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

by S. C. Gwynne

  He was also starting to accumulate wealth. In spite of a yearly salary of $1,350 from VMI, of which he tithed $180, and generous donations to other charities, he had both real estate and financial assets. He had purchased a substantial home and a working farm. He had also made a number of shrewd investments. He had purchased shares in the Lexington Savings Institution, the oldest bank in Rockbridge County. By the end of the decade he had not only made a good return on that investment but had also become a director of the bank, sitting on its board alongside some of the more prominent citizens of the town. He invested in the Lexington Building Fund Association, a purchase that by 1863 would net him a handsome profit of $1,644.11 In partnership with Maggie’s husband, John T. L. Preston, and VMI professor William Gilham, he invested in real estate. In 1860 he made his last big investment with them and another man, buying a leather tannery.12 (He would make a large profit, quickly, on the tannery.13)

  Part of Jackson’s new prosperity and social status was the human property he owned: six slaves, three of whom he had personally acquired, and three who were given to him as a wedding present by Anna’s father. Though he had grown up in northwestern Virginia—a place with relatively few slaves that ultimately refused to secede from the Union with the rest of the state—Jackson had been around them all his life. His uncle Cummins owned as many as a dozen. One of those, Uncle Robinson, seems to have been a close friend to Tom and Laura when they were growing up. Jackson’s relationship with his own slaves illustrates the relative complexity of a system that was often seen by Northerners in the stark terms portrayed in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He acquired his first slave, Albert, when Albert came to him and asked Jackson to buy him so that he would be allowed to buy his freedom by paying back the purchase price. Jackson agreed, although he was living as a bachelor and had no need of Albert’s services. He initially rented Albert out as a waiter to VMI for $120 a year. When Albert came down with a protracted illness and could not earn money, Jackson took him in and cared for him. War came before Albert had fully paid Jackson.

  The next slave who came into his possession was an older woman named Amy, who was about to be sold to pay off debt. She, too, begged Jackson to buy her, as Anna put it, as “deliverance from her troubles.”14 He had no immediate use for her, either, and found her a place with another family until Anna arrived. Amy turned out to be a wonderful cook, and Anna came to regard her as “a treasure.” After the war started, Amy became sick, and Jackson secured a home for her and paid her board, medical expenses, and finally her funeral bill. A Lexington friend of Jackson’s, impressed by his charity toward Amy, wrote to him, saying, “The cup of cold water you have ministered to this poor disciple may avail more in the Master’s eye than all the brilliant deeds with which you may glorify your country’s battlefields.”15 In response to the pleas of an elderly lady in town who could no longer care for a four-year-old slave named Emma, Jackson bought the little girl with the idea that she could be helpful to Anna later on. Emma had some sort of learning disability, but Jackson tried to teach the child catechism anyway. Then there was strong-minded, independent Hetty, who had been Anna’s nurse since birth, and her two rambunctious teenage boys, whom Anna taught to read, and who later drove Jackson’s carriage. From Anna’s later account, Jackson was a kind, if stern, master. Though we have no record of how he regarded his slaves, Anna had a fairly traditional Southern view. In her memoirs, she referred to their slaves as among “other animate possessions of the family,” lumping them together with the family’s horse, milk cows, and chickens.16

  But Jackson’s dealings with his own slaves were just a small part of his relations with the larger African-American community in Lexington. In the fall of 1855, he started, with Pastor William White’s approval, a Sunday school for blacks at the Presbyterian church. Though several earlier attempts had failed, Jackson believed strongly in his mission. In White’s description, “he threw himself into this work with all of his characteristic energy and wisdom.”17 According to Anna, Jackson’s motivation was simple enough: “His interest in that race was simply because they had souls to save.” It was a formidable task. Most blacks were uninterested in attending, and some of the town’s whites actively opposed the idea, partly because of the Old South notion that educated blacks were potentially dangerous. The example at hand was Nat Turner, a Virginia slave who had been taught to read and educated by his masters, and who had led a bloody slave rebellion in 1831 that killed sixty whites.

  Jackson proceeded anyway, and soon had eighty to one hundred slaves in attendance at the Lexington Colored Sabbath School. The school was entirely his creation: he conceived it, financed it, organized it, promoted it, and recruited students as well as a dozen teaching assistants. His services began with prayer, which he gave, followed by the singing of “Amazing Grace,” which he would lead also, in spite of being unable to carry a tune. There were Bible readings and oral examinations. Bibles were awarded to the best students. Jackson even delivered, in person, reports to owners of their slaves’ participation and progress.18 His personal influence in the school is evidenced by attendance figures, which dropped during his summer absence to fewer than fifty. From what evidence we have Jackson was well liked by blacks in town. In the words of William White, “He was emphatically the black man’s friend.”

  Still, not all Lexington residents liked the idea of the school, not least because state law in Virginia prohibited whites from teaching blacks to read and write. On May 1, 1858, Jackson happened to encounter three lawyers he knew on the street in front of the county courthouse. One of them, Colonel S. M. Reid, clerk of the courts, said to him, “Major, I have examined the statute and conferred with the commonwealth’s attorney. Your Sunday school is an ‘unlawful assembly.’ ” The other two lawyers expressed agreement with Reid, and one of them, J. D. Davidson, said, further, that “probably the grand jury will take it up and test it.” Jackson, normally the most civil of men, responded angrily, “Sir, if you were, as you should be, a Christian man, you would not think it or say so.” Jackson then turned on his heel and strode away. Though Jackson went to Davidson’s office later to apologize, the larger point was made: he would fight any interference with his school.19 The school, in fact, continued in operation for thirty years.20

  It is noteworthy that Jackson’s Sunday school also offered him the opportunity to play pastor, a profession he might have preferred above all others but one for which he understood he had neither the personality nor the gift of public speech. “The subject of becoming a herald of the cross has often seriously engaged my attention,” he once wrote an aunt, “and I regard it as the most noble of all professions. . . . I would not be surprised if I were to die on a foreign field, clad in ministerial armor, fighting under the banner of Jesus.”21 His choice of words is interesting, considering that he had, in effect, failed as a peacetime soldier and had certainly failed to become a minister of God.

  Yet there he was, on the eve of the great Civil War, a man who through sheer determination had forged a prosperous life for himself, lacking only children to complete the picture. (That would change, too.) Reverend William S. White, who knew him as well as anyone outside his family, called him the happiest man he ever knew, a sentiment heartily endorsed by Anna Jackson.

  PART THREE

  VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  WHERE IS THE THUNDER OF WAR?

  There had been army reviews before, but nothing like this one. The sheer scale of the Grand Review, as it was styled, dwarfed anything that had come before it in North America, and even rivaled the European pageants of Frederick the Great, Wellington, and Napoléon.1 On the chilly, windswept morning of November 20, 1861, four months after the Battle of Manassas, on a treeless plain eight miles west of Washington, DC, George Brinton McClellan, the thirty-four-year-old general in chief of all Union armies, staged an exhibition that featured a veritable sea of blue-uniformed men: seventy thousand of them, ran
ged in glittering lines that stretched in a semicircle two and a half miles wide.2 Thirty thousand spectators watched in wonder from fields, trees, housetops, and barns as the massive body wheeled before them, bayonets flashing and regimental flags flying, and led by saber-wielding officers.3 In attendance were most of the people who mattered in Washington, including President Abraham Lincoln, Secretary of War Simon Cameron, Secretary of State William Seward, scores of senators and congressmen, and foreign diplomats. They had all come out from the city in carriages to this place, known as Bailey’s Crossroads, in the cold weather to watch.

  In spite of the presence of so many notables, this was McClellan’s show. He was, by his own careful design, its featured attraction, and his stage management was, as usual, flawless. He arrived on a large, muscular black horse, a compact man who yet managed to inspire such descriptions as “broad-shouldered, strong-chested, strong-necked and strong-jawed.” His hand was cocked jauntily on his hip. He was flanked by his immaculate, gold-lace-trimmed staff, a cohort of 1,800 prancing cavalry, and even a mounted cavalry band.4 As smoke from a ninety-gun salute drifted across the assembly, “Little Mac” joined the president, Cameron, and Seward and together they rode down the long line of troops as a band played “Hail to the Chief” and the cheers of the soldiers rolled across the snow-streaked plain.5 It was all, as the Philadelphia Press put it, “indescribably grand,”6 so much so that it helped inspire a Washington woman named Julia Ward Howe to begin writing, the next day, new lyrics for the popular tune “John Brown’s Body.” The song would become famous as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

  It was possible, in fact, to watch this military pageant and forget, momentarily, that it was this same army—or rather an earlier version of it—that had fled in full panic from a smaller rebel force at Manassas, climbing up one another’s backs and over flabbergasted civilians to reach the safety of the capital. It was even possible to ignore for the moment the rather stark fact—it was becoming starker with each passing week—that only a few miles away from this throat-tightening spectacle, camped that very same Confederate army with precisely the same commanding generals—Johnston and Beauregard—and it was almost exactly where the fleeing Federals had left it in July. Since then no Union forces had advanced against it, no artillery had been fired in its direction other than a few rounds lobbed by a Federal reconnaissance party.7 Indeed, the Confederate forces had been allowed to conduct their own reviews, unmolested, a mere dozen miles away—to Confederate general Joe Johnston’s amazement.

  What made such proximity so remarkable was that, whereas in July the Union had outnumbered its rivals 35,000 to 32,000, there were now 150,000 Federal troops in the field against 40,000 rebels, a mismatch so absurd that many politicians and pundits in the North were beginning to wonder why they were watching reviews at all instead of reading about military victories.8 This was the grand irony of McClellan’s Grand Review. The troops who were turned out for this parade alone—seventy-six regiments, seventeen batteries, and seven regiments of cavalry, roughly half of the Army of the Potomac—were greater in number than all of the Confederate forces in Virginia, and far better equipped. Though not everyone would have agreed with those troop appraisals—as we will see, that was part of the problem—there was plenty of reliable intelligence in the hands of Union generals and Northern politicians to suggest that it was true, or at least approximately true, and with numbers like that, rough estimates were all that was needed.9

  The reason for such bristling passivity was not hard to find, even in a war that was unfolding in a rat’s nest of political and military intrigue. It was the immaculately dressed man on the big black horse: George B. McClellan, the general who, possessed of an enormous, gleaming weapon, mysteriously refused to use it. He was one of the most remarkable public figures the United States of America has ever produced. The list of his personal attributes was as striking then as it is now. He was an extremely efficient and even gifted administrator. He was good at the business side of running an army. He was also egocentric to a nearly unimaginable degree, harshly judgmental of others, vainglorious, mean-spirited, dissembling, almost pathologically risk-averse, haughty, insincere, back-stabbing, callously dismissive of his peers, and, though he was not a coward in any conventional sense, he was certainly very troubled by the idea of sending large numbers of men into battle. To give edge to all of this, he believed himself to be God’s chosen instrument on earth for the salvation of the Union. He was so convinced of this that, later in the war, he was able to justify jeopardizing an entire Union army to advance his own interests.10 Part of McClellan’s brilliance was that, to his bosses in Washington and to the nation at large, he did not seem to be any of those things—at least not at first. His true personality was as thoroughly cloaked, in its own way, as his classmate Tom Jackson’s. He appeared, in the spring and summer of 1861, as the savior of the Union, a bright, briskly efficient, refreshingly straightforward, confident, and confidence-inspiring man who could right the terrible wrongs of Manassas and make “On to Richmond!” something other than the empty battle cry it had become.

  McClellan had always seemed destined for greatness. Precociously smart, he had gone off to the University of Pennsylvania at fourteen, then matriculated at West Point at sixteen, two years under the minimum age, where he graduated second in the same class—1846—in which Jackson ranked seventeenth. Unlike the socially awkward Jackson, McClellan was immensely popular with his classmates. He served with distinction as an engineer in the Mexican-American War and was subsequently assigned by the US Army as an observer in the Crimean War. He resigned from the army at age thirty to become vice president and chief engineer of the Illinois Central Railroad. Two years later he became president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad. He did well at both jobs. “There is an indefinable air of success about him and something of the ‘man of destiny,’ ” wrote a contemporary.11 In late July 1861, following the Union disaster at Manassas, he had been given command of the Army of the Potomac, reporting to Winfield Scott. Brimming with confidence and buoyed up by a fawning press, McClellan gave a speech soon after he arrived in which he promised that the war he was going to wage would be short, sharp, and final. Indeed, he seemed to harken strangely back to the very early, romantic days of the war, when people believed that one big, glorious fight would settle the issue. “I expect to fight a terrible battle,” he wrote to a friend. “When I am ready I shall move without regard to season or weather. . . . But of one thing you may rest assured—when the blow is struck it will be heavy, rapid, and decisive.”12

  He became instantly famous, and it went instantly to his head. “I find myself in a strange position here—President, Cabinet, Genl. Scott all deferring to me—by some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land,” he wrote to his young wife, Nelly. “I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me—but nothing of that kind would please me—therefore I won’t be Dictator. Admirable self denial!”13 In another letter to her he wrote, “Who would have thought, when we were married, that I should so soon be called on to save my country?”14 As though he needed more of this sort of encouragement, the press insisted on comparing him to a young Napoléon.

  But it turned out that Little Mac was very good at one thing, and it was not a small thing: training an army. Starting in August, he transformed the Army of the Potomac from the ragged corps that had lost its first battle and almost all its confidence into something that looked as if it could win a war. Working long hours, he tightened discipline, pulled in shirkers and wanderers, made everything from transport to the commissary work more efficiently, and drilled the men endlessly. He built fifty forts and redoubts around Washington, DC, with parapets twelve feet thick, armed with three hundred guns, and fronted by abatis (barricades of fallen trees). In a very real sense, McClellan rescued the Union in those early days from despondency and fear: someone had to rebuild the army and show the cou
ntry that there was great hope for the future. He did it with chin up and cap bill down, and none of the men who cheered as he rode by them had any notion that he was anything less than the great commanding officer he seemed to be.

  He was also showing just how deeply ambitious he was. He moved almost immediately against his boss, the debilitated Winfield Scott, who suffered from dropsy, vertigo, and paralysis and had trouble staying awake. McClellan largely ignored him, violating military protocol by dealing directly with the president and cabinet, and complaining loudly to all of them that Scott was holding things up, interfering with McClellan’s grand plan for a fast and decisive end to the war. Scott complained bitterly about McClellan’s maneuvering, but to no avail. On November 1, Scott retired, leaving McClellan as general in chief as well as commander of the Army of the Potomac. Little Mac had wanted it all, and, with astonishing speed, he had gotten it.

  Meanwhile, he was behaving more and more as though he were, in fact, the power of the land. He rented a splendid house very near the White House, where he and Nelly threw lavish dinner parties. He went everywhere with a large entourage of aides and staff officers. His vainglory had an edge to it, too. The more entrenched he became, the more contempt he felt for his peers and rivals. He wrote to his wife, “I can’t tell you how disgusted I am with these wretched politicians—they are a most despicable set of men. . . . I am becoming daily more disgusted with this imbecile administration.” He thought Lincoln’s cabinet contained “some of the greatest geese I have ever seen. . . . Seward is the meanest of them all—a meddlesome, officious, incompetent little puppy. . . . [Secretary of the Navy Gideon] Welles is a garrulous old woman. . . . [Attorney General Edward] Bates is an old fool. . . . The presdt. is nothing more than a well meaning baboon . . . ‘the original gorilla.’ . . . It is sickening in the extreme [to] see the weakness and unfitness of the poor beings who control the destinies of this great country.”15 McClellan’s self-infatuation reached its apogee one evening in November, when Lincoln and Seward came to call on him at his home. They were told he was at a dinner party. They waited. An hour later McClellan arrived and was told about his visitors. He ignored them, walked upstairs, and retired for the evening. An hour and a half after they arrived, a servant informed Lincoln and Seward that McClellan had gone to bed. (It would not be the last time that he stood Lincoln up or publicly ignored him.)