They Called Him Stonewall

by Davis, Burke;

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  They Called Him Stonewall

  A Life of Lieutenant General T. J. Jackson, CSA

  Burke Davis

  to Angela

  Contents

  BOOK ONE

  Prologue: John Brown’s Body

  1 IS GIDEON QUITE SANE?

  2 FRONT ROYAL

  3 WINCHESTER

  4 THE VICTOR RETREATS

  5 CROSS KEYS

  6 PORT REPUBLIC

  7 WHENCE THE CONQUEROR

  8 THE PROFESSOR

  9 HE HAS FOUGHT BEFORE

  10 PRELUDE TO FAME

  BOOK TWO

  Prologue: Smile, Mr. Davis

  11 THE DASH TO RICHMOND

  12 STRANGE FAILURES

  13 THE LONGEST OF ALL DAYS

  14 SEVEN BLOODY DAYS AT AN END

  15 THE DEBUT OF GENERAL POPE

  16 THE FOOT CAVALRY AT A GALLOP

  17 SECOND MANASSAS

  18 INVASION!

  19 A TIME OF LEISURE

  20 MASSACRE IN DECEMBER

  BOOK THREE

  Prologue: Take Heart, Mr. Lincoln

  21 A BRIEF ELEGANCE

  22 CHANCELLORSVILLE

  23 “MY OWN MEN!”

  24 THE DEPARTURE

  APPENDIX

  SELECT CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

  IMAGE GALLERY

  INDEX

  Acknowledgment

  About the Author

  Book One:

  If this valley is lost, Virginia is lost.

  —JACKSON

  Prologue:

  JOHN BROWN’S BODY

  It had been a long wait on the hill, with the crowd shivering under a wind from upriver, but at last, just before noon, there was a stir on the porch of the jail.

  An ugly old man appeared there, shuffling in carpet slippers, wearing a long-tailed coat and black hat, blinking in the light of the sun, which had just emerged. Men standing near by caught the odor of him and his time in the jail.

  The prisoner walked stiffly, and was drawn forward by the pain of a kidney ailment, so that his step seemed tentative and doddering. He handed a folded bit of paper to his jailer, who rustled it as if to read it, but the old man spoke, and the jailer thrust the note into his pocket.

  The old man craned his wattled neck to peer at soldiers moving in the roadway beneath—three infantry companies wheeling into line. Other troops waited beyond.

  “I had no idea Governor Wise thought my murder so important,” the prisoner said. The nasal voice was unhurried and bitter; the set of the cracked lips betrayed no fear.

  He went forward as if accompanied by friends, down a flight of stairs with his jailer on one arm and the sheriff on the other. They clambered into a waiting wagon, and when the old man had settled himself on a coffin between the seats, the driver snapped his whip over the rumps of two white farm horses. The prisoner paid no heed to the box on which he sat, and all about, at their distance, the troops watched with covert curiosity the stiff-backed old man who bore himself as if impatient to die. The wagon crawled behind the militia infantry, its wheels strewing the merest dust, and the coffin trailing an odor of fresh lumber.

  The wagon went up toward the crest of the hill, where the gallows were.

  “A man couldn’t have asked prettier weather,” old Brown said. Neither the sheriff nor the jailer looked at the prisoner.

  The old man’s hatchet face had a pleasant, almost happy, expression as he gazed around at the country under the dull sky. Hills tumbled to the west, incredibly blue in the distance; to the east, where the waters of the Shenandoah and the Potomac met, the river banks loomed in vast shoulders. The prisoner saw above these the smoke of Harpers Ferry, where ruin had come to him.

  The wagon turned into a hollow square of troops, one thousand of them, and went past a piece of artillery which gaped toward the gallows with gunners at attention. The old man raised his head once more to the valley of the Shenandoah.

  “This is a beautiful country,” he said. “I never truly had the pleasure of seeing it before.”

  “None like it,” the sheriff said.

  The prisoner was first to mount the scaffold, and when he stood above the crowd, he snatched off his dusty hat, which he dropped at his feet. His hair rose in an unkempt gray shock.

  Two men fitted the white hood over his head and adjusted the rope. In the last glimpse of light, the prisoner caught sight of the red and gray uniforms of cadets of the Virginia Military Institute who stood between the regiments of militia. Once the hood was on, the jailer stirred his feet, as if adapting himself to a new sense of relief.

  Half a dozen hands thrust over the scaffold, groping for the prisoner’s fallen hat, and one of them dragged it off, evading the jailer’s vicious kicks. Subdued sounds came from below, where unseen men fought over the souvenir.

  The old man’s voice was muffled by the hood. “I can’t see, gentlemen. You must lead me.”

  The sheriff and a guard led him to the trap, where he stood in the broken slippers, waiting. The militia stamped endlessly in the dust below, going back to its places in the square.

  “You want a private signal, now, just before?” the sheriff asked.

  “It’s no matter to me. If only they would not keep me waiting so long.”

  The sheriff and the jailer did not now recognize the old voice they knew so well; it was formal and somehow remote. It was the first slight sign of fear or remorse or even hesitation the old man had shown them, and the two officers exchanged glances of veiled triumph.

  The militia was ten minutes at its stumbling, while the old man waited, now and then bending his knees to make himself comfortable. Each of the other figures on the scaffold seemed to grow more rigid as time passed. The sheriff looked far down the hill on every hand, creasing his brow over an expression of childlike earnestness, as if he entertained the fear that someone might storm the hilltop, crowned as it was with a mass of troops, in an effort to deliver the old man.

  The very young men of the Virginia Military Institute smirked at the awkward militia; but their smiles were fleeting, and hidden from the bearded officer who sat his horse on their right front, as if daydreaming. The commander was a sorry figure, clasped tightly in a shabby coat. He was the obscure Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy and Artillery Tactics from the Institute in Lexington.

  “Lookit old Tom Fool,” one of the cadets whispered. “Another wink, and he’s asleep.”

  “Giving orders to God,” another scoffed. “We heard him last night, apraying for old Brown’s soul like a damned niggerlover.”

  Major Thomas Jonathan Jackson, almost as if he had heard the words of the child soldiers, stirred and turned his gaze down the line. “Gentlemen,” he piped. The cadets fell silent.

  From the ranks of the Richmond militia across the square, a thin-shouldered infantryman glared at the hooded figure on the scaffold. The militiaman’s eyes were dark with excitement, as if he had quite lost himself in the spectacle. He was Private John Wilkes Booth.

  Major Jackson galloped between the companies, herding them into order, and then settled once more, head lowered, withdrawing into his wrinkled uniform. Already he was thinking of writing a letter to his wife, a description of old Brown’s end. A few nights earlier he had reassured her:

  Charlestown, Nov. 28, 1859

  I reached here last night in good health and spirits. Seven of us slept in the same room. I am much more pleased than I expected to be; the people appear to be very kind. There are about 1,000 troops here, and everything is quiet so far. We don’t expect an
y trouble. The excitement is confined to more distant points. Do not give yourself any concern about me. I am comfortable, for a temporary military post.

  There was at length an end to the shuffling of feet in the field, and on the scaffold there were slight movements. The prisoner muttered to his jailer, “Be quick, Avis.”

  The jailer tightened the noose, stepped backward, and the sheriff took a hatchet from a guard. The glinting blade parted a rope, thumped into the wood, and the old man dropped through the platform. The rope whipped back and forth, spinning, rasping against the scaffold, and then began to slow its motion. No sound came from the field where the watchers stood.

  After an interval, Major J. T. L. Preston, the Institute Latin professor, shouted, as if he read from a paper—so loudly that all of them heard:

  “So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union! All such enemies of the human race!”

  The troops were ordered at ease, and stood in the square for half an hour longer, while the dark bundle stilled on the scaffold. A band of men went there, and the body was cut down.

  The soldiers moved off, and behind them rose the clatter of hammers on the coffin case.

  The jailer, thrusting a hand into his pocket, drew forth the paper on which the old man had written. He read its trembling script.

  Charlestown, Va., 2nd December, 1859.

  I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land; will never be purged away; but with Blood …

  The jailer shook his head, grinning uncertainly, and passed the paper to the sheriff, who was to deliver it to the widow.

  It was no later than twelve thirty, but the shadow of the gallows already lay across the dust of the slope, where the Virginia soldiers had marched and the horses of their officers had torn the cold turf.

  Major Jackson rose directly from supper and sat down to the writing of a letter to his wife. With his bluff manner of detachment, he closed his mind to the passage of the others in his room:

  December 2nd. John Brown was hung today at about half-past eleven A.M. He behaved with unflinching firmness.… The coffin was of black walnut, enclosed in a box of poplar.… He was dressed in a black frock-coat, black pantaloons, black vest, black slouch hat, white socks, and slippers of predominating red. There was nothing about his neck but his shirt collar.…

  Brown fell through about five inches, his knees falling on a level with the position occupied by his feet before the rope was cut. With the fall his arms, below the elbows, flew up horizontally, his hands clinched; and his arms gradually fell, but by spasmodic motions. There was very little motion of his person for several moments, and soon the wind blew his lifeless body to and fro.

  His face, upon the scaffold, was turned a little east of south, and in front of him were the cadets, commanded by Major Gilham. My command was still in front of the cadets, all facing south … altogether it was an imposing but very solemn scene.

  I was much impressed with the thought that before me stood a man in the full vigor of health, who must in a few moments enter eternity. I sent up the petition that he might be saved. Awful was the thought that he might in a few minutes receive the sentence, “Depart ye wicked, into everlasting fire!” I hope that he was prepared to die, but I am doubtful. He refused to have a minister with him. His wife visited him last evening.

  His body was taken to the jail, and at six o’clock P.M. was sent to his wife at Harpers Ferry. When it arrived, the coffin was opened, and his wife saw the remains, after which it was again opened at the depot before leaving for Baltimore, lest there should be an imposition. We leave for home via Richmond tomorrow.

  1

  IS GIDEON QUITE SANE?

  Roosting on the fence in the early May sun, he was more scarecrow than man, an effigy from the hands of some rustic humorist of this hill country. He was a joke of some sort; otherwise he defied belief.

  He sat, incongruously sucking a lemon, on the outskirts of the village of New Market, Virginia, this spring day of 1862, surrounded by his troops, who rested after a brief noon meal. Wry-faced and pensive, he dealt with his everlasting lemon, evidently oblivious to all else.

  No one knew where the fruit came from, but it was always on hand. He spent half his time with one of the yellow skins gleaming in his beard, and his men had been waved into combat with his half-sucked lemons, as if by the batons of some imperial marshal. None other among the millions caught up in the great war seemed to be supplied with lemons, as this one was. The fruit had surely come from afar, through the blockade which was beginning to strangle his country—and whose leaks were a scandal on both sides of the Potomac. Yet the grim, warring deacon, T. J. Jackson, affected lemons. It was one of the least of his mysteries, vaguely connected with the nervous indigestion and cold feet of which he complained.

  Last night, in the midst of his troubles, he had made the first confession of his suffering, to Kyd Douglas, the cub of his staff. Douglas, reading a Richmond newspaper to his commander, had laughed at the report of a man who had committed suicide because of his dyspepsia. Jackson wagged his head.

  “Ah, you don’t understand, young man. I have been in agony from it for twenty years, and I’ll never again risk its horrors. I can think of nothing more likely to drive a man to suicide than dyspepsia.”

  Hence, the staff presumed, lemons, and the curious meals: raspberries, milk and bread. But the officers exchanged no amused glances before him. It was not precisely fear which ruled his headquarters, but there was little time for levity.

  Today he wore, as he had since anyone could remember, the old coat of a major, a grimy, dusty, threadbare and single-breasted survivor of the Mexican War, permanently wrinkled into the General’s inelegant mold by its sixteen years of service. The most urbane of his officers could describe the General’s cap only as “mangy.” Now, as ever, it rode far down his nose, the visor all but touching the beard. The coat was stained with the rusty watermarks of years; everything about him seemed in disrepair. So awkwardly did he crouch on his fence that he created the impression that, if he should fall, he might clatter to earth in three or four sections.

  Unnoticed now by his men or his staff, he fell into one of his customary five-minute naps, having taken at least a dozen during the day. In that moment, nothing could have been more ludicrous than the suggestion that this man and these troops stood on the very threshold of military immortality. There was scarcely a soul on hand who recalled with any pride, just now, that the weather-beaten figure hanging on the fence rails had won passing fame last summer at Bull Run, as well as a curious nickname, Stonewall.

  He had been up most of the night with new worries, these the most embarrassing of all. Some troopers of Turner Ashby—Ashby, the dashing leader of his cavalry—had got drunk on duty, from sampling applejack of the country. The enemy, of course, had seized that moment to drive them in, killing a few, capturing others, and driving the survivors into the hill fastnesses, God knew where. It had not been long, either, since the General had stamped out a rebellion of the mountain people, shot some deserters, and fought a couple of unfortunate battles. Yet his plain face wore that serene somnolence.

  His troops were by no means unaware that he was a strange one, for he gave daily demonstrations of his character. Lately, when he had snappishly inquired the whereabouts of a courier who had been serving him faithfully, he was told that the boy was dead, a few moments earlier killed in line of duty. Jackson had muttered in his distracted voice, “Very commendable. Very commendable.”

  Nothing that came in the path of this little army seemed normal or within reason. Yesterday, for example. The troops were fresh from a bloody little brush with the enemy on a bluff hill called Bull Pasture Mountain, a victory, their commander assured them, after the Federals had abandoned the village of McDowell. They did not fathom the strategy in his mind and his elation at driving apart the twin armies of the enemy. They knew only that the Yanks of the Ohio and West Virginia regiments had fought like furies, a
nd that the gray columns had lost more heavily than the enemy. The men in Jackson’s ranks would remember the march home. Its route, they noted profanely, took them on a detour—in the path of the enemy, who was just now satanically clever.

  All day the Confederates had plodded in a blue fog of smoke, coughing, spluttering. It was a bitter cloud that pressed over them on the mountain roadway. For the Federals had set fire to the hill forests to cover their retreat, winning praise even from Jackson for the stratagem. The pillars of smoke and fire lay far ahead, blotting out the vistas to the eye and telescope. The army stumbled forward, all but blind.

  The Federals were not yet content. They lay on hidden bluffs with their horse artillery and, when the army of Jackson appeared in good range, poured concentrated fire down upon it from the masked batteries, scattering the files. It was slow, painful work: creeping forward, falling flat under fire, lying while the front files flanked out the big guns, then on to meet the next entertainment arranged by the Yankees. The skirmishers burned their feet in smoking woods, for they were driven out of the road by officers in an effort to prevent ambush. It went on until after dark. And so, on this May day, they were in no mood for heroics from anyone, not even their fierce commander.

  He declared a half-holiday for them, and they rested, but they made bitter jokes about his being forced to march on Sunday, which must have tortured his God-fearing heart. And when they were enjoined by officers to celebrate a day of thanksgiving with fasting and prayer, they howled in mingled pain and amusement. Many had not eaten well since marching on McDowell—for then, as usual, they had been told to prepare for action by cooking three days’ rations, which they had done, and then eaten all, knowing that hundreds of them might not survive the third day, and that rations carried easier in the belly than in the knapsack. They laughed, and complained, and yet they somehow loved the commander who drove them like a madman; they would not have exchanged him.

  One of his officers wrote home what many were thinking: “General Lee is the handsomest person I ever saw.… This is not the case with Jackson. He is ever monosyllabic and receives and delivers orders as if the bearer of a conduct pipe from one ear to the other. There is a magnetism in Jackson, but it is not personal … no one could love the man for himself. He seems to be cut off from his fellow men and to commune with his own spirit only, or with spirits of which we know not. Yet the men are almost as enthusiastic over him as over Lee.…”