Rebel Yell

by S. C. Gwynne

  Northern feelings about Jackson were perhaps best summarized by John W. Forney, the prominent editor of the Washington Chronicle. “Stonewall Jackson was a great general, a brave soldier, a noble Christian, and a pure man. May God throw these great virtues against the sins of the secessionist, the advocate of a great national crime.”24 (Lincoln wrote Forney immediately to compliment him on the “excellent and manly” article in the Chronicle on “Stonewall” Jackson.25) Jackson’s beloved, estranged father-in-law George Junkin, who had embraced the Union cause and moved north, voiced some of the same feelings. “I was completely unmanned,” he wrote, of hearing the news of Jackson’s death.

  I sought my state-room, to weep there. Is it wrong, is it treason, to mourn for a good and great, though clearly mistaken man? I cannot feel it to be so. I loved him dearly—but now—he is with dear, dear Ellie and the rest! Oh, God! Oh give us grace to acquiesce in these terrible mysteries of Thy providence.26

  It is curious that, though many Northerners could not forgive him for fighting, as they perceived it, to protect the institution of slavery, the Northern newspaper the Independent, edited by archabolitionist clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, voiced no such qualms. It said simply that Jackson was “Quiet, modest, brave, noble, honorable, and pure. He fought neither for reputation now, nor for future personal advancement.”27

  The most famous Northern view of Jackson came from the celebrated poet John Greenleaf Whittier, whose poem “Barbara Frietchie,” published in 1864, became a national sensation. It described an almost entirely mythological incident from September 1862, when Jackson’s troops were passing through Frederick, Maryland, on their way to the battles of Harpers Ferry and Antietam. As Whittier told it, after Jackson’s troops had taken down all the American flags, the elderly Frietchie had retrieved one and flown it from her attic window. Seeing it, Jackson ordered his men to shoot it down, but Frietchie caught it as it fell and held it forth, crying, “Shoot, if you must, this old gray head / But spare your country’s flag.” Jackson’s reaction followed:

  A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,

  Over the face of the leader came;

  The nobler nature within him stirred

  To life at that woman’s deed and word:

  “Who touches a hair of yon gray head

  Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.

  All day long through Frederick street

  Sounded the tread of marching feet:

  All day long that free flag tost

  Over the heads of the rebel host.

  Ever its torn folds rose and fell

  On the loyal winds that loved it well;

  And through the hill-gaps sunset light

  Shone over it with a warm good-night.

  None of this ever happened. But to the Northern nation—the wartime nation—the incident was as good as documented fact. What it said to them was that Jackson was a gentleman and a Christian and a decent person in spite of his role in killing and maiming tens of thousands of their young men. But it also said that he was, fundamentally, an American. It was his Americanness that had “stirred” in him and redeemed him.

  The effect of Jackson’s death on the fate of the Confederacy itself is harder to measure. There were many, such as historian John Esten Cooke, writing in 1865, who believed that “with his disappearance from the scene, the fortunes of the South, like her banner, began to droop.” Jed Hotchkiss said that “nearly all regarded [Jackson’s death] as the beginning of the end,” a feeling that was reinforced by the disastrous Confederate loss at Gettysburg only two months later. For some this went beyond the unsettling feeling that the Confederate star of destiny had dimmed. One soldier in the 13th Virginia Regiment wrote that “men who had fought without flinching up to this time became timid and fearful of success.”28 Such feelings were by no means universal, and there was optimism still left in the South, though in shorter supply. But the great emotional lifts of Second Manassas and Chancellorsville would never be repeated. Lee would never again divide his army in that spectacular way, there would be no more flashing flank marches. Robert E. Lee would never again be quite so brilliant. After the war he commented only once on what might have happened if Jackson had lived. He was talking about Gettysburg. “Jackson would have held the heights which Ewell took on the first day,” he told his brother. By that he meant that Jackson would have seized the high ground where the Union made its famous defensive stands: Cemetery Ridge, Big and Little Round Tops. There would have been no Pickett’s charge because Jackson would have held that ground before the battle started. It’s all hypothesis. We will never know.

  • • •

  At eight o’clock on the morning of May 13, 1863, a train on the Virginia Central Railroad carrying Jackson’s remains left Richmond for the journey back to his final resting place in Lexington. At Gordonsville the cars were shifted to the Orange and Alexandria line. At every stop along the way, large, silent crowds came out to meet the train. Many of the people wept quietly; others handed flowers through the windows of the train, and there were soon enormous heaps and mounds of flowers and wreaths around the casket. In the days since Jackson’s death, an interest bordering on obsession had developed to see the general’s baby daughter. She not only had to be seen by the mourners, but touched and handled as well. Her presence seemed to make them feel better. This phenomenon had begun in Richmond while Jackson lay in state in the capitol and Anna received visitors in a darkened room in the Governor’s Mansion. “So numerous were the requests to see her,” wrote Anna, “that Hetty, finding the child growing worried at so much notice and handling, sought a refuge beyond the reach of the crowd . . . bewailing that ‘people would give her baby no rest.’ ”29 Now, on the train, which stopped only for fuel and water and not to embark or disembark passengers, the clamoring was so loud that, in Anna’s words, little Julia “was handed in and out of the car windows to be kissed.”30

  At Lynchburg, where the traveling party left the train and boarded a canal boat for Lexington, citizens once again thronged to see Jackson’s casket. The city mounted a full tribute. As in Richmond, minute guns fired and bells tolled, and thousands of people came forward and silently offered flowers. Fifteen hundred convalescent soldiers limped forth to join the procession that followed the casket to the James River. The boat headed upstream at a laborious pace, with two mules pulling it along from the bank, picked up the North Fork of the James, and finally arrived in Lexington at sunset on May 14, where the entire corps of cadets from the Virginia Military Institute was there, in full dress, to meet it.

  Jackson’s body was taken by artillery caisson to the VMI barracks, where he was laid out in his old lecture room, near his old chair and the cases containing his scientific teaching equipment.31 Superintendent Francis H. Smith ordered the lecture room draped in mourning for six months, and half-hour guns to be fired throughout the next day. Far into that evening, men, women, and children from the town and country came to visit Jackson for the last time. That night cadets stood guard over his casket. The next day, May 15, his remains were taken in another long procession to the First Presbyterian Church, where he had been a deacon and had run the black Sunday school. There, before an overflow crowd of more than four thousand—the wartime population of the town was less than two thousand—Jackson’s old friend and mentor Dr. William S. White conducted the memorial service. He read from First Corinthians—“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death”—and then gave a sermon based on letters he had received from Jackson during the war, in particular one after White’s son’s death. “The death of your noble son and my much esteemed friend, Hugh, must have been a severe blow to you,” Jackson had written, “yet we have the sweet assurance that, whilst we mourn his loss to the country, to the church, and to ourselves, all has been gain for him . . . that inconceivable glory to which we are looking forward is already his.”32 It was as though Jackson were telling his country, from beyond the grave, how to think about his own death. From the church the pro
cession re-formed and, led by eight companies of VMI cadets, with Jackson’s tearful servant Jim Lewis leading the riderless horse, moved to the Lexington graveyard, where Jackson was buried next to his and Anna’s daughter Mary Graham and close to his first wife, Ellie, and their stillborn son. In life he had known the place well. He had gone there countless times after Ellie’s death, racked by grief and hopelessness and feeling that God “had left me to mourn in human desolation.” He had wanted desperately to join her. He believed she was in a better place, a place where they would both be granted what he had once called “an unending immortality of happiness.”33

  (1) Jackson’s boyhood home: Orphaned at the age of seven, Jackson was sent to live with six bachelor uncles, a step-grandmother, and two aunts at prosperous Jackson’s Mill in mountainous western Virginia (now West Virginia). The main residence (left) was one of the finest houses in the region.

  (2) Jackson’s sister, Laura Jackson Arnold: They were orphans and extremely close friends growing up. After the war started Laura became an ardent supporter of the Union cause and cut all ties to her brother. They never reconciled.

  (3) Jackson in the Mexican-American War, 1847: Just out of West Point, the shy young man traveled south to fight in Mexico, where he showed almost reckless bravery in the battles that led to the fall of Mexico City. He was rapidly promoted.

  (4) The Virginia Military Institute as it looked on the eve of the Civil War, in mountain-ringed Lexington, Virginia. The castellated barracks on the right contained Jackson’s classroom and also his bachelor quarters. On April 21, 1861, Jackson and 176 young cadets marched from those barracks for Richmond to join the Confederate army. Many of them, including Jackson, would never see Lexington or VMI again.

  (5) Main Street in Lexington as it looked in the Civil War era. A block away, Jackson founded and ran a successful Sunday school for slaves. Here he made his life before the war as a college professor, investor, farmer, homeowner, husband, and church deacon.

  (6) Jackson’s home in Lexington: Behind its doors he was a complex, passionate, highly sensitive man who loved deeply and had a nineteenth-century romantic’s view of beauty and nature. He loved Shakespeare, European architecture, and gardening. He taught himself to be fluent in Spanish.

  (7) Jackson’s first wife, Ellie: The vibrant and irreverent daughter of a college president was his first love. She died tragically while giving birth to their stillborn son. Jackson was so grief-stricken that friends began to worry that he was losing his mind.

  (8) The woman he loved but could not marry: Maggie Junkin was the brilliant, engaging sister of Jackson’s first wife, Ellie, destined to become a famous poet. Though they clearly loved each other, rules of the Presbyterian Church forbid a marriage.

  (9) Jackson as college professor in 1857: He was the most peculiar of teachers: a humorless, puritanical, gimlet-eyed stickler for detail. He taught the toughest course at the Virginia Military Institute.

  (10) Second wife, Anna, and daughter, Julia: Married in 1857, Thomas and Anna were blissfully happy in Lexington, where they bought a house and a farm and owned six slaves. This photo, taken three to four years after his death, shows his daughter, Julia, whom he knew only briefly.

  (11) Confederate president Jefferson Davis: He disliked and distrusted Jackson at the start of the war. His political meddling in Jackson’s command led to Jackson’s controversial resignation in 1862.

  (12) Henry Kyd Douglas: The handsome young Douglas was a member of Jackson’s staff and one of the general’s favorites. His memoir is one of the most important records of Jackson’s wartime career.

  (13) Wartime Harpers Ferry: This is what the town and its approaches looked like when Jackson seized it in September 1862. His victory resulted in the largest surrender of Federal troops in the war, larger in numbers than the surrender of Generals Cornwallis or Burgoyne in the Revolutionary War.

  (14) Robert E. Lee: He and Jackson formed an extraordinary partnership that changed the course of the war. In their stunning victories at Second Manassas and Chancellorsville they demonstrated a high-command teamwork not previously witnessed on either side.

  (15) Confederate general Richard S. Ewell: “Old Baldy” was one of Jackson’s toughest and most reliable generals. But it took him a while to get over his conviction that Jackson was “crazy as a March hare.”

  (16) Confederate general Daniel Harvey “D. H.” Hill: He was Jackson’s brother-in-law and one of the Confederacy’s leading generals. Of the Battle of Malvern Hill, where he fought alongside Jackson, he said, “It was not war, it was murder.”

  (17) Ambrose Powell “A. P.” Hill: Jackson’s great weakness was his inability to get along with his fellow generals, especially the hard-nosed “Little Powell” Hill. Jackson put him in arrest after Cedar Mountain, and the two feuded continuously after that.

  (18) The brilliant, erratic Turner Ashby embodied the immense cavalry advantages the South held early in the war. His dashing, reckless exploits as Jackson’s cavalry chief became the stuff of legend. This photograph was taken after his death.

  (19) Jedediah Hotchkiss: The maps he made were a critical part of Jackson’s astounding maneuvers in his Shenandoah Valley Campaign. In an era where maps were few and unreliable, Jackson had a sure grasp of terrain and how to use it.

  (20) White Oak Swamp: This Civil War photo of White Oak Swamp tells you everything you need to know about the condition of much of the terrain during the Seven Days battles. It was here that Jackson and his corps stalled and missed an opportunity to destroy the Union army.

  (21) Confederate general Joseph Johnston: One of the top rebel commanders early in the war, he was among the first to spot Jackson’s talent and to recommend his promotion.

  (22) James Longstreet: He and Jackson were Robert E. Lee’s top lieutenants. He was a solid fighter whom Lee called his “old warhorse.” While he inspired respect from the enemy, his rival Jackson inspired fear and awe.

  (23) James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart: The stiff, reserved Jackson and the ebullient, outgoing Stuart were completely different personalities but the best of friends. Stuart and his cavalry were Jackson’s eyes and ears on his most famous marches.

  (24) Hunter Holmes McGuire: Considered by many to be one of the best surgeons in the war, he was Jackson’s medical officer and one of his most important staff members. After the war he became president of the American Medical Association.

  (25) Destruction at the Dunker church: Jackson’s fight on the Confederate left at the Battle of Antietam was the single bloodiest phase of the single bloodiest day in American history. He successfully repulsed repeated attacks by the Union army.

  (26) Union general Nathaniel Banks: The former governor of Massachusetts and speaker of the House of Representatives was one of Jackson’s main opponents in his legendary Shenandoah Valley Campaign. Jackson’s victory over Banks at Winchester catapulted the rebel general to international fame.

  (27) Union general Joseph Hooker: “Fighting Joe,” or, as Lee contemptuously called him, “Mr. F. J. Hooker,” won a reputation as an aggressive fighter. But his caution led to his humiliation by Lee and Jackson at the Battle of Chancellorsville.

  (28) Union general George McClellan: A gifted administrator and motivator, he was also vainglorious, mean-spirited, dissembling, haughty, backstabbing, and callously dismissive of peers. He called his boss Lincoln “the original gorilla.”

  (29) Fredericksburg, Virginia, as it looked before the battle, a charming, prosperous river town of five thousand souls where George Washington spent his boyhood and James Monroe once practiced law. For reasons that would become painfully clear to the Union army, Lee decided to stand and fight on the high bluffs behind the town.

  (30) The destruction caused by Federal artillery at the Battle of Fredericksburg, December 11, 1862. Witnesses on both sides were stunned by the barbarity of this attack on a civilian target. A disgusted Robert E. Lee observed, “These people delight to destroy the weak and those who can make no
defense.”

  (31) Union general Irvin McDowell: He had victory in his hands at First Manassas, but his delays opened the way for Jackson’s brilliant defensive stand and subsequent counterattack.

  (32) Union secretary of war Edwin Stanton: Jackson’s military victories repeatedly thwarted Stanton’s war plans. After Jackson’s spectacular victory at Winchester, Stanton seemed to come completely unhinged, sending an SOS to northern governors to send troops to save Washington, DC, from Jackson’s army.

  (33) The wartime general: In November 1862, following the Battle of Antietam, Jackson was photographed in Winchester. Note the wrinkled and weather-beaten condition of his uniform.

  (34) Moss Neck Manor, one of Virginia’s great estates, on the grounds of which Jackson and his staff spent the winter of 1862–63. It was a time of religious revivals and snowball fights and band concerts and social visits and book reading and the sort of leisure soldiers rarely got. Here Jackson befriended a golden-haired five-year-old named Janie Corbin, who would die tragically of scarlet fever.