CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Jackson’s trip to Europe in the summer of 1856 probably had as much to do with his continued grief over Ellie’s death as with putting distance between himself and the brilliant, engaging Maggie Junkin. Whatever the reason, he wanted to get away, and get away he did.1 He secured a leave of absence from VMI and, embarking from New York City on July 9, made a solitary, three-month tour of the Continent; there, his intensity, thoroughness, academic rigor, and seriousness of purpose were perfectly characteristic of the man. Pushing himself sixteen hours a day, he covered an astonishing amount of ground, visiting London, York, Liverpool, Chester, Glasgow, Stirling, Edinburgh, Antwerp, Brussels, Waterloo, Naples, Rome, Genoa, Milan, Venice, Mantua, Modena, Florence, Livorno, Pisa, Marseilles, Lyon, Paris, Calais, Bonn, Cologne, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Baden-Baden, Strasburg, Aix-la-Chapelle, Basel, Brienz, Thum, and Geneva. He rose early, and walked miles to see every sight he could squeeze in. He kept travel diaries. He hiked in the mountains. He later wrote in rapturous terms of “the romantic lakes and mountains of Scotland, the imposing abbeys and cathedrals of England; the Rhine, with its palisaded banks and luxuriant vineyards; the sublime scenery of Switzerland . . . the sculpture and painting of Italy.”2 It is noteworthy that Jackson, who had read extensively in military history and had studied Napoléon’s battles closely, visited only one battlefield: Waterloo, in Belgium. The future general was apparently more interested in Renaissance art and Gothic architecture than in troop movements on a battlefield.
If Jackson’s plan was to finally put his grief behind him, it succeeded. When he returned to teaching at VMI in October, the crippling sadness he’d felt was gone. He was ready to look for someone new. Maggie, moreover, was being courted that fall by Jackson’s friend John T. L. Preston, a founder of VMI and one of Lexington’s most prominent businessmen, who had lost his own wife earlier that year and had seven children. How Jackson felt about the relations between his close friends will never be known. In any case, Maggie was out of reach. In December 1856 Jackson traveled to Charlotte, North Carolina, to call on Miss Mary Anna Morrison, with whom he had spent time in Lexington several years before when she was visiting her sister Isabella, who had married his old friend Harvey Hill.
Anna, as she was known, was twenty-five, seven years younger than Jackson. In photographs of the period she was slender, brunette, and attractive. She was also intelligent, sensible, suitably pious, and came with all the refinements of a woman of her social standing. She was the daughter of Dr. Robert Hall Morrison, who had founded Davidson College in 1837 and now served as pastor to three country churches. Like George Junkin—in fact, almost exactly like George Junkin—Morrison was a Presbyterian minister, professor, and college president. Anna’s mother, Mary Graham Morrison, belonged to one of the leading Carolina families: her father had been a prominent general in the War of 1812; her brother had been a governor, US senator, and secretary of the navy, and had been General Winfield Scott’s vice presidential running mate in the 1852 presidential election. While Anna had pleasant memories of Jackson from their meetings in Lexington—he was engaged at the time, and she was with her younger sister—she was amazed to receive a letter from him talking about “blissful memories” of the time “we had been together in Lexington.” She wrote later that “I can truthfully say that my fate was as much a surprise to me as it would have been to anyone else.”3
But she was quite pleased with Jackson, as was her family, whom he impressed with his ardent Christianity, his ability to hold a job, and his war record. Dr. Morrison and Jackson also shared a profession: they were both college science teachers. The courtship lasted only a day: Jackson returned to Lexington an engaged man. From there the relationship was carried on through the mails. Jackson, meanwhile, moved out of the Junkin house (and away from Maggie) and took rooms in a hotel. On July 16, 1857, Anna and the major were married at her home in North Carolina. It was perhaps not entirely coincidental that Maggie Junkin and John Preston were married—after a brief rupture in the engagement that was smoothed over by none other than their mutual friend Major Jackson—only two weeks later.4 Maggie, in turn, bought Jackson’s wedding presents for Anna while on a trip to Philadelphia.
Jackson quickly settled into a happy, domestic life with Anna, marred only by the death of a daughter in infancy in May of the following year. Though the two grieved for the child—the second such heartbreaking loss for Jackson—there is no evidence that her death affected their happiness with each other. In the second year of their marriage, Thomas and Anna, who had been living in the Lexington Hotel, bought a house, which immediately became the center of their lives. Jackson, the transplanted orphan, had always longed for such simple domesticity—his own family, in his own home—and finally, at age thirty-five, he had what he wanted. The house was a simple, solid, dignified, two-story brick structure, just off Main Street in downtown Lexington. The Presbyterian church was a block away; VMI was a ten-minute walk.
Jackson’s daily routine—adhered to rigorously—began at 6:00 a.m. with prayers and a cold bath, even in freezing weather. He taught class from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m., then returned home and studied the Bible and his class lessons until 1:00 p.m., when it was time for the midday meal, followed by thirty minutes or more of leisure time that Anna remembers as one of the “brightest periods in the home life.”5 Her description of him behind closed doors mirrors Maggie’s:
Those who knew General Jackson only as they saw him in public would have found it hard to believe that there could be such a transformation as he exhibited in his domestic life. He luxuriated in the freedom and liberty of his home, and his buoyancy and joyousness of nature often ran into a playfulness and abandon that would have been incredible to those who saw him only when he put on his official dignity. . . . He would often hide himself behind a door at the sound of the approaching footstep of his wife, and spring out to greet her with a startling caress.6
In the afternoon he would work in his garden, or ride with Anna out to a twenty-acre farm he had purchased outside of town. (From his days at Jackson’s Mill, Jackson had acquired a love of growing food, and he was good at it; he was fond of canning tomatoes, propagating flowers with cuttings, and burying cabbages for winter use.7) Then came supper, a brief period of relaxation, and his traditional hour spent alone, eyes closed, reviewing his lessons in half-light. After that, he and Anna would sit together in their parlor and Anna would read to him, sometimes from Shakespeare, which he loved, or from history books. He was deeply in love with her, and when they were separated he missed her greatly. “Your husband has a sad heart,” he wrote during one absence. “Our house looks so deserted without my esposa. Home is not home without my little dove. I love to talk to you, little one, as though you were here, and tell you how much I love you.”8 (Such endearments were not typical of most of the great Civil War generals. “Of the major figures in the Civil War whose letters survive,” wrote Jackson biographer James I. Robertson Jr., “the stern VMI professor sent the most intimate, emotional, and sentimental messages.”9)
Though his life and work at VMI never really changed—he was always the austere and strangely inept professor—in the life of the town Jackson began to look more and more like the prosperous, upstanding middle-class citizen he had worked hard to be. In 1857 he became a deacon in his church, responsible for soliciting donations—which meant going door to door, asking for them—and distributing charity to the needy. He was considered the First Presbyterian’s best deacon, discharging his duties and “reporting” his results to Pastor William White with an almost amusing military precision. As part of a board of five deacons, White later wrote, “he was the animating and guiding spirit of that body.”10
He was also starting to accumulate wealth. In spite of a yearly salary of $1,350 from VMI, of which he tithed $180, and generous donations to other charities, he had both real estate and financial assets. He had purchased a substantial home and a working farm. He had also made a number of shrewd investments. He had purchased shares in the Lexington Savings Institution, the oldest bank in Rockbridge County. By the end of the decade he had not only made a good return on that investment but had also become a director of the bank, sitting on its board alongside some of the more prominent citizens of the town. He invested in the Lexington Building Fund Association, a purchase that by 1863 would net him a handsome profit of $1,644.11 In partnership with Maggie’s husband, John T. L. Preston, and VMI professor William Gilham, he invested in real estate. In 1860 he made his last big investment with them and another man, buying a leather tannery.12 (He would make a large profit, quickly, on the tannery.13)
Part of Jackson’s new prosperity and social status was the human property he owned: six slaves, three of whom he had personally acquired, and three who were given to him as a wedding present by Anna’s father. Though he had grown up in northwestern Virginia—a place with relatively few slaves that ultimately refused to secede from the Union with the rest of the state—Jackson had been around them all his life. His uncle Cummins owned as many as a dozen. One of those, Uncle Robinson, seems to have been a close friend to Tom and Laura when they were growing up. Jackson’s relationship with his own slaves illustrates the relative complexity of a system that was often seen by Northerners in the stark terms portrayed in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He acquired his first slave, Albert, when Albert came to him and asked Jackson to buy him so that he would be allowed to buy his freedom by paying back the purchase price. Jackson agreed, although he was living as a bachelor and had no need of Albert’s services. He initially rented Albert out as a waiter to VMI for $120 a year. When Albert came down with a protracted illness and could not earn money, Jackson took him in and cared for him. War came before Albert had fully paid Jackson.
The next slave who came into his possession was an older woman named Amy, who was about to be sold to pay off debt. She, too, begged Jackson to buy her, as Anna put it, as “deliverance from her troubles.”14 He had no immediate use for her, either, and found her a place with another family until Anna arrived. Amy turned out to be a wonderful cook, and Anna came to regard her as “a treasure.” After the war started, Amy became sick, and Jackson secured a home for her and paid her board, medical expenses, and finally her funeral bill. A Lexington friend of Jackson’s, impressed by his charity toward Amy, wrote to him, saying, “The cup of cold water you have ministered to this poor disciple may avail more in the Master’s eye than all the brilliant deeds with which you may glorify your country’s battlefields.”15 In response to the pleas of an elderly lady in town who could no longer care for a four-year-old slave named Emma, Jackson bought the little girl with the idea that she could be helpful to Anna later on. Emma had some sort of learning disability, but Jackson tried to teach the child catechism anyway. Then there was strong-minded, independent Hetty, who had been Anna’s nurse since birth, and her two rambunctious teenage boys, whom Anna taught to read, and who later drove Jackson’s carriage. From Anna’s later account, Jackson was a kind, if stern, master. Though we have no record of how he regarded his slaves, Anna had a fairly traditional Southern view. In her memoirs, she referred to their slaves as among “other animate possessions of the family,” lumping them together with the family’s horse, milk cows, and chickens.16
But Jackson’s dealings with his own slaves were just a small part of his relations with the larger African-American community in Lexington. In the fall of 1855, he started, with Pastor William White’s approval, a Sunday school for blacks at the Presbyterian church. Though several earlier attempts had failed, Jackson believed strongly in his mission. In White’s description, “he threw himself into this work with all of his characteristic energy and wisdom.”17 According to Anna, Jackson’s motivation was simple enough: “His interest in that race was simply because they had souls to save.” It was a formidable task. Most blacks were uninterested in attending, and some of the town’s whites actively opposed the idea, partly because of the Old South notion that educated blacks were potentially dangerous. The example at hand was Nat Turner, a Virginia slave who had been taught to read and educated by his masters, and who had led a bloody slave rebellion in 1831 that killed sixty whites.
Jackson proceeded anyway, and soon had eighty to one hundred slaves in attendance at the Lexington Colored Sabbath School. The school was entirely his creation: he conceived it, financed it, organized it, promoted it, and recruited students as well as a dozen teaching assistants. His services began with prayer, which he gave, followed by the singing of “Amazing Grace,” which he would lead also, in spite of being unable to carry a tune. There were Bible readings and oral examinations. Bibles were awarded to the best students. Jackson even delivered, in person, reports to owners of their slaves’ participation and progress.18 His personal influence in the school is evidenced by attendance figures, which dropped during his summer absence to fewer than fifty. From what evidence we have Jackson was well liked by blacks in town. In the words of William White, “He was emphatically the black man’s friend.”
Still, not all Lexington residents liked the idea of the school, not least because state law in Virginia prohibited whites from teaching blacks to read and write. On May 1, 1858, Jackson happened to encounter three lawyers he knew on the street in front of the county courthouse. One of them, Colonel S. M. Reid, clerk of the courts, said to him, “Major, I have examined the statute and conferred with the commonwealth’s attorney. Your Sunday school is an ‘unlawful assembly.’ ” The other two lawyers expressed agreement with Reid, and one of them, J. D. Davidson, said, further, that “probably the grand jury will take it up and test it.” Jackson, normally the most civil of men, responded angrily, “Sir, if you were, as you should be, a Christian man, you would not think it or say so.” Jackson then turned on his heel and strode away. Though Jackson went to Davidson’s office later to apologize, the larger point was made: he would fight any interference with his school.19 The school, in fact, continued in operation for thirty years.20
It is noteworthy that Jackson’s Sunday school also offered him the opportunity to play pastor, a profession he might have preferred above all others but one for which he understood he had neither the personality nor the gift of public speech. “The subject of becoming a herald of the cross has often seriously engaged my attention,” he once wrote an aunt, “and I regard it as the most noble of all professions. . . . I would not be surprised if I were to die on a foreign field, clad in ministerial armor, fighting under the banner of Jesus.”21 His choice of words is interesting, considering that he had, in effect, failed as a peacetime soldier and had certainly failed to become a minister of God.
Yet there he was, on the eve of the great Civil War, a man who through sheer determination had forged a prosperous life for himself, lacking only children to complete the picture. (That would change, too.) Reverend William S. White, who knew him as well as anyone outside his family, called him the happiest man he ever knew, a sentiment heartily endorsed by Anna Jackson.