CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lexington knew the caricature Jackson, the health crank, the unbending, automaton-like professor, the social bore with high Christian principles. This was the strangely two-dimensional face he presented to the world, and he wore it for a decade, like armor. Because he seemed a decent enough man, a polite and conscientious man with no apparent malice in his heart, the town adopted him. If he could never adjust his habits and ways to those of Lexington society, no matter: Lexington would adapt itself to him. It got used to Major Jackson and in its own way came to appreciate him. He was a curiosity, a sort of minor civic institution.
But he was not what he seemed. Concealed behind this carefully constructed social front was a layered, highly complex, passionate, deeply sensitive man who loved deeply and grieved deeply. He had a poetic heart, and a nineteenth-century romantic’s embrace of beauty and nature. He loved Shakespeare and European architecture. He was self-taught and completely fluent in Spanish; he was a devoted and talented gardener; and he read widely in world history and military history and reveled in travel. He had an ecstatic, almost mystical sense of God. He loved walking in the country around Lexington, gloried in sunsets and mountain views and in the blooming Shenandoah spring. He was a man who could laugh uproariously, and roll around on the floor in play with a child, speaking Spanish baby talk, a man who kept close track of news and gossip inside his large, extended family. He was a doting, affectionate, and passionate husband who, behind closed doors, had an expansive and often joyous personality.
Almost no one in Lexington—or anywhere else, for that matter—knew or suspected any of this. His students and fellow parishioners would have been astounded to learn it. Many would not have believed it. The real Thomas J. Jackson was almost entirely private. He was deliberately and ingeniously cloaked. The more fully realized part of him was revealed only to a very small group of people, all of them female, and all of them close to his heart. All came to full prominence in his life during his time in Lexington.
The first was his sister, Laura, who pervades Jackson’s life. She was the focus of much of his love and all of his brotherly concern. She was his faithful correspondent, and though her letters to her brother have been lost, a large number of his letters to her have survived. They show her only in reflection, of course. But taken as a group they provide a sweeping twenty-year portrait of Jackson himself. The letters can be simply chatty, passionately religious, or elaborately rhetorical, but they cover almost all aspects of his life, from his marriages, to religion, to his health and his obsession with it, to grief, financial matters, relations with his extended family, his travels in Europe and the United States, and even to his fondness for peaches.
Laura was special for a number of reasons, but mainly because she was the only other surviving remnant of a family struck by repeated calamities. Thomas and Laura were born in very modest circumstances in Clarksburg, Virginia, a river junction town in the mountains and narrow valleys of far northwestern Virginia, not far from Ohio and Pennsylvania. (The area is now part of West Virginia.) Their father, Jonathan Jackson, was a failed country lawyer, a poor business manager, and a compulsive gambler whose main talent seemed to be running up large debts. Their mother, Julia Neale, from nearby Parkersburg on the Ohio River, seems to have been a much better sort, described by contemporaries as “very intelligent” and having a “comely and engaging countenance” and “a graceful and commanding presence.”1
Jonathan and Julia married in 1817, and set up housekeeping in Clarksburg. They had three children: Elizabeth in 1819, Warren in 1821, and Thomas in 1824. They struggled financially. While Julia was pregnant with her fourth child, typhoid fever killed six-year-old Elizabeth. Less than a month later, her husband, Jonathan, died from the same illness. The day after his death Julia gave birth to a daughter, Laura. Julia was now, at twenty-eight, a widow with two small children and an infant.2
She was also destitute, and soon accepted the charity of the local Masonic order, which offered her the use of a tiny, twelve-foot-square, one-room house. She sewed, taught school, and somehow managed to feed her children. Her situation did not improve. Her children were pitiable sights in town, wearing ragged clothes and sometimes accepting the charity of local merchants and tradesmen. In 1830, when Tom was six, Julia met and married a man fifteen years her senior named Blake Woodson, another hard-luck country lawyer, but this time with eight children of his own scattered in various places. Desperate to save her family, she had made another marital mistake, worse than the first one: Woodson not only made little money but was harsh and verbally abusive to the family. The family moved far from Clarksburg, to the tiny hamlet of New Haven (now Ansted), southeast of Charleston, so that Blake could take a government job. He and Julia struggled and fell deeper into debt. She was soon pregnant again.
By the fall of 1831 there was so little money left that Julia decided, reluctantly but with no real choice, to send her children away. Warren would live with Neale relatives in Parkersburg. Seven-year-old Tom, as he was known, and five-year-old Laura would travel north to live with a collection of Jackson relatives at a place called Jackson’s Mill, eighteen miles south of Clarksburg near the town of Weston. Little Tom begged not to be sent away, and when an uncle and his slave arrived to fetch them, he hid in the woods. When he left home, on the back of a horse, his mother wept uncontrollably. A month later, she gave birth to a boy, William Wirt Woodson. Three months later Tom and Laura were back in the same place, watching their mother die. She had fallen ill and had summoned her children to say good-bye. On December 4, 1831, she passed away. Tom and Laura, now orphaned, went back to the mill. The new baby—Jackson’s half brother—ended up with one of the Neale relatives in Parkersburg.3 (Blake Woodson remarried and died penniless a year and a half later.)
In spite of their apparently disastrous fortunes, there were compensations in this new life. The Jacksons of Jackson’s Mill—six bachelor uncles, ranging in age from twenty-nine to ten, a step-grandmother, and her two adult daughters—were a proud, boisterous, occasionally rowdy, and very successful bunch. By the standards of Lewis County, they were rich. They owned lands up and down the river valley, and their splendid main residence was one of the finest houses in the region. They owned the largest sawmill in the area, as well as a grain mill, carpenter and blacksmith shops, housing for a dozen slaves, and a general store. There were sheep, cattle, chickens, and orchards on the property. The man in charge of all this was Jackson’s father’s brother, twenty-nine-year-old Cummins Jackson. Uncle Cummins, as Jackson called him, was a big, strapping fellow with an outsized personality, a shrewd businessman who dominated local commerce and had a fondness for suing neighbors, competitors, and anyone who annoyed him. He was later found to be dishonest, too, and was caught counterfeiting silver coins, an offense for which he would be indicted by a grand jury.
But to Tom and Laura their uncle Cummins was kind and solicitous, as were their maiden aunts, uncles, and step-grandmother. The evidence suggests that the children were loved and looked after. Except for the absence of their parents, and the inevitable loneliness Tom and Laura felt, Jackson’s Mill was a wonderful place to grow up. There was the splendid, rushing West Fork River that ran by the mill; there were orchards and meadows and woodlands to play in. Young Tom drove oxen, tended cattle and sheep, chopped wood, rode and raced horses, and helped with the harvest. He made maple syrup. He was quiet, shy, serious, and hardworking. He was not exceptional in any particular way and was considered by his uncle Cummins to be the least bright of the three Jackson children. He read whatever books he could lay his hands on and learned slowly. He seemed to have a flair for math—what little he had access to. Though he grew up surrounded by large numbers of cousins, uncles, and aunts on both sides of the family, his great confidante and friend was Laura. Together they ranged over the large property. One summer a slave named Uncle Robinson helped them build a raft, and Tom rowed his sister across the river, where they played in a shady stand of poplars and maples. Sometimes Tom crossed the river by himself, and rested there alone beneath the spreading trees.
In spite of the relative comforts of Jackson’s Mill, there was one more dislocating trauma the children would have to face. Four years after they arrived there—they were now eleven and nine years old—their step-grandmother Elizabeth Jackson died, an event with life-changing consequences for the children. Because the two maiden aunts had married and left the mill, Elizabeth had been the sole remaining female on the compound, which meant that the only people left to care for Tom and Laura were bachelor uncles and the slaves. To Neales and Jacksons alike, this was unacceptable. So Tom and Laura were sent away again. Laura went to Parkersburg with a Neale aunt; Tom went to a farm near Clarksburg owned by his father’s sister Polly and her husband, Isaac Brake. Though Laura found a warm new home, Tom found nothing but a troublesome relationship with his uncle Isaac, who disparaged him, treated him like an outsider, and gave him at least one hard whipping.
A year later, Tom could endure it no longer. He ran away. In Clarksburg he told relatives that he was not going back. When a cousin begged him to return to the Brakes, he said simply, yet for a twelve-year-old boy quite stubbornly, “Maybe I ought to, ma’am, but I am not going to.” The next day he walked eighteen miles to Jackson’s Mill, where Cummins Jackson happily welcomed him back. He spent the rest of his childhood in that sturdy masculine environment, attending several small, rural schools and working alternately for Cummins and at a variety of jobs that included surveying, teaching school, and serving warrants and collecting delinquent accounts as constable for Lewis County. His childhood was, in that regard, not altogether exceptional for someone from that rural county in Virginia in the 1830s. Young men were expected to grow up quickly, and worked at whatever jobs were available.4 Probably the most exceptional part was twelve-year-old Tom’s adventure with his sixteen-year-old brother Warren down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, where they spent a summer and part of a fall cutting and selling wood to passing steamers. The work was hard, the money poor. Both boys got malaria and came home much the worse for what started out as a spirited adventure.
Nor was Jackson’s orphanhood—for all that has been made of it—terribly unusual. Outbreaks of typhoid, yellow fever, and smallpox were common at the time, destroying families and leaving children bereft of parents. (The early 1800s were the heyday of orphanage-building in America.) Tom Jackson undoubtedly missed the love of a mother and father, but he was also busy, industrious, and part of a large, prosperous, and well-connected family that loved him. He lived in the home of a man of whom he would later write, affectionately, “Uncle was like a father to me.” He had no choice but to endure his separation from Laura and Warren. They were thrilled to see each other periodically. They corresponded and remained close. When Warren died of tuberculosis when Tom was seventeen—he had never quite recovered from their ill-fated river trip—Tom and Laura were all that remained of the original Jackson family.
• • •
We know in some detail the circumstances of Laura’s life: where she lived, whom she married, what her family’s finances were like, and who her children were. But she herself is harder to see. In the few surviving photos of her, she looks a good deal like her brother, which is not entirely fortunate. She was plain and a bit masculine, with Jackson’s thin lips, strong chin, prominent brow, and wide-set eyes. She suffered from at least some of the same ailments he did, especially uveitis. She was highly sensitive, particularly to perceived neglect by her brother, and her feelings could be easily hurt.5 She married well. Her husband, Jonathan Arnold, was a prosperous landowner, lawyer, and cattle dealer from Beverly, Virginia. He was twenty-four years her senior, and she was his third wife. They had four children, the oldest of whom was named after her brother Tom, who loved them all dearly and played the part of the doting, indulgent uncle while spending significant parts of five summers with the family during his decade in Lexington.
In his letters to Laura, Jackson was unguarded in a way he never was at VMI or around most of his Lexington acquaintances. A letter in early 1853 was typical for its candor and its range. He describes his own passionate embrace of God—evoking a soaring vision of divinity that was not even hinted at in his solemn demeanor around town. “I hope,” he wrote,
that ere this spring your health has improved and that the returning spring will reanimate your feelings and suggest the idea that it is but the symbol of the endless beauties and enjoyments of the world to come. The passage of Scripture from which I have derived sufficient support, whenever applied, is in the following words: “Acknowledge God in all thy ways, and He shall direct thy paths.” What a comfort is this! My dear sister, it is useless for men to tell me that there is no God, and that His benign influence is not to be experienced in prayer, when it is offered in conformity to the Bible. For some time past not a single day has passed without my feeling His hallowing presence whilst at my morning prayers.6
He then shifted, as he commonly did in his correspondence with his sister, from the divine to the quotidian: he spoke of the cold weather, of the news and activities of their many relatives, how people had filled their icehouses, and how he despaired of getting dried peaches, which he loved. As always, there was his health—complaining of “nervousness” and “cold feet”—and his diet:
My dishes are very plain; in general brown bread is the principal article for breakfast and tea; and sometimes I probably do not taste meat for more than a month; and I have not to my recollection used any other drink than cold water since my return home.
Permeating most of his letters to her is a profound, unflagging optimism that even tragedy in his life could not undermine. It was linked to his relationship to God and his belief in the afterlife. But he was also a fundamentally cheerful man who insisted on looking at the brighter side of life. In a letter written a month later, while he was enduring his usual struggles keeping his cadets in check and having the same tired pranks pulled on him, he invoked the sunny optimism of his religion. “Our lives,” he wrote,
have been checkered in a most marked manner, and we are still, notwithstanding all the ill omens of our youth, living even beyond the usual period of human life, and I trust that before us are the brightest of our days. In taking a retrospective view of my own life, each year has opened, as I consider, with increased promise. And with my present views, the future is holding richer stores in reserves. . . . I too have crosses, and am at times deeply afflicted, but however sore may be the trials, they lose their poignancy, and instead of producing injury, I feel that I am but improved by the ordeal. But how is this accomplished? By throwing myself on the protection of Him whose law book is the wonderful Bible. My dear sister I would not part with this book for countless universes. I feel ready to make every sacrifice to carry out the will of Him who so loved us as to give His only begotten son to die for me.7
On April 15, 1853, he wrote Laura a letter whose playful tone would have flabbergasted his students at VMI:
My Dear Sister: Our spring is opening beautifully, though it is said to be late. I wish that I could be with you this evening, Ah! Not this evening only, but many evenings. I am invited to a large party to-night, and among the scramble, expect to come in for my share of fun.8
• • •
The notion of Jackson scrambling for his “share of fun” at an evening party would have seemed implausible and possibly ridiculous to anyone who knew him. What accounted for this sudden exuberance was a significant change in the young major’s life: he was in love, though he wasn’t yet ready to tell Laura. He was in fact engaged, though no one else knew that, either. The courtship had happened rather quickly. After moving to Lexington, Jackson had met one of the town’s gray eminences: the Reverend Dr. George Junkin, the president of Washington College, which was founded in 1749 and endowed by George Washington himself.9 Junkin was a force in early American higher education. An ordained Presbyterian minister and a professor of classics, he had been the first president both of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and Miami University in Ohio. He had taken the job at Washington College in 1848. While fulfilling his academic duties he also conducted regular services at the Washington College chapel and in a nearby town.10
Austere, imposing, intellectual, and deeply religious, Junkin was the sort of older man who had been missing in Jackson’s life, and Jackson immediately liked him. He was soon a regular visitor to the Junkins’ parlor in the large brick mansion with a white portico that was the Washington College president’s residence. Junkin liked Jackson, too. According to Junkin’s brother and biographer D. X. Junkin, who knew Jackson well, relations between the two “were those of a fond father and an affectionate son.”11They spent hours discussing theological issues and Presbyterian doctrine. The Pennsylvania-born Dr. Junkin was also outspoken on the subject of slavery, which he regarded as a moral and an economic evil.12 It is likely that the two men discussed this as well. (After secession, Junkin would leave for the North, condemning slavery as he left—a painful event in Jackson’s life.)
But there was another reason Jackson was interested in the Junkin family. One of the reverend doctor’s eight children was the spirited, devout, and cheerfully irreverent Elinor, known as Ellie, a year younger than Jackson and still resident in the Junkin home. He had met her on an early visit and had become more intimate with her when they both began teaching Sunday school at the Presbyterian church in February 1852. Soon he was falling in love with her, though it apparently took a bit of time before he understood what was happening to him. Harvey Hill describes a visit from Jackson during which, no matter what Hill said, Jackson would manage to maneuver the conversation back to Ellie. Jackson finally confessed, “I don’t know what has changed me. I used to think her plain, but her face now seems to me all sweetness.” Hill started to laugh and then replied, “You are in love. That’s what is the matter!” According to Hill, Jackson then “blushed up to the eyes, and said that he had never been in love in his life, but he certainly felt differently toward this lady from what he had ever felt before.”13 By January 1853, the major was calling on her regularly.14
The chestnut-haired Ellie shook Jackson’s life to its foundations. She was in most ways his opposite. She had a vibrant, outgoing personality, a finely tuned sense of humor, and was not at all shy about teasing the stern Major Jackson about his unusual behavior. She was, according to her niece, “one of the sunniest, happiest of beings.”15 Just as important, she was deeply religious, more so even than Jackson himself. Soon it was apparent to everyone who knew them that Jackson was seeking Ellie’s hand in matrimony. Though Dr. Junkin and his wife, Julia, admired Jackson’s piety and seriousness, they were surprised that such a solemn and socially ungraceful man should want to marry their spritely, extroverted daughter.16 And Jackson had done so little self-promotion that for months the Junkins were not aware of his exploits in the Mexican-American War. But they soon got used to the idea, and encouraged it. Sometime in early 1853, the two were engaged.
There was just one problem. Ellie’s older, unmarried sister, Margaret “Maggie” Junkin, was bitterly jealous of Jackson and entirely unreconciled to the idea that Ellie would marry him and thus leave her, at age thirty-two, to a dreary life at home, possibly as an old maid. But there was more to her opposition than simple fear of abandonment. Though she and Ellie were five years apart, they were inseparable friends. They dressed alike, shared the same room, and took walks and rode horses together. They shared each other’s most intimate secrets. The two sisters were, moreover, complementary personalities: Ellie was intensely social; Maggie was shy, a bit withdrawn, more sensitive and emotional, and less comfortable in society.
Nor was Maggie somehow the weaker, less talented, or less attractive of the two. From the few photographs we have of her, if she was not precisely pretty and had less pretensions to fashion than her younger sister, she was certainly good-looking. She was petite, with fair skin, intelligent eyes, and a headful of auburn curls. She was also something of a prodigy, a rising literary star who had published stories, poems, and essays in some of the leading periodicals of the day. (She went on to achieve renown as the “Poetess of the South,” publishing widely read and well-reviewed works on the war and other subjects; in her later life she corresponded extensively with literary friends Robert Browning, Lord Tennyson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Christina Rossetti.17)
And now she had set her considerable talents against Major Jackson. Not only was he a competitor for Ellie’s affections, but he was also the sober-sided, wholly prosaic soldier and science professor from the mountains of western Virginia seemed to collide with everything Maggie, with her literary training and romantic and poetic soul and as the daughter of a classicist, valued. She undoubtedly had also heard the stories about his peculiarities that circulated at VMI, which was only a five-minute walk from her home. It is not clear exactly what she said to her sister, but she evidently intervened. “Elinor is in love with a Major Jackson, a professor at the University [sic], and Margaret won’t let him come to the house,” wrote one of their cousins.18 The result of Maggie’s campaign was that, soon after the engagement was made, Ellie abruptly broke it off, and she and Jackson stopped seeing each other. Jackson, helpless against Maggie’s influence, was miserable. “I don’t think I ever saw anyone suffer as much as he did during the two or three months of estrangement,” wrote Hill. “He . . . said to me one day: ‘I think it probable that I shall become a missionary and die in a foreign land.’ ”19
And so he might have, had Maggie not decided to relent. Her recantation came in the form of a sentimental poem, addressed to Ellie, that admitted her deep jealousy but vowed to accept her sister’s choice:
Tis but the common work of Time
To mar our household so
And I must learn to choke the sob
And smile to see them go. . . .
Forgive these saddened strains, Ellie
Forgive these eyes so dim!
I must—must love whom you have loved
So I will turn to him—
And clasping with a silent—touch
Whose tenderness endears
Your hand and his between my own
I bless them with my tears.20
The poem was followed by an equally penitent letter:
I will try to fling from me the intensely painful idea that anything shall ever divide me from you. I have been very wrong to let this idea gain so deep a seat in my mind, but it was because I sincerely believed it. Now it shall not be. However I may be of the opinion that you will not need me so much, if you become a wife, I will not abate one jot of my need for you and my clinging to you. I will endeavor to keep in check my selfishness, and I find a pure pleasure in yr. new happiness and prospects, and instead of not liking the major because he does the same thing I do, i.e. believes you necessary to his happiness, I will try to make that a very reason for liking him better.21
With Maggie’s reluctant reconciliation, the engagement was back on, though this time secretly, and the two were married at sundown on August 4, 1853, by Dr. Junkin in a modest ceremony in the parlor of the president’s mansion at Washington College. By the time the rest of the town found out—to its amazement—that Major Jackson was married, he was already off on his honeymoon. But that was not the only piece of interesting news. Acquaintances also learned that Ellie and the major were not alone: Maggie Junkin, who was still not happy about losing her sister—she had told a friend that “the word marriage jars my ears to hear it”—had accompanied them on the trip. The three of them, together, journeyed north on a tour to Philadelphia, where they went sightseeing; West Point, where he proudly showed them the lovely campus of his alma mater; and Niagara Falls, which he had visited before and which he found endlessly entertaining. The last stop was Québec Province, in Canada, where they visited Montréal and Québec City, and where Jackson insisted on visiting the site of the famous Battle of the Plains of Abraham, where British general James Wolfe, in a daring assault, had died while defeating French forces under the Marquis de Montcalm in 1759. “I shall never forget,” Maggie wrote later, “the dilating enthusiasm that seemed to take possession of the whole man; he stood a-tiptoe, his tall figure appearing much taller than usual, under the overpowering feeling of the moment . . . he swept his arm with a passionate movement around the plain and exclaimed, quoting Wolfe’s dying words—‘I die content! To die as he died, who would not die content!’ ”22
It was in Canada, too, that Jackson insisted on watching a Highlander regiment drill on Sunday evening, which his new wife felt violated the sanctity of the Sabbath. Jackson went anyway, stating that if Sunday was the only time he could see it, then it was not wrong to do so. Ellie disagreed and let him know it, saying in her direct way that what he was doing was “a very sophistical way of secularizing sacred time.” Jackson thought it over and later agreed. For the rest of his life he took great pains to keep the Sabbath holy.23
On their return to Lexington in August, the couple set up housekeeping in a wing of the splendid Junkin residence—putting them in ever-closer proximity to Maggie, who, along with the senior Junkins, was the only occupant of the large house. If Maggie was still somewhat icy around him, Jackson, as always, got along very well with Dr. Junkin, who referred to him as “my dear young son.”24 We do not know much about the marriage itself, or what they were like behind closed doors. We do know that Jackson was happier than he had ever been and that he loved his wife dearly. “My wife is a great source of happiness to me,” he wrote Laura on October 15, 1853. His evenings were no longer lonely. She made jokes, she teased him. He loosened up. Jackson proudly escorted her to church on Sunday—though she had no better luck than anyone else in keeping him awake—and both resumed teaching Sunday school. She almost certainly persuaded him to apply for the job as mathematics teacher at the University of Virginia—perhaps having concluded, as he should have, that his job at VMI was a dead end. The two went out frequently together into Lexington society, and were in modest demand as a couple. In the summer of 1854, Ellie and Tom traveled 130 miles to Beverly, where they spent the summer with Laura and her husband, Jonathan. Laura and Ellie got along well. As was the custom of the day, they exchanged locks of hair.
But friends agreed that Ellie’s most telling effect on Jackson had to do with his religion, and his marriage to her coincided with a conspicuous deepening of his faith. “Elinor Junkin had more to do with the extraordinary piety which was afterward so conspicuous in ‘Stonewall Jackson,’ than has ever been told,” wrote Maggie’s stepdaughter Elizabeth Preston Allan. “Major Jackson found in [her] not only the sweetest woman he had ever known, and the most charming and engaging companion, but the highest type of Christian as well. Hers was the stanch, conscientious, God-fearing faith of the old Covenanters.”25 They both believed in the reality of heaven and eternal life with God. Indeed, when Ellie’s mother passed away, Jackson wrote to Laura that “her death was no leaping into the dark. She died in the bright hope of an unending immortality of happiness.”26 With Ellie his belief seems to have evolved into its ultimate form, a constant, quasi-mystical union with the divine, in which God was alive in every part of his life, no matter how minute. As one friend later put it, “God was in all his thoughts . . . God, God Himself, the living, personal and present God . . . possessed his whole being.”27 Jackson himself summed it up in this extraordinary statement, in response to a friend’s asking how he obeyed the biblical command to “pray without ceasing.” He replied,
I can give you my idea of it by illustration, if you will allow it, and will not think that I am setting myself up as a model for others. I have so fixed the habit in my own mind that I never raise a glass of water to my lips without lifting my heart to God in thanks and prayer for the water of life. Then, when we take our meals, there is the grace. Whenever I drop a letter in the post-office, I send a petition along with it for God’s blessing upon its mission and the person to whom it is sent. When I break the seal of a letter just received, I stop to ask God to prepare me for its contents, and make it a messenger of good. When I go to my classroom and await the arrangement of the cadets in their places, that is my time to intercede with God for them. And so in every act of the day I have made the practice habitual.
When the friend asked if he sometimes forgot to do this, he responded,
I can hardly say that I do; the habit has become almost as fixed as to breathe.28
Tom and Ellie’s visit to the Arnold family in the summer of 1854 was happy for other reasons as well. Ellie was pregnant. Though the long, bumpy journey back to Lexington from Beverly must have been difficult for her, she had no problems with her pregnancy and did not expect to have any; her mother had given birth successfully nine times in ten pregnancies. Ellie spent the early fall making preparations for the baby’s arrival. On Sunday, October 22, 1854, she went into labor. A local doctor was in attendance, as were her sisters, Maggie and Julia.
It is not clear exactly what went wrong, but Ellie was very quickly in very deep trouble. It began when she gave birth to a stillborn son—a tragedy for the Jacksons, though not necessarily a threat to her own life. The following is Jackson’s own description of the events that followed. “The Doctor said that all was well,” he wrote. “The womb closed apparently healthfully, though the child (a son) was dead. The Doctor left the house for a few minutes, and I was admitted into the room and upon observing her agonizing pain I desired the Doctor to return. He soon after entered, but a sudden change had taken place: the womb had relaxed, and in a short time her spirit took its flight.”29 What had happened after the delivery of the dead baby was a massive and excruciatingly painful hemorrhage that the doctor could not stop. Ellie bled to death.
Jackson was shattered. When his friend and VMI colleague Raleigh Colston arrived to offer sympathy, Jackson led him “to the chamber of death, and with unfaltering hand, removed the veil which covered the dead infant resting upon its dead mother’s breast. Then as quietly [he] replaced it. There were no tears, no quivering of the lips, only a few whispered words.”30 As he sank into grief, Jackson struggled to reconcile his religious views—that God had taken Ellie deliberately for His own purposes and that she now dwelt in paradise—with his own deep sense of loss. His letter to his sister, Laura, written a day later, shows evidence of this war within him:
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord. It is his will that my Dearest wife & child should no longer abide with me, and as it is His holy will, I am perfectly reconciled to the sad bereavement, though I deeply mourn my loss. My Dearest Ellie breathed her last on Sunday evening, the same day on which the child was born dead. Oh! The consolations of religion! I can willingly submit to anything if God strengthens me. Oh! My sister would that you could have him for your own God! Though all nature to me is eclipsed, yet I have joy in knowing that God withholds no good things from them that love and keep his commandments.31
At the funeral, held in Lexington the following day, VMI cadets marched in procession down Main Street to the cemetery, where a single casket containing mother and son was laid in the earth. When the mourners had all left, a pale, devastated Jackson continued to stand at the open grave, holding his cap in his hand while snow flurries swirled around him. Eventually his pastor came and led him slowly away. In spite of his fatalistic refusal to wish that she had not died—that would defy God’s will—it would take him years to recover from her death. Though he went back to his section room at the end of the week and betrayed none of his misery to his students, he visited her grave daily, and friends began to fear that he was losing his mind. He wrote that God had “left me to mourn in human desolation” and was heard to say, when sick with a cold, “If only I could go up to God now!”32 He told Harvey Hill that “he felt an almost irresistible desire to dig up the body and once more be near the ashes of one he had loved so well.”33 More than anything, he told Laura, he wanted to join Ellie in heaven. Fully eight months after her death, he wrote to Laura that his fondest wish on earth was still “that I might join her before the close of another day.”34 He did not want to wait.
• • •
In December of the year Ellie died, Jackson received a remarkable letter. It was from Maggie Junkin, his old adversary, who had never quite accepted him into the family and had never been completely cordial to him. Maggie, who had been so overcome by Ellie’s death that she had not even been able to follow the coffin to the cemetery, and who had fled to Philadelphia, now told him frankly that she had felt “an irresistible desire to write to you” to find relief from her crushing sadness. She told him that the previous night she had suddenly been overcome by the sense that Ellie was “forever gone . . . I seemed for the first time to comprehend that Ellie was dead.” She asked Jackson to write to her, but said she would understand if he did not. Though he did not respond to her immediately, she was clearly in his thoughts, as evidenced by a letter he wrote to her brother in early February. “Dear Maggie!” he wrote. “How can I ever make an adequate return for her deep solicitude? My heart yearns to see her; and yet it may be best for her that we should not meet so soon; for my tears have not ceased to flow, my heart to bleed.”35 A week later Jackson finally replied to her with a deeply affectionate letter, saying that “you and I were certainly the dearest objects which she left on earth” and that “I have thought of you much, and prayed for you much, and your best interests are at my heart. I am very anxious to see you.”36 He later wrote that, though he still longed to join Ellie in death, Maggie’s “kindness to me and affection for me has [sic] no little influence in lightening up the gloom which for months has so much envelopped [sic] me. . . . To sum up all dear Maggie I want to see you again.”37
It was the beginning of a warm, complex, and unusual friendship. By the end of the summer of 1855 the two were back together at the Junkin house, where the family had insisted that Jackson stay. Once a busy, joyous place, the deaths of both Ellie and her mother within a few months of each other now made the elegant old house seem empty and sad. It was in this gloomy atmosphere that Maggie and the major got to know each other. Each evening at precisely nine o’clock, after Jackson had finished his class preparations, Maggie would visit him in his study. If she entered the room even a minute before nine, she later wrote, “I would find him standing before his shaded light, with his eyes shut, as silent and dumb as the sphinx.” A moment later he would “fling aside his shade, wheel round his easy chair, and give himself up to the most delightful nonchalance.”38 They would then spend the next two hours in conversation.
They talked about everything. Jackson told her all about his childhood, the death of his parents and his years at Jackson’s Mill, his life at West Point, and his military service in Mexico and in Florida. She heard stories of nighttime raids on Mexican gardens with fellow officers and of dances at the homes of Mexican nobility in the days after the war. He opened up to her completely, as he had with Ellie. He would also tell her funny stories, Maggie wrote later, “and be so carried away by them as almost to roll from his chair in laughter. More contagious and hearty laughter I have never heard.”39 She spoke of him as “sportive and rollicking, and full of quips and pranks . . . his cheerfulness and abandon were beautiful to see. . . . He was exceedingly fond of little children, and he would play them all manner of tricks, and amuse them endlessly with his Spanish baby-talk.” She was not only able to overlook the oddities in his behavior but also astonished her family by declaring her new friend to be “the very stuff out of which to make a stirring hero”—a remarkable bit of prescience, uttered five years before the war started.40 Maggie opened up, too, telling about her struggles as a writer and the difficulties of being taken seriously as a woman in the literary world. They studied Spanish together. He wrote a letter to her in that language, calling her “my dearly beloved sister” and signing it “Your very loving brother, Thomas.”41
By the summer of 1856, Maggie and the major were almost certainly in love and thus faced a very serious problem. The constitution of the Presbyterian Church prohibited a man from marrying his dead wife’s sister. In the eyes of the Church Maggie and Thomas were, by virtue of his marriage, forever brother and sister. They were both, moreover, living in the house of a prominent Presbyterian minister who happened to be her father. However reconciled they may have been to their fate, there were also signs that their feelings for each other sometimes caused an uncomfortable—if not unbearable—emotional strain. Maggie left abruptly on trips at least twice. In the spring of 1856, after spending a full winter in the same house with Jackson, she left on short notice to spend time with relatives, while Jackson, a few months later, departed for the relative safety of Europe. Whatever else might happen, Maggie Junkin and Thomas Jackson were never going to be together.