Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson Read online

  His metamorphosis began in the first year of the war, with his brilliant performance in the Confederate victory at Manassas. But it was rooted mainly in an extraordinary campaign that had begun on March 23 and ended on June 9, 1862. What Jackson did in those seventy-eight days, in a small and dazzlingly beautiful theater of war bounded by mountain ranges on either side, redefined the conflict and made him the most celebrated field commander in the war. Though the particulars of each battle or skirmish could be quite complex, their significance, seen collectively, was strikingly clear and simple. Using a combination of speed, deception, and sheer audacity, Jackson, with 17,000 men (and often far fewer), had taken on and beaten Union forces that, though never united, totaled more than 52,000. He marched his men at a pace unknown to soldiers of the day, covering an astounding 646 miles in 48 days, fighting five major battles, and skirmishing almost daily. He made flashing strikes in unexpected places, falling on the enemy from behind mountain ranges and out of steep passes. With his small force he had driven four Union armies from the greater part of the Shenandoah Valley, inflicting 5,000 casualties, capturing 3,500 prisoners, an immense quantity of stores and supplies, and seizing 9,000 small arms. He had evaded a massive pincer movement designed by Abraham Lincoln himself to catch him. Then, in the most stunning maneuver of all, he had turned on both jaws of the pincer—two Union armies—and beaten them in succession. In a war where the techniques of marching and fighting were being reinvented almost literally hour by hour, Jackson’s intelligence, speed, aggression, and pure arrogance were the wonders of North and South alike. They were the talk of salons in London and Paris.

  Jackson’s success was all the more striking because it had come amid so many Confederate defeats, just as that feeling of despair that Jefferson Davis’s niece described had begun to descend on the entire beleaguered South. Confederates had lost major battles that spring at Shiloh and Forts Donelson and Henry in Tennessee. New Orleans had surrendered. Most of Kentucky and Tennessee were lost, as was part of the Carolina coast. News of what Jackson had done in the valley was rolling off Southern presses at the very moment that McClellan’s giant army was shouldering its way up the York-James Peninsula toward Richmond. Jackson’s victories not only drove the enemy from a large part of Virginia; his successes had also frozen in place and then diverted another army, some 40,000 troops camped near Fredericksburg, Virginia, that had been ready to move against Richmond.22 If those troops had arrived on the city’s undefended west side—complementing the 120,000 on the east—Richmond would have had little choice but to surrender. That had been the Union’s grand plan, and Jackson had laid waste to it. In that sense, he had already saved Richmond, or at least he had bought it time. More than anything else, perhaps, he had given Southern morale a tremendous lift in its darkest hour; he had shown that an undermanned Confederate army could outmarch, outmaneuver, and outfight much larger and better equipped Yankee forces. He had even proven—the math works out almost perfectly—the old Southern chestnut that one rebel was worth at least three cowardly Yanks. (That ratio was probably not random or accidental: in the larger war, some 2.1 million Union soldiers eventually took up arms against 880,000 Confederates.23)

  By the time Jackson passed through Charlottesville that day, a mere ten days after the closing battle of his valley campaign, Confederate papers were already hailing him as the new national idol. The Richmond Whig asserted that “he wears the sword of the Lord of Gideon” and proclaimed that “he has been . . . chawing up Yankees by the thousands as if they were so many grains of parched popcorn.”24 The Richmond Daily Dispatch called him simply “The Hero of The War,” hailing him as a “decisive genius” and comparing his “rapid marches, profound calculations, [and] energetic attack” to the legendary Italian campaign of Napoléon Bonaparte.25 The North, meanwhile, had gotten the notion that Jackson was a Southern version of the abolitionist John Brown, a man who worshipped a grim, Old Testament God of vengeance, a holy warrior who wielded a strange and powerful influence over his men. Some said he was simply a remorseless killer, nearly as hard on his own troops as he was on the enemy. But no one really knew. Not yet. Jackson, the dusty, rumpled man on the train, was still almost completely shrouded in mystery.

  He was traveling east by train that day because Robert E. Lee, a man with whom he would soon develop a partnership that changed the course of the Civil War, had summoned him. And because Lee was about to launch a hazardous—many would have deemed it suicidal—attempt to drive McClellan’s army away from the gates of the capital, and he wanted Jackson in its vanguard. Though it would take several days for this closely guarded information to spread through the rank and file, the reaction when it came was one of almost delirious joy. “Jackson is coming!” was the rumor that swept through the Confederate regiments in front of the city.26 “In our sultry, squalid camps along the Chickahominy,” wrote one soldier who was bivouacked in the swampy lowlands east of Richmond, “the news had reached us of the brilliant Valley campaign, and in the midst of destitution and depression and doubt, with the enemy at the very gates of the capital, [Jackson’s victories] read like a fairy tale. . . . With feverish interest we devoured the accounts of rapid marches, of sudden appearances where least expected, which had frustrated every combination of the enemy.”27 To them, Jackson’s movement east with his vaunted Army of the Valley meant that he was coming to save Richmond, which meant that he was coming to save the Confederacy. And the soldiers of the beleaguered Army of Northern Virginia believed to the bottom of their ragged, malnourished rebel souls that he was going to do precisely that.

  PART ONE

  THE UNIMAGINED WAR

  CHAPTER ONE

  AWAY TO RICHMOND

  For Thomas J. Jackson the war started precisely at 12:30 p.m. on the afternoon of April 21, 1861, in the small Shenandoah Valley town of Lexington, Virginia. As beginnings go, it was grand, even glorious. Fort Sumter had fallen to the rebels on April 13. Virginia had seceded on the seventeenth, and since then its citizens had been in the grip of a sort of collective delirium that had sent them thronging into the streets. It was that way everywhere in the country, North and South. Though no one could say what was going to happen next, or where it might happen, and very few knew what it might be like to actually shoot another human being, Americans everywhere felt a new and joyous sense of clarity and purpose. War would be the way forward, not the old-fashioned idea of war as horror and heartbreak but a new and heady notion of grand adventure and impending glory. And so Lexington, a quiet, picturesque college town of 2,135 on a hilltop at the southern end of the valley, was being turned into an armed camp, in the happiest possible sense of that term.1 Volunteer companies were organized in the streets; militiamen marched to and fro; students from Washington College drilled under their Greek teacher; ladies sewed regimental flags and mended socks; lunches were packed; old squirrel guns and fowling pieces and muskets from the War of 1812 were dragged out of storage, cleaned, and oiled. There was an atmosphere of picnic and parade. As one Confederate soldier recalled, those days were “the only time we can remember when citizens walked along the lines offering their pocketbooks to men whom they did not know; that fair women bestowed their floral offerings and kisses ungrudgingly and with equal favor among all classes of friends and suitors; when the distinctions of wealth and station were forgotten, and each departing soldier was equally honored as the hero.”2

  Meanwhile, across town at the Virginia Military Institute, the South’s oldest military college, the cadets were embarking on a solemn mission. Three days before, their superintendent had received orders from the governor to send them immediately to Richmond to help drill the raw recruits who were arriving in large numbers. Now, in the warm sunshine of the Sabbath morning of April 21, on a promontory high above the North Branch of the James River and with the mountains rising in the distance, they were preparing to do just that. Around noon, 176 of them were in line in front of their castellated barracks, young, fresh-faced, and deliberately ser
ious, with “their cheeks aglow, and their eyes sparkling with the expectation of the military glory awaiting them,” as one observer recalled.3 They wore short-billed kepis and shell jackets with brass buttons. They stood at attention: four small companies in eight immaculate lines. Flanking them was their baggage train, wagons loaded with equipment, and drivers, mounted, whips in hand, waiting for the command to move out.4 It was a grand and inspiring scene—for little Lexington, anyway—and a crowd of people had gathered on Institute Hill to watch it.

  In front of the cadets stood their commander, the unimposing Major Thomas J. Jackson. He was thirty-seven years old, trim, bearded, a bit gaunt, and a shade under six feet tall. You would have noticed his pale, blue-gray eyes; his high, wide forehead; and his thin, bloodless lips, which always seemed tightly pressed together. For the occasion he had worn his very best uniform: a faded, dark-blue, double-breasted coat with a major’s epaulets, blue trousers with gold piping, a sword, sash, and forage cap.

  It is worth taking inventory of him at the moment he rode off to war. Though he held himself ramrod straight on the parade ground, his bearing seemed odd, even to a casual observer: more awkward than military, more graceless than dignified. He had large hands and feet, and seemed not to know quite what to do with them. And this strangely stiff posture suggested exactly how these cadets saw him: as a perfect martinet, a humorless, puritanical, gimlet-eyed stickler for detail, a strict enforcer of every rule and regulation. He was such a literalist when it came to duty that he had once, while in the army, worn heavy winter underwear into summer because he had received no specific order to change it. Once, when seated on a camp stool with his saber across his knees, he was told by VMI’s superintendent to “remain as you are until further orders.” The next morning the superintendent found him seated on the camp stool in the same position, because, according to Jackson, “you ordered me to remain here.”5 He insisted that his students obey his orders just as unquestioningly. He was as painfully formal in conversation as he was in class.

  Worse still, from the students’ point of view, he not only taught the school’s toughest and most loathed course, “Natural and Experimental Philosophy”—essentially what we call physics, though it included math and such other disciplines as optics and astronomy—he was also, by universal acclaim, VMI’s worst teacher. Though he was presumed to understand the dreaded Bartlett’s Optics textbook that he taught, he was unable to impart that wisdom to his students. He insisted on rote recitation; he explained little or nothing. He had survived an attempt led by the school’s alumni six years before to get rid of him, for all of those reasons.6 Jackson also taught artillery drill, at which he seemed only marginally more competent than he was as a science teacher.

  He seemed in other ways to be a man who had at least found his place in the world. He had been born in modest circumstances in Clarksburg, in northwestern Virginia (now West Virginia), orphaned at seven, and raised mainly by his uncle, who owned a gristmill and farm. In spite of a poor childhood education, he had somehow made it through West Point. Though he was childless, he was said to be happily married. He was known to everyone as a devout Christian. He was a deacon in the Presbyterian Church, to which he devoted a good deal of his time. He had a very decent brick house in town, and a small farm in the country, and owned six slaves.

  Those who knew him well could also have told you that he was a victim of a host of physical ailments, real and imagined, and that he traveled long distances in search of water cures that involved both drinking and soaking in supposedly healing waters. That his diet was odd, too, often consisting of water and stale bread or buttermilk and stale bread and he was so resolute about this that he carried his own stale bread with him when invited out to dinner. As he stood by the barracks inspecting his troops that day, he might have been charitably described as a comfortable mediocrity: a decent enough man, a harmless eccentric, an upstanding Christian and good citizen who, unfortunately, was an inept teacher. It is worth noting that the preceding description is far from complete. There was a good deal more to him even then than most of his students or colleagues ever suspected—more, indeed, of what made him great later on. He held his secrets close. He was never what he seemed to be, not in Lexington, not later in the war.

  There was, however, one item that stood out on Major Jackson’s curriculum vitae as of that bright April afternoon. That was his conspicuous and, to many, uncharacteristic record in the Mexican-American War in 1847. Though he seemed to most of his acquaintances in Lexington to have the personality of neither warrior nor leader, it was said that he had exhibited great bravery in battle and that the commanding general Winfield Scott himself had singled out the young Jackson for praise. Students and faculty at VMI had heard the story, though it made no particular sense to them. Jackson seemed the furthest thing from a hero. Whether this brief, anomalous glory held any meaning in the year 1861, no one could yet say.

  A little after noon, Jackson removed his cap and called out loudly, “Let us pray.” The pastor of the local Presbyterian church, the Reverend Dr. William S. White, piped up with a short prayer, followed by a collective “Amen.” It was time to go. Or it would have been if someone other than Jackson had been commanding. Though the battalion was ready to move out—in fact, the cadets were dying with joy and anticipation—Jackson insisted that it depart precisely at 12:30, as planned. Jackson was a fanatic about duty, and duty dictated punctuality, and he was not, merely for the sake of this romantic war that everyone seemed to want, going to waive his rules. When his second in command, Raleigh Colston, a teacher of foreign languages, approached him and said, “Everything is ready, sir. Shall I give the command forward?,” Jackson’s answer was a clipped “No.” They would wait. Jackson sat on a camp stool, unmoving, while the minutes ticked by.7

  Finally, as the college bells rang 12:30, Jackson mounted his horse, wheeled toward the cadets, then shouted, “Right face! By file left, march!”8 As the young men marched, Jackson remained motionless and expressionless. One cadet later recalled “how stiffly he sat on his horse as the column moved past him.”9 Thus they went off to war, to the sound of fife and drum, Jackson somewhat awkwardly shepherding the small column that contained the sons of some of the South’s most prominent families. A mile away, across the small bridge that spanned the river, lay the carriages, wagons, and stagecoaches that would take them to the town of Staunton, where they would board a train for Richmond. The moment was sweetly sad, as were moments like this that were taking place across the country. It would have been sadder still if the assembled onlookers had known that Jackson and many of his ruddy-cheeked charges would never see Lexington again.

  • • •

  Behind the pomp and circumstance lay the curious fact that the stern, inelegant man leading the column had done everything in his power to prevent the war that he was now marching off to fight. He hated the very idea of it. His conviction was in part due to his peculiar ability, shared by few people who landed in power on either side—Union generals Winfield Scott and William Tecumseh Sherman come prominently to mind—to grasp early on just how terrible the suffering caused by the war would be, and just how long it was likely to last.10 The detail-obsessed physics professor’s embrace of such a large abstraction is perhaps an appropriate introduction to the man himself: Jackson’s brilliance was that he understood war. He understood it at some primary, visceral level that escaped almost everyone else. He understood it even before it happened.

  In the months leading up to the war Jackson had remained a confirmed Unionist. He opposed secession. Though he was a slave owner, he held no strident, proslavery views. Indeed, his wife, Anna, wrote that she was “very confident that he would never have fought for the sole object of perpetuating slavery.”11 He had attended West Point, had been in combat under the flag of the United States of America, and had later served in the country’s peacetime army. He was a patriot, in the larger sense of the word. As a Christian he was shocked by what he saw as the ungodly and in
appropriate enthusiasm on both sides to settle their differences by fighting. “People who are anxious to bring on war don’t know what they are bargaining for,” he wrote to his nephew.12

  In February 1861, the failure of a Virginia-sponsored peace conference in Washington made Jackson so fearful of war that he called upon his pastor, the Reverend White, to talk about what might happen. “It is painful to discover with what unconcern they speak of war, and threaten it,” Jackson told him. “They do not know its horrors. I have seen enough of it to make me look upon it as the sum of all evils.”13 His wife, Anna, offered a striking summary of his beliefs in those early days. “I have never heard any man express such an utter abhorrence of war,” she wrote. “I shall never forget how he once exclaimed to me, with all the intensity of his nature, ‘Oh, how I deprecate war!’ ”14 But there was more to it than that. According to his sister-in-law, Maggie Preston, who was perhaps his closest friend, Jackson also recoiled physically at war’s violence. “His revulsions at scenes of horror, or even descriptions of them,” she wrote, “was almost inconsistent in one who had lived the life of a soldier. He has told me that his first sight of a mangled and swollen corpse on a Mexican battlefield . . . filled him with as much sickening dismay as if he had been a woman.”15