CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
In the fourteenth month of the Civil War, its two most celebrated generals, east or west, were George McClellan and Stonewall Jackson.1 They were both in the Virginia theater, so it was inevitable that they would fight. The two men were famous for such different reasons. Jackson owed his instant celebrity to his victories in the valley. McClellan’s fame was barely rooted in conquest at all. Though he had won a small fight in the western theater and a minor battle at Williamsburg on his way up the peninsula, Little Mac was mainly known as the man who had rescued the army—and the United States itself—from its deep despair after the Battle of Manassas. In personality and physical build the two men were virtual antipodes. McClellan was as compact, hearty, and outgoing as Jackson was gaunt, reserved, severe, and silent. Jackson was the equivalent of an attack dog who had to be restrained from marching on Philadelphia and Baltimore, while McClellan had had to be cajoled, coaxed, and sometimes lugged by Lincoln and Stanton every step of the way to Richmond, where he still had not managed to mount an attack. Jackson often camped with his men; McClellan never did. Mac was constantly telling his men how good they were and how proud he was of them; Jackson did this only rarely. McClellan never visited battlefields, and had an instinctive horror of the bloody front; Jackson took Anna on a tour of Manassas.
In spite of these differences, the two generals shared one very large and important attribute: they had both been members of the Class of 1846 at the US Military Academy, a class that eventually produced more generals—twenty-two, twelve Union and ten Confederate, including two lieutenant generals and fourteen major generals—than any West Point class in history. But even as part of this tiny, cloistered world where the graduating class numbered only fifty-nine, their experiences at West Point were as different as the men themselves.
It was remarkable that Jackson had been allowed into the place at all. His education, like that of many rural Americans of his era, fell somewhere between inadequate and incomplete. His uncle Cummins, who raised him, had never liked the idea of book learning much anyway and considered Tom the least smart of his brother’s three children. Thus whatever instruction Jackson got was spotty at best: winter months at a rural elementary school (the children were needed for summer and fall for harvests); a brief time at a school that he persuaded Cummins to start at Jackson’s Mill; and a few years at slightly more sophisticated schools in the nearby town of Weston. He did like learning, and read whatever he got his hands on, which wasn’t much. By the time he was fifteen, he was accomplished enough—by Virginia mountain standards, anyway—to receive a county appointment to teach eleven- and twelve-year-olds in a log cabin.
In spite of his educational shortcomings, in the spring of 1842 Jackson had made application to his local congressman, Samuel L. Hays, for an appointment to West Point. Jackson and three others took a set of informal examinations, the most important of which was mathematics, a discipline in which Jackson had little formal training. Unfortunately, he was not quite as good in that subject as his friend Gibson Butcher, who got the appointment instead. Jackson was deeply disappointed. He had seen the academy, with its free education and promise of a military career, as a chance to escape the rural life at Jackson’s Mill.
Then something happened to offer new hope. It took Butcher exactly one day to bust out of West Point. He quickly realized that he hated the whole idea of the place, returned home immediately, and told his friend Tom Jackson what he had done. Jackson, sensing opportunity, decided to reapply. He used his family connections to marshal recommendations from local officials, took crash courses in math and grammar from family friends, then traveled by stagecoach and train to Washington, DC, where he unloaded the whole scheme—Butcher’s resignation plus his own hastily solicited endorsements and renewed application—on a surprised Congressman Hays, who happened to be a neighbor of his uncle Cummins. Jackson got the appointment.
But mere appointment was only the first step in a West Point candidacy. In those days applicants had to travel to the academy in June to undergo the ordeal of formal entrance tests. In the examination room, Jackson was required to stand at a blackboard and solve problems presented to him by the examining board. Nothing in his own academic background had prepared him for such a trial, and he found the examination excruciatingly difficult. As he labored through his problems, sweat streamed off his face. He wiped it off first with one cuff and then the other. Somehow he also became covered with chalk. His classmates found the process painful to watch. Several days later, the board posted the results of the examination: of 122 candidates, 30 had failed, leaving only 92 students who would enter the first-year class. Jackson’s name was the very last on the list. It was thought by some that he had not passed at all, but somehow the sheer, wretched, sweat-stained doggedness of his effort had convinced the board to let him in.
When the new admit arrived at his barracks, wearing his plain gray homespun clothing, a coarse felt hat, and oversized leather brogans and carrying a pair of weather-stained saddlebags, he looked very much like what he was: a semieducated bumpkin from the Allegheny Mountains.2 He seemed quite out of place. He was visibly uncomfortable. When a fellow cadet from Virginia named Dabney Maury came to his room to say hello, Jackson, in Maury’s words, “received my courteous advances in a manner so chilling that it caused me to regret having made them, and I rejoined my companions with criticisms brief and emphatic as to his intellectual endowments.”3 Those companions included future Confederate generals George Pickett and A. P. Hill.
• • •
George Brinton McClellan’s entrance into West Point could not have been more different. While Jackson’s father was a failed lawyer, compulsive gambler, and alcoholic who died when Jackson was two and left the family destitute, McClellan’s Yale-educated father built a thriving surgical practice in Philadelphia, founded a medical college, edited an influential journal, and owned a stable of trotting horses. He had married Elizabeth Steinmetz Brinton, from one of Philadelphia’s leading families. Together they moved in the upper stratum of that city’s society, counted Daniel Webster among their friends, and gave their son George an education fully appropriate to his social rank.4 He was sent first to an elite private elementary school, and then to a private tutor with whom he learned to read the classics and to converse in both Latin and French. He was a brilliant student, a prodigy in both language and mathematics. He was also charming, engaging, and anything but a grind. He was, said his sister, “the brightest, merriest, most unselfish of boys.”5 He briefly attended a preparatory academy and then, at age thirteen, enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania. Two years later he had, according to his father, “nearly completed his classical education at the university,” and he enrolled at West Point at age fifteen and a half.6 Most of the other admits were at least eighteen, and some were twenty or older. While the miserable Jackson toiled and sweated at the blackboard, the magnificently prepared McClellan breezed into the academy. According to one classmate, “he went at once to the head of the class, and remained there until the end.”7
What he and Jackson encountered there, when classes began in the fall, was one of the nation’s toughest and most demanding academic programs. As the nation’s top engineering school, West Point was math-heavy and math-driven. The academy was, moreover, a true university, requiring students to pass courses in ten different fields of study.8 Examinations were held twice a year, in January and June, and each one was an academic watershed: if you failed, you went home, never to return. When Jackson went on the school’s only vacation—a single furlough in the middle of a four-year course of study—he told his nephew Thomas Arnold that at one point he was allowed only three weeks to “learn the English grammar” and that if he failed he would have been sent home immediately. “Oh, I tell you I had to work hard,” he said.9 The daily regimen itself was tough, too: cadets awoke at 5:00 a.m., and the day that followed included ten hours of homework in addition to classes and drills. The barracks were primitive and chilly in winter; food was often “bull-beef” and boiled potatoes. Strangely—in retrospect—the only part of the curriculum specifically related to the operations of an army was Professor Dennis Hart Mahan’s fourth-year course on engineering, fortifications, and military tactics. Mahan, moreover, devoted a mere nine hours of class time to army organization and battlefield tactics. The brevity of the course, plus the fact that many of its dogmas were frozen in Napoleonic times, would limit the effect of Mahan’s teachings on the Mexican-American and Civil Wars. (Grant later dismissed the effect almost entirely;10 Jackson did take two of Mahan’s principles to heart: “celerity” and “boldness.”11)
Jackson struggled. He stayed up late at night, piling anthracite coal on his metal grate while “boning” his lessons for the next day. As he would do later at VMI, he spent hours staring at a blank wall while rehearsing his homework in his mind. “No one I have ever known,” said one of his barracks mates, “could so perfectly withdraw his mind from surrounding objects or influence, and so thoroughly involve his whole being in the subject under consideration.”12 And though he developed a few friends, he remained for the most part a social misfit. He walked around campus with his head down, looking neither right nor left.13 He was modest and shy to a fault. He blushed when spoken to. When he did speak, according to schoolmate John C. Tidball, “his voice was thin and feminine—almost squeaky—while his utterances were quick, jerky, and sententious,” and did not encourage further conversation.14 He did not participate in extracurricular activities such as group swims in the Hudson, summer dances, or bull sessions. He was always too busy studying.15 Then, too, he had a stomach ailment—presumably dyspepsia—that caused him to stand or sit in a bizarrely stiff posture. According to one of his classmates, he was afraid that he might otherwise compress some of his internal organs and make the condition worse.16 All of this foreshadowed his health obsessions as an adult. Other cadets found such practices bizarre, to say the least.17
One of the better-known anecdotes of Jacksonian behavior came from the same cadet, Dabney Maury, who had tried unsuccessfully to befriend him on the first day. During summer, when they lived in tents, Maury and two of his Virginia friends, A. P. Hill and Birkett Fry (also a future Confederate general), were “lolling upon our camp bedding” when Jackson happened by on evening “police duty,” which involved cleaning up trash. In Maury’s account, he “lifted the tent wall, and addressed [Jackson] with an air of authority and mock sternness, ordering him to be more attentive to his duty, to remove those cigar stumps, and otherwise mind his business.” Jackson responded with such a “stern and angry” look that Maury later went to his tent to apologize. “Mr. Jackson,” he said, “I find I made a mistake just now in speaking to you in a playful manner not justified by our slight acquaintance. I regret that I did so.” Jackson leveled a stony gaze at him and said, “That is perfectly satisfactory, sir.” Maury then returned to his friends, telling them flatly, “Cadet Jackson, from Virginia, is an ass.”18 That was the last meaningful social interaction the three aristocratic Virginians had with him at West Point.
On one occasion—and only one—Jackson provided a glimpse of the unbending moral absolutism that was to characterize his later dealings with William French in Florida. During one inspection, a cadet had stolen Jackson’s scrupulously clean musket and replaced it with his own dirty one. Jackson reported the loss. The cadet was soon found with Jackson’s weapon and then lied about how he had gotten it. For once Jackson’s shyness left him: he was furious. He demanded that the cadet be court-martialed and expelled. It was only after much persuasion by his peers and officers that he was convinced not to press charges.19
McClellan had none of these problems. His main worry was whether he would lead his class, or have to settle for second or third place. He was so smart that he could coast through courses others found difficult. He wrote his brother that he was doing “not much, I confess” in the way of studying. In French he did hardly anything at all, and still ranked eighth in the class.20 McClellan was not only obviously brilliant, but he had a sparkling, gregarious personality that made him one of the most popular cadets in his class. Even his academic rival Charles Stewart found him to be a generous and honorable man who had “not a mean thought in him.” Nor was McClellan a narrow or prudish conformist. On New Year’s Eve during his first year he and several friends risked punishment to procure a late-night feast of oyster pies from a well-known, off-limits local tavern.21 Teachers liked him, too. Erasmus Keyes, his artillery instructor—who would later command the 4th Corps of the Army of the Potomac under McClellan in the peninsula campaign—wrote that “a pleasanter pupil was never called to the blackboard.”22 McClellan made many close friends, including his roommate A. P. Hill. Those friends tended to be from the South, and from the upper echelons of society. McClellan would always carry a deep, abiding sympathy for that part of the country. (That feeling would become more and more apparent as the war progressed.) It is not known how much interaction he and his classmate Jackson had, though in such a small group of young men they certainly came into frequent contact with each other. (After the Mexican-American War, Jackson made a point of visiting McClellan and Dabney Maury when he was on court-martial duty at West Point, where both were on the faculty.23) In any case, there would seem to have been an uncrossable social and academic gulf separating the two cadets, one that very little could possibly change.
• • •
Then something interesting happened. Into this rather predictable narrative of the casually successful Philadelphia blue blood and the struggling Appalachian orphan came a new story line entirely: Jackson, who had started his West Point career dead last in the weakest section, known as the Immortals, began a steady rise in the class ranks. It is hard to imagine the sort of pressure he was under that first semester as the worst student in a class that was undoubtedly going to shrink substantially, as West Point classes did. The fear of washing out, and returning home a failure, must have been harrowing. He barely made it through the January exams, which weeded out another 16 students. His 62nd in math saved him. After the June exams at the end of the first year, only 72 of the original 122 students remained. Someone paying close attention that spring might have noticed the remarkable progress of cadet Thomas J. Jackson, who suddenly ranked 51st in the class.
Against all expectations he was rising fast, finally catching up to all that secondary education he had never had. In his second year he encountered the guts of the academy’s math program, much dreaded by cadets: analytical geometry and calculus. He was, as it happened, very good at both. In the January 1844 exams he rose to 21st—a stunning achievement, considering where he had started out. He did well in other subjects, too. Only in drawing was he still mired with the other Immortals. (Drawing was entirely related to military uses, sketching fortifications and so forth.) He was by now so confident that he wrote his sister, Laura, that “unless fortune frowns on me more than it has yet, I shall graduate in the upper half of my class.”24 By the end of junior year—when he roomed with future Union cavalry general George Stoneman, almost as taciturn as he—he had placed 11th in natural philosophy (the subject he later taught), one of the academy’s toughest courses, and 30th in general merit. By the time he graduated he ranked 17th in a class of 59, a feat driven partly by his number 4 ranking in logic, which many cadets considered “a bugbear”—a course even harder than natural philosophy. One cadet compared Jackson to “a meteor.”25
There were other changes in Jackson’s life, too. Though he was still stiff, formal, and shy, he had found his place in the class. He had clearly earned his classmates’ respect. He actually loved the place. “It grieves me,” he wrote Laura in his last year, “that in a short time, I must be separated from amiable and meritorious friends whom an acquaintance of years has endeared to me by many ties.” In spite of his oddities, his schoolmates noticed that he did have a “sweet smile of recognition” for people he knew.26Perhaps his best trait was his kindness, which was noted by more than one of his classmates. Future Confederate general William Gardner noticed it when Jackson, unsolicited, came to console him while he was under arrest and confined to quarters. Sickness and grief in his fellows seemed to always elicit sympathy from Jackson.27 One of Jackson’s roommates, Tennessean Parmenas Turnley, wrote later, “While there were many who seemed to surpass him in intellect, in geniality, and in good-fellowship, there was no one of our class who more absolutely possessed the respect and confidence of all.”28
Except possibly George McClellan, of course, the nineteen-year-old undisputed star of the class. He finished second. As president of the Dialectic Society—which held the intellectual elite of West Point’s senior class—he delivered the valedictory address at graduation. He was as much of a grand success walking out of the academy’s doors as he had been entering through them four years before. But if his classmates thought he was perfect, his correspondence showed that he was perhaps not quite. There were flashes, in his letters home, of the petulance, self-pity, and vainglory that would later damage his career. He bridled for much of his West Point life, for example, that he was not number one in the class, which he attributed to unfairness. “Toiling uphill is not what it is cracked up to be,” he complained to his mother. “I do not get marked as well for a good (or better) recitation, as the man above me.”29 When he found out he would graduate number two instead of number one, he wrote his family, “I must confess that I have enough malice in me to want to show them that if I did not graduate at the head of my class, I can nevertheless do something.” And always there was his almost melancholy sense of the burden of his own talent. “I know not what fate has in store for me,” he wrote his sister, “I only know that I must expect the hardest of trials a proud spirit can bear before I can effect anything.” He might have been writing in the spring of 1862, as his old classmate Tom Jackson was bearing down on his Army of the Potomac, unseen, from the high, rain-swept battlements of the Blue Ridge Mountains.