by S. C. Gwynne
—If you speak in company, speak late.
—Avoid triumphing over an antagonist.
—Say as little of yourself & friends as possible.13
Though much of his social behavior had its roots in this strict personal code, Jackson was also deeply shy by nature, evidence of which was his terrible discomfort in any situation that required him to speak publicly. This, too, was on display in his first years in Lexington for all to see. He had joined the local debating society in the interests of self-improvement, and it periodically fell to Jackson to stand up and say something on some public issue of the day. His early efforts were excruciating to watch and embarrassing for both the flustered, red-faced Jackson and his listeners. When his turn came, he would stand and begin to speak, seem to lose himself in confusion, then stop abruptly. After a pause, he would resume speaking, continue haltingly for a while, then finally stop altogether, sometimes in midsentence. He would then sit down, staring straight in front of him. The debate would resume without him. Even more remarkable than this public mortification, though, was Jackson’s refusal to accept defeat. He would often rise a second or even a third time on the same evening, undoubtedly to a good deal of wincing in the hall. Often these repeated efforts ended exactly as the first one had: abruptly, and with no resolution.14 Once his performance was so inept that he even made the town newspaper, which referred to the “nervous speech of Major Jackson,” making a point—cruelly, thought Jackson’s friend Harvey Hill—of putting the word in italics.15
His shortcomings as a speaker were apparent in church, too. When his pastor, the Reverend William S. White, urged more parishioners to lead prayers in weekly meetings, Jackson went to see him. He told the minister that he wanted to comply but was afraid that he might not make a favorable impression on the congregation. “But you are my pastor and the spiritual guide of the church,” he continued, “and if you think it my duty, then I shall waive my reluctance and make the effort to lead in prayer, however painful it might be.”16 White did call on him at the next meeting, and Jackson led the prayer in his faltering, agonizing, cringe-inducing way. The prayer was indeed just as painful for the audience as he said it might be. But here, too, Jackson refused to quit. When White, out of respect for Jackson’s feelings, did not call on him for the next few weeks, Jackson protested. “My comfort or discomfort is not the question,” he said. “If it is my duty to lead in prayer, then I must persevere in it until I learn to do it aright, and I wish you to discard all consideration for my feelings.”17 Though he was never eloquent, Jackson eventually learned to stand and speak or lead prayers competently, and without humiliation.
There were other idiosyncrasies, too—so many that they were difficult to keep track of. Though he was devoutly religious, and dutifully went to church several times a week, he was also famous for falling asleep during the service. He did this at almost every service, usually during the sermon. Because he insisted on sitting perfectly erect in his pew, the moment that sleep overtook him was a dramatic one, as he suddenly tilted to one side. This caused much mirth among the VMI cadets in the gallery, who watched and waited for it.18 Jackson was fully aware of his problem, and it was typical of his stubbornness that he refused to do anything about it. When asked by female friends why he did not just lean back in his pew, so as to be less conspicuous—and less of a bad example to the cadets—Jackson replied, “I will do nothing to superinduce sleep by putting myself at ease, or making myself more comfortable; if, however, in spite of my resistance I yield to my infirmity, then I deserve to be laughed at, and accept as punishment the mortification I feel.”19 So he was humiliated by what happened to him. But he stuck to his principles, which held that yielding to sleep while trying to sit rigidly upright was a weakness that somehow deserved punishment. Indeed, Jackson always sat bolt upright, no matter where he was. He never crossed his legs. He never allowed his back to touch a chair. And church was not the only place he took public naps. He sometimes fell asleep, too, in the midst of conversations with friends.20 These were the same friends who had to endure him standing up during his visits to them because he said it helped his alimentary canal stay straight. No matter what was happening or what interesting or momentous conversation was under way, Major Jackson would rise and leave, without fail, at 9:00 p.m.
To many of Jackson’s acquaintances, the oddest thing of all about him was his obsession with his health. Though some who knew him considered him a hypochondriac, he was plagued by several very real, chronic illnesses.21 When he arrived at VMI in the summer of 1851, the uveitis that he had first experienced in 1849 had become so acute that he felt pain just trying to focus his eyes on objects. He saw spots—floaters—and was at times so extremely sensitive to light that he feared he might go blind. He would never read at night, which led to what many considered his most eccentric behavior: sitting alone in the dark with his eyes closed, mentally preparing his lesson for the next day. He answered all letters from memory, so as not to have to read them twice. There was little else he could do to alleviate the symptoms. When he was suffering the worst pain, he would fill a basin with cold water, put his face underwater, and hold his eyes open as long as he could hold his breath. He would do that six times a day, using water drawn from a well or a river.22 To persons without an understanding of such an affliction, that might seem very odd behavior indeed.
Though his eye problems occurred intermittently during his adult life, his dyspepsia seems to have been a more or less permanent condition. In the mid-nineteenth century the term was a catchall, incorporating everything from simple indigestion or sour stomach to gastritis, acid reflux, peptic ulcer, parasites, and even stomach cancer. It is not clear exactly what Jackson suffered from. But it caused him so much discomfort that, according to one of his staff officers in the war, “When I expressed my surprise that a man in Richmond had committed suicide, driven to it by dyspepsia, [Jackson] said that he could understand that and thought that if a man could be driven to suicide by any cause, it might be from dyspepsia.”23 He suffered, too, from sinus and ear infections. One in particular, in 1858, was so severe that it left him almost completely deaf in his right ear.24
He sought water cures, or hydrotherapy, from Massachusetts to western Virginia, usually at mineral springs, where he would spend weeks at a time, taking cold-water baths and drinking the waters. He visited such establishments fourteen times during the course of his life, and invariably claimed that they had given him relief. As part of the “water cure” he sometimes wore wet shirts next to his body. He also strictly regulated his diet, sometimes adhering to a regimen of stale bread and cold water, eating meat less than once a month.25 He once spent a summer eating mostly fresh buttermilk and cornbread. As with everything else, he did not change his private behavior in public: from his days in postwar Mexico City onward he would bring his own food to dinner parties. “It is probable,” he wrote his sister, Laura, in 1850, “that I am more particular in my rules [about diet and health] than any person of your acquaintance.”26
Jackson was obsessive about anything that involved his health. In addition to his eyes and digestive system, he worried variously about his hearing, throat, liver, kidneys, nervous system, musculature, and the circulation of his blood. He read books on health, and was a diligent follower of the latest fads, including the inhalation of glycerin and nitrate of silver, and the swallowing of ammonia. He was a prodigious walker, traveling five miles a day, but he also engaged in the sort of strange-looking leaping exercises that his army colleagues at Fort Hamilton had noted. Then there were the stories that had passed into legend, many of which were recalled long after the war and may be apocryphal. During his early military service, according to a man who was in his class at West Point, Jackson “became convinced that one of his legs was bigger than the other, and that one of his arms was likewise unduly heavy. He had acquired the habit of raising the heavy arm straight up, so that, as he said, “the blood would run back into his body and lighten it.”27 Other stories were harder to verify, bu
t circulated in Lexington nonetheless. According to one, the major believed that one side of him was smaller than the other, and to correct this he would exercise the smaller side more frequently, to “make it catch up with the other.” It was also reported that he had requested that his landlady not use pepper in his meals because, according to a cadet at the time, “whenever he got any pepper on his tongue, it always took away the use of his right leg.”28 When it came to the unusual Major Jackson, no story seemed too outlandish to believe.
In all of these stories—amusing and otherwise—there is Jackson’s terrible earnestness, his profound seriousness of purpose, and his unashamed, unflagging persistence in fulfilling that purpose. Though Jackson was in no sense naive, there is a simplicity and a purity about him—almost a sweetness, seen from the perspective of 160 years—that belies portrayals of him as nothing but an oddball and a crank, and a dour one at that. His behavior was never mean-spirited, never sullen or gloomy, and he rarely indulged a bad mood. Though he was stern, he was always polite, and almost always pleasant to those around him. People who did not know him well could not guess that his reticence in social situations grew from deeply held Christian principles. They could not understand that his often pathetic yet ultimately successful attempts at public speaking rose from personal principle and a conviction that he could overcome obstacles by sheer force of will. Thus he remained, for most people in Lexington in his early years there, a man imprisoned in the elaborate, codified, and highly idiosyncratic personality he had created for himself.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE EMBATTLED PROFESSOR
The course Jackson taught at VMI, “Natural and Experimental Philosophy,” was brutally difficult. It had been brutally difficult when he took it in 1845 at West Point, where it was loathed and feared by most of the cadet corps, which included some of the brightest math and engineering students in the country. Jackson’s VMI course used exactly the same texts, some of them written by William H. C. Bartlett, his old professor. The subjects included a dizzying array of the most difficult scientific and mathematical concepts of the day: electricity, magnetics (including electromagnetism and electrodynamics), acoustics, optics (reflection and refraction of light, microscopes and telescopes), analytical mechanics, the motion of celestial bodies, and astronomy. Unlike most of his fellow West Point cadets, Jackson actually liked the course and had done well in it, placing eleventh of sixty-two in his class. This was despite the fact that his previous schooling in rural western Virginia had given him little preparation for such advanced work, and had placed him at a huge disadvantage against classmates such as Philadelphia-raised George McClellan, the future Union general, who had spent two years at the University of Pennsylvania before he even arrived at West Point. Jackson was an exceptional math and science student; the dreaded Bartlett was one of his favorite professors.
The other subject he taught at VMI was something he knew a great deal about, too: artillery. Each day between 2:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. he would drill cadets in the transportation, deployment, and firing of mobile field artillery consisting of four six-pounder smoothbores and two twelve-pounder howitzers. In place of horses, underclassmen would pull the field pieces around the drill ground. Most of this was straight mechanical drill. The “tactical” side of artillery—its use on a battlefield—was something Jackson was not called upon to explain.1
He was the most peculiar of teachers. According to the many accounts left by his former students, he did not really teach at all. Instead, he would assign what were considered to be extremely difficult lessons, and then listen to “recitations” of those lessons by cadets at the blackboard, correcting them as they went along. “At the appointed time [Jackson] ‘heard’ them, and this was about all of it,” recalled one former cadet. “Discussions in the class-room were unknown, and even explanations were infrequent. . . . The text was the one great thing which he came to ‘hear,’ and we came to ‘say,’ if we could, and most of us commonly couldn’t, when the said text was Bartlett’s Course of Natural Philosophy, in three of the toughest volumes this scribe ever attacked—‘Mechanics,’ ‘Optics and Acoustics,’ and ‘Spherical Astronomy.’ ”2
Jackson’s behavior in the classroom seemed as peculiar as it did everywhere else. “When questioning the cadets,” wrote future Confederate general James H. Lane, one of his students, “he had a peculiar way of grasping his lead pencil, with his thumb on the end towards the cadets, and when a mistake was made, he would say ‘rather the reverse’ and flip his thumb back on the pencil.”3 When befuddled cadets asked him to explain some point, Jackson’s answer—devoid of imagination or technique—was simply to recite back to them the exact words of the text, which he had committed to memory and then rehearsed for several hours in darkness. Though this did nothing to help impart knowledge to his charges, some were impressed anyway by his command of the subject. “In the section room he would sit perfectly erect and motionless,” recalled cadet James McCabe, “listening with grave attention and exhibiting the great powers of his wonderful memory, which was, I think, the most remarkable that ever came under my observation.”4 But Jackson’s power of recall offered little help to students who had trouble understanding his course. When one cadet insisted, after hearing Jackson explain a problem twice in exactly the same way, that he still did not understand it, Jackson ordered him to leave the section room.5 The result was that, while the brightest students managed to master the course, those in the middle and at the bottom were often left on their own to flounder, and sometimes to fail.
To make matters worse, Jackson placed great value on regurgitating every last detail of the assigned texts. When, in response to Jackson’s question “What are the three simple machines?” a cadet answered, “The inclined plane, the lever, and the wheel,” Jackson replied, “No, sir. The lever, the wheel, and the inclined plane.” That was exactly as they were listed in the textbook, and that was how Jackson wanted it.6 No amount of student outrage or protest could dislodge him from this position. His course managed to be both dreadfully dull and appallingly difficult, with few light moments. When the students begged him to give them a separate session to help them review for a test, Jackson met them in his classroom in the dark, where, according to one cadet, he “sat in front of us on his platform, and with closed eyes questioned us over many pages of a complicated study.”7 Whenever Jackson did manage to make what one student termed “an ironical remark,” he would hasten to qualify his expression by adding, “Not meaning exactly what I say,” even though the meaning was plain to everyone. The expression soon became a byword around the barracks.8 Such remarks made Jackson seem to be what he was not: stupid, or uncomprehending. Cadets would call him Old Tom Jackson while pointing, significantly, to their heads and saying that “he was not quite right there.”9
In the cloistered world of VMI, most of which was contained within a single building, the shortcomings of the man cadets called Old Jack, Tom Fool, Old Hickory, and Square Box (in reference to his large feet) were on intimate display. By the end of his first year it had become common knowledge that the grave, taciturn major was, if not completely inept, at the very least the worst teacher at the institute. If there was anyone who thought otherwise, he left no historical record. Even Colonel Francis H. Smith, VMI’s superintendent and the man who both hired Jackson and kept him in his job, acknowledged his failure. “As a Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy, Major Jackson was not a success,” Smith wrote later, after his most illustrious faculty member’s rise to world fame. “He had not the qualifications needed for so important a chair. He was no teacher, and he lacked the tact required in getting along with his classes. He was a brave man, a conscientious man, and a good man, but he was no professor.”10
But mere inability to impart knowledge was only the beginning of Jackson’s problems as a professor. One might expect that such a stern pedagogue would rule his classroom with an iron fist. But the reverse was true. Jackson was a poor disciplinarian whose classroom ofte
n seemed on the edge of complete chaos. While he sat, gimlet-eyed, watching one of the cadets recite, the other students, arrayed in a horseshoe curve behind Jackson, would often be in a full-scale battle, pelting one another with spitballs and other paper projectiles. Others cheated by taking crib sheets to the blackboard with them, concealing them from Jackson but not from the other students. Former cadet Lane said he only saw Jackson attempt to catch one of them. “As he approached the guilty party,” wrote Lane, “his heavy, creaking boots betrayed him; the cadet slipped the paper up his sleeve. . . . When Jackson reached him, he asked sharply ‘What is that in your hand, Sir?’ The Cadet turned suddenly with a surprised look, opened his hand and said ‘a piece of chalk,’ at the same time displaying it. ‘Yes, a piece of chalk,’ responded Jackson, and there was a general laugh at ‘Old Jack’ as he returned, foiled, to his rostrum.”11
Sometimes the cadets would truss a first-year student in a chair and balance the chair against the classroom door so that it would tip over when Jackson entered. Cadets would walk behind him, mimicking his step, as he walked with his long strides through campus, head down, looking straight ahead. According to one student, “from behind buildings and around corners he was saluted with cries and catcalls.”12 Almost invariably, one of them would draw a picture of outsized feet on the blackboard in Jackson’s section room.13 Sometimes there would be caricatures in which his body was swallowed up by his boots. Over a decade, his teaching often took place in an atmosphere of what one cadet called “wanton disrespect.”14
Through all of this, Jackson never lost his temper or his dignity; rather, he took it all with a strange, almost distracted, imperturbability, as though he were too thick to understand what was really happening. “They played tricks on him, they made sport of him,” wrote D. H. Hill, a math professor at Lexington’s Washington College at the time. “They teased him, they persecuted him. All in vain. He turned neither to the right nor to the left, but went straight on in his own ways.”15 It should be noted that Jackson was not a complete pushover: he put many students on report, and placed some of them in arrest. Though he made fewer charges than the other teachers, he usually made them stick. Nor was Jackson universally despised. Though almost everyone agreed that he was a bad teacher, several of his students later wrote that they admired him for his record in the Mexican-American War, his strong sense of duty, and his Christian ethics. Indeed, in 1858, Jackson’s seventh year at VMI, a cadet named Leigh Wilber Reid wrote a strikingly prescient poem about Jackson, saying that he saw “The stamp of genius on his brow, and he / With his wild glance and keen but quiet eye / Draws forth from secret sources, where they lie.” Reid had written poems about three other professors, all of them critical and derogatory.16