Until 1 P.M. he was alone in his study, standing at a high table, for there was no chair. He stood in order to keep perfect the alignment of his organs. He first read his Bible, using a commentary, poring over the pages, marking frequently with a pencil. He then studied his textbooks, and went to lunch.
After the meal, he gave himself half an hour for leisure, which Anna thought “one of the brightest periods in the home life.” Many afternoons he drove to the farm with Anna, and she waited under a shade tree while he worked in the fields with a Negro helper. They went for occasional moonlight drives in the Valley.
There was no night study of books, for artificial light, Jackson thought, harmed his eyesight. He then “formed the habit of studying mentally for an hour or so without a book,” reviewing the morning’s lessons. He left Anna with a distinct memory of these hours: “He would, if alone with his wife, ask that he not be disturbed by any conversation, and he would then take his seat with his face to the wall, and remain in perfect abstraction until he finished his mental task, when he would emerge with a bright and cheerful face into social enjoyment again.”
He became fond of having Anna read to him, and in that way they passed many evenings. Now and then, especially when she read Shakespeare, he would interrupt with a brief command: “Mark that!”
He moved his study into the living room and worked there under Anna’s eye, at his tall custom-made desk, or “sat with face to the wall, as silent and as dumb as the Sphinx,” among his small library of history, religion and science.
Early in 1858, Anna bore a daughter, whom they named Mary Graham; the infant died after a few weeks. Jackson wrote to a niece: “My little daughter was called from this world of sin to enjoy the heavenly happiness of Paradise. She died of Jaundice on the 25 of May. Whilst your Aunt Anna and myself feel our loss, yet we know that God has taken her away in love.”
Jackson continued to suffer his vague and various ailments. He complained of an inflammation of an ear and his throat, and of neuralgia. He dosed himself with these: “chloroform liniment, a preparation of ammonia, glycerine, nitrate of silver.” But after months of treatment, he wrote: “My disease is not understood by my physicians here, and I have nearly, if not entirely, lost my hearing in my right ear, and my left ear is diseased and my nose is also internally affected.”
He took Anna north for the summer, and in New York he found “a physician by the name of Carnochan,” in a medical college, who treated him for an inflamed tonsil and complications of the lung, by “paring off part of the tonsil.”
There was some time for diversions on this trip. Jackson dutifully inspected Fortress Monroe, and for a few days bathed in the surf at Cape May, New Jersey, where Anna pictured him as “luxuriating.” She dismissed his tonsillitis as “a slight bronchial trouble,” and enjoyed sight-seeing with him. In New York, however, he left her alone in the mornings, striding forth from their hotel on long and unexplained walks. They went occasionally to the Dusseldorf Art Gallery, where Jackson studied paintings, gravely and at length.
Back in Lexington for the last of his undisturbed sessions with his cadets, Jackson seemed even more firmly fixed in the routine of his life. Colonel Smith reported that Jackson more than once paced up and down outside his Institute office in a pouring rain—because it was yet a few minutes prior to the customary time for presentation of his weekly report to the superintendent. He would not enter until the precise moment.
He was the butt of many a cadet joke, but there were times when Jackson could laugh with the young men who were so shortly to become soldiers. One afternoon, the drill field was especially resonant with mockery of his high, thin voice; every cadet officer was mimicking Jackson, and the drawls became so ridiculous that the companies could hardly remain together, for the laughter of cadets. The cadet adjutant, emboldened by the uninterrupted horseplay, asked Jackson how he liked the drill.
“Very much, sir,” Jackson replied. “The officers gave very fine commands this afternoon.”
Cadet artillerymen enjoyed a few moments of hilarity with Jackson one day by mounting a hidden bell inside the limber box of an artillery caisson, which tinkled at every movement of the battery. Jackson halted the guns time and again, seeking the source of the tinkling which gave the cadets such amusement, but if he found it, no recorded punishment was meted out.
He was perplexed by a failure of one of his scientific experiments. Jackson marched his class to the parade ground one afternoon, announced that the Institute’s clock was incorrect, and that he would show them how to determine the time by observation with his instruments. It was shortly past noon at the time, but Jackson, after a series of calculations, announced the hour as 7 P.M., and cadets fell all about him, howling in laughter at the error made ludicrous by the man of legend Jackson had become. The Major joined in the laughter, but was careful to inspect his instruments and pronounce them out of working order.
Among other things his cadets recalled was the motionless, intent figure seated in the classroom, hearing recitations without a book before him, and correcting students from memory, quoting long passages of text.
To Anna he seemed to lead a double life, and she was to insist into her old age that the people of Lexington never knew her husband, because they could not fathom the change that came over him when he entered his home. There, she said, he was so gay and carefree by contrast that strangers could not have recognized him.
She recalled occasions when he tumbled on the floors with visiting small children, and a kinsman carried to manhood the recollection of Jackson saying solemnly to a young child:
“I had a little pig
And I fed him on clover.
And when he died,
He died all over.”
The Major spent much time in good-humored teasing of the plump, brown-eyed little North Carolina girl he had married. He invariably used Spanish terms of endearment, and referred to himself as esposo and to her as esposa or esposita. He found her uncle, William Graham, amusing, a gentleman Whig from the old days who wore antique knee breeches and ruffled shirts, and silk stockings with silver buckles. He teased his wife about the Morrison clan, too, a tribe which had come from the Isle of Lewis, fishermen of the Outer Hebrides, and he likely repeated the family legend about old Jim Morrison, the first of the American branch: “He killed more red Indians and more red liquor than any man in Pennsylvania.” Old Jim’s sons had run strongly to Presbyterian ministers.
Anna’s elder sister, Isabella, had married D. H. Hill, who was to become a Confederate general; Eugenia, the younger girl, married another such officer of the future, Rufus Barringer of North Carolina.
There were evidently some items which the Major kept from his wife:
A West Point companion, D. H. Maury, saw him just before he went to Lexington and had the chance to observe him closely. Maury wrote: “He had then become hypochondriacal. He had queer ideas about his health; he thought one side of him was heavier than the other, and sometimes he would raise one hand up to the arm’s length to let the blood flow downward and lighten that arm.”
The major certainly concealed nothing of his character by design, for he seemed to regard it as his duty to confess every thought passing his mind and to explain his compulsions in some detail.
Once he fell to discussing with a church friend the difficulty of obeying the injunction of the Bible, “Pray without ceasing.” Jackson held that such obedience was simple.
“When we take our meals, there is grace. When I take a draught of water I always pause, as my palate receives the refreshment, to lift up my heart to God in thanks and prayer.… Whenever I drop a letter into the box at the post office I send a petition along with it for God’s blessing upon its mission, and upon the person to whom it is sent. When I break the seal upon a letter, I stop to pray to God that he might prepare me for its contents, and make it a messenger of good. When I go to the classroom, and wait for the arrangement of the cadets in their places, that is my time to intercede with
God for them. And so of every familiar act of the day.”
“But don’t you often forget them—coming so frequently?”
“No. I have made the practice habitual to me; and I can no more forget it than to forget to drink when I am thirsty. The habit has become as delightful as regular.”
His household, molded to such an inflexible form, operated smoothly and with punctuality. Anna recalled one of Jackson’s habits of outwitting his errant servants. “When a servant left a room without closing a door, he would wait until he had reached the kitchen, and then call him back to shut it, thereby giving him extra trouble, which generally insured his remembrance next time. His training made the colored servants as polite and punctual as that race is capable of being.”
His wife recorded one “playful endearment” staged by Jackson:
“One morning he returned from a very early artillery drill, for which he had donned full regimentals, as it was during commencement time, and he never looked more noble and handsome than when he entered his chamber, sword in hand. He playfully began to brandish the sword over his wife’s head, looking as ferocious and terrible as a veritable Bluebeard, and asking her if she was not afraid. His acting was so realistic that, for a moment, the timid little woman did quail, which he no sooner saw than he threw down his sword, and, in a perfect outburst of glee, speedily transformed himself into the very antipode of a wife-killer.”
The major, she said, would often hide behind a door when he heard her approaching, and spring out “to greet her with a startling caress.”
Anna was in New York for medical treatment for a few days, and Jackson’s letters were full of such sentiments as: “Home is not home without my little dove. I love to talk to you as though you were here.… You are somebody’s sunshine … my little dove, my little pet.… Try to live near to Jesus, and secure that peace which flows like a river.… You are very precious to somebody’s heart.”
Shortly after, when he had gone to White Sulphur Springs for the baths, he wrote her: “I am tired of this place.… I want to go and stay with my little woman. As yet I am not certain whether the waters are beneficial.”
In November, 1859, he was ordered to Charlestown, where he commanded troops at the hanging of John Brown. He returned from that scene with a head cold, of which he complained.
War was now coming obviously closer to them, but the Major seems to have avoided the arguments then waxing in Lexington as in every other village and town. He let it be known that he favored the Union and insisted that Virginia could get her rights inside better than without. But he left no doubt as to where his sympathies lay. At the approach of 1860, he wrote his aunt, Mrs. Alfred Neale:
What do you think about the state of the country? Viewing things at Washington from human appearances, I think we have great reason for alarm, but my trust is in God; and I cannot think that He will permit the madness of men to interfere so materially with the Christian labors of this country at home and abroad.
In June, the summer before the election of Lincoln, Jackson’s letters showed more concern for such matters as a new piano, and the planting of Silesia lettuce, and a trip to the North, than for affairs of politics.
Anna and Jackson took the baths at Brattleboro, Vermont, and Northampton, Massachusetts, that summer, and in the latter town, at a place called the Round Hill Water Cure, Jackson made a firm friend of a Baptist minister who was an Abolitionist—to the astonishment of Anna. Her husband, she said, listened to the arguments over slavery and the secession issue, but did not enter them. Anna was herself lured to the water cure:
“I had gone there without a particle of faith in hydropathy, but as I was not strong, my husband persuaded me to try it, and it was astonishing how rapidly my strength developed. From not being able to walk a mile on arrival, by degrees I came to walking five miles a day with ease, and kept it up.”
Back home, in an atmosphere becoming more tense each day, with South Carolina in outright rebellion and other states following, Jackson continued to live quietly. His first recorded mention of the day’s crisis, in any detail, was in a line to Laura. After he had asked, “What is being done for The Redeemer’s cause?” in her town in Western Virginia, he wrote:
I am looking forward with great interest to the 4th of January when the Christian people of this land will lift their united prayer as incense to the Throne of God in supplication for our unhappy country. (A national day of prayer for peace). What is the feeling about Beverly respecting secession? I am strong for the Union at present, and if things become no worse I hope to continue so. I think the majority in this country are for the Union, but in counties bordering on us there is a strong secession feeling.
A Washington peace conference brought a momentary lull in the gathering storm; when it failed, Jackson talked over the situation with his minister, Dr. White:
“If the Federal Government persists in these measures, there must be war. It is painful to see with what unconcern they talk war—they do not know its horrors. I have seen enough of it to know it as the sum of all evils.… But if they take the threatened step, we must fight.”
Writing a nephew, T. J. Arnold, in Western Virginia, Jackson set down more fully his thoughts on the coming whirlwind.
… I am in favor of making a thorough trial for peace, and if we fail in this, and the state is invaded, to defend it with a terrific resistance.…
I desire to see the state use every influence … to procure an honorable adjustment of our troubles, but … if the free states, instead of permitting us to enjoy the rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution … should endeavor to subjugate us, and thus excite our slaves to servile insurrection in which our families would be murdered without quarter or mercy, it becomes us to wage such a war as will bring hostilities to a speedy close.
People who are anxious to bring on war don’t know what they are bargaining for; they don’t see all the horrors that must accompany such an event.
For myself I have never as yet been induced to believe that Virginia will even have to leave the Union. I feel pretty well satisfied that the Northern people love the Union more than they do their peculiar notions of slavery, and that they will prove it to us when satisfied that we are in earnest about leaving the Confederacy unless they do us justice.
He wrote later to another correspondent: “If I know myself, all I am and have is at the service of my country.” He meant Virginia, not the United States.
Before Virginia’s Secession Convention, an incident threatened bloodshed in Lexington. In the absence of officers, a group of cadets fired on a United States flag in the village, ripped it down and replaced it with a state flag. The town’s volunteer militiamen drove off the cadet guard and went about restoring the American flag. Drums beat the alarm on the Institute campus, and most of the corps poured out the gates, ready for a skirmish. Only the sudden arrival of Colonel Smith halted it. The cadets were marched back to their barracks, where, in an exciting scene, they were harangued by their officers on the nation’s crisis.
After several men had spoken, cadets began to call for Jackson, and the tradition is that, this time, with all traces of his customary shyness gone, he shouted:
“I admire the spirit you have shown in rushing to the defense of your comrades; and I commend the way in which you obeyed the commands of your superior officer. The time may come, young gentlemen, when your state will need your services, and if that time comes, draw your swords and throw away your scabbards.”
April twelfth brought Fort Sumter; April fourteenth, Lincoln’s call for seventy-five thousand men to defend the Union; April seventeenth, Virginia’s secession.
Little else that Jackson said in these times is left. He was heard to agree with the theme of Jefferson Davis that the South was not in revolt, but that she was seeking to maintain the liberties won in the Revolution. This theory was much in vogue at the moment.
Virginia’s secession came with Jackson in the midst of a Presbyterian synod meeting in Lexington,
when his house literally crawled with visiting ministers. He found no time for church sessions, for he was on almost constant duty at the Institute, where war had already come.
Governor Letcher had sent an order from Richmond: The V.M.I. cadets of the upper classes, those best qualified, were to come at once to the capital. Jackson was to command them.
Late Saturday night, April 20, alone with Anna, he sighed the hope that he would at least be given tomorrow for rest and church affairs. It was not quite dawn when boots thumped on his steps and a messenger hammered on the door—the orders to move to Richmond. Jackson went to the campus without breakfast and worked most of the morning to prepare his young men for the road. He set 1 P.M. as their time of departure, and went home to Anna and a delayed breakfast.
He sent Dr. White to the barracks to pray over the young soldiers. Jackson then closed the door of his bedroom and sat down with Anna, taking his Bible and reading from the fifth chapter of Second Corinthians words which deeply moved his wife:
“For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle be dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens …”
The Major read the entire chapter, and then prayed for the country, for peace, and for Anna, her home and servants—and went out the door to war.
He found the cadets waiting at the Institute, with every strap in place. After a brief devotional service by Dr. White, they were impatient to take the road. An officer came to Jackson, saying that all was ready and that the corps should move.
Jackson nodded to the clock on the barracks wall, which indicated a few minutes before one. The young soldiers were forced to stand, silent and frowning, until their exact commander gave the word. Precisely at one o’clock they were off. They were quickly out of sight, on their way to Staunton and the railroad. Jackson was to return only in death.
9
HE HAS FOUGHT BEFORE
Jackson led his cadets toward a Richmond gone mad. He put them into camp at the Fair Grounds, a little over a mile from the center of the city, and was then caught in the currents of war which swirled more rapidly each day. He was well known among the leaders of Virginia’s war effort. R. E. Lee, who had so strongly recommended him for a new job, seven years before, was commander of the Virginia troops. Of this, Jackson wrote Anna: “Colonel Robert E. Lee … has been made major general. This I regard as of more value to us than to have General Scott as commander.… I regard him as a better officer than General Scott.”
They Called Him Stonewall Page 14
