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

by S. C. Gwynne

  Jackson fared better as an instructor of artillery, a subject he was far better at explaining. As one of his students later wrote, a change would come over him at the sound of the guns. “The grasp on the sabre would tighten; the quiet eyes would flash.”17 In fact, he taught the most intensive artillery course in the South and very likely the equal of courses at West Point.18 Over a decade he managed to impart considerable knowledge to several hundred students that would have a telling effect in the coming war. Scores of them would actually serve as artillerists under Jackson himself.

  But here, too, he had trouble controlling his charges, who had far more freedom on the drill ground than in the section room to play pranks and otherwise disrupt the class. Cadets mimicked his commands, which he issued in drawn-out syllables in his high-pitched, mountain-inflected voice. They removed the linchpins so that the cannon wheels would fall away, sending the various pieces of the gun tumbling down the hill. Sometimes he caught them, and put them in arrest; often he did not. The trick, in any case, was repeated semester after semester. It became a sort of tradition. Another common prank was to spin the cannon in the direction of the major, causing him to leap out of the way.

  Some of the tricks were not so harmless. Once a cadet dropped a brick from a third-story barracks window that barely missed Jackson. Jackson, striding forward as he always did and looking neither left nor right, took no notice of it, though as D. H. Hill said, “his escape was almost miraculous.” The perpetrator was never caught. When asked later why he did not try to find out who had done it, Jackson replied, “The truth is, I do not want to know that we have such a coward in the corps of cadets.”19 His comment is a small revelation. Though his reaction might seem to be that of someone with strange physical habits who lacked connection with the real world about him, in fact he saw the act for what it was, and had a distinct, deliberate, and intelligent response to it. Jackson might seem opaque, out of touch, or just bizarrely insensitive to pranks or disrespect, but everything we know about him suggests that none of that was true. As his later wartime record would show, Jackson was extremely competent in the many skills required of a commanding general. He was highly perceptive and exquisitely sensitive to everything around him. His correspondence, much of which survives, is that of an incisive and articulate observer. Appearances and nicknames notwithstanding, he was nobody’s fool. Unfortunately, he never wrote to his sister or to friends to tell them the stories of his struggles at VMI. We can only assume that he was, as you would expect him to be, mortified by his own inability to keep his charges under control.

  His sensitivity to this problem came out in his first sharp disagreement with his boss, VMI superintendent Francis H. Smith. In the spring of 1852, Smith happened to be walking across the parade ground when he saw one of the cannons lose its wheels and scatter in several directions—the result of the linchpin-pulling trick. He walked over to Jackson and ordered him to report the cadet officers responsible for allowing this to happen. Stung by what he perceived to be sharp criticism—though it hardly sounds like that—Jackson immediately went back to his room in the barracks and wrote Smith a note requesting that he “put his severe reprimand in writing.”20 After that, Jackson’s treatment of Smith became noticeably cooler. He did not, as far as we know, “cut” him as he had done Major French at Fort Meade, but for a time he would have nothing to do with him on anything except official business, and on that he was curt and deliberately abrupt.21 As with French, Jackson, the normally duty-bound, strictly-by-the-book military man, had some obvious problems with officers of elevated rank, and with authority in general, especially when they said anything critical of him. This rogue character trait—nothing in his past quite accounts for it, and it would seem to violate both his military and Christian sense of duty—would come into play significantly during the Civil War, in ways that would have a profound effect on his military career.

  Jackson had several notable confrontations with cadets who were unhappy with him or who felt he had been unjust. The most famous of these took place in April 1852. It involved a cadet named James A. Walker. Walker, a highly ranked student, had challenged Jackson in trigonometry class over an answer to a problem that Walker had written on the blackboard, insisting that he was right and telling Jackson that he had not made himself clear. Jackson told the cadet that he was out of line, whereupon Walker protested angrily. When Jackson told him to be quiet, he refused, and Jackson put him under arrest. After a court-martial, in which sixty-two pages of testimony were recorded, Walker was found guilty on all charges and dismissed from the institute.22 His response was to challenge Jackson to a duel, and to write him a note saying that if he did not receive satisfaction he would kill Jackson on sight.

  What happened next is not quite clear, though many versions exist. The most commonly cited is that told by D. H. Hill, who later said that Jackson had asked him for advice on whether to seek a restraining order. Hill advised him not to, saying that if he did so, the cadets would regard him as a coward. But Jackson disregarded him and went straight to the magistrate. Hill saw this as the quintessential demonstration of Jackson’s personality: he would do his Christian duty to avoid a fight, and he would accept the social consequences. “I have thought that no incident in the life of Jackson was more truly sublime than this,” wrote Hill. “He was ambitious, covetous of distinction, desirous to rise in the world, sensitive to ridicule, tenacious of honor—yet, from a high sense of Christian duty, he sacrificed the good opinion of his associates.” In Hill’s version, Jackson at the same time let it be known that he would defend himself if attacked, and Walker never dared attack him. In any case, there was nothing in Jackson’s behavior that suggested cowardice to anyone. The cadet was expelled, and that was the end of it.

  We do know with great precision what happened to the expelled student. He entered the war with the 4th Virginia Regiment. He fought with distinction under Jackson as part of the Stonewall Brigade, rising steadily by Jackson’s promotions and making colonel in March 1862. In May 1863 he was promoted to brigadier general and became, by Jackson’s direct command on his deathbed (“I do not know a braver officer”), the Stonewall Brigade’s last commanding officer.23 Thirty-nine years after his expulsion from VMI, he acted as chief marshal at the unveiling of the Stonewall Jackson monument in Lexington. His nickname, given to him at the Battle of Gettysburg and which he kept for the rest of his life, was Stonewall Jim. He would later write of Jackson that “the cadets came to understand him and to appreciate his character for courage and justice, and to respect and love him for his kindly heart and noble soul.”24

  Walker was not the only one who complained publicly about Jackson. Superintendent Smith, in fact, had fielded a steady stream of complaints about him that never resulted in any direct action. But in the spring of 1856 he finally faced a full-scale protest. Acting on the basis of a number of complaints, the Society of the Alumni appointed a VMI graduate to investigate and prepare a report for the school’s governing body, the Board of Visitors. In July, the alumni presented a resolution condemning the mismanagement of the Department of Natural and Experimental Philosophy, and saying that Jackson lacked “capacity adequate to the duties of the chair.”25 Though this might easily have been grounds for dismissal or reassignment, nothing of the sort happened. The board decided simply to table the resolution, and there the matter rested. When Jackson found out about this campaign against him a year later, he made a formal request that every charge be investigated. But the board—like General David Twiggs in Tampa, who fielded a similar request—would have nothing to do with it. The members tabled Jackson’s request as well.

  It is noteworthy, considering how difficult it must have been for him to engage year after year in a difficult job for which he had no aptitude, that he even stuck it out. (His one attempt to leave was a failure, too: he applied for a job teaching math at the University of Virginia in 1854, but did not get the job.) One explanation comes from his second wife, Anna, who said that Jackson had on
ce been asked by a friend if it wasn’t presumptuous of him to take the teaching job at VMI when his eye illness made him incapable of doing it properly. “Not in the least,” Jackson said. “The appointment came unsought, and was therefore providential; and I knew that if Providence set me a task, he would give me the power to perform it. So I resolved to get well.”26 He persisted because he believed God wanted him to.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  DELIBERATELY AND INGENIOUSLY CLOAKED

  Lexington knew the caricature Jackson, the health crank, the unbending, automaton-like professor, the social bore with high Christian principles. This was the strangely two-dimensional face he presented to the world, and he wore it for a decade, like armor. Because he seemed a decent enough man, a polite and conscientious man with no apparent malice in his heart, the town adopted him. If he could never adjust his habits and ways to those of Lexington society, no matter: Lexington would adapt itself to him. It got used to Major Jackson and in its own way came to appreciate him. He was a curiosity, a sort of minor civic institution.

  But he was not what he seemed. Concealed behind this carefully constructed social front was a layered, highly complex, passionate, deeply sensitive man who loved deeply and grieved deeply. He had a poetic heart, and a nineteenth-century romantic’s embrace of beauty and nature. He loved Shakespeare and European architecture. He was self-taught and completely fluent in Spanish; he was a devoted and talented gardener; and he read widely in world history and military history and reveled in travel. He had an ecstatic, almost mystical sense of God. He loved walking in the country around Lexington, gloried in sunsets and mountain views and in the blooming Shenandoah spring. He was a man who could laugh uproariously, and roll around on the floor in play with a child, speaking Spanish baby talk, a man who kept close track of news and gossip inside his large, extended family. He was a doting, affectionate, and passionate husband who, behind closed doors, had an expansive and often joyous personality.

  Almost no one in Lexington—or anywhere else, for that matter—knew or suspected any of this. His students and fellow parishioners would have been astounded to learn it. Many would not have believed it. The real Thomas J. Jackson was almost entirely private. He was deliberately and ingeniously cloaked. The more fully realized part of him was revealed only to a very small group of people, all of them female, and all of them close to his heart. All came to full prominence in his life during his time in Lexington.

  The first was his sister, Laura, who pervades Jackson’s life. She was the focus of much of his love and all of his brotherly concern. She was his faithful correspondent, and though her letters to her brother have been lost, a large number of his letters to her have survived. They show her only in reflection, of course. But taken as a group they provide a sweeping twenty-year portrait of Jackson himself. The letters can be simply chatty, passionately religious, or elaborately rhetorical, but they cover almost all aspects of his life, from his marriages, to religion, to his health and his obsession with it, to grief, financial matters, relations with his extended family, his travels in Europe and the United States, and even to his fondness for peaches.

  Laura was special for a number of reasons, but mainly because she was the only other surviving remnant of a family struck by repeated calamities. Thomas and Laura were born in very modest circumstances in Clarksburg, Virginia, a river junction town in the mountains and narrow valleys of far northwestern Virginia, not far from Ohio and Pennsylvania. (The area is now part of West Virginia.) Their father, Jonathan Jackson, was a failed country lawyer, a poor business manager, and a compulsive gambler whose main talent seemed to be running up large debts. Their mother, Julia Neale, from nearby Parkersburg on the Ohio River, seems to have been a much better sort, described by contemporaries as “very intelligent” and having a “comely and engaging countenance” and “a graceful and commanding presence.”1

  Jonathan and Julia married in 1817, and set up housekeeping in Clarksburg. They had three children: Elizabeth in 1819, Warren in 1821, and Thomas in 1824. They struggled financially. While Julia was pregnant with her fourth child, typhoid fever killed six-year-old Elizabeth. Less than a month later, her husband, Jonathan, died from the same illness. The day after his death Julia gave birth to a daughter, Laura. Julia was now, at twenty-eight, a widow with two small children and an infant.2

  She was also destitute, and soon accepted the charity of the local Masonic order, which offered her the use of a tiny, twelve-foot-square, one-room house. She sewed, taught school, and somehow managed to feed her children. Her situation did not improve. Her children were pitiable sights in town, wearing ragged clothes and sometimes accepting the charity of local merchants and tradesmen. In 1830, when Tom was six, Julia met and married a man fifteen years her senior named Blake Woodson, another hard-luck country lawyer, but this time with eight children of his own scattered in various places. Desperate to save her family, she had made another marital mistake, worse than the first one: Woodson not only made little money but was harsh and verbally abusive to the family. The family moved far from Clarksburg, to the tiny hamlet of New Haven (now Ansted), southeast of Charleston, so that Blake could take a government job. He and Julia struggled and fell deeper into debt. She was soon pregnant again.

  By the fall of 1831 there was so little money left that Julia decided, reluctantly but with no real choice, to send her children away. Warren would live with Neale relatives in Parkersburg. Seven-year-old Tom, as he was known, and five-year-old Laura would travel north to live with a collection of Jackson relatives at a place called Jackson’s Mill, eighteen miles south of Clarksburg near the town of Weston. Little Tom begged not to be sent away, and when an uncle and his slave arrived to fetch them, he hid in the woods. When he left home, on the back of a horse, his mother wept uncontrollably. A month later, she gave birth to a boy, William Wirt Woodson. Three months later Tom and Laura were back in the same place, watching their mother die. She had fallen ill and had summoned her children to say good-bye. On December 4, 1831, she passed away. Tom and Laura, now orphaned, went back to the mill. The new baby—Jackson’s half brother—ended up with one of the Neale relatives in Parkersburg.3 (Blake Woodson remarried and died penniless a year and a half later.)

  In spite of their apparently disastrous fortunes, there were compensations in this new life. The Jacksons of Jackson’s Mill—six bachelor uncles, ranging in age from twenty-nine to ten, a step-grandmother, and her two adult daughters—were a proud, boisterous, occasionally rowdy, and very successful bunch. By the standards of Lewis County, they were rich. They owned lands up and down the river valley, and their splendid main residence was one of the finest houses in the region. They owned the largest sawmill in the area, as well as a grain mill, carpenter and blacksmith shops, housing for a dozen slaves, and a general store. There were sheep, cattle, chickens, and orchards on the property. The man in charge of all this was Jackson’s father’s brother, twenty-nine-year-old Cummins Jackson. Uncle Cummins, as Jackson called him, was a big, strapping fellow with an outsized personality, a shrewd businessman who dominated local commerce and had a fondness for suing neighbors, competitors, and anyone who annoyed him. He was later found to be dishonest, too, and was caught counterfeiting silver coins, an offense for which he would be indicted by a grand jury.

  But to Tom and Laura their uncle Cummins was kind and solicitous, as were their maiden aunts, uncles, and step-grandmother. The evidence suggests that the children were loved and looked after. Except for the absence of their parents, and the inevitable loneliness Tom and Laura felt, Jackson’s Mill was a wonderful place to grow up. There was the splendid, rushing West Fork River that ran by the mill; there were orchards and meadows and woodlands to play in. Young Tom drove oxen, tended cattle and sheep, chopped wood, rode and raced horses, and helped with the harvest. He made maple syrup. He was quiet, shy, serious, and hardworking. He was not exceptional in any particular way and was considered by his uncle Cummins to be the least bright of the three Jackson childre
n. He read whatever books he could lay his hands on and learned slowly. He seemed to have a flair for math—what little he had access to. Though he grew up surrounded by large numbers of cousins, uncles, and aunts on both sides of the family, his great confidante and friend was Laura. Together they ranged over the large property. One summer a slave named Uncle Robinson helped them build a raft, and Tom rowed his sister across the river, where they played in a shady stand of poplars and maples. Sometimes Tom crossed the river by himself, and rested there alone beneath the spreading trees.

  In spite of the relative comforts of Jackson’s Mill, there was one more dislocating trauma the children would have to face. Four years after they arrived there—they were now eleven and nine years old—their step-grandmother Elizabeth Jackson died, an event with life-changing consequences for the children. Because the two maiden aunts had married and left the mill, Elizabeth had been the sole remaining female on the compound, which meant that the only people left to care for Tom and Laura were bachelor uncles and the slaves. To Neales and Jacksons alike, this was unacceptable. So Tom and Laura were sent away again. Laura went to Parkersburg with a Neale aunt; Tom went to a farm near Clarksburg owned by his father’s sister Polly and her husband, Isaac Brake. Though Laura found a warm new home, Tom found nothing but a troublesome relationship with his uncle Isaac, who disparaged him, treated him like an outsider, and gave him at least one hard whipping.