CHAPTER TWO

THE IMPERFECT LOGIC OF WAR

Thus the contented, domestic man who did not want to leave his home to fight a war and, until the very last minute, did not think he would have to. In the end, he chose war because he believed Virginia had no choice and, like most people in the United States of America in the year 1861, Jackson’s first loyalty was to his home state.

What, then, had sent the professor and his cadets marching down the hill on that pleasant spring day? The answer is maddeningly complex, partly because Jackson’s reasons for fighting had little to do with what had propelled the two sections into the war in the first place. Nor were they the same reasons the seven states of the lower South had seceded in late 1860 and early 1861. Virginia—with the most industry, the most manpower, and by far the most military talent in the Confederacy—had its own ideas, its own political logic, and its own destiny to fulfill. Jackson, quintessentially Virginian, must be seen in that light.

What had driven the nation to the brink of war—as opposed to what Jackson and his VMI charges were thinking about that day—was a bitter and often bloody, half-century-long clash over the question of the expansion of slavery. For most of that time, the abolition of slavery in the states where it existed had been a marginal issue. Radical Northerners such as William Lloyd Garrison and Henry Ward Beecher advocated it; the mainstream of the Republican Party, including Abraham Lincoln, did not. But what Lincoln and Republicans and Free Soilers and abolitionists of various stripes in the North absolutely did agree on—and were prepared to risk a good deal to get—was the severe restriction, if not the complete prohibition, of slavery in the nation’s new territories and newstates. All other political questions, such as those of states’ rights, protective tariffs, and a national banking system, were subservient to this primal, paradigm-shattering, nation-defining question. The antislavery zealot John Brown arose from its darker places, as did the tortured legal arguments of the Dred Scott case. The argument and eventually the war were thus about the future, not the past. They were about the failure, on a grand scale and drawn out over five decades, of Americans to agree on what to do with their westward-booming nation’s three prodigious land acquisitions—the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the annexation of the Oregon Territory from Britain in 1846, and the Mexican Cession that followed the Mexican-American War in 1848. Together these acquisitions had added more than 1.7 million square miles of territory to the United States of America, dwarfing the 375,000 square miles of the original thirteen colonies. They accounted for most of the land west of the Mississippi.¹

The moral and political debate entailed an inevitable calculus of power: whichever side, slave or free, added more states to its roster, the more its representational power grew, and with it the ability to determine the laws of the land. For the South, failure to add new states meant that its parochial interests would be slowly, surely, choked to death. For the North, failure meant living in a nation of slaves, a possibility made frighteningly real by the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857, ruling, in effect, that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in the territories. Neither outcome was remotely acceptable to the nation as a whole. The great political accommodations of the age—the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which prohibited slavery north of latitude 36'30" with the exception of Missouri; the Compromise of 1850, a package of bills that admitted California as a free state, allowed the New Mexico and Utah territories to decide the slavery question by popular vote, and preserved slavery in Washington, DC; and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened those territories to slavery based on popular vote, effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise—represented ever more shrill and ever more desperate attempts to level an unlevelable playing field.

Those were the reasons the politicians, the statesmen, the newspaper editors, the lawyers, and the intellectuals went to war, anyway. But they did not explain why the average soldier fought. They were not the reasons Virginians such as Jackson and his cadets would have given for wanting to fight Yankees. Jackson had remained generally aloof from national politics. As a slaveholder, he was aware of the congressional debate over slavery in the territories, but not deeply versed in it. He was like many ordinary Virginians of his day: a moderate states’-rights Democrat who favored keeping Washington’s nose out of Virginia’s business and working within the Union to resolve differences. He had no ideology; he was a Virginian.² The cadets he taught, moreover—part of that great mass of young men who would do most of the war’s fighting—would have had little understanding of the freakish political complexity of the Compromise of 1850, for example, which attempted to settle the question of slavery in what was essentially the entire American Southwest, plus California. Most would have been unable to parse the meaning of “states’ rights” in the federal Constitution, or fully grasp the reasons for the disastrous splintering of the Democratic Party in 1860—a carefully planned conspiracy intended to inspire Southern secession—which had guaranteed the victory of Abraham Lincoln.³ Virginians were not stupid; they just had more provincial and personal views of the world than the men who rode to battle in the halls of Congress.

Nor were the Virginians inclined as a whole to buy the idea, hawked loudly by the states of the lower South, that Lincoln’s election meant that the federal government was going to free the slaves and forcibly mix the two races. Lincoln had denied this categorically in his inaugural address. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly,” he said on March 4, 1861, little more than a month before the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, “to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Neither Jackson nor most of his fellow citizens in Lexington believed that the war was about staving off the immediate abolition of slavery. By and large, they abhorred the idea of secession.

What made Jackson and his cadets want to fight, amid all this swirl of rhetoric, belief, ideology, and implicit threat, were events much closer to home.

•  •  •

The first of those events was an invasion of the state of Virginia. It took place on October 16, 1859, a year and a half before the war’s official start, when the radical abolitionist John Brown and twenty-one of his followers seized the Federal arsenal at the river-junction town of Harpers Ferry in northern Virginia.⁴ Brown’s object had been to secure muskets and use them to arm local slaves. He then planned to start a guerrilla war whose object was to free all 491,000 slaves in Virginia.⁵ Having accomplished that, he would then head south, replicating his success in other states. The vision was vast, apocalyptic, and, on its face, ridiculous. The raid was so poorly organized that it looked like a planned martyrdom. Brown never made it out of Harpers Ferry, nor did he even appear to have a plan for escaping, let alone arming hundreds of thousands of slaves. His raiding party managed to kill seven townspeople and wound ten others. Then a group of eighty-six US marines under army colonel Robert E. Lee arrived from Washington, stormed the building where Brown and his men were barricaded, and put a fast and violent end to Brown’s gambit. Ten of the raiders were killed; Brown was captured and turned over to Virginia authorities, who, to avoid a lynching, brought him speedily to trial. On November 2, 1861, he was convicted of treason, conspiring with slaves to rebel, and murder, and sentenced to be hanged on December 2 in nearby Charlestown.

Rumors, meanwhile, swept the countryside: armed abolitionists were on the march; slaves were rising up; antislavery radicals were coming to Brown’s rescue. None of it was true, but that hardly mattered. Brown’s attack had been implausible enough. What fresh horrors would now descend on the South? In the days following Brown’s sentencing, Virginia governor Henry A. Wise summoned some 1,500 Virginia militiamen to Charlestown. They were put under the command of Colonel Francis H. Smith, Jackson’s boss and the superintendent of VMI, who would supervise the execution itself.⁶ As additional security, Wise also ordered 85 cadets from VMI to Charlestown. In charge of them were Major William Gilham, commanding an infantry unit of 64 cadets, and Major Thomas J. Jackson, commanding an artillery unit of 21 cadets.⁷ On November 25 they traveled by stagecoach to Staunton and from there took trains to Washington and on to Charlestown. The Richmond Daily Dispatch called them “the best drilled troops on the ground.”⁸Upon arrival, Jackson wrote his wife, Anna, that “there are about one thousand troops here, and everything is quiet.” He added that “seven of us slept in the same room.”⁹

On the day of Brown’s execution, the cadets, armed and uniformed in gray trousers and red flannel shirts crossed by two white belts and looking quite dashing, were stationed near the scaffold. Jackson’s artillery unit was about forty yards in front of it.¹⁰ His two howitzers—light, short-barreled cannons that were likely loaded with canister, turning them into the equivalent of large, sawed-off shotguns—were ready to sweep the field. Jackson, who had been an artillerist in the US Army, attended to even the smallest details.He was ready for whatever might come. At 11:00 a.m. Brown was led to the gallows.

One of the best accounts of what followed comes from Jackson himself, who recorded the event in a letter to his wife on the day of the execution. “He behaved with unflinching firmness,” wrote Jackson, noting that Brown “ascended the scaffold with apparent cheerfulness,” and, when asked if he wished to be signaled when the trapdoor was about to drop, “replied that it made no difference, provided he wasn’t kept waiting too long.” Jackson then described the death itself: “Brown fell through about five inches, his knees falling on a level with the position occupied by his feet before the rope was cut. With the fall his arms, below the elbows, flew up horizontally, his hands clinched; and his arms gradually fell, but by spasmodic motions. There was very little motion of his person for several moments, and soon the wind blew his lifeless body to and fro. His face, upon the scaffold, was turned a little east of south, and in front of him were the cadets, commanded by Major Gilham.” Jackson was clearly mesmerized by what he saw, fascinated by both the means of death and Brown’s stoic behavior. “I was much impressed with the thought that before me stood a man in the full vigor of health, who must in a few moments enter eternity. I sent up the petition that he might be saved. Awful was the thought that he might in a few minutes receive the sentence, ‘Depart, ye wicked, into everlasting fire.’ I hope that he was prepared to die, but I am doubtful. He refused to have a minister with him.”¹¹

Thus Jackson, a firm believer in the punishments of hell, had sent up a prayer for the salvation of the soul of John Brown, a condemned murderer whom Jackson saw—incorrectly—as a godless man. In fact, Brown, who had modeled himself on biblical patriarchs and believed he had been called by God to rid the world of slavery, was every bit as devout as Jackson.¹² Jackson could not see him that way, of course. He considered Brown a murderer. It is noteworthy that the two men would later be compared by Northerners, who, in their attempt to understand Jackson’s character, found important similarities between them. And indeed, in the broadest sense, they were not altogether wrong. Both John Brown and Thomas Jackson were hard, righteous, and uncompromising men, religious warriors in the tradition of Oliver Cromwell, the ardently Christian political and military leader in the English Civil War. Both believed beyond doubt that God was on their side. Both believed that they were agents of God and that by killing the enemy they were doing His work. Jackson would have bridled at any such comparison. He saw murder—as opposed to killing men in an official war—as violating God’s law. Though his armies later sent many Yankee soldiers to their graves, there is never any evidence that Jackson, a stickler for duty and obedience, knowingly broke any law.

What happened in the weeks and months after Brown’s trial and execution amounted to an almost instant revision of history, and it changed entirely the meaning of his raid in the minds of everyone in slave and nonslave America. The first perceptions of Brown and his attack on Harpers Ferry were easily categorized: he may have thought he was working to abolish slavery, but in fact he was delusional, perhaps even insane. And it followed that Brown and his cohort were only a tiny splinter group of radicals and did not represent the way most abolitionists in the North actually felt. That was certainly the quickly expressed view in the North. The antislavery Worcester Spy, in Massachusetts, called it “one of the rashest and maddest enterprises ever.” Archabolitionist William Lloyd Garrison thought that, though it might have been “well intended,” it was also “misguided, wild, and apparently insane.”¹³

But at his trial Brown had surprised everyone. He was not only coolly rational but also remarkably eloquent. “I deny everything but what I have all along admitted,” he said,

of a design on my part to free the slaves. . . . Had I interfered in the manner which I admit . . . in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great . . . every man in this Court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment. This Court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever that men should do to me, I should do so even to them. . . . Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.¹⁴

Brown’s words—and his self-possession in the courtroom—changed everything. These were not the words of a madman and a murderer, as Northerners now saw it, but of a principled religious man who insisted that his purpose had not been to incite rebellion but simply to arm slaves for their self-defense. The change of perception swept quickly through the nonslave states in the days following the trial. The day he was executed, church bells had tolled in many Northern towns and cities; guns fired salutes; sermons were preached on the purity and correctness of his motives; and people all over the North prayed for the soul of this martyr to liberty. Brown’s death was no longer an oddity. It was suddenly a sensation. Henry David Thoreau called him a “crucified hero.” William Dean Howells, a leading Northern intellectual, wrote that “Brown has become an idea, a thousand times purer and better and loftier than the Republican idea.”¹⁵ Everyone was suddenly talking about the grandeur and nobility of the man, the rightness of what he had done.

The reaction of Southerners to such Northern expressions of sympathy was horror mixed with disbelief that their brethren could possibly wish upon them the fate that Brown had planned. To Southerners and particularly to Virginians, whose state had been invaded, Brown was a terrifying figure, the dark, avenging side of the antislavery movement that had been on view for five years in the bloody civil war in Kansas—where Brown and his Free State volunteers had murdered five men in 1856. He had, after all, intended to arm slaves and set them free, which presumably meant setting them upon their masters, which meant that people in Connecticut and Massachusetts were now endorsing the violent deaths of white men, women, and children all over the South. “This mad attempt by a handful of vulgar cutthroats, and its condign punishment,” wrote the Reverend Robert Lewis Dabney, an important Presbyterian leader in the South and later chief of Jackson’s staff, “would have been a very trivial affair to the Southern people, but for the manner in which it was regarded by the people of the North. Their presses, pulpits, public meetings and conversations, disclosed such a hatred of the South and its institutions, as to lead them to justify the crime, involving though it did the most aggravated robbery, treason and murder; [and] to exalt the bloodthirsty fanatic who led the party, to a public apotheosis.”¹⁶

Those sentiments were replicated all over the South, and the complaints became more grievous as more became known about the wealthy Northern benefactors who had helped Brown finance his enterprise. Wrote Henry Kyd Douglas, a Virginian and another member of Jackson’s staff in the war: “There is nothing in the history of fanaticism, its crimes and follies, so strange and inexplicable as that the people of New England, with all their shrewdness and general sense of justice, should have attempted to lift up the sordid name of that old wretch and . . . to exalt him among the heroes and benefactors of this land. . . . Why they should have sent him money and arms to encourage him to murder the white people of Virginia is beyond my comprehension.”¹⁷

Though some Northern politicians tried to blunt the effect of the Northern response, the damage—and it was very deep, emotional damage—had been done. The reaction to the event now loomed larger than the event itself. “The Harper’s Ferry invasion has advanced the cause of disunion more than any event that has happened since the formation of the government,” wrote the Richmond Whig and the Richmond Enquirer under a single byline. “Thousands of men who, a month ago, scoffed at the idea of a dissolution of the union . . . now hold the opinion that its days were numbered.”¹⁸ In Jackson’s letter to his nephew in January 1861, in which he had put forward the disturbing idea of a “black flag” war, his pointed reference—“if the free states . . . excite our slaves to servile insurrection in which our Families will be murdered without quarter or mercy”—was to John Brown’s raid. It had apparently changed Jackson’s way of thinking about his Northern brethren, too.

•  •  •

Still, Jackson had remained—like the town of Lexington—“strong for the Union.” Indeed, most of the state of Virginia, in spite of this new sense of vulnerability, remained in favor of the Union. But all this would change, with astounding speed, over the course of three days in the month of April 1861.

There had been a sort of giddiness in the air anyway that winter and spring. Lincoln’s election on December 20, 1860, had prompted the immediate secession of seven Southern states: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Society in the Old Dominion and other “border” states trembled with anticipation, of what nobody quite knew, though perhaps it was simply the possibility of moral clarity, after so much political bombast. Whatever the cause, an odd sort of social intoxication seemed to grow in direct proportion to the bitterness and fatalism of the political debate, and it took the outward form of happiness. “The winter of 1860–1861 was with us one of unprecedented gaiety,” wrote Confederate memoirist Charles Minor Blackford of the town of Lynchburg, though he could have been describing many other Virginia towns. “The spirit of fun and frolic seemed to take possession of our people both young and old, and for months entertainments were given. Party after party succeeded each other in rapid succession.”¹⁹ Though Virginia remained within the Union, secession flags were being raised all across the state, including on the campuses of VMI and Washington College. In one instance, Major Jackson had discovered a piece of cloth hanging from a flagpole where the American flag usually hung. It turned out to be a crude secession flag with the words “Hurrah for South Carolina” written in shoe blacking. Jackson ordered it removed.²⁰ Public debates had, meanwhile, grown more and more strident: Jackson’s father-in-law, for example, Dr. George Junkin, president of Washington College, was strongly critical of anyone who supported secession. He became a fixture at the increasingly common public gatherings, once arguing that secession was “the essence of all immorality.”²¹

The issue of secession came to a head for Lexington—and for Jackson—on the evening of April 13. VMI cadets who supported secession marched from campus into town, where they were greeted by a hostile, overwhelmingly pro-Union crowd consisting mostly of members of a local militia company.²² There was some pushing and shoving, and a few threats were issued; but peace held, and the secessionists soon hoisted their fifteen-star flag of the Southern Confederacy, with the motto “Union of the South,” from a pole erected near the courthouse.²³ Speeches were made, including several by VMI faculty members.²⁴ Pleased with its success, the secessionist group started to disperse. The Unionist group stepped forward and raised the Stars and Stripes on its own pole. But the cadets had managed, the night before, to sabotage the pole, which snapped and fell. The cadets cheered.

At that point, the mood of the assembled crowd changed. Taunts were made, blows exchanged.²⁵ An intoxicated militiaman drew a revolver and knife on several cadets. When one cadet returned to the institute and announced that cadets were being assaulted by Unionists, “the effect was instant and magical,” wrote former cadet Charles Copland Wight. “Everyone rushed for his gun and a cartridge box and then all rushed pell mell for town.”²⁶ Almost two hundred of them arrived, loaded their muskets, fixed bayonets, and prepared to charge the militiamen, who seemed fully prepared to stand their ground.

Into the incipient battle now strode Colonel Francis H. Smith, the school’s superintendent, along with several faculty members, including Jackson. He insisted that he was their commander and that if they were going to fight it would be under his command. With Jackson’s help, he managed to stop them and persuade them to return to their barracks. It is unclear exactly what Jackson did, but according to the local Presbyterian minister, were it not for his intervention, “blood would have been shed.”²⁷ When the cadets got back to the institute, still in high spirits, Smith berated them for being “unwise and unsoldierly.” Then two other professors stepped forward with their own, more gentle remarks. As they spoke, however, cries went up through the hall—no one was sure if they were serious or joking—for “Old Jack” to address the crowd. Considering who Jackson was, what the cadets apparently thought of him, and the gravity of the situation, it was a strange request. Still, Smith seemed to think it was a good idea, too. He turned to Jackson, who was seated next to him. “I have driven the nail in,” he said, “but it needs clinching. Speak with them.”

To the surprise of many of the cadets, Jackson mounted the rostrum. For those who witnessed it, what happened next was an astounding transformation, one that many would talk about for decades to come. “Military men make short speeches,” Jackson began, in a tone of voice unfamiliar to his charges, “and as for myself I am no hand at speaking anyhow.” There was something about his voice that caught the cadets’ attention, a hint that the man on the rostrum was no longer their eccentric professor, a man they sometimes called Tom Fool, the object of teasing and jokes around the institute. Jackson continued: “The time for war has not yet come, but it will come, and that soon. And when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.”

That was all. Draw the sword and throw away the scabbard. Perhaps it was the simplicity of those words, or their saber-thrust directness. But as Jackson turned and stepped to his seat, the room, until now tense and murmurous, erupted in a series of cheers, one after another, that rang through the barracks. The force of his words—their sheer implausibility—had shocked and dazzled the young men. Instead of the awkward physics teacher, what they saw before them was a soldier and, watching his flashing eyes and intent expression, they were reminded of those stories of the Mexican-American War they had heard. “Hurrah for Old Jack!” they shouted, themselves amazed that they were hurrahing the eccentric major, and continued shouting it long after the meeting was dismissed. And they never forgot it. Fifty years later, one of them wrote, “The thrilling effect of those words is felt by the writer to this day. They touched the heart of every boy who heard them, and men now gray will tell of the enthusiastic cheers which drowned all further speeches.”²⁸

Now the tide of secession and war began to sweep in quickly. What settled the matter for Virginians—with the same galvanizing speed with which the attack on Sumter had united the North—was a proclamation, issued on April 15 by Abraham Lincoln, calling on the states that had not seceded to provide 75,000 troops “to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union,” and also “to execute the laws of the Union, [and] suppress rebellions.” Virginians knew what this meant: armed coercion. It meant that 2,340 sons of Virginia (the state’s quota) were going to be used as a military force against the sons of Georgia and Texas and other Confederate states. If Lincoln was calling for war on the Confederate States of America, the subtext was also clear: these troops would be used against any state that left the Union.

The reaction in Virginia was swift and, this time, sure. Governor John Letcher, a pragmatist who had opposed secession, now cabled furiously back to Washington on the sixteenth. “I have only to say that the militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purposes as they have in view,” he wrote. “Your object is to subjugate the Southern states, and a requisition made upon me for such an object . . . will not be complied with. You have chosen to inaugurate civil war.”²⁹

On April 17, Virginians learned that their militia had already been dispatched to seize both the federal armory at Harpers Ferry and the enormous naval yard at Norfolk. That same day the state convention voted 88 to 55 to secede from the Union (though Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley voted 12 to 5 against secession).

If the cadets who marched to Richmond with Thomas Jackson four days later had been asked why they were doing it, few would have replied that it was because of their convictions about slavery, or their beliefs about state sovereignty or any of the other great national questions that had been debated for so long. They would have told you then—as most of Stonewall Jackson’s soldiers in the army of the Confederate States of America would have told you later—that they were fighting to repel the invaders, to drive the Northern aggressors from their homeland. That was why Virginia went to war. The great and complicated political reasons for secession, thundered about in Congress and in the state legislatures, were not their reasons, which were more like those expressed by a captive Confederate soldier, who was not a slaveholder, to his puzzled Union captors. “I’m fighting because you’re down here,” he said.³⁰ To Jackson, Lincoln had launched a war of aggression against sovereign states. That was why he fought, why he believed that God could not possibly be on the side of the aggressor. The Northern response to John Brown’s raid had proven beyond a doubt the North’s malign intent. Now, finally, soldiers were coming. “Had [Lincoln] not made war upon the South, Virginia would not have left the Union,” wrote William Thomas Poague, who would fight as a gunner under Jackson, and whose view was typical of Virginians in the war. “The North was the aggressor. The South resisted her invaders. History will vindicate her course.”³¹