Rebel Yell

by S. C. Gwynne

  I can give you my idea of it by illustration, if you will allow it, and will not think that I am setting myself up as a model for others. I have so fixed the habit in my own mind that I never raise a glass of water to my lips without lifting my heart to God in thanks and prayer for the water of life. Then, when we take our meals, there is the grace. Whenever I drop a letter in the post-office, I send a petition along with it for God’s blessing upon its mission and the person to whom it is sent. When I break the seal of a letter just received, I stop to ask God to prepare me for its contents, and make it a messenger of good. When I go to my classroom and await the arrangement of the cadets in their places, that is my time to intercede with God for them. And so in every act of the day I have made the practice habitual.

  When the friend asked if he sometimes forgot to do this, he responded,

  I can hardly say that I do; the habit has become almost as fixed as to breathe.28

  Tom and Ellie’s visit to the Arnold family in the summer of 1854 was happy for other reasons as well. Ellie was pregnant. Though the long, bumpy journey back to Lexington from Beverly must have been difficult for her, she had no problems with her pregnancy and did not expect to have any; her mother had given birth successfully nine times in ten pregnancies. Ellie spent the early fall making preparations for the baby’s arrival. On Sunday, October 22, 1854, she went into labor. A local doctor was in attendance, as were her sisters, Maggie and Julia.

  It is not clear exactly what went wrong, but Ellie was very quickly in very deep trouble. It began when she gave birth to a stillborn son—a tragedy for the Jacksons, though not necessarily a threat to her own life. The following is Jackson’s own description of the events that followed. “The Doctor said that all was well,” he wrote. “The womb closed apparently healthfully, though the child (a son) was dead. The Doctor left the house for a few minutes, and I was admitted into the room and upon observing her agonizing pain I desired the Doctor to return. He soon after entered, but a sudden change had taken place: the womb had relaxed, and in a short time her spirit took its flight.”29 What had happened after the delivery of the dead baby was a massive and excruciatingly painful hemorrhage that the doctor could not stop. Ellie bled to death.

  Jackson was shattered. When his friend and VMI colleague Raleigh Colston arrived to offer sympathy, Jackson led him “to the chamber of death, and with unfaltering hand, removed the veil which covered the dead infant resting upon its dead mother’s breast. Then as quietly [he] replaced it. There were no tears, no quivering of the lips, only a few whispered words.”30 As he sank into grief, Jackson struggled to reconcile his religious views—that God had taken Ellie deliberately for His own purposes and that she now dwelt in paradise—with his own deep sense of loss. His letter to his sister, Laura, written a day later, shows evidence of this war within him:

  The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord. It is his will that my Dearest wife & child should no longer abide with me, and as it is His holy will, I am perfectly reconciled to the sad bereavement, though I deeply mourn my loss. My Dearest Ellie breathed her last on Sunday evening, the same day on which the child was born dead. Oh! The consolations of religion! I can willingly submit to anything if God strengthens me. Oh! My sister would that you could have him for your own God! Though all nature to me is eclipsed, yet I have joy in knowing that God withholds no good things from them that love and keep his commandments.31

  At the funeral, held in Lexington the following day, VMI cadets marched in procession down Main Street to the cemetery, where a single casket containing mother and son was laid in the earth. When the mourners had all left, a pale, devastated Jackson continued to stand at the open grave, holding his cap in his hand while snow flurries swirled around him. Eventually his pastor came and led him slowly away. In spite of his fatalistic refusal to wish that she had not died—that would defy God’s will—it would take him years to recover from her death. Though he went back to his section room at the end of the week and betrayed none of his misery to his students, he visited her grave daily, and friends began to fear that he was losing his mind. He wrote that God had “left me to mourn in human desolation” and was heard to say, when sick with a cold, “If only I could go up to God now!”32 He told Harvey Hill that “he felt an almost irresistible desire to dig up the body and once more be near the ashes of one he had loved so well.”33 More than anything, he told Laura, he wanted to join Ellie in heaven. Fully eight months after her death, he wrote to Laura that his fondest wish on earth was still “that I might join her before the close of another day.”34 He did not want to wait.

  • • •

  In December of the year Ellie died, Jackson received a remarkable letter. It was from Maggie Junkin, his old adversary, who had never quite accepted him into the family and had never been completely cordial to him. Maggie, who had been so overcome by Ellie’s death that she had not even been able to follow the coffin to the cemetery, and who had fled to Philadelphia, now told him frankly that she had felt “an irresistible desire to write to you” to find relief from her crushing sadness. She told him that the previous night she had suddenly been overcome by the sense that Ellie was “forever gone . . . I seemed for the first time to comprehend that Ellie was dead.” She asked Jackson to write to her, but said she would understand if he did not. Though he did not respond to her immediately, she was clearly in his thoughts, as evidenced by a letter he wrote to her brother in early February. “Dear Maggie!” he wrote. “How can I ever make an adequate return for her deep solicitude? My heart yearns to see her; and yet it may be best for her that we should not meet so soon; for my tears have not ceased to flow, my heart to bleed.”35 A week later Jackson finally replied to her with a deeply affectionate letter, saying that “you and I were certainly the dearest objects which she left on earth” and that “I have thought of you much, and prayed for you much, and your best interests are at my heart. I am very anxious to see you.”36 He later wrote that, though he still longed to join Ellie in death, Maggie’s “kindness to me and affection for me has [sic] no little influence in lightening up the gloom which for months has so much envelopped [sic] me. . . . To sum up all dear Maggie I want to see you again.”37

  It was the beginning of a warm, complex, and unusual friendship. By the end of the summer of 1855 the two were back together at the Junkin house, where the family had insisted that Jackson stay. Once a busy, joyous place, the deaths of both Ellie and her mother within a few months of each other now made the elegant old house seem empty and sad. It was in this gloomy atmosphere that Maggie and the major got to know each other. Each evening at precisely nine o’clock, after Jackson had finished his class preparations, Maggie would visit him in his study. If she entered the room even a minute before nine, she later wrote, “I would find him standing before his shaded light, with his eyes shut, as silent and dumb as the sphinx.” A moment later he would “fling aside his shade, wheel round his easy chair, and give himself up to the most delightful nonchalance.”38 They would then spend the next two hours in conversation.

  They talked about everything. Jackson told her all about his childhood, the death of his parents and his years at Jackson’s Mill, his life at West Point, and his military service in Mexico and in Florida. She heard stories of nighttime raids on Mexican gardens with fellow officers and of dances at the homes of Mexican nobility in the days after the war. He opened up to her completely, as he had with Ellie. He would also tell her funny stories, Maggie wrote later, “and be so carried away by them as almost to roll from his chair in laughter. More contagious and hearty laughter I have never heard.”39 She spoke of him as “sportive and rollicking, and full of quips and pranks . . . his cheerfulness and abandon were beautiful to see. . . . He was exceedingly fond of little children, and he would play them all manner of tricks, and amuse them endlessly with his Spanish baby-talk.” She was not only able to overlook the oddities in his behavior but also astonished her family by declaring her new friend to be �
�the very stuff out of which to make a stirring hero”—a remarkable bit of prescience, uttered five years before the war started.40 Maggie opened up, too, telling about her struggles as a writer and the difficulties of being taken seriously as a woman in the literary world. They studied Spanish together. He wrote a letter to her in that language, calling her “my dearly beloved sister” and signing it “Your very loving brother, Thomas.”41

  By the summer of 1856, Maggie and the major were almost certainly in love and thus faced a very serious problem. The constitution of the Presbyterian Church prohibited a man from marrying his dead wife’s sister. In the eyes of the Church Maggie and Thomas were, by virtue of his marriage, forever brother and sister. They were both, moreover, living in the house of a prominent Presbyterian minister who happened to be her father. However reconciled they may have been to their fate, there were also signs that their feelings for each other sometimes caused an uncomfortable—if not unbearable—emotional strain. Maggie left abruptly on trips at least twice. In the spring of 1856, after spending a full winter in the same house with Jackson, she left on short notice to spend time with relatives, while Jackson, a few months later, departed for the relative safety of Europe. Whatever else might happen, Maggie Junkin and Thomas Jackson were never going to be together.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  AN UPRIGHT CITIZEN

  Jackson’s trip to Europe in the summer of 1856 probably had as much to do with his continued grief over Ellie’s death as with putting distance between himself and the brilliant, engaging Maggie Junkin. Whatever the reason, he wanted to get away, and get away he did.1 He secured a leave of absence from VMI and, embarking from New York City on July 9, made a solitary, three-month tour of the Continent; there, his intensity, thoroughness, academic rigor, and seriousness of purpose were perfectly characteristic of the man. Pushing himself sixteen hours a day, he covered an astonishing amount of ground, visiting London, York, Liverpool, Chester, Glasgow, Stirling, Edinburgh, Antwerp, Brussels, Waterloo, Naples, Rome, Genoa, Milan, Venice, Mantua, Modena, Florence, Livorno, Pisa, Marseilles, Lyon, Paris, Calais, Bonn, Cologne, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Baden-Baden, Strasburg, Aix-la-Chapelle, Basel, Brienz, Thum, and Geneva. He rose early, and walked miles to see every sight he could squeeze in. He kept travel diaries. He hiked in the mountains. He later wrote in rapturous terms of “the romantic lakes and mountains of Scotland, the imposing abbeys and cathedrals of England; the Rhine, with its palisaded banks and luxuriant vineyards; the sublime scenery of Switzerland . . . the sculpture and painting of Italy.”2 It is noteworthy that Jackson, who had read extensively in military history and had studied Napoléon’s battles closely, visited only one battlefield: Waterloo, in Belgium. The future general was apparently more interested in Renaissance art and Gothic architecture than in troop movements on a battlefield.

  If Jackson’s plan was to finally put his grief behind him, it succeeded. When he returned to teaching at VMI in October, the crippling sadness he’d felt was gone. He was ready to look for someone new. Maggie, moreover, was being courted that fall by Jackson’s friend John T. L. Preston, a founder of VMI and one of Lexington’s most prominent businessmen, who had lost his own wife earlier that year and had seven children. How Jackson felt about the relations between his close friends will never be known. In any case, Maggie was out of reach. In December 1856 Jackson traveled to Charlotte, North Carolina, to call on Miss Mary Anna Morrison, with whom he had spent time in Lexington several years before when she was visiting her sister Isabella, who had married his old friend Harvey Hill.

  Anna, as she was known, was twenty-five, seven years younger than Jackson. In photographs of the period she was slender, brunette, and attractive. She was also intelligent, sensible, suitably pious, and came with all the refinements of a woman of her social standing. She was the daughter of Dr. Robert Hall Morrison, who had founded Davidson College in 1837 and now served as pastor to three country churches. Like George Junkin—in fact, almost exactly like George Junkin—Morrison was a Presbyterian minister, professor, and college president. Anna’s mother, Mary Graham Morrison, belonged to one of the leading Carolina families: her father had been a prominent general in the War of 1812; her brother had been a governor, US senator, and secretary of the navy, and had been General Winfield Scott’s vice presidential running mate in the 1852 presidential election. While Anna had pleasant memories of Jackson from their meetings in Lexington—he was engaged at the time, and she was with her younger sister—she was amazed to receive a letter from him talking about “blissful memories” of the time “we had been together in Lexington.” She wrote later that “I can truthfully say that my fate was as much a surprise to me as it would have been to anyone else.”3

  But she was quite pleased with Jackson, as was her family, whom he impressed with his ardent Christianity, his ability to hold a job, and his war record. Dr. Morrison and Jackson also shared a profession: they were both college science teachers. The courtship lasted only a day: Jackson returned to Lexington an engaged man. From there the relationship was carried on through the mails. Jackson, meanwhile, moved out of the Junkin house (and away from Maggie) and took rooms in a hotel. On July 16, 1857, Anna and the major were married at her home in North Carolina. It was perhaps not entirely coincidental that Maggie Junkin and John Preston were married—after a brief rupture in the engagement that was smoothed over by none other than their mutual friend Major Jackson—only two weeks later.4 Maggie, in turn, bought Jackson’s wedding presents for Anna while on a trip to Philadelphia.

  Jackson quickly settled into a happy, domestic life with Anna, marred only by the death of a daughter in infancy in May of the following year. Though the two grieved for the child—the second such heartbreaking loss for Jackson—there is no evidence that her death affected their happiness with each other. In the second year of their marriage, Thomas and Anna, who had been living in the Lexington Hotel, bought a house, which immediately became the center of their lives. Jackson, the transplanted orphan, had always longed for such simple domesticity—his own family, in his own home—and finally, at age thirty-five, he had what he wanted. The house was a simple, solid, dignified, two-story brick structure, just off Main Street in downtown Lexington. The Presbyterian church was a block away; VMI was a ten-minute walk.

  Jackson’s daily routine—adhered to rigorously—began at 6:00 a.m. with prayers and a cold bath, even in freezing weather. He taught class from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m., then returned home and studied the Bible and his class lessons until 1:00 p.m., when it was time for the midday meal, followed by thirty minutes or more of leisure time that Anna remembers as one of the “brightest periods in the home life.”5 Her description of him behind closed doors mirrors Maggie’s:

  Those who knew General Jackson only as they saw him in public would have found it hard to believe that there could be such a transformation as he exhibited in his domestic life. He luxuriated in the freedom and liberty of his home, and his buoyancy and joyousness of nature often ran into a playfulness and abandon that would have been incredible to those who saw him only when he put on his official dignity. . . . He would often hide himself behind a door at the sound of the approaching footstep of his wife, and spring out to greet her with a startling caress.6

  In the afternoon he would work in his garden, or ride with Anna out to a twenty-acre farm he had purchased outside of town. (From his days at Jackson’s Mill, Jackson had acquired a love of growing food, and he was good at it; he was fond of canning tomatoes, propagating flowers with cuttings, and burying cabbages for winter use.7) Then came supper, a brief period of relaxation, and his traditional hour spent alone, eyes closed, reviewing his lessons in half-light. After that, he and Anna would sit together in their parlor and Anna would read to him, sometimes from Shakespeare, which he loved, or from history books. He was deeply in love with her, and when they were separated he missed her greatly. “Your husband has a sad heart,” he wrote during one absence. “Our house looks so deserted without my esposa. H
ome is not home without my little dove. I love to talk to you, little one, as though you were here, and tell you how much I love you.”8 (Such endearments were not typical of most of the great Civil War generals. “Of the major figures in the Civil War whose letters survive,” wrote Jackson biographer James I. Robertson Jr., “the stern VMI professor sent the most intimate, emotional, and sentimental messages.”9)

  Though his life and work at VMI never really changed—he was always the austere and strangely inept professor—in the life of the town Jackson began to look more and more like the prosperous, upstanding middle-class citizen he had worked hard to be. In 1857 he became a deacon in his church, responsible for soliciting donations—which meant going door to door, asking for them—and distributing charity to the needy. He was considered the First Presbyterian’s best deacon, discharging his duties and “reporting” his results to Pastor William White with an almost amusing military precision. As part of a board of five deacons, White later wrote, “he was the animating and guiding spirit of that body.”10