CHAPTER THREE
They traveled north, thirty-eight rough miles through the green brilliance of the Shenandoah spring, through drifts of dogwood blossoms so thick they looked like snow on the ground. At Staunton they took a special train east, crossing the Blue Ridge Mountains and then dropping down across the river-and-stream-crossed plateau of the Piedmont country, watching as the flawless farms, timbered hillsides, and swelling meadows floated by in the windows of the train. Though none of them could have known it then, this was one of the last glimpses they would ever get of the old South, a place as yet unvexed by war and unmarked by the ravages of sprawling, rapacious armies. That was all to come. Soon it would be impossible to find even a small corner of Virginia that had not been deeply scarred. When Major Thomas J. Jackson and his 176 charges arrived on the night of April 22, 1861, Richmond, a steepled brick city of forty thousand that rose sharply from the banks of the James River, was already in the embrace of this great change.
The city, in fact, was swarming with recruits. They had been streaming in, day and night, since Virginia’s secession. They were conspicuous for their almost complete lack of understanding of military methods and protocols, their fondness for alcohol, their idiosyncratic and often brilliantly colored uniforms, their plumed and sashed commanders, and the atrocious and obsolete weapons they carried—when they carried them at all.1 Many had ancient smoothbore flintlocks that literally could not have hit a barn door at fifty paces. Some carried butcher knives, as though those might be enough to frighten the Yankees back to Maine or Ohio. They were undiscouraged: they marched and countermarched, bivouacked where they could, and looked for someone in authority who could somehow make sense of all this or tell them where they ought to go.
Into this happy swirl of confusion came Jackson and his cadets, arriving unheralded at the Richmond station. They were desperately needed. Soldiering, as it turned out, was all about drilling and discipline and such inconveniences as adherence to a strict schedule. The cadets, as it happened, knew something about these things. (The usual repository of such skills, the militias, were relics of a bygone era, more like social clubs than functioning military units; though they were supposed to perform three perfunctory drills a year, few did even that.2) Jackson delivered his charges to the Virginia authorities, who put them briefly on review, then put them immediately to work instructing the new recruits. They were just boys, really. But they looked crisp and soldierly and possessed specialized knowledge that was suddenly critical to the war effort—often to the annoyance of the volunteers and militiamen, many of whom saw indignity in the whole idea. “To get up at dawn to the sound of fife and drum . . . to be drilled by a fat little cadet, young enough to be my son, of the Virginia Military Institute, that, indeed, was misery,” wrote a thirty-three-year-old recruit. “How I hated that little cadet!”3 (The cadets would eventually train some 15,000 recruits that year in Richmond.4)
Having done his duty, Jackson was now curiously adrift, without a command. No new orders had awaited him on his arrival. No one in authority had any immediate plans for him. This was despite the fact that, of 1,200 West Point graduates who were fit for military service at the beginning of 1861, only 300 were in the South, and thus in great and immediate demand in a new country that was planning to repel an invader.5 Overlooked, too, were Jackson’s regular army credentials—four years in the service, including a brief, distinguished stint in the Mexican-American War—that ought to have been highly valued in the chaotic, protomilitary world of Richmond. Jackson left no record of his reaction to this apparently deliberate oversight, though he cannot have been pleased. It appeared that, in some parts of the Southern hierarchy anyway, his reputation as an eccentric martinet had preceded him.
While he harbored plenty of ambition and earnestly believed he could help the Confederacy’s war effort, he was not the sort of man to push himself on state politicians. “He knew that the estimate formed of his powers by the major part of the people and the authorities was depreciatory,” acknowledged his friend and later chief of staff Robert Lewis Dabney. “But he disdained to agitate, or solicit for promotion.”6 His fate, he believed, was in God’s hands, as was the whole of this incomprehensible war, and he preferred to leave it that way.
Jackson managed to make himself useful anyway. Duty was duty, after all. He volunteered to be an artillery drillmaster, joining other former US Army officers on a training ground at Richmond College.7 His immediate supervisor was the flamboyant John B. Magruder, who had been Jackson’s commander in the Mexican-American War. For the next two days, Jackson, rejoined by twelve of his cadets, instructed recruits in the rudiments of artillery.
But there was no getting around it. Jackson was, for the moment, lost in the crowd. And a bumptious, jostling crowd it was in that unruly spring, jammed with self-seekers and self-promoters and name-droppers and people with political connections who were clamoring for colonelcies or captaincies or whatever they fancied. “He was not the recipient of any special attention,” wrote one officer who met Jackson at camp. “[He] was very quiet and reticent, having little to say to anyone.”8 Jackson’s dress, especially amid the plumage of the militia officers, was plain verging on shabby, starting with his weather-beaten cap. “From its faded looks it would be fair to judge that he bought it when he became a member of the faculty in 1851,” wrote his friend John Lyle. “His blue cloth coat had no advantage of the cap in smartness of appearance and was, no doubt, of the same age . . . a stranger would not have picked out the man in the faded blue uniform.”9 In these early days Jackson was the man everyone expected him to be: plain, shy, tight-lipped, polite to everyone yet never eager to chat or make small talk; a modest man of apparently modest talents who smiled but never laughed.10
In this uncertain state, he fended off his wife’s offer to come and join him. “The scene here, my darling pet, looks quite animated,” he wrote Anna on April 25, in an upbeat tone that almost certainly did not match his mood. “Troops are continually arriving. Yesterday about seven hundred came in from South Carolina. . . . I received your precious letter, in which you speak of coming here in the event of my remaining. I would like very much to see my sweet little face, but my darling had better remain at her own home, as my continuance here is very uncertain.”11 Indeed, it was so uncertain and his time so unoccupied that at one point he spent the better part of the day teaching a raw recruit—a corporal of the guard—every detail of the man’s new position, accompanying him through the whole circuit of sentry posts, patiently teaching him the various salutes and challenges, and instructing him in his duty.12 Jackson was not only unwanted and unneeded; he was bored, too.
That same day his orders finally came through. They were a crushing disappointment. They confirmed whatever feelings he had that he was being slighted. He had been made a major in Virginia’s topographical engineers, an appointment that his wife said he found “distasteful,” which was probably a graceful understatement.13 It was more like an insult. That was first because Jackson was no engineer, a job that involved “drawing”—essentially the rendering of terrain, buildings, and fortifications. It had been his worst subject at West Point. Far worse was the implied lack of respect for him as a soldier. The job was likely to be behind a desk in Richmond rather than on the front lines. And at a time when colonelcies and field commands were being given out liberally to men with less experience or no experience at all, Jackson would now enter the army at the same rank he had won by brevet fourteen years before.14 As the great surge of war thrummed about him in the streets of Richmond, he was, in effect, being buried in a desk job for which he had little aptitude.
Fortunately for Jackson, he was not the only one who saw the absurdity in placing someone with wartime experience behind a desk in a fledgling nation full of people who did not have the slightest idea how to fight a war. As it happened, an old friend from his childhood days in northwestern Virginia named Jonathan Bennett was working in Richmond as state auditor. Bennett had been surprised to hear about Jackson’s assignment, and took his concern immediately to Virginia governor John Letcher, another Jackson friend from Lexington, where the former had practiced law. Letcher quickly intervened, and by April 26 had secured for Jackson an appointment as colonel of the Virginia volunteers. The next day he summoned Jackson to his office and announced what must have seemed an astounding turn of luck, giving Jackson what Jackson himself later said was the best possible appointment he could have received. Not only was it a colonelcy; he would soon receive orders to take command at Harpers Ferry, the northernmost outpost of the Confederacy and a place of great strategic value that contained an armory and was located on one of the Union’s key railroad lines.
Jackson was elated. He left that night. Along the way, he received his actual orders from Major General Robert E. Lee, the ranking army officer of the Confederacy. “You will proceed without delay to Harper’s Ferry, Virginia . . . and assume command of that Post,” wrote Lee. “After mustering into the service of the state such companies as may be accepted under your instructions, you will organize them into regiments or battalions, uniting as far as possible companies from the same section of the state.”15 Jackson already liked and admired Lee, and wrote Anna that he regarded him as “a better officer than Gen. [Winfield] Scott,” the highest-ranking Union commander. Jackson had met both men in the Mexican-American War.
The location of his assignment at the edge of the mountainous and Union-tilting northwestern section of the state (today it is the state of West Virginia) was not coincidental. Jackson, who had grown up in those mountains, had so many relatives there that, in Bennett’s words, “almost every second man is his kinsman.”16 In a directive to Letcher, Lee stated that “great confidence is placed in the personal knowledge of Major Jackson in this regard. If deemed expedient, he can assemble the volunteer forces of the northwest.”17
Thus Jackson’s commission had been given him as much for political reasons as for any perceived notion of his military abilities. But there was nothing wrong with that. The early days of the war were a sort of golden age for “political” generals and colonels and other officers—men who were given appointments for the constituencies they represented or the allies they brought with them and not for their military experience. The ranks of both sides were already full of them, and it would take several years to weed out the worst of them. Because he had been to West Point and had fought in Mexico, Jackson would never be grouped with such people. Still, he was seen as someone who might be politically useful in the western regions of Virginia. Either way, he got the job. It was a small event that would have astonishing consequences.