host. He absolutely refused to judge people or to say anything derogatory about them, even when badgered to do so. One such conversation, rendered later by a close friend, went like this:
“C— ? Oh, C— has some fine points of character,” said Jackson.
“But it seems to me that he is wanting in fixed principles.”
“Indeed? It would give me pain to think so.”
“Come now, Major, I know that you understand Captain C— thoroughly, and I am sure you must disapprove of him.”10
But Jackson never gave in.
Much of this behavior grew out of his faith, his desire to be uncompromisingly truthful at all times, and his very particular sense of Christian courtesy. He explained his refusal to voice disapproval of others by saying, “It is quite contrary to my nature to keep silence where I cannot but disapprove. Indeed I may as well confess that it would often give me real satisfaction to express just what I feel, but this would be to disobey the divine precept [judge not lest ye be judged], and I dare not do it.”11 One of his favorite books was George Winifred Hervey’s The Principles of Courtesy, which laid down specific behavioral rules under such rubrics as “humility,” “gravity,” “salutations,” “gentleness,” “deportment in the street,” and “deportment at church.”12 Always intent on improving himself, Jackson had compiled, while a student at West Point, a lengthy list of sayings, aphorisms, and proverbs under three categories: rules for conversation, choice of friends, and general principles. The following small sample explains at least some of his behavior:
—Endeavor to be at peace with all men. Never speak disrespectfully of anyone without a cause.
—Never try to appear more wise or learned than the rest of the company.
—Use no hurtful deceit: think innocently and justly, and if you speak, speak accordingly.