CHAPTER ELEVEN
In the summer of 1861, as citizens in the North and South tried to sort out what had happened on Henry Hill and Chinn Ridge, they began to discuss a new topic: their generals. A few months before, no one had cared particularly about generals, who they were, what they looked like, or what they might have done in the Mexican-American War or in some dusty Indian outpost in the West. But all that had changed. Suddenly the world was awash in these folks, with their sashes, side-whiskers, and idiosyncrasies, and because the fate of the country and the lives of thousands of young men rested in their hands, they were the objects of keen, often obsessive interest. They were the new celebrities. Names of formerly obscure, regular army types such as David Hunter and Joe Johnston now populated the pages of the newspapers and soldiers’ letters home, and the more often they appeared the more the names began to take on emblematic status. Beauregard was the dashing spirit of Southern victory, McDowell the symbol of unsettling, inexplicable Union defeat; Bee represented the notion of tragic glory, of the sacrifices that would have to be made. McClellan, remote and magnificent in Ohio and western Virginia, was the hope of the despondent North.
Jackson was not yet among those prominent names. To the extent that anyone knew him at all, he embodied the nickname Barnard Bee had given him. He was steadfast and immovable, an iron-hard fighter who would stand on the soil of Virginia, eyes ablaze and chin tilted toward the heavens, and defy the Yankee invaders. If this seemed two-dimensional, the man his soldiers saw was scarcely more defined. Their experience of him was strictly military, all protocol and logistics and army business. He did not make small talk, he rarely socialized, and he revealed little of himself to subordinates. He was usually polite, but the soft-spoken politeness itself—like his regular daily prayers, offered alone in his quarters—was a form of aloofness. Brigadier General Jackson seemed indeed like a wall: it was impossible to penetrate him.
But Jackson was, in a larger sense, anything but opaque. After the Mexican-American War he had spent five years in the regular army, in postings that included Pennsylvania, New York, and Florida, long enough to be well known to his peers and commanders. For a full decade, from 1851 to 1861, he had lived a very visible life in Lexington, a small college town of two thousand souls where everybody knew everybody else’s business. He was deeply involved in the very small and very transparent world of VMI, where he was one of a handful of professors. He was a deacon at his church. He had married twice, owned a redbrick house in town and a modest farm outside of town, sat on the board of a local bank, and was active in the local debating society. He had several close friends. To them, and to many others in Lexington, Jackson was considerably more than this implacable, God-obsessed mystery whom people were starting to talk about. He was just Major Jackson, a shy and socially awkward man who was perhaps not a very good teacher but who had nonetheless built for himself a tidy, middle-class life—a very American story of hard work and self-betterment and modest success.
That story begins in 1851, not in Lexington but in the months just before he arrived there—in a swampy backwater in Florida, where young Brevet Major Thomas Jackson had finished his regular army career by doing something truly extraordinary: he had single-handedly transformed a small, sleepy garrison into a nightmare of recrimination, political infighting, and moral accusation.
• • •
Jackson’s return from the Mexican campaign was, inevitably, less than glorious. After a brief posting to a barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he landed at Fort Hamilton, on the coast of Long Island, about ten miles from New York City. Compared with the swashbuckling and high adventure of Mexico, this new life was commonplace. It gave him his first real taste of the often dreary, routinized life of the peacetime army, where promotion was slow, action rare, and political backbiting the order of the day. Though he was quartermaster and commissary of his unit, he spent much of his time on court-martial duty, traveling to upstate New York and Pennsylvania to sit on military juries, ruling on desertions and insubordination and drunkenness and other army sins. On the brighter side, the new life offered him free time. He attended an Episcopal church, where he was baptized, read the Bible, and began what would become a full-blown obsession with his health and diet, eating stale bread and plain meat to ease his chronically upset stomach, taking water cures, and doing “leaping” and “swinging” exercises that caused much curiosity at the fort.1 There he passed his twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth birthdays. In December 1850 he was reassigned to Company K of the 1st Artillery, and to a post that would soon make Fort Hamilton seem like a dream of happiness.
This was Fort Meade, Florida, a three-day march to nowhere through swamp and pine forest from Tampa, itself a forlorn outpost of two hundred souls in the flat, humid, lake-pocked terrain of central Florida. (The entire state of Florida had only eighty-five thousand inhabitants, half of them slaves.) Fort Meade’s ostensible purpose was to protect white people from marauding bands of Seminoles—more specifically, those Seminoles who had not accepted the treaties under which they would be forced onto Indian territories in what is now Oklahoma. That there were hardly any of these Indians out there did not seem to matter. There had been much blood shed and money spent fighting them since 1817, and forts had been built and they all had to be staffed with armed men. Company K consisted of a commanding officer, fifty-two enlisted men, and four officers. They were the only human beings, as far as anyone knew, within ten miles of the fort. Jackson arrived there, with the rest of the company, on December 18, 1850.
His posting started well enough. His job was again quartermaster and commissary, in charge of property, supplies, and food. His commanding officer was a portly, balding Baltimorean with a protuberant mustache named William H. French, who had graduated from West Point nine years ahead of him. The two men had known each other for three years, and, if they weren’t exactly friends, they seem to have been pleasant enough acquaintances. French invited Jackson to dinner several times in his first months there, where Jackson enjoyed the company of his wife, the lively Caroline Read French. Like Jackson, French was a stickler for duty and detail, and like Jackson he had won brevet promotions for valor in the Mexican-American War, and though he held the actual rank of captain (Jackson was a first lieutenant, one notch down), they were both brevet majors. They resembled each other in less benign ways, too: neither had an engaging personality, and both were ambitious for promotion and advancement. Unlike Jackson, French could be rude and abrasive.
He was also more than just a perfectionist; he was a meddler as well. He insisted on involving himself with the smallest details of barracks life, and often found fault with those details. He wanted a formal report, for example, on why a musket belonging to one of the enlisted men had been damaged. When Jackson, presiding over a case of drunkenness and unsoldierly conduct, found the corporal guilty and recommended punishment, French rejected it as too lenient.
Jackson came in for criticism in other ways, too. French dispatched him twice to find Indians. On both occasions, after marching long distances through jungles and swamps, Jackson failed to do so.2 French was furious, and fired off a note to army headquarters accompanying the report of Jackson’s second expedition with a vow “to go myself and endeavor to turn the Southern and eastern point of the lake,” rather than “throw it on my subalterns should Indians be on the other side at this season which is ‘corn planting time.’ ”3 Jackson chafed under all this. He was unhappy. His health declined, notably his eyes, which were most likely afflicted by a condition known today as uveitis, an inflammation of the iris and pupil that causes eye aches, bloodshot eyes, sensitivity to light, blurred vision, and floaters. He may have suffered from dyspepsia as well. In February he tried and failed to transfer to another post.
Relations between the two men continued to deteriorate. As company quartermaster, it was Jackson’s responsibility to supervise the construction of several buildings at the fort. He considered this an important part of his job. Now French began to assert control over the process, overriding Jackson’s orders and making his own changes. Jackson’s unhappiness soon gave way to anger. Whenever he encountered French at the fort, Jackson averted his eyes, an old military practice known as “cutting.” French did the same, though in Jackson’s case the behavior bordered on insubordination.4 They spoke to each other only about official matters, and only when necessary.
Finally, Jackson could take it no longer. He wrote a formal protest to the commanding officer in Tampa saying that French was interfering with his rights as quartermaster. French, angered by Jackson’s righteous nitpicking, blasted back in his own note to Tampa.5 Jackson, in fact, was way out of bounds. He was, in effect, asserting that he was entitled to an independent command within a company of fifty-two men and four officers occupying a small fort. He was insisting that he should not be subject to the normal command structures of the army. Six days later he received a categorical rebuke from Colonel Thomas Childs in Tampa, who stated pointedly that “the Gen’l Comdg. knows no state of military affairs where the Comdg. Officer can divide responsibility with a junior.” He also lectured Jackson: “A difference of opinion amongst Officers may honestly occur on points of duty. It ought never to degenerate into personalities, or be considered a just cause for withholding the common courtesies of life so essential in an Officer & to the happiness & quiet of garrison life.”6
Still, Jackson was not finished with French. This dispute had been about rank and authority. The next one, which exploded over two weeks in mid-April, was about morality. It began with gossip, specifically a scandalous story about Captain French that made the rounds of the garrison in early April. The thirty-five-year-old French lived at the fort with his wife, two small children, and a household servant named Julia. In the account Jackson heard, French had been seen walking alone with Julia in late afternoon and early evening on several occasions, both on the post and in the woods. The suggestion, delivered with a wink and a nudge, was that French and Julia were lovers. Jackson had also heard that several of Julia’s potential beaus among the enlisted men had understood that they were supposed to stay away from her because Captain French had “taken her for himself.” In a small, remote garrison, such a rumor would have spread quickly.
And it might have remained a rumor had Jackson not decided to intervene. His reaction to the gossip was in some ways predictable. Adultery was a crime, both in the military and in civil society. It was also a sin against the laws of God—prohibited by the Sixth Commandment. So Jackson decided, without authorization, to conduct his own investigation—an extraordinary and risky move by a young first lieutenant against his commanding officer. If Jackson was fearless, he was also shockingly insensitive to what his action inevitably looked like: the opportunistic and even malevolent work of a disgruntled subaltern engaged in a highly visible power struggle with his commanding officer.
On April 12, unbeknownst to French, Jackson summoned and interrogated a dozen enlisted men in his office. He promised the interviewees that nothing would happen to them, then proceeded to ask them detailed questions about what they had seen. Where had French and Julia been observed walking together? At what hour? Had anyone seen or heard of any immoral conduct? Had one of them witnessed, through an open window, the two of them together on the captain’s bed? Jackson’s questions could be quite specific, too. When one enlisted man denied having seen the two on a bed together, and said he had only seen “a foot” in the room, Jackson wanted to know if the legs were “bare or covered” or belonged to a man or a woman. Thus it went, the young first lieutenant grilling the reluctant, deeply uncomfortable men. As a criminal investigation, it was a notable failure. A few of the men had seen French walking with the girl, that was all.
Sensing the peril of their position, the men immediately told their sergeant what had happened, and the sergeant, sensing the peril of his position, immediately told French. And French exploded. The next morning he placed Jackson under arrest for conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. He then called in the men who had spoken with Jackson, asked them in detail what had been said, and, for good measure, called in another eight to ask them if they had heard any such assaults on his character. This, too, turned up little of note. Some of the men acknowledged seeing the two together, though they had observed nothing improper. Several of the men acknowledged hearing the story that the “major had taken her for himself” but had treated it as a joke. In any case, no one had seen anything.
Jackson, meanwhile, had concluded that French was at least guilty of unbecoming conduct and proceeded to draw up charges. While he was working on them, he was visited by company surgeon Jonathan Letterman (later to become the medical director of the Army of the Potomac), who begged him to withdraw his accusations because of the pain they would cause French’s popular and likable wife. Jackson listened to him, and his eyes filled with tears. “Inflicting pain on her was agony to him,” wrote his brother-in-law D. H. Hill. “But his conscience compelled him to prosecute the case.”7 In other words, his strong sense of the righteousness of his actions overrode the fact that he was potentially destroying French’s marriage and his career at the same time.
On Sunday, April 13, Jackson sent a letter to Tampa asking for release from arrest and calling for a “Court of Inquiry” on French’s behavior.8 The next day, Jackson filed formal papers. His charge carried four “specifications,” roughly: (1) that French and Julia had had intimate relations; (2) that they had taken improper walks together; (3) that they had taken a walk together outside the fort; and (4) that it was common knowledge among Julia’s prospective suitors that he had “cut them out.” The language Jackson used showed his evident contempt for French, whom he portrayed as a harsh and dishonest man who was “not to be believed as speaking the truth, when his interest in his opinion requires him to speak falsely.” French retaliated by firing off a letter that same day, defending himself from “so malicious a slander and falsehood,” pointing out the innocence of his actions, and asserting that none of the men in the garrison had witnessed anything improper. French wanted Jackson court-martialed. He reminded his superiors that Jackson, feeling wronged, had “adopted the system of non-intercourse, vulgarly styled ‘cutting’ on the ground that he was deprived of his rights,” and cast doubt on Jackson’s motives. French wrote:
Foiled thus in his attempts to have my official conduct reprehended, he altered his course, and descending into the purloins of the camp he has changed his attacks to a charge upon me and my family, but so blindly and upon ground so absolutely untenable that finding himself without a support in proof, he wished to escape from the consequences of his act and be allowed to retire unscathed upon a plea of “a sense of duty.” 9
What happened next was odd, since it was Jackson, not French, who had the weaker case. French started to unravel. He began to see conspiracies where none existed, and began a hunt for informants. On April 16 he accused Second Lieutenant Absalom Baird of conspiring with Jackson to undermine French’s authority, and he placed Baird under arrest. (He would eventually file charges against all of his officers.) He filed eight court-martial charges against Jackson. “When Major Jackson is brought to trial for his outrageous conduct,” he wrote, “the evidence which I will bring before the court will cover him with the infamy he deserves.”
Even odder, all this hysteria and supposed moral calumny at Fort Meade received an ice-cold welcome in Tampa. The new commander there, General David Twiggs, who had been forced to read through many pages of charges and countercharges, found it all preposterous and a waste of his time. He told the two officers to stop what they were doing, to forget the issue, and to resume normal business. He had no intention of dealing with any of it. Jackson immediately accepted Twiggs’s order and sent no further grievances to Tampa.
French, meanwhile, could scarcely believe that he was not going to be allowed to refute the charges against him. Unhappy with Twiggs’s ruling, he applied to General Winfield Scott himself, citing “this most extraordinary case of outrage.” Again, he was turned down flat. French, even more convinced of a large conspiracy, brought charges against surgeon Jonathan Letterman and Lieutenant Amos Beckwith for improper conduct, and court-martial charges against a noncommissioned officer for his role in Jackson’s investigation. Twiggs, in Tampa, considered French now so far out of control that, on October 1, he relieved him of command and transferred him to Fort Myers. But the mortally offended French was not finished. In March of the following year, still trying to rescue his reputation from what Jackson had done to it, he appealed for redress directly to the secretary of war. This finally exhausted the patience of General Twiggs, who relieved French of command at Fort Myers. He also wrote a career-damaging reaction to French’s behavior. French, he said, “has preferred charges successively against all the officers serving under his orders, and has shown himself incapable of conducting the service harmoniously at a detached post.”10
Jackson, meanwhile, seemed not only unscathed by what had happened—he doesn’t even mention it in his correspondence—but was also, quite happily, on his way to a new life. While French was drowning in anger and shame and frustration, Jackson, immune from regret, was busy making other plans. On February 4, before the disputes with French began, he had received an unsolicited letter from Colonel Francis H. Smith, superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, asking for permission to place his name in nomination for the job of professor of natural and experimental philosophy and instructor of artillery.
Jackson’s name had come up in the unlikeliest of ways. Smith, who had been having trouble hiring a new professor, had consulted his friend D. H. “Harvey” Hill, a professor at nearby Washington College in Lexington. Smith, desperate for a new candidate, had handed Hill a copy of the Army Register and asked him to recommend someone. Hill perused it, then came to the name of the young officer he had met in Mexico, Tom Jackson. Hill recalled how Captain Taylor had described Jackson as a man who would “make his mark,” and how Jackson’s heroism at Contreras and Chapultepec had confirmed precisely what he had said. Hill pointed to the name, at the top of page 278.11 As luck would have it, one of Jackson’s relatives was a member of the school’s board.
Jackson, who had agreed enthusiastically to put his name in nomination, was offered the job at VMI in the first week in April and decided immediately to accept it. The timing is interesting, because by the time he brought his charges against French, he had the job offer in hand. He had only to keep his mouth shut, depart on his furlough, then resign and take the job. Instead, by bringing charges, he put that job, and his future happiness, at considerable risk. Either a lengthy court of inquiry or his own court-martial trial might well have prevented Jackson from taking the job, which required his presence in Lexington on July 1. And French did, in fact, suspend the April 14 orders granting Jackson his requested leave—which was for now his only way out.
All of this would suggest that Jackson, as a soldier and a Christian, truly believed that he had no choice but to do what he did. His tears when explaining his position to Letterman were authentic, as was the sympathy he later expressed to the officer to whom he was denying leave to be with his ill and dying family members. Jackson always possessed an absolute sense of what he was required to do—a personal code that was not always convenient for those around him.
Jackson departed Fort Meade, and Florida, forever on May 21, 1851, after forty-three days under arrest. He left behind him a dysfunctional garrison still seething with anger and suspicion. There is no record that he ever gave it a second thought. He later explained, according to his friend Robert Dabney, that “while campaigning was extremely congenial to his tastes, the life of a military post in times of peace was just as repulsive; that he perceived the officers of the army usually neglected self-improvement and rusted, in trivial amusements, at these fortresses.”12 To his sister he wrote cheerfully, “Good news. I have been elected Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy in the Virginia Military Institute, and you may expect me home in the latter part of June.”