APPENDIX
Jackson touched many lives during the war, from his immediate family to his students at VMI, the residents of Lexington, and friends and colleagues in the army. Many of these people never lived to see the end of the war; some lived well into the twentieth century. Here is what became of them.
FAMILY AND FRIENDS
ANNA AND JULIA JACKSON
Following her husband’s death Anna lived in Lincoln County, North Carolina, northwest of Charlotte, with her parents. She later moved to Charlotte and Baltimore, where her daughter, Julia, received formal schooling. Anna lived in Richmond and spent summers in Lexington (though not in the Washington Street house) and eventually settled in Charlotte, where she lived out her life as the Widow of the Confederacy, a highly visible and beloved figure in the South who attended many Confederate reunions and dedications of monuments, including several to her husband. She was awarded a pension by the North Carolina legislature in 1907, which she used to start a school for wayward boys. In response to a request from her daughter, Julia, she wrote a comprehensive biography of her husband (with help from friends), which stands today as one of the best sources on the subject. Anna died in Charlotte in 1915 at age eighty-three. Julia—who changed her middle name from “Laura” to “Thomas”—married William Christian in 1885 and had two children, a daughter and a son. She died tragically of typhoid fever at age twenty-six in 1889. Her daughter—Stonewall Jackson’s granddaughter—Julia Jackson Christian Preston, died in 1991 at age 104.
LAURA JACKSON ARNOLD
Laura remained a strong Unionist and kept her distance from the Jackson family for the rest of her life. She was one of two women awarded membership in a Union veterans association known as the Grand Army of the Republic. Anna wrote to her after her brother Thomas’s death, but we know nothing of any other contact. She divorced her Confederate-leaning husband in 1870. Because of poor health she spent nearly thirty years in a private sanatorium near Columbus, Ohio. She died at age eighty-five at the home of her daughter-in-law in Buckhannon, West Virginia, in 1911.
MARGARET JUNKIN PRESTON
Maggie had a happy marriage to John T. L. Preston and went on to become one of the most prominent poets in the South, male or female. She maintained friendships and literary correspondence with Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Christina Rossetti, among others. She published prose and poetry mostly in magazines, including Harper’s and the Southern Literary Messenger. She wrote both prose and poetry about her beloved friend Thomas Jackson. She became blind in her old age and died in Baltimore in 1897 at seventy-six.
GEORGE JUNKIN
The father of Ellie and Maggie Junkin had been the first president of Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and president of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, before assuming the post of president of Washington College in 1848. He left that job in May 1861 at age seventy-one amid controversy over his pro-Union and anti-secession views. He moved to Philadelphia and wrote several tracts attacking secession. He was heartbroken over the death of his former son-in-law Thomas, who was also his close friend. He died in Philadelphia in 1868.
JIM LEWIS
Devastated by Jackson’s death, Lewis went to work for Sandie Pendleton and served him until Pendleton’s death in 1864. He returned to his hometown of Lexington—where he was believed to have attended Jackson’s Sunday school—and died there.
THE REVEREND DR. WILLIAM S. WHITE
White continued as pastor of the Presbyterian church in Lexington until his retirement in 1866. Upon his death at seventy-three in 1873, Maggie Preston wrote a memorial poem for him.
STAFF
SANDIE PENDLETON AND KATE CORBIN
After Jackson’s death, Pendleton served under Richard Ewell and eventually as chief of staff to Jubal Early. In December 1863 he married Kate Corbin at Moss Neck Manor. He was with Early when the latter was defeated by Union general Phil Sheridan at the Third Battle of Winchester on September 19, 1864, in the Shenandoah Valley. In a follow-up battle, Pendleton was fatally wounded in the abdomen. He died on September 23, 1864. A month later, Kate gave birth to a son, who died of diphtheria in 1865. Kate later remarried. Kate, Sandie, and their child are buried in the cemetery at Lexington near Jackson.
HUNTER MCGUIRE
McGuire rose to become the most prominent physician in Virginia, where he founded a number of hospitals, including what would become the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond. He was president of the American Medical Association. After the war he wrote articles and gave speeches about Jackson, for whom he was a staunch advocate. There is a statue of McGuire on the grounds of the Virginia state capitol. He died in 1900.
ALEXANDER ROBINSON BOTELER
Boteler returned to his farm near Shepherdstown, now West Virginia, and combined a life of farming with public service, which included appointments to the 1876 Centennial Commission, the Tariff Commission, and to a post as assistant attorney in the Justice Department. He was a beloved and colorful figure in his hometown. He died in 1892.
HENRY KYD DOUGLAS
Douglas later served as chief of staff and assistant adjutant general to Generals Edward Johnson, John B. Gordon, Jubal Early, J. H. Pegram, and John A. Walker. As a colonel with the 13th and 49th Virginia Regiments, he was wounded six times. After being severely wounded at Gettysburg, he was captured and imprisoned until March 18, 1864, when he was paroled. He was treasurer of a committee of the Stonewall Brigade that raised more than $6,000 to erect a monument to Stonewall Jackson. After the war he practiced law in Winchester, Virginia, and later in Hagerstown, Maryland. He died in 1903 at sixty-five years of age. Douglas noted in his memoir that Jackson “while living, never had a staff member killed or wounded until Chancellorsville, where he fell, and as he had never spared them or himself it was often remarked upon.” But when the “protection of his presence” was removed, all that changed. Douglas listed the following present or former staff subsequently killed or wounded: J. K. Boswell, Stapleton Crutchfield, E. F. Paxton, W. S. H. Baylor, Edward Willis, J. R. Jones, A. J. Jackson, Sandie Pendleton, Joseph G. Morrison, and Charles Marshall.
JAMES POWER SMITH
Jackson’s young aide returned to the Union Theological Seminary and was ordained a Presbyterian minister. He served as pastor at the Presbyterian church in Fredericksburg for twenty-three years. He later shared in the dedication of the large Jackson Monument in Richmond. He also dedicated a site on the Lacy farm near Chancellorsville, where the resourceful Tucker Lacy had buried Jackson’s arm after it was amputated. (The “grave” can be visited today.) Smith died in 1923 at eighty-six, the last surviving member of Jackson’s staff.
ROBERT L. DABNEY
Dabney’s first project after the war was a biography of Stonewall Jackson, which he published in 1865. Though he was deeply biased in favor of his beloved general, the book is full of useful material and is still in print today. After the war Dabney remained one of the most prominent intellectuals in Southern Presbyterianism. He taught at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia and later at the University of Texas. He continued to hold pro-slavery opinions, and spoke widely on Jackson and the Confederacy. He died in 1898 at age seventy-seven.
JOSEPH GRAHAM MORRISON
Anna Jackson’s brother served in the 57th North Carolina Infantry and was promoted to captain. He was wounded and lost a foot after the Battle of Petersburg. He contracted tuberculosis and after the war spent four years recuperating in California. He returned to build a successful career as a planter in North Carolina, where he also ran the Mariposa Cotton Mills. He eventually reclaimed the family home where he and his sister Anna had grown up. He died in 1906 at age sixty-three.
CONFEDERATE GENERALS
ROBERT E. LEE
Lee became president of Washington College (now Washington and Lee) in Lexington in October 1865 and held that position until his death from pneumonia, following a stroke, in 1870, at age sixty-three. His famous name helped him raise funds and transform Washington into one of the South’s leading colleges. As president he lived in the same magnificent Greek Revival mansion where Jackson and his first wife, Ellie—the daughter of the college’s then president George Junkin—resided during their marriage. It is now known as the Lee-Jackson House. Lee, like Jackson, is buried in Lexington. Though he had applied for a pardon and restoration of his citizenship after the war, it was never granted to him. William Seward, who had no intention of approving Lee’s request, had given Lee’s application to a friend as a souvenir, and thus it disappeared for more than a hundred years. In 1970 Lee’s “Amnesty Oath” was discovered and in 1975 President Gerald Ford finally restored Lee’s full status as an American citizen.
A. P. HILL
Hill was promoted to lieutenant general after Jackson’s death and commanded the Army of Northern Virginia’s 3rd Corps in the Gettysburg campaign. He was killed during the Union offensive at the Third Battle of Petersburg in April 1865.
D. H. HILL
The prickly, hypercritical Hill was not given a corps command in the reorganization that followed Jackson’s death. In 1863 he played an important role in the Confederate triumph at Chickamauga, after which he was openly critical of General Braxton Bragg for failing to exploit the victory. His criticism landed him on the sidelines for the rest of the war. In postbellum years Jackson’s brother-in-law was quite successful. He edited the popular magazine The Land That We Love, and served as the first president of the University of Arkansas, from 1877 to 1884. He then became president of Middle Georgia Military and Agricultural College (now called Georgia Military College), where he served for five years. He died in Charlotte in 1889 at age sixty-eight and was buried at Davidson College, where his father-in-law, Robert Hall Morrison—father of both Isabella Hill and Mary Anna Jackson—had been the institution’s first president.
JEB STUART
The magical early days of his dominance over the Union cavalry ended at the Battle of Brandy Station on June 9, 1863, when he was barely able to hold the field against the Union force under Alfred Pleasonton in what amounted to the largest mounted battle in American history. Less than a month later, Stuart fell out of touch with headquarters in the crucial days leading to the Battle of Gettysburg. He arrived late on that battle’s second day and was repulsed by Union cavalry on the third. He fought his final battle on May 11, 1864, successfully checking Union general Philip Sheridan’s advance toward the city of Richmond. Stuart was shot by a dismounted Michigan cavalryman with a pistol and died the day after the battle, May 12. He was thirty-one years old.
RICHARD B. GARNETT
Garnett served as a pallbearer in Jackson’s procession in Richmond. Two months later, he was killed commanding a brigade in George Pickett’s famous charge at the Battle of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, at age forty-five.
RICHARD S. EWELL
Ewell did not fare nearly so well after he lost Jackson. In the wake of the latter’s death, he was promoted to lieutenant general in charge of most of Jackson’s old corps, making him the third-ranking officer in the army after Lee and Longstreet. Though Ewell performed well at the beginning of the Gettysburg campaign, winning the Second Battle of Winchester and capturing a garrison of four thousand men, he did poorly at Gettysburg. After a victory on the battle’s first day, he declined to press his advantage, which meant that the Union forces ended up holding the key high-ground positions south of town, which eventually included Cemetery Ridge, Little Round Top, and Big Round Top. Jackson, in a similar situation, likely would have taken that ground, which would have radically changed what happened on the battlefield the next day. Lee later said as much. Ewell led his corps in the Battle of the Wilderness and performed well, but lapsed again at the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse. Lee reassigned him to the garrison of Richmond. He surrendered that force a few days before Lee surrendered at Appomattox. After the war he turned to farming at his wife’s property near Spring Hill, Tennessee, and leased a successful cotton plantation in Mississippi. He was president of the board of trustees of the Columbia Female Academy. He doted on his grandchildren. He died of pneumonia at age fifty-four in 1872.
JAMES LONGSTREET
Though Longstreet strenuously objected to Lee’s tactics at Gettysburg, it was his men who mounted the unsuccessful attack on the Confederate left on day two (including Little Round Top) and his men who went forward in Pickett’s famous charge, the doomed offensive that resulted in a Confederate defeat. Longstreet later fought well in the Confederate victory at the Battle of Chickamauga, and was seriously wounded during the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. After the war his criticism of Lee’s tactics and his support of the Republican Party—especially the 1868 presidential campaign of Ulysses S. Grant—led to attacks on his character in the South by such “Lost Cause” proponents as Jubal Early and W. N. Pendleton. Grant appointed him surveyor of customs for New Orleans. He wrote an eight-hundred-page memoir of the war, published in 1895. He later served as US ambassador to Turkey and railroad commissioner before his death in 1904. His second, much younger, wife, Helen, died in 1962.
JUBAL EARLY
Early fought at Gettysburg, the Shenandoah Valley, Spotsylvania Courthouse, and Cold Harbor. He emerged as one of Lee’s better generals. When the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered on April 9, 1865, Early escaped to Texas, then proceeded to Mexico, Cuba, and eventually to Toronto, Canada, where he briefly settled and wrote a memoir of the war. Pardoned in 1868, he returned to Virginia to practice law and soon became the most vocal of the unreconstructed rebels. His writing helped launch the so-called Lost Cause movement, whose main tenets were that the North had beaten the South not by military skill but because it was able to field vastly more men and weaponry; that the war was about defending states’ rights against Northern aggression; that slavery was a benign institution; that Reconstruction was an attempt to destroy the Southern way of life; and that the leaders of the Confederate armies were principled, Christian men in contrast to Union leaders such as Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, who showed their low moral character in their brutally destructive marches through Georgia, South Carolina, and the Shenandoah Valley. The principal heroes of the Lost Cause were Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson; its principal villain was James Longstreet. Early died in 1894 at age seventy-seven after falling down a flight of stairs in Lynchburg, Virginia.
UNION GENERALS
GEORGE MCCLELLAN
After being relieved of command by Lincoln in November 1862, McClellan entered politics and in 1864 won the Democratic nomination for president. He ran against Lincoln on an antiwar platform and lost. Following the war he worked at various engineering jobs, including as chief engineer for the New York City Department of Docks. He was president of a railroad. In 1878 he was elected governor of New Jersey, a position he held for a single term, until 1881. He spent much of his last years traveling and writing his memoirs, which were published posthumously. He died unexpectedly of a heart attack in Orange, New Jersey, in 1885 at age fifty-eight.
AMBROSE BURNSIDE
Burnside’s war career after his defeat at Fredericksburg was spotty. Exiled to the Department of the Ohio, he engineered the successful defense of Knoxville. He commanded the Union 9th Corps in the overland campaign, which included the Battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Courthouse, North Anna, and Cold Harbor. At the siege of Petersburg he famously approved a plan for Union coal miners to tunnel under a Confederate fort and blow it up. Though the mine’s explosion indeed blew a huge hole in the Confederate lines, Burnside’s men were unable to take advantage of it, a failure for which he was unfairly blamed. After the war he did rather well. He was president of three railroads and served three one-year terms as governor of Rhode Island. He was elected a US senator in 1874 and served until 1881, when he died suddenly of angina at age fifty-seven.
WILLIAM H. FRENCH
Old Blinky—Jackson’s nemesis in Florida and beyond—served in the Gettysburg campaign. His reputation was ruined for good in the Mine Run campaign in November 1863 when he was harshly criticized by General George Meade for being too slow to pursue an advantage. Though he saw no more combat, he remained with the army, serving on various military boards in Washington. From 1865 to 1872 he commanded artillery on the Pacific Coast. In 1875 he was appointed commander of Fort McHenry. He retired in 1880 and died in 1881 at age sixty-six.
JOSEPH HOOKER
After his defeat at Chancellorsville, Hooker moved the Army of the Potomac north to block Lee’s invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania. When he impulsively offered his resignation after a minor squabble, Lincoln and Stanton were quick to accept it, replacing him with the man they preferred anyway, George Meade. Hooker was transferred to the western theater, where he saw success at the Battle of Lookout Mountain. Later he served well in Sherman’s 1864 Atlanta campaign. From 1864 until his retirement from the army in 1868, Hooker served as commander of various Federal departments. He suffered from poor health in the postwar years and was partially paralyzed by a stroke. He died in 1879 at age sixty-four.
IRVIN MCDOWELL
After the defeat at Second Manassas, McDowell spent two years in effective exile from Union military leadership. He remained in the army, and spent the years from 1864 to his retirement in 1882 in a series of regional army commands that included the Department of the Pacific, the Departments of the East and South, and the Division of the Pacific. In 1879 a presidential board of review issued a report on the Battle of Second Manassas, recommending a pardon for General Fitz John Porter. The report was harshly critical of McDowell, arguing, among other points, that he had failed to forward information to either Pope or Porter about James Longstreet’s position. After his retirement, McDowell became parks commissioner in San Francisco, helping to lay out parts of Golden Gate Park. He died in 1885 at age sixty-six.
JOHN POPE
Pope’s Civil War career did not end with the fiasco at Second Manassas, nor did it suffer over the long term. He spent the remainder of the war fighting Indians, first in the Department of the Northwest. In 1864 he became commander of the Department of Missouri, and by war’s end the Military Division of the Missouri, the largest geographical command in the United States. He was a prominent departmental commander during the Indian Wars. Like Irvin McDowell, he rose to the rank of major general in the Regular Army, of which there were only six. His final posting was in California in the Division of the Pacific. Also like McDowell, his reputation was damaged in 1879 by the federal report on the Battle of Second Manassas that concluded that he and not Fitz John Porter bore most of the blame for the defeat. He retired in 1886 and died in 1892 at the Ohio Soldiers’ Home near Sandusky at the age of seventy.
NATHANIEL BANKS
Banks’s military career continued to sputter after Second Manassas. He was briefly given command of defense forces in Washington, then shipped south to New Orleans to assume command of the Department of the Gulf. There he performed poorly in several military campaigns, though he did have the distinction of commanding the first African-American troops in combat. In 1864 he was sent back to Washington for the rest of the war. He spent the rest of his life doing what he always did best: politics. He served in Congress from 1865 to 1879, then as US marshal for Massachusetts—a patronage job—until 1888, and again in Congress for a single term, from 1888 to 1890. He died in September 1894 at age seventy-eight. His death made national headlines.
MISCELLANY
LITTLE SORREL
Lost after the Battle of Chancellorsville, the horse Jackson called “Fancy” was eventually recovered by a Confederate soldier and sent to Virginia governor John Letcher, who in turn sent him to live with Anna Jackson in North Carolina. The horse became a much-loved pet, famous for using his mouth to lift latches and let himself out of his stable. In Anna Jackson’s memoir she wrote that he would “go deliberately to the doors of all the other horses and mules, liberate each one, and then march off with them all behind him . . . to the green fields of grain around the farm.” Fences proved no obstacle to him, either. He would use his mouth and muzzle to lift off fence rails until the fence was low enough to jump over. He later lived at VMI, where he grazed on the parade ground and was a favorite of cadets, and spent his last days at the Old Confederate Soldiers’ Home. His hide was stuffed and mounted and can be seen today at VMI.
SHENANDOAH VALLEY
What Sherman’s men did to Georgia is more famous, but what happened to the lovely Shenandoah Valley was just as horrific, and a great deal more systematic. The valley’s unfortunate location made it an almost continuous battleground. It was the scene of three major campaigns and some twenty-three battles. Winchester alone changed hands an estimated seventy-two times. The worst of it came in the fall of 1864, when Union general Philip Sheridan’s army embarked on a deliberate campaign to destroy the valley’s food-producing capacity during what was a bumper year. In a two-week period Sheridan’s soldiers burned barns, mills, and standing crops. They burned at least fifty houses to the ground. They rounded up livestock and killed them or drove them away. Much of the devastation wrought by Sherman’s soldiers on his march to the sea was haphazard or accidental. Here it was all quite deliberate, and every bit as destructive. By the end of it much of the valley was a smoking ruin.
VMI
On May 15, 1864, the cadet corps from VMI fought as a unit for the first time, at the Battle of New Market in the Shenandoah Valley. Ten were killed and forty-seven wounded. Less than a month later, the institute was shelled and burned by Union troops under David Hunter. Destroyed were the barracks where Stonewall Jackson taught, the mess hall, two faculty residences, and the library—all but two buildings. The cadets were relocated to Richmond. A total of 1,800 VMI cadets fought in the war (16 for the North), and of them 250 were killed.
STONEWALL BRIGADE
Jackson’s most famous brigade later fought in the Gettysburg, Mine Run, and Wilderness campaigns. When its commander Colonel James Walker was wounded at Spotsylvania, the brigade was disbanded and dispersed to other units. They continued to fight in the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864, at Petersburg, and at Appomattox. By the war’s end only 210 of the 6,000 men who had served in the brigade during the war were still under arms.