by S. C. Gwynne
A year later, Tom could endure it no longer. He ran away. In Clarksburg he told relatives that he was not going back. When a cousin begged him to return to the Brakes, he said simply, yet for a twelve-year-old boy quite stubbornly, “Maybe I ought to, ma’am, but I am not going to.” The next day he walked eighteen miles to Jackson’s Mill, where Cummins Jackson happily welcomed him back. He spent the rest of his childhood in that sturdy masculine environment, attending several small, rural schools and working alternately for Cummins and at a variety of jobs that included surveying, teaching school, and serving warrants and collecting delinquent accounts as constable for Lewis County. His childhood was, in that regard, not altogether exceptional for someone from that rural county in Virginia in the 1830s. Young men were expected to grow up quickly, and worked at whatever jobs were available.4 Probably the most exceptional part was twelve-year-old Tom’s adventure with his sixteen-year-old brother Warren down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, where they spent a summer and part of a fall cutting and selling wood to passing steamers. The work was hard, the money poor. Both boys got malaria and came home much the worse for what started out as a spirited adventure.
Nor was Jackson’s orphanhood—for all that has been made of it—terribly unusual. Outbreaks of typhoid, yellow fever, and smallpox were common at the time, destroying families and leaving children bereft of parents. (The early 1800s were the heyday of orphanage-building in America.) Tom Jackson undoubtedly missed the love of a mother and father, but he was also busy, industrious, and part of a large, prosperous, and well-connected family that loved him. He lived in the home of a man of whom he would later write, affectionately, “Uncle was like a father to me.” He had no choice but to endure his separation from Laura and Warren. They were thrilled to see each other periodically. They corresponded and remained close. When Warren died of tuberculosis when Tom was seventeen—he had never quite recovered from their ill-fated river trip—Tom and Laura were all that remained of the original Jackson family.
• • •
We know in some detail the circumstances of Laura’s life: where she lived, whom she married, what her family’s finances were like, and who her children were. But she herself is harder to see. In the few surviving photos of her, she looks a good deal like her brother, which is not entirely fortunate. She was plain and a bit masculine, with Jackson’s thin lips, strong chin, prominent brow, and wide-set eyes. She suffered from at least some of the same ailments he did, especially uveitis. She was highly sensitive, particularly to perceived neglect by her brother, and her feelings could be easily hurt.5 She married well. Her husband, Jonathan Arnold, was a prosperous landowner, lawyer, and cattle dealer from Beverly, Virginia. He was twenty-four years her senior, and she was his third wife. They had four children, the oldest of whom was named after her brother Tom, who loved them all dearly and played the part of the doting, indulgent uncle while spending significant parts of five summers with the family during his decade in Lexington.
In his letters to Laura, Jackson was unguarded in a way he never was at VMI or around most of his Lexington acquaintances. A letter in early 1853 was typical for its candor and its range. He describes his own passionate embrace of God—evoking a soaring vision of divinity that was not even hinted at in his solemn demeanor around town. “I hope,” he wrote,
that ere this spring your health has improved and that the returning spring will reanimate your feelings and suggest the idea that it is but the symbol of the endless beauties and enjoyments of the world to come. The passage of Scripture from which I have derived sufficient support, whenever applied, is in the following words: “Acknowledge God in all thy ways, and He shall direct thy paths.” What a comfort is this! My dear sister, it is useless for men to tell me that there is no God, and that His benign influence is not to be experienced in prayer, when it is offered in conformity to the Bible. For some time past not a single day has passed without my feeling His hallowing presence whilst at my morning prayers.6
He then shifted, as he commonly did in his correspondence with his sister, from the divine to the quotidian: he spoke of the cold weather, of the news and activities of their many relatives, how people had filled their icehouses, and how he despaired of getting dried peaches, which he loved. As always, there was his health—complaining of “nervousness” and “cold feet”—and his diet:
My dishes are very plain; in general brown bread is the principal article for breakfast and tea; and sometimes I probably do not taste meat for more than a month; and I have not to my recollection used any other drink than cold water since my return home.
Permeating most of his letters to her is a profound, unflagging optimism that even tragedy in his life could not undermine. It was linked to his relationship to God and his belief in the afterlife. But he was also a fundamentally cheerful man who insisted on looking at the brighter side of life. In a letter written a month later, while he was enduring his usual struggles keeping his cadets in check and having the same tired pranks pulled on him, he invoked the sunny optimism of his religion. “Our lives,” he wrote,
have been checkered in a most marked manner, and we are still, notwithstanding all the ill omens of our youth, living even beyond the usual period of human life, and I trust that before us are the brightest of our days. In taking a retrospective view of my own life, each year has opened, as I consider, with increased promise. And with my present views, the future is holding richer stores in reserves. . . . I too have crosses, and am at times deeply afflicted, but however sore may be the trials, they lose their poignancy, and instead of producing injury, I feel that I am but improved by the ordeal. But how is this accomplished? By throwing myself on the protection of Him whose law book is the wonderful Bible. My dear sister I would not part with this book for countless universes. I feel ready to make every sacrifice to carry out the will of Him who so loved us as to give His only begotten son to die for me.7
On April 15, 1853, he wrote Laura a letter whose playful tone would have flabbergasted his students at VMI:
My Dear Sister: Our spring is opening beautifully, though it is said to be late. I wish that I could be with you this evening, Ah! Not this evening only, but many evenings. I am invited to a large party to-night, and among the scramble, expect to come in for my share of fun.8
• • •
The notion of Jackson scrambling for his “share of fun” at an evening party would have seemed implausible and possibly ridiculous to anyone who knew him. What accounted for this sudden exuberance was a significant change in the young major’s life: he was in love, though he wasn’t yet ready to tell Laura. He was in fact engaged, though no one else knew that, either. The courtship had happened rather quickly. After moving to Lexington, Jackson had met one of the town’s gray eminences: the Reverend Dr. George Junkin, the president of Washington College, which was founded in 1749 and endowed by George Washington himself.9 Junkin was a force in early American higher education. An ordained Presbyterian minister and a professor of classics, he had been the first president both of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and Miami University in Ohio. He had taken the job at Washington College in 1848. While fulfilling his academic duties he also conducted regular services at the Washington College chapel and in a nearby town.10
Austere, imposing, intellectual, and deeply religious, Junkin was the sort of older man who had been missing in Jackson’s life, and Jackson immediately liked him. He was soon a regular visitor to the Junkins’ parlor in the large brick mansion with a white portico that was the Washington College president’s residence. Junkin liked Jackson, too. According to Junkin’s brother and biographer D. X. Junkin, who knew Jackson well, relations between the two “were those of a fond father and an affectionate son.”11 They spent hours discussing theological issues and Presbyterian doctrine. The Pennsylvania-born Dr. Junkin was also outspoken on the subject of slavery, which he regarded as a moral and an economic evil.12 It is likely that the two men discussed this as well. (After secession, Junkin would leav
e for the North, condemning slavery as he left—a painful event in Jackson’s life.)
But there was another reason Jackson was interested in the Junkin family. One of the reverend doctor’s eight children was the spirited, devout, and cheerfully irreverent Elinor, known as Ellie, a year younger than Jackson and still resident in the Junkin home. He had met her on an early visit and had become more intimate with her when they both began teaching Sunday school at the Presbyterian church in February 1852. Soon he was falling in love with her, though it apparently took a bit of time before he understood what was happening to him. Harvey Hill describes a visit from Jackson during which, no matter what Hill said, Jackson would manage to maneuver the conversation back to Ellie. Jackson finally confessed, “I don’t know what has changed me. I used to think her plain, but her face now seems to me all sweetness.” Hill started to laugh and then replied, “You are in love. That’s what is the matter!” According to Hill, Jackson then “blushed up to the eyes, and said that he had never been in love in his life, but he certainly felt differently toward this lady from what he had ever felt before.”13 By January 1853, the major was calling on her regularly.14
The chestnut-haired Ellie shook Jackson’s life to its foundations. She was in most ways his opposite. She had a vibrant, outgoing personality, a finely tuned sense of humor, and was not at all shy about teasing the stern Major Jackson about his unusual behavior. She was, according to her niece, “one of the sunniest, happiest of beings.”15 Just as important, she was deeply religious, more so even than Jackson himself. Soon it was apparent to everyone who knew them that Jackson was seeking Ellie’s hand in matrimony. Though Dr. Junkin and his wife, Julia, admired Jackson’s piety and seriousness, they were surprised that such a solemn and socially ungraceful man should want to marry their spritely, extroverted daughter.16 And Jackson had done so little self-promotion that for months the Junkins were not aware of his exploits in the Mexican-American War. But they soon got used to the idea, and encouraged it. Sometime in early 1853, the two were engaged.
There was just one problem. Ellie’s older, unmarried sister, Margaret “Maggie” Junkin, was bitterly jealous of Jackson and entirely unreconciled to the idea that Ellie would marry him and thus leave her, at age thirty-two, to a dreary life at home, possibly as an old maid. But there was more to her opposition than simple fear of abandonment. Though she and Ellie were five years apart, they were inseparable friends. They dressed alike, shared the same room, and took walks and rode horses together. They shared each other’s most intimate secrets. The two sisters were, moreover, complementary personalities: Ellie was intensely social; Maggie was shy, a bit withdrawn, more sensitive and emotional, and less comfortable in society.
Nor was Maggie somehow the weaker, less talented, or less attractive of the two. From the few photographs we have of her, if she was not precisely pretty and had less pretensions to fashion than her younger sister, she was certainly good-looking. She was petite, with fair skin, intelligent eyes, and a headful of auburn curls. She was also something of a prodigy, a rising literary star who had published stories, poems, and essays in some of the leading periodicals of the day. (She went on to achieve renown as the “Poetess of the South,” publishing widely read and well-reviewed works on the war and other subjects; in her later life she corresponded extensively with literary friends Robert Browning, Lord Tennyson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Christina Rossetti.17)
And now she had set her considerable talents against Major Jackson. Not only was he a competitor for Ellie’s affections, but he was also the sober-sided, wholly prosaic soldier and science professor from the mountains of western Virginia seemed to collide with everything Maggie, with her literary training and romantic and poetic soul and as the daughter of a classicist, valued. She undoubtedly had also heard the stories about his peculiarities that circulated at VMI, which was only a five-minute walk from her home. It is not clear exactly what she said to her sister, but she evidently intervened. “Elinor is in love with a Major Jackson, a professor at the University [sic], and Margaret won’t let him come to the house,” wrote one of their cousins.18 The result of Maggie’s campaign was that, soon after the engagement was made, Ellie abruptly broke it off, and she and Jackson stopped seeing each other. Jackson, helpless against Maggie’s influence, was miserable. “I don’t think I ever saw anyone suffer as much as he did during the two or three months of estrangement,” wrote Hill. “He . . . said to me one day: ‘I think it probable that I shall become a missionary and die in a foreign land.’ ”19
And so he might have, had Maggie not decided to relent. Her recantation came in the form of a sentimental poem, addressed to Ellie, that admitted her deep jealousy but vowed to accept her sister’s choice:
Tis but the common work of Time
To mar our household so
And I must learn to choke the sob
And smile to see them go. . . .
Forgive these saddened strains, Ellie
Forgive these eyes so dim!
I must—must love whom you have loved
So I will turn to him—
And clasping with a silent—touch
Whose tenderness endears
Your hand and his between my own
I bless them with my tears.20
The poem was followed by an equally penitent letter:
I will try to fling from me the intensely painful idea that anything shall ever divide me from you. I have been very wrong to let this idea gain so deep a seat in my mind, but it was because I sincerely believed it. Now it shall not be. However I may be of the opinion that you will not need me so much, if you become a wife, I will not abate one jot of my need for you and my clinging to you. I will endeavor to keep in check my selfishness, and I find a pure pleasure in yr. new happiness and prospects, and instead of not liking the major because he does the same thing I do, i.e. believes you necessary to his happiness, I will try to make that a very reason for liking him better.21
With Maggie’s reluctant reconciliation, the engagement was back on, though this time secretly, and the two were married at sundown on August 4, 1853, by Dr. Junkin in a modest ceremony in the parlor of the president’s mansion at Washington College. By the time the rest of the town found out—to its amazement—that Major Jackson was married, he was already off on his honeymoon. But that was not the only piece of interesting news. Acquaintances also learned that Ellie and the major were not alone: Maggie Junkin, who was still not happy about losing her sister—she had told a friend that “the word marriage jars my ears to hear it”—had accompanied them on the trip. The three of them, together, journeyed north on a tour to Philadelphia, where they went sightseeing; West Point, where he proudly showed them the lovely campus of his alma mater; and Niagara Falls, which he had visited before and which he found endlessly entertaining. The last stop was Québec Province, in Canada, where they visited Montréal and Québec City, and where Jackson insisted on visiting the site of the famous Battle of the Plains of Abraham, where British general James Wolfe, in a daring assault, had died while defeating French forces under the Marquis de Montcalm in 1759. “I shall never forget,” Maggie wrote later, “the dilating enthusiasm that seemed to take possession of the whole man; he stood a-tiptoe, his tall figure appearing much taller than usual, under the overpowering feeling of the moment . . . he swept his arm with a passionate movement around the plain and exclaimed, quoting Wolfe’s dying words—‘I die content! To die as he died, who would not die content!’ ”22
It was in Canada, too, that Jackson insisted on watching a Highlander regiment drill on Sunday evening, which his new wife felt violated the sanctity of the Sabbath. Jackson went anyway, stating that if Sunday was the only time he could see it, then it was not wrong to do so. Ellie disagreed and let him know it, saying in her direct way that what he was doing was “a very sophistical way of secularizing sacred time.” Jackson thought it over and later agreed. For the rest of his life he took great pains to keep the Sabbath holy.23
But friends agreed that Ellie’s most telling effect on Jackson had to do with his religion, and his marriage to her coincided with a conspicuous deepening of his faith. “Elinor Junkin had more to do with the extraordinary piety which was afterward so conspicuous in ‘Stonewall Jackson,’ than has ever been told,” wrote Maggie’s stepdaughter Elizabeth Preston Allan. “Major Jackson found in [her] not only the sweetest woman he had ever known, and the most charming and engaging companion, but the highest type of Christian as well. Hers was the stanch, conscientious, God-fearing faith of the old Covenanters.”25 They both believed in the reality of heaven and eternal life with God. Indeed, when Ellie’s mother passed away, Jackson wrote to Laura that “her death was no leaping into the dark. She died in the bright hope of an unending immortality of happiness.”26 With Ellie his belief seems to have evolved into its ultimate form, a constant, quasi-mystical union with the divine, in which God was alive in every part of his life, no matter how minute. As one friend later put it, “God was in all his thoughts . . . God, God Himself, the living, personal and present God . . . possessed his whole being.”27 Jackson himself summed it up in this extraordinary statement, in response to a friend’s asking how he obeyed the biblical command to “pray without ceasing.” He replied,