by S. C. Gwynne
In this uncertain state, he fended off his wife’s offer to come and join him. “The scene here, my darling pet, looks quite animated,” he wrote Anna on April 25, in an upbeat tone that almost certainly did not match his mood. “Troops are continually arriving. Yesterday about seven hundred came in from South Carolina. . . . I received your precious letter, in which you speak of coming here in the event of my remaining. I would like very much to see my sweet little face, but my darling had better remain at her own home, as my continuance here is very uncertain.”11 Indeed, it was so uncertain and his time so unoccupied that at one point he spent the better part of the day teaching a raw recruit—a corporal of the guard—every detail of the man’s new position, accompanying him through the whole circuit of sentry posts, patiently teaching him the various salutes and challenges, and instructing him in his duty.12 Jackson was not only unwanted and unneeded; he was bored, too.
That same day his orders finally came through. They were a crushing disappointment. They confirmed whatever feelings he had that he was being slighted. He had been made a major in Virginia’s topographical engineers, an appointment that his wife said he found “distasteful,” which was probably a graceful understatement.13 It was more like an insult. That was first because Jackson was no engineer, a job that involved “drawing”—essentially the rendering of terrain, buildings, and fortifications. It had been his worst subject at West Point. Far worse was the implied lack of respect for him as a soldier. The job was likely to be behind a desk in Richmond rather than on the front lines. And at a time when colonelcies and field commands were being given out liberally to men with less experience or no experience at all, Jackson would now enter the army at the same rank he had won by brevet fourteen years before.14 As the great surge of war thrummed about him in the streets of Richmond, he was, in effect, being buried in a desk job for which he had little aptitude.
Fortunately for Jackson, he was not the only one who saw the absurdity in placing someone with wartime experience behind a desk in a fledgling nation full of people who did not have the slightest idea how to fight a war. As it happened, an old friend from his childhood days in northwestern Virginia named Jonathan Bennett was working in Richmond as state auditor. Bennett had been surprised to hear about Jackson’s assignment, and took his concern immediately to Virginia governor John Letcher, another Jackson friend from Lexington, where the former had practiced law. Letcher quickly intervened, and by April 26 had secured for Jackson an appointment as colonel of the Virginia volunteers. The next day he summoned Jackson to his office and announced what must have seemed an astounding turn of luck, giving Jackson what Jackson himself later said was the best possible appointment he could have received. Not only was it a colonelcy; he would soon receive orders to take command at Harpers Ferry, the northernmost outpost of the Confederacy and a place of great strategic value that contained an armory and was located on one of the Union’s key railroad lines.
Jackson was elated. He left that night. Along the way, he received his actual orders from Major General Robert E. Lee, the ranking army officer of the Confederacy. “You will proceed without delay to Harper’s Ferry, Virginia . . . and assume command of that Post,” wrote Lee. “After mustering into the service of the state such companies as may be accepted under your instructions, you will organize them into regiments or battalions, uniting as far as possible companies from the same section of the state.”15 Jackson already liked and admired Lee, and wrote Anna that he regarded him as “a better officer than Gen. [Winfield] Scott,” the highest-ranking Union commander. Jackson had met both men in the Mexican-American War.
The location of his assignment at the edge of the mountainous and Union-tilting northwestern section of the state (today it is the state of West Virginia) was not coincidental. Jackson, who had grown up in those mountains, had so many relatives there that, in Bennett’s words, “almost every second man is his kinsman.”16 In a directive to Letcher, Lee stated that “great confidence is placed in the personal knowledge of Major Jackson in this regard. If deemed expedient, he can assemble the volunteer forces of the northwest.”17
Thus Jackson’s commission had been given him as much for political reasons as for any perceived notion of his military abilities. But there was nothing wrong with that. The early days of the war were a sort of golden age for “political” generals and colonels and other officers—men who were given appointments for the constituencies they represented or the allies they brought with them and not for their military experience. The ranks of both sides were already full of them, and it would take several years to weed out the worst of them. Because he had been to West Point and had fought in Mexico, Jackson would never be grouped with such people. Still, he was seen as someone who might be politically useful in the western regions of Virginia. Either way, he got the job. It was a small event that would have astonishing consequences.
CHAPTER FOUR
DISCIPLINE AND OTHER NOVEL IDEAS
The chaos Jackson found at Harpers Ferry was very like the chaos he had found at Richmond, with one important distinction. He was now in command of it. Here was the same motley assortment of volunteers and militiamen, the same rawboned recruits with the same naive, self-fulfilling notions of what the war was going to be like; the same lack of order; the same wild exuberance. Some 2,500 men, mostly from the Shenandoah Valley, had assembled in the warming Appalachian spring in the tiny, picturesque mountain town on a tongue of land at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. It was lovely, outsized country: broad-shouldered mountains falling abruptly into sparkling, muscular rivers. If this notch in the mountains seemed to the recruits a perfect place to have a sort of extended social picnic, punctuated with parades, they could hardly be blamed. There had been no one, in the two weeks since secession, to tell them otherwise. “Society was plentiful,” wrote a young recruit who was there, “for the ranks were filled with the best blood of Virginia; all its classes were there. Mothers and sisters and other dear girls came constantly to Harper’s Ferry and there was little difficulty in seeing them. Nothing was serious yet; everything much like a joke.”1
In charge of all this were four generals of the militias, a colorful set of men even by the standards of the early war. They dressed the way they believed generals ought to dress: cocked hats and feathers, epaulets and ceremonial sashes, gleaming sabers and pistols. They looked quite grand, the more so since they went about like pashas, with entourages that included aides-de-camp, adjutants, inspectors general, personal servants, and various supernumeraries. They served whiskey liberally to friends and colleagues. They liked ceremony and spectacle, and provided plenty of both. They owed their positions to their prominence in their hometowns and counties; the ranking officer, for example, sixty-year-old Major General Kenton Harper, was the mayor of Staunton, Virginia, and the editor of the town’s newspaper. He presided over what, by military standards, was an organizational disaster: there was no medical facility, no commissary or quartermaster, no chief of ordnance. The limit of military organization was the hundred-man company. There was little equipment or ammunition, and many of the men had no rifles.2 But no one in command seemed terribly exercised about the shortages. Life rolled on, reviews were held, speeches made, and everyone seemed quite happy in anticipation of the excitement that was surely to come.
Amid such pomp and visions of martial glory, the new commanding colonel who arrived on the evening of April 27 was a sorry disappointment. He was, in fact, the opposite of anyone’s idea of what a leader was supposed to look like, and his somber, uncourtly, and undashing manner did nothing to change that impression. He had only two assistants: Assistant Adjutant General John Preston, a personal friend, founder of VMI, and a leading businessman in Lexington; and Inspector General James Massie, a VMI faculty member. The new commander had no prancing steeds and not a thread of gold trim on his uniform. Bearded, solemn, and unexceptional, he walked with long awkward strides through the camps, wearing his faded blue VMI uniform and a beate
n-up cadet cap that he pulled down so far over his nose that it obscured the upper part of his face. “The Old Dominion must be sadly deficient in military men, if this is the best she can do,” wrote one newspaper correspondent who spent some time with him. “He is nothing like a commanding officer.”3
Jackson, meanwhile, felt exactly like a commanding officer. This was what he had wanted, and he believed without any doubt that he was equal to the task. He took a modest room at a little wayside hotel near the railroad bridge, where he sat with Preston at a small pine table—often under a tree in the yard—reviewing the rolls of troops.4 His self-assurance was immediately tested. On the day he arrived, Virginia governor Letcher had informed state militias in Harpers Ferry and elsewhere that officers above the rank of captain would be relieved of duty the moment a state-designated commanding officer arrived. Jackson’s first job was to enforce this order, which meant dismantling most of the military command structure in Harpers Ferry. Predictably, the idea that the imperial generals were being ousted in favor of this shabbily dressed, socially inept professor seemed disgraceful, both to the officers and to the men who served under them. “The deposed officers . . . left for home or for Richmond in a high state of indignation,” wrote a member of a Staunton regiment. “The men were deeply attached to their field officers, and regarded the ordinance of the convention as an outrage on freemen and volunteers.”5 Jackson thus began his tenure in an atmosphere of outright hostility and insubordination. Many of the militia officers had stormed off to Richmond to plead their cases, unable to believe that it could possibly be in the interest of the state or the Confederacy to replace them. Some militiamen simply left in disgust.
Jackson, unfazed by any of this public contempt—one of his great strengths, and weaknesses, was that he cared little about the opinions of others—now moved quickly to reorganize the troops. He began by asking some of the militia officers to stay and help him, thus buying goodwill with a number of companies. Working late into the night and sometimes through until morning—his one complaint to his wife in otherwise happy letters was his lack of sleep—he slowly but firmly stripped the militia companies of their independence and hammered them together into regiments, recruiting many VMI graduates into command positions. He got rid of the whiskey and instituted a rigorous and unforgiving program of drill and instruction, which began at 5:00 a.m. and continued for the next seventeen hours and included up to seven hours of marching. Sometimes the days did not end even there: on May 2 Jackson ordered his troops to sleep on their weapons, and scheduled a full inspection for 1:30 a.m.
Drilling came in different forms. There were marching drills, which taught the men how to walk together in formation and how to transform themselves from a marching column, two or four abreast, into a two-man-deep battle line—and then how to reverse that action. The idea was to be able to move a five-hundred-to-one-thousand-man regiment in an orderly way to, from, and around a battlefield; how to advance, how to retreat, how fast to march, how to dress ranks, how not to shoot at friendly troops. Weapons drills involved instruction in the nine separate actions required to fire a musket. There was instruction on all sorts of other skills, too, from military protocol to making camp to the handling and cooking of rations. To help him with this, Jackson had procured the services of ten cadets from VMI. Since there was virtually no training for officers in the South—who often sat up late at night in their tents reading printed manuals—the cadets’ expertise was crucial to the early war preparations of the Confederacy.6
Within a week Jackson had, to the amazement of local observers, quietly rebuilt the entire military operation at Harpers Ferry. Though the troops were still alarmingly green in many cases, “The presence of a mastermind was visible in the changed conditions of the camp,” wrote John D. Imboden, an artillerist from Staunton. “Perfect order reigned everywhere. Instruction in the details of military duty occupied Jackson’s whole time.”
Many of the militia officers who had left in a huff had thought better of it and had quietly returned, taking their places in the new volunteer army, now squarely under the command of the peculiar professor. What had emerged from the anarchy and disarray of that week was, in fact, a distinct and unusual style of command. It began with rigid discipline and adherence to the strictest military code. Jackson would not tolerate disobedience, insubordination, tardiness, or neglect of duty. “Once or twice some willful young officer made experiment of resisting his authority,” wrote Dabney, “[but] his penalties were so prompt and inexorable that no one desired to adventure another act of disobedience.”7 Punishments were doled out fairly and evenhandedly, without passion or prejudice. Duty was duty. You shirked it at your own peril, and there was nothing personal about what happened to you—arrest and the guardhouse—if you did. Jackson—the new Jackson, anyway—was all about scrupulous honesty, meticulous accountability, and cool professionalism. Soldiers quickly learned that quiet and unconversational did not mean irresolute.
Everyone who had known him before noted the change. “It occurred to us at the time that Jackson was much more in his element here as an army officer than when in the professor’s chair at Lexington,” wrote John Gittings, a former student who saw him in Harpers Ferry. “His manner had become brusque and imperative; his face was bronzed from exposure, his beard was now of no formal style, but was worn unshorn.”8 He was already a very different creature from the professor he had been just a few weeks before. He had discovered a new competence, something he had never done before on this scale but was exceptionally good at. The men could feel it, and perceptions changed. The martinet’s obsession with petty detail now came to be seen as evidence of an iron will. “The only moments of relaxation we enjoyed were those we spent at meal times, but here we were met by the grave, solemn countenance of our Commanding Colonel,” wrote recruit Charles Grattan. “All were afraid of him, for none knew how kindly and genial a heart beat in his bosom. . . . We ate silent as mutes, ever and anon casting a healthy eye upon the Colonel to see if he ate like other men, or bolted raw meat and gnawed bloody bones.”9
Men who performed their duty to Jackson’s specifications quickly discovered the other side of their commander. “He was a rigid disciplinarian, yet as gentle and kind as a woman,” wrote Imboden. “He was the easiest man in the army to get along with pleasantly so long as one did his duty. He was as courteous to the humblest private who sought an interview for any purpose as to the highest officer in his command.”10 As an instructor, he was patient, forbearing, and tolerant of mistakes, provided his students were trying diligently to learn.
Jackson proved to be good at pure logistics as well. After his arrival in Harpers Ferry he had been tasked by Lee with the removal of the rifled-musket fabricating machinery from the former Federal armory to Richmond. Within a week, Jackson had informed an amazed Lee that two-thirds of it had already been moved—a remarkable feat, considering that the complicated machines and their water-powered gearing had to be carefully dismantled before shipment.11 When he discovered that a wagon shortage had occurred because local merchants were paying twice the government rate, he seized the rolling stock. Local businessmen screamed in protest. Jackson ignored them.12 Unwilling to wait for Richmond to ship him the ammunition cars he wanted, he put blacksmiths and carpenters to work converting commercial wagons to caissons. Impatient with the military bureaucracy on his requisition of horses, he dispatched his quartermaster to horsey Loudon County to impress or purchase them. Realizing that Confederate railways were low on rolling stock, he conceived and carried out an ingenious plan that siphoned off locomotives and cars from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, an important Union lifeline to Washington and points east, and took them south into Virginia.13
By May 11, Jackson had seen his command grow to 4,500 soldiers, and his transformation of the large, disorderly encampment into the rudiments of an effective military force had not gone unnoticed. Lee was certainly aware of it.14 “[I] am gratified at the progress you have made in the organizati
on of your command,” he noted in a letter to Jackson on May 9.15 By May 21 Jackson would have fully 8,000 men—7,000 of them armed—a number that included infantry and cavalry from Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, and Maryland.16 They were still woefully underequipped. “Words cannot express to you our deplorable condition here,” wrote Major Kirby Smith on May 29 in a blast directed at his inept state government. “[We are] unprovided, unequipped, unsupplied with ammunition and provisions.”17 In Harpers Ferry, as in the rest of the South, soldiers drilled in whatever they could muster: frock coats, swallowtails, jackets, and shirtsleeves. They carried their own carbines and fowling pieces until someone put an official weapon—likely a smoothbore musket—into their hands. (Indeed, Jefferson Davis was still complaining to Brigadier General Joseph Johnston more than a month later: “I have not arms to supply you.”18) In spite of that, Jackson’s sheer organizational prowess inspired plenty of optimism. A report from an inspector general of the army in late May was surprisingly upbeat. He pointed out shortages of clothing and equipment, inadequate ground for drilling, and the rawness and inexperience of the soldiery. But the inspector also noted that “a fierce spirit animates these rough-looking men,” and credited Jackson with assembling “force enough here to hold this place against any attack.”19
While Jackson was laboring to create a fighting force, making do with a scant few hours of sleep each night, he also managed to write a steady stream of affectionate letters to his wife, expressing his love, and advising her on such matters as closing up the house, finding places for the slaves, and moving to her parents’ house in North Carolina. “I just love my little business woman,” he wrote. “Let Mr. Tebbs have the horse and rockaway at his own price; and if he is not able to pay for them, you may give them to him, as he is a minister of the Gospel. . . . My habitual prayer is that our kind Heavenly Father will give unto my darling every needful blessing.”20 He wrote of his military progress, too: “I am strengthening my position, and if attacked shall, with the blessing of Providence, repel the enemy. I am in good health, considering the great amount of labor which devolves upon me, and the loss of sleep to which I am subjected. . . . Colonels Preston and Massie have been of great service to me. Humanly speaking, I don’t see how I could have accomplished the amount of work I have done without them. . . . Oh, how I would love to see your precious face!”21