The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  He carried himself in the accustomed ramrod configuration that made people account him stiff. He still thought it best for his health to keep his alimentary canal straight. Both afoot and on horseback he was awkward in his movements, as always. His sole objective in either case was to cover the ground and it didn’t matter much to him how he looked doing it. The truth was, as someone said, Jackson was “not educated in Mr. Turveydrop’s school of politeness, nor versed in the poetry of motion.”5 In an age when stylish uniforms and fine horses were the rule, he was clearly marching to a different and more ragged drum.6

  His horse matched him perfectly in appearance. His name was Little Sorrel, which was also his description. He was, Henry Kyd Douglas observed, “as little like a Pegasus as his master was like an Apollo.”7 Jackson purchased him as a gift for his wife when he was at Harpers Ferry hijacking locomotives. He had at first named him Fancy, which was a barefaced misnomer, for he was the plainest of horses. But Jackson preferred him for his easy gait—“as easy,” he said, “as the rocking of a cradle.”8 Little Sorrel was like his master in many ways. He could readily doze between pauses in the fighting and he moved calmly about in the passion of battle as if nothing was happening. Jackson’s men swore that Little Sorrel “could not run except toward the enemy.”9 But in time the horse came to recognize an ovation for Jackson by these same men as worse than war and a signal to hightail it out of there. Because the horse had intelligent eyes “as soft as a gazelle’s,”10 Jackson loved him and would hand-feed him apples along the side of the road.

  On this war horse, Jackson sat stiffly with arms akimbo, legs straightened rigidly before him, and toes pointed zenithward. When Little Sorrel started off on his inevitable lope, the general’s body swayed in accompaniment with an awkward jerking motion, as though a stiff spring had been inserted in the back of the saddle. The bearing of neither could be considered martial. Indeed, it could have been said of them together, as it had been said of the man alone since his West Point days: strange looking, and quite unprepossessing.11

  The ovations that invariably greeted his passage through his army were an embarrassment to him. His appearance created the same uproar generally caused by a rabbit, which the soldiers loved to run down with raucous shouts and cries. When distant cheering was heard the army would assume, “That’s Jackson or a rabbit.”12 Jackson tried to get these visitations over with as quickly as possible. He loped up the line as fast as he could on Little Sorrel, his body bent forward, his hat snatched off his head and held out stiffly before him by way of a salute. On he rocketed in this manner, looking “like a rusty-jointed collector of contributions at a protracted meeting.”13

  Mounted or afoot Jackson was a complicated combination of characteristics and eccentricities.

  He was different. “Nobody ever understood him,” a soldier said, “and nobody has ever been quite able to account for him.”14 He “knew the country, the people, and himself,” a Richmond insider said. “The last was not known to any other in the country.”15 One of his officers said: “No one could love the man for himself. He seems to be cut off from his fellow men and to commune with his own spirit only, or with spirits of which we know not.”16

  He was likened, under normal circumstances, to a country schoolmaster, unaccustomed to the saddle but inexplicably sitting in one anyhow, and engaged in some difficult and absorbing mathematical calculation as he jogged along his way. In battle, however, when cannon thundered, small arms fire rattled, and sabers flashed, all that changed. He was transfigured into something else entirely. Out went the schoolmaster, in came the fighter; out went tranquility, in came devouring excitement; out went the ice, in came the fire. In this mode, the possibility of losing the battle he was engaged in at the moment never crossed his mind.17

  He was devout. One of the reasons losing never entered his mind was that he considered the whole affair to be out of his hands entirely and in those of an all-kind Providence. “We know that all things work together for good to them that love God,” was the way he felt about life in general and battle in particular.18 Victories were God’s doing, and to Him went the credit. Out of guns or bullets? Then under Divine blessing “we must rely upon the bayonet,” he said.19

  When Jackson decided to take up religion as his way of life here and hereafter, it was like everything else he ever took up: he took it up entirely. When he decided to become a Presbyterian, he became one heart and soul. When he married, he married the daughter of a Presbyterian divine. When she died after a short time, he married the daughter of another Presbyterian divine. When he came to believe that one should sanctify Sundays, he sanctified them wholly and without stint. He would not travel on the Sabbath, or let anything that had to do with him travel on that day—including his mail. Nor would he even read a letter on Sunday. When he learned that a railroad in which he owned stock engaged in a large amount of Sunday trafficking, he sold the stock.20

  None of this meant, however, that he wouldn’t fight on Sunday. The battle at Bull Run was fought on Sunday. So was the clash at Kernstown. He hated to do it, but that was the way he was. The one thing that outranked Providence was duty. In any conflict between the two, duty won every time. Providence said thou shalt not kill. But if duty said it was necessary, he did it without hesitation, wholesale if possible. Indeed there were those who believed that Providence and duty were one and the same with Jackson. His first wife, Elinor Junkin, believed that. She told him in their short time together that duty was the goddess of his worship. He did everything from a sense of duty. His sister-in-law insisted he even ate from a sense of duty.21

  He was rigidly abstemious. But this also had to do with duty. His brother-in-law, Confederate General Daniel Harvey Hill, who had walked with him on the beach in Mexico, said that like Paul, Jackson “kept his body under.” He would not let any appetite control him or any weakness overcome him. He therefore used neither tobacco, coffee, nor spirits. He would go all winter without a cloak or overcoat, for no other reason than he “did not wish to give way to cold.”22

  This would explain why he never left ranks to run from the rain at West Point. It would also explain why loving strong drink, he never touched it. When Dominie Wilson danced the inebriated two-step with him at Brown’s Hotel, it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. He told a brother officer that he was more afraid of drink than he was of federal bullets.23 He therefore considered it part of his duty to protect his soldiers from the first if not from the second. At Harpers Ferry in the first year of the war he issued an order forbidding any shopkeeper in town to sell ardent spirits to his soldiers, on penalty of being shut down and the liquor confiscated.24 Since the soldiers managed to get the spirits anyhow, he had to order all the whiskey in town poured from barrels into the gutters. The men dipped it up in buckets. He ordered it poured into the Potomac; the soldiers came with buckets tied to the ends of ropes and caught it as it cascaded to the waters below. At least that was what cavalryman John N. Opie swears happened, although he may have been drunk at the time.25 It was with men of such tenacity, ingenuity, and dedication that Jackson fashioned the Stonewall Brigade.

  He was taciturn and modest. “If silence is golden, then Jackson was rich indeed,” a soldier said of him.26 He talked like he came and went: suddenly, and it didn’t take him long to say what he had to say. He blushed like a schoolgirl at a compliment and was easily confused in the presence of strangers. If the strangers were pretty young women threatening him with smiles and embraces, he was utterly paralyzed and stampeded.27 If ambition was in him, self-aggrandizement wasn’t. Not until he had asked the hand of Elinor Junkin in marriage and the records of his army career were placed before her father, did the family have any idea that he had so distinguished himself in the Mexican War.28

  He was tender—in his fashion; and domesticated—to a degree. D. H. Hill spoke of his “tenderness of conscience.”29 He addressed his second wife, Anna, as “my precious little darling” and my “little pet,” and by other endearing terms that
would have scandalized his West Point classmates.30 He lavished Spanish love-words on his loved ones, and in the privacy of his own living room at Lexington he danced the polka.31 This would have astonished Dabney Maury who had believed that the idea of Jackson dancing the german was a self-evident absurdity. It would not have surprised Dominie Wilson, however, who had danced the two-step with him.32

  He was dyspeptic. Anna called this malady his “arch-enemy,”33 and it added to the aura of eccentricity that encased him. He had other real and imagined ailments that contributed to this aura as well. He told Maury and McClellan before the war that one arm and one leg were heavier than the others and that he therefore occasionally raised his arm straight up to let the blood run back into his body and relieve the excessive weight. Given his reputation as a praying man, this procedure was often mistaken on the battlefield as a form of supplication to the Almighty.34 A severe inflammation of his ear and throat coupled with an attack of neuralgia in his early years at VMI had left him hard of hearing in his right ear.35

  But dyspepsia was the main problem, and it made Jackson prone to the common dyspeptic tendency to nod off sometimes when he ought not to. This beset him most sorely in church, where he always sat as usual in a perfectly bolt-upright position, disdaining to lean against the back of the pew. D. H. Hill had seen him often in church sitting like a ramrod, but with his head bowed down to his knees, sound asleep. He was awake for the text and a few opening words of the sermon, but not for much else. His chief ecclesiastical victim over the years had been the Reverend Dr. William S. White, his pastor in Lexington. The story was told that one evening the faculty of the two institutions of higher learning in Lexington, VMI and Washington College, were invited to attend a special lecture of a celebrated mesmerist, at which many citizens of the town were also present. After some impressive feats of hypnotism, the mesmerist wished to try his hand on one of the professors in the audience, and Jackson went forward. He was the last one in the audience the mesmerist should have selected. Jackson’s will was too strong and the spell had no effect—to everyone’s amusement. But the fun ran over when a female voice from the audience said in a stage whisper: “No one can put Major Jackson to sleep but the Rev. Dr. White!”36

  Ironically, the Union generals came to believe he never slept. Henry Kyd Douglas could have told them he slept a great deal, and not just from dyspepsia. Give him five minutes to rest and he could sleep for three of it. When nothing important was happening he slept—in any position and anywhere, in a chair, under fire, on horseback. Time other men gave to conversation Jackson gave to sleep.37

  He was fearless. One of his soldiers described him in battle: With his “war-look” on he “rode about the battlefield regardless of shot and shell, looking as if nothing was going on.”38 Although he was partially deaf in one ear, with weak eyes and a fragile nervous system, none of these were to be confused with a weak will. The nervous system caused the muscles of his face to twitch convulsively when a battle was about to begin. His hand would tremble so that he could not write, and his soldiers would say, “Old Jack is making mouths at the Yankees.”39 One of Jackson’s favorite maxims was, “Never take counsel of your fears.”40 He practiced it and recommended it to others, generals and couriers alike.

  He was a workaholic. It was early to rise and late to bed with Jackson—or better yet, never to bed at all. He always moved his army at daybreak or else started the night before.41 He was a “second day man,” his soldiers said—beginning early and fighting late and beginning again early the next day. His basic work ethic was to advance and fight and to go on doing it until the enemy was whipped.42

  And in all things but one he was a stonewall. To those who knew him, the nickname he won at Manassas fit perfectly, not so much because of his heroic stand there, but for his unyielding stand about everything everywhere. He was a stonewall before he was ever christened that in fire and blood at Manassas. Fifty-eight West Point classmates had found that out about him years before. The one exception was in moving his army. When Dennis Hart Mahan talked of the importance of celerity at West Point now, he could point to this former cadet as an example of what he meant. As on the frontier, so in Jackson’s battles: The front was all around and the rear was nowhere. And in Jackson’s army there was little sympathy with human infirmity. The idea was getting around among his troops that he was a relentlessly “one idea’d man,” who looked upon broken-down soldiers and stragglers as the same odious thing—weak creatures wanting in patriotism.43

  His men nonetheless laughed when they saw him on his sorrel with the rim of his cap resting on his nose and his chin upthrust seeking the light. But their cheers as he rode by said the laughter was the laughter of respect. It was hard not to laugh at this strange man with his oddities, eccentricities, and one-idea’dness, but it was just as hard not to respect him. Beneath the oddness was a fighter—and, although it was tough to see sometimes, a general.

  The soldier he was calling from the Rappahannock to be with him in the Valley was a fighter and a general too. And it was as difficult to believe it of him as it was of Jackson.

  Richard Ewell was already convinced of his new commander’s lunacy. How could a man who wouldn’t eat pepper, as Jackson wouldn’t because he believed it produced a weakness in his left leg, be anything but over the edge? But just about everybody agreed that when it came to being over the edge, Ewell left Jackson well back from the cliff. Dick Taylor, one of Ewell’s brigadiers, believed that Virginia probably never produced a truer gentleman, braver soldier, more lovable—or odder—man.44

  Ewell’s eccentricity began with his appearance. He was nearly bald—one of his nicknames was “Old Bald Head”—and had been since his twenties when his hair had started to fall out and he had written home to his sister Rebecca that he was now shaving his head “to keep what little I have left from following suit.”45 This gave his head a bomb-shaped configuration. He had bright prominent eyes and an aquiline nose, which the literate and well-read Taylor compared to that of Francis of Valois, and the disposition of a nervous bird. All in all, Taylor thought he bore a striking resemblance to a woodcock. This was confirmed by a birdlike habit of cocking his head to one side and making quaint utterances delivered in a lisp.46

  Although Ewell may have looked like a woodcock, he swore like a screech owl. “His profanity,” one officer noted, “did not consist of single or even double oaths, but was ingeniously wrought into whole sentences. It was profanity which might be parsed, and seemed the result of careful study and long practice.”47 It was a talent that would cause the pious Jackson to say at one point in their relationship: “Ewell, that was well done, and I don’t see how a man of your habits and who uses language like yours can do his work so well.”48

  It was a talent that may have been cultivated on the Indian frontier, where Ewell had spent most of his army career after graduating from West Point in 1840. There was no accounting for it in his background, for he came from one of the most genteel and prominent of Virginia families. His father had been a distinguished physician in Washington City and his mother had been the daughter of the first secretary of the navy. His grandfather had been a classmate of Thomas Jefferson at William and Mary College.49

  In many ways his heart was not in this war. It had come much to his bitter regret. Like many others who had been in the old army, he now fought for his state out of “a painful sense of duty.” He was to write of the war, after the war, “It was like death to me.”50

  On the frontier Ewell had been without equal as a cavalry captain. It was a measure of the regard in which he was held that a fort was named for him in Texas and a county named for him in Arizona Territory—Ewell County, later changed to Pima.51 When there had been a need recently to go foraging for the division, Ewell had gone out personally, returning late in the day in triumph leading a single bull. Taylor told him it was truly impressive, but that it would hardly feed eight thousand men. “Ah!” said the general, “I was thinking of my fifty dragoons.”
52 This tendency to think only company-size may have been one of the reasons he believed “the road to glory cannot be followed with much baggage.”53

  Ewell, like Jackson, fancied himself a victim of mysterious internal maladies. Jackson wouldn’t eat pepper because of it, but Ewell would confine his diet to frumenty, a preparation made from wheat. His nervousness often prevented him from sleeping in the normal fashion and he would pass nights curled up around a camp stool in positions that would dislocate the joints of an ordinary human body and, as Taylor said, drive the “caoutchouc man” to despair.54

  When cross about something, Ewell could be difficult to deal with, brusque and abrupt, sparing nobody with his profane lisping rebuke. But this masked a true nature that was chivalric in the extreme, tender, and humane, “as generous a heart as ever beat in human bosom,” one of his kin said of him.55 Listening in on a Ewell conversation could be an experience. He was given to inexplicable comments that came from nobody knew where. “General Taylor!” he asked his brigadier suddenly one day, “What do you suppose President Davis made me a major-general for?”56

  At Bull Run in the first year of the war, an expected order from General P.G.T. Beauregard directing Ewell to begin an assault on the Union left hadn’t arrived. One of his lieutenants, John B. Gordon, found Ewell in an agony of suspense, chafing like a caged lion, mounting his horse one moment, dismounting it the next, walking to and fro muttering to himself, “No orders, no orders.”

  Ewell’s own written orders were full, accurate, and lucid. His verbal orders, however, especially when he was under intense excitement, were direct from Babel, understandable by no man in any tongue. At such times his eyes glittered with a peculiar brilliancy and his brain far outpaced his speech. His thoughts leaped across great chasms which his words could never hope to cross. He was given to wildly improbable combinations of words and ideas, such as this invitation to Gordon to join him in breakfast before the battle of Bull Run: