Jubal Anderson Early

Jubal Anderson Early, Confederate Officer

November 3, 1816–March 2, 1894

HIGHEST RANK:

Confederate Officer

ASTROLOGICAL SIGN:

Scorpio

NICKNAMES:

Old Jube, Old Jubilee

WORDS TO REMEMBER:

“We haven’t taken Washington, but we’ve scared Abe Lincoln like hell!” (regarding his appearance on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., in 1864)

The afternoon of March 2, 1865, was frigid and gloomy in the upper Shenandoah Valley. There, just west of Waynesboro, some two thousand ragged men in gray and butternut stood wearily in the cold drizzle, their numbers stretched thin along three-quarters of a mile of low ridgeline. At around 3:00, they watched in horror as throngs of cavalry troopers in mud-spattered blue came charging and screaming and shooting their way toward them from directly ahead and on the left flank. Outnumbered and outmaneuvered, the hungry, threadbare Rebels knew a really bad thing when they saw it, and they began falling back to a pair of bridges that crossed the South River behind them. Most of them didn’t make it and were either cut down or captured by the pursuing Federals.

Perched on a vulnerable piece of ground, its flanks left hanging without proper protection, the defensive position at Waynesboro must have been chosen by an amateur or an idiot. But the Confederate officer in question, Lieutenant General Jubal Early, was neither. He was, however, disillusioned by fighting against outrageous odds with little to no resources and men who looked more like scarecrows than soldiers. Since its spectacular reverse at the Battle of Cedar Creek the previous October, his once glorious Army of the Valley had been living on borrowed time, its ranks inexorably thinned by hunger, desertion, and Robert E. Lee, who needed every man he could muster for the desperate campaign around Petersburg. Early was, to put it simply, psychologically played out, and Waynesboro proved it. It was to be his last battle during the Civil War—but not, interestingly enough, his last fight on behalf of the Confederacy.

Jubal Early was given to frequent outbursts of profanity—even on the rare occasions when he set foot inside a church.

Jubal Anderson Early had grown to manhood in Franklin County, Virginia, surrounded by the comfort and ease of the tobacco-growing caste. His unusual first name was the result of an old Early family custom of bestowing names that began with the letter J. According to the Book of Genesis, Jubal, a descendant of Cain and brother of Jabel, was the “forerunner of those who play the harp and the flute.” He entered West Point in 1833, where he distinguished himself by consistently ranking near the bottom of his class in the conduct department and for having a plate broken over his head by Lewis Armistead, who would fall in battle years later during Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. Though pissing off his fellow cadets and racking up demerits seemed to come naturally, so did classwork, and he graduated with high academic marks. He was sent to fight Seminole Indians in the wilds of Florida, where American soldiers were suffering more from the lacerations of saw palmetto than they were from an enemy who had perfected the art of evasion. For the impatient Early, the drudgery of Florida was enough to set his mind on a career change. He resigned his commission and, after a period of intense study, began practicing law in Rocky Mount, Virginia, and got himself elected to the state legislature.

When war broke out with Mexico, Early’s unpleasant memories of Florida faded behind a resurgent patriotism. He joined the Virginia regiment as a major and set off, like so many of his fellow gringos, in search of battlefield glory.

He didn’t find any. But he did make a name for himself as the military governor of Monterrey, a post he’d been given by General Zachary Taylor himself. In addition to establishing law and order, Early drilled the troops under his command to perfection—a skill that would serve him well in years to come. Despite this considerable accomplishment, Early’s Mexico experience did nothing to alleviate his abiding ambivalence to army life. He had seen no action, and the only physical danger he’d encountered was from arthritis—a gift from the Mexican campaign that remained with him for the rest of his days. Disenchanted and as cynical as ever, he went back to Virginia a civilian.

Early couldn’t have known it at the time, but his return to civilian life was, once again, to be temporary. As a lawyer, his talents lay principally in his unadorned honesty, perseverance, and penchant for thinking ill of others, which tended to galvanize his legal confrontations. Bereft of the oily charm typical of courtroom solicitors, he did much of his work in the confines of his office and stuck to the small stuff. But when he was elected to his state’s secession delegation, he waded into some very big stuff and didn’t hold back. Jubal Early was levelheaded, patriotic, and dismissive of what he considered Southern hubris. Few Virginians were as adamantly pro-Union in those days as he was. Not even Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural speech—interpreted as insufferably aggressive throughout much of Dixie—could change Early’s mind. Right up until the vote to secede, the scrappy lawyer from Rocky Mount did his darnedest to sway his fellow delegates from a course he considered tantamount to madness.

Still, like many of his countrymen with military experience, he put aside his political views once the Confederacy became a reality, and he ran to the defense of his homeland—the local soil to which his blood was bound. “Whether we have the right of secession or revolution,” he solemnly proclaimed, “I want to see my state triumphant.” It was a statement that accurately summed up the beliefs of many.

He began the Civil War as a colonel, but that didn’t last long. At the First Battle of Bull Run, Early marched his brigade from its original position on the far right of the Confederate line all the way to the left flank, where his troops played a crucial role in routing the enemy. It was a six-mile march, completed in just three hours—a performance made possible by Early’s ability to quickly whip untried civilians into passable soldiers, which earned him a promotion to brigadier general. In time he became one of the most estimable fighting generals in the Army of Northern Virginia, a crotchety, rumpled oddball who knew his business and got results from his men. His élan could verge on recklessness: In May 1862, during the Battle of Williamsburg, his hastily arranged assault on a Union redoubt was brave, costly, and pointless; Early himself got a bullet in the shoulder. But mishaps like this were the exception rather than the rule.

He was a virtuoso of maneuver under fire, as he proved at the Battle of Antietam. In the hellish action of that bloodiest of days, Early took over the division when his superiors were wounded and proceeded to blunt a potentially decisive Northern attack by changing fronts twice and delivering the fire of his troops where it was needed most, to devastating effect. Later that year at Fredericksburg, he saved Stonewall Jackson’s end of the line by foiling a Union stab that had thrown the whole wing into disarray. In January 1863, he was promoted to major general and given his own division in Richard Ewell’s corps. He would lead his division at such important engagements as Chancellorsville, where he covered the far Confederate right near Fredericksburg; the Second Battle of Winchester, where his men helped to rout and capture much of the Union garrison; and Gettysburg, where, after helping to sweep the town of enemy forces, he made a daring assault against the Union right that ultimately came to nothing for lack of reinforcement.

Repulsed at Gettysburg, the Army of Northern Virginia took a breather, then once again began dueling with George Meade’s Army of the Potomac. In November, at the Battle of Rappahannock Station, Early’s men found themselves pinned against the Rappahannock River by an overwhelming Union force. Early, who called the debacle “the first serious disaster that had befallen any of my immediate commands … since the commencement of the war,” had the ignominious fate of watching his routed soldiers brave the bone-chilling waters of the river rather than suffer capture by the enemy. Meade’s advance was stopped a few weeks later at Mine Run, where Early found himself in temporary command of the Second Corps while the perpetually ailing Ewell was on sick leave. The two armies settled back into the positions they had occupied just two months before.

The high-water mark of the Confederacy had passed, and few felt it as acutely as Jubal Early. By the winter of 1863–1864, the curmudgeonly Virginian had become even more irritable than usual, throwing accusatory invective at his fellow officers with disturbing recklessness. Even Ewell, his friend and superior, felt Early’s lash, and their relationship soured. “Old Jubilee” had acquired a well-earned reputation for detesting things: officers who brought their wives on campaign, civilians who didn’t know how to march like troops, unruly soldiers who plundered and burned without orders to do so, and—most notoriously—cavalry. Dismissed by Early as “buttermilk rangers,” his cavalry officers were constantly being blamed for any and every reverse. At least one of them, John Imboden, felt compelled to seek redress through official channels, though the confrontation ultimately fizzled. In February 1864, a thoroughly nettled Early wrote Robert E. Lee for a leave of absence to assuage a growing “lukewarmness in the cause.” It was granted.

In fact, Early may not have returned to duty at all had it not been for the thing he detested most of all: Yankees. “I wish they were all dead,” he had said after the Battle of Fredericksburg, during which Federals had brutishly ransacked the town. “I not only wish them all dead but I wish them all in Hell.” And he did his utmost to facilitate their journey. Having begun the war as a reluctant military professional who openly ridiculed secession, Early had since formed the opinion—based on personal experience of the enemy’s ruthlessness—that Northerners were the filth of humanity. And his fury would only grow.

Shortly before the Battle of Cold Harbor, he once again assumed command of Ewell’s corps, a post that remained permanent this time—Lee made it official by promoting Early to lieutenant general. Having already acquired corps-command experience (in addition to substituting for Ewell, he had assumed control of A. P. Hill’s corps during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House in early May), Old Jube eased into the role in which he was destined to make history.

Jubal Early had been one of Stonewall Jackson’s favorite protégés. Now, in the Shenandoah Valley that had made Stonewall an icon, Early was to write his own legend and nearly outdo his deceased mentor. It all began when Ulysses Grant sent Major GeneralDavid Hunter into the valley as the right hook of a great pincer intended to squeeze the Confederacy to death once and for all. A holdover from the appointments that served to highlight Abraham Lincoln’s early ineptitude at choosing generals, “Black Dave” Hunter was an abstemious zealot with a penchant for punitive warfare, ersatz martial law, and arson—precisely the sort of sanctimonious Yankee brigand that made Jubal Early’s heart fibrillate with spleen. Hunter fell upon the Confederacy’s breadbasket like the self-appointed Second Horseman of the Apocalypse, razing and burning as he went. During a four-day visit to Lexington, he set the Virginia Military Institute and Washington College on fire and destroyed former governor John Letcher’s home for good measure. Then he headed for Lynchburg.

Waiting for him there was Jubal Early, sent racing westward by Lee with the Second Corps to defend the town and do something about Hunter. After halting the oncoming Federals at Lynchburg on June 17, Early pushed the despised Hunter back down the valley and into the mountains of West Virginia. And that was just for starters. With virtually the whole valley to himself, Early made his way northward, going over to the offensive down an avenue of invasion that opened onto the vitals of the enemy. Time for a little payback.

Brushing aside the meager resistance it met, the Army of the Valley came rolling out of the Shenandoah Valley like a fierce and sudden storm on a sunny day. Early’s secret weapon was speed, made possible by a ruthless paring of kit and baggage. After crossing the Potomac, he swept into Maryland and extorted $20,000 from the terrified folks of Hagerstown. Frederick coughed up an impressive $200,000. But while Early was busy holding up civilians, desperate preparations were being made to meet the obvious threat he posed to Washington, D.C. Moving southeast toward the Union capital, Early came up short before a hastily assembled enemy host on the Monocacy River led by Lew Wallace—the future author of Ben-Hur. Early’s hardened veterans (many of whom had fought under Jackson) butchered Wallace’s brave greenhorns, but at a remarkable price: one whole day of a very tight schedule. The Rebels went on to the suburbs of the capital on July 11, causing a stir the likes of which Washingtonians had not seen since the bad old days of 1861. The district’s militia was called up, stupefied government clerks had firearms thrust into their sweating hands, and gleeful Democrats began whooping it up in anticipation of Lincoln’s defeat at the polls.

All for naught. Though Early was within sight of the nearly completed Capitol dome, he could also see the extraordinary defensive works that stood between him and his precious prize. Washington, D.C., was some of the best defended real estate in the western hemisphere. And while the trenches had been manned by the Union army’s dregs just days prior, they were now full of men from the Sixth and Nineteenth Corps—gnarled veterans who didn’t need the elaborate fortifications of Washington to give Early and his crew trouble. Lew Wallace had bought enough time at the Monocacy for the Northern high command to race seasoned troops into the defenses around the capital.

But Early had done his job as well. When Lee sent him into the Shenandoah, it was with the hopes of creating enough of a mess to draw Union forces away from the Army of the Potomac that was pressing down on Richmond. He had done that and more. As his marauding army made its way toward Washington, newspapers throughout the North—and, more significantly, the world—reflected the belief that Jefferson Davis’s Confederacy was anything but dying. Perhaps, if nothing else, Jubal’s adventure held out the hope of igniting intervention from a reluctant Europe.

That never happened, of course. Early’s raid was like swinging a stick at a hornet’s nest—in addition to sending units from around Washington in pursuit of Early’s force, Grant unleashed Hunter into the Shenandoah Valley once again with the instruction to strip it of food “so that crows flying over it, for the balance of this season, will have to carry their provender with them.” He might as well have ordered a fish to go swimming. But as Black Dave set about his familiar deleterious tactics with renewed gusto, Early, ever the opportunist, was awaiting another chance to strike. He got it when much of the pursuing Union force from Washington was pulled back, freeing him to go on the offensive again. Moving north, Early struck the Federals at Kernstown on July 24 and sent them retreating across the Potomac, leaving him once more in control of the Shenandoah Valley. And this time the payback was to be more spectacular.

Determined to cover the mounting cost of Hunter’s excesses by bringing the war to the other side, Early sent troopers up to Pennsylvania on a little errand. They were to give the good people of Chambersburg a choice: scare up $100,000 in gold or watch their tidy hamlet go up like kindling. Refusing to be intimidated, the townspeople called the Confederates’ bluff—and watched their town burn to the ground.

The destruction of Chambersburg was controversial, even to some of the officers on Early’s staff. He himself always assumed full responsibility for the affair and never admitted so much as a twinge of guilt. After all, anyone who doubted whether the war had entered an implacable new phase needed only to look at the Shenandoah Valley itself, where bluecoats had been destroying property for weeks. Besides, the bursting Northern economy could afford such depredations; Early’s Confederacy could not. It is significant to note that one of the reasons Chambersburg’s citizens failed to take their occupiers very seriously is that they hardly looked the part: By this time, even Jubal Early’s vaunted veterans looked like shoeless vagabonds.

And they weren’t going to get any prettier. To put it simply, Old Jubilee’s salad days were behind him. For months he had made a mockery of Northern military might, pushing around an enemy that always outnumbered him and tweaking the nose of the Lincoln administration itself. To Grant in particular, the recent high jinks in the Shenandoah were a very, very bad joke that had to go away. It was against this background that he loosed one of his favorite dogs of war upon the wily Early: Phil Sheridan. With overwhelming force and some of the toughest cavalry on the continent at his disposal, Sheridan grappled with the Army of the Valley at Winchester and routed it completely at Fisher’s Hill. Early showed his age at the Battle of Cedar Creek in October by making a truly spectacular breakthrough against superior numbers and inexplicably failing to complete the job; the predictable Union counterattack blew his army to smithereens. The hangers-on were defeated the following March at Waynesboro. And so passed Lieutenant General Jubal Early’s illustrious Army of the Valley.

When things started to go badly for Early, the Confederacy on whose behalf Old Jube had fought so hard let him down, blaming his reverses on rumored drunkenness. The stupendous indignity at Cedar Creek, in particular, drew irrational anger from the newspapers. Robert E. Lee stood by him until the clamor in civilian and military circles became too loud to handle; Early then found his forces gradually relocated for more pressing service around Richmond, relegating his command to a sort of formality. As for Early himself, he just got meaner and meaner. While riding past his ragged men one day and hearing them chant, “Give us something to eat,” Old Jubilee responded scornfully by throwing their recent defeat in their faces: “Fisher’s Hill! Fisher’s Hill, damn you!”

Ironically, for this one-time opponent of secession, defeat at the hands of the Union was simply intolerable. In the wake of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, he armed himself and fled to Mexico, where his attempt to get the French-backed emperor Maximilian to declare war on the United States came to nothing. By 1866, he was in Canada, from which he watched the unfolding Southern Reconstruction with horrified fascination. Not until 1869 did he find it in himself to give life in Virginia another go. During the 1870s, he began supporting himself as a drawing supervisor, with fellow unreconstructed veteran P. G. T. Beauregard of the Louisiana State Lottery Company, which freed him to devote time to what became his obsession: creating the cult of the “Lost Cause.” As president of the Southern Historical Society, Early did more than anyone else to paint the War Between the States as a tableau of naked aggression by a vast, mongrelized horde of laborers upon a race of nobility whose leaders—particularly Robert E. Lee, the only human Early never bitched about—were manliness personified. His scapegoat to explain the South’s defeat at the hands of such an unworthy opponent was James Longstreet, whose dilatory performance on the second day of Gettysburg was nothing less than a betrayal that undermined any chance of victory in that critical battle. Interestingly, the war of words ignited by Early against Longstreet—whose postwar conversion to the Republican Party was seen as the ultimate apostasy and proof of his guilt—essentially demolished the latter’s reputation as one of Robert E. Lee’s most trusted lieutenants, giving Early the final and, perhaps, most enduring victory of his career as a Confederate partisan.

In the end, it seems that friction defined Jubal Early’s life—right up to its end in March 1894 from injuries incurred during a fall down the steps of the Lynchburg post office. To Robert E. Lee, he had been “my bad old man.” But the local newspaper’s obituary editor probably hit the nail on the head when he referred to the deceased as “a rough diamond … [with] an exclusive and repellent exterior.”

SOUTHERN COMFORT

For a man feared by the enemy for his aggressive generalship, Jubal Early wasn’t much to look at. Beneath a white slouch hat with a black plume feather that became his hallmark, he often preferred the comfortable clothes of a common civilian. In winter he was known to wrap his head and extremities in cloth and don a duster that fell to his ankles. But it was the man himself, more than the packaging, that tended to shock. Stooped and aged beyond his years by arthritis, constantly spewing vulgarities in a shrill voice through a spray of saliva stained umber by an ever-present tobacco plug, he gave the appearance more of an eccentric barnyard fool than a sharp-minded lawyer and leader of armies. Little wonder that one of his aides described him as “decidedly a character … with some peculiarities that render him very amusing.”

SURLY EARLY

In April 1864, Richard Ewell placed Jubal Early under arrest for insubordination. Though the precise nature of the offense remains lost to history (Ewell was dissuaded from carrying through with the affair by Robert E. Lee), it is hardly surprising, given Early’s capacity for intemperate behavior. While stationed in Virginia at the very beginning of the Mexican War, Early got kicked out of his quarters for fighting with the assistant adjutant general. His anti-secession outbursts on the eve of civil war got him into hot water with many of his fellow Virginia delegates, including his friend John Goode—with whom Early very nearly got into a duel. The outbreak of war only made him more waspish, as he proved during the winter of 1861 during a celebratory assemblage of prominent Confederate officers. After a toast was offered to three fallen heroes of Bull Run (Francis Bartow, Barnard Bee, and C. F. Fisher), Early flatly refused to drink because no Virginians had been mentioned—a needless peccadillo that got everyone yelling, inspired the Virginia delegation to get up and leave, and drove Early into a drink-inspired funk that left him dozing in the woods against a tree for the duration of the night.

Not surprisingly, he didn’t make a very tolerant butt of other people’s jokes. In the summer of 1864, his men once noticed that a passing staff officer bore a stunning resemblance in dress to Old Jube. After the men began chanting “Jube’s brother, Jube’s brother!” for a time, one of them suggested that Early go and “kiss his brother.” The general rode over to the ranks in a fit of pique and shouted that he was going to do his best to create a battle especially for their benefit, so “that every one of them would be killed and burn in hell through all eternity.”

DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES

Jubal Early never married. He did, however, father four children by fellow Rocky Mount resident Julia McNealey, with whom he carried on a very cordial relationship for nearly twenty years. She married another man in 1871. True to form, Early cared not a whit about public censure, passing his surname on to all four of his kids.

He’s a Soul Man

Jubal Early was infamously irreligious, though he was known to attend church on rare occasions, if only to buttress the morale of his more pious troops. But as Charles Osborne recounts in his book Jubal, not even the sacred confines of a church could compel Early to keep his peace when his blood was up. While attending services toward the end of the war, Early and his staff heard a sermon in which the minister posed a question about the Resurrection: “What would be your feelings,” he asked the congregation, “at seeing those gallant ones who have given up their lives for their beloved country, rising in their thousands and marching in solemn procession?” The general shocked his fellow churchgoers by shouting out an answer: “I would conscript every damned one of them!”

If you find an error or have any questions, please email us at admin@erenow.org. Thank you!