Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War
In Washington’s campaigns more than one of the Jacksons won rank and
reputation; and when peace was established they married into
influential families. Nor was the next generation less successful.
Judges, senators, and soldiers upheld the honour of the name, and
proved the worth of the ancestral stock. They were marked, it is said,
by strong and characteristic features, by a warm feeling of clanship, a
capacity for hard work, and a decided love of roving. Some became
hunters, others explorers, and the race is now scattered from Virginia
to Oregon. A passion for litigation was a general failing, and none of
them could resist the fascination of machinery. Every Jackson owned a
mill or factory of some sort—many of them more than one—and their
ventures were not always profitable. Jackson’s father, among others,
found it easier to make money than to keep it. Generous and incautious,
he became deeply involved by becoming security for others; high play
increased his embarrassments; and when he died in 1827 every vestige of
his property was swept away. His young widow, left with three small
children, two sons and a daughter, became dependent on the assistance
of her kinsfolk for a livelihood, and on the charity of the Freemasons
for a roof. When Thomas, her second son, was six years old, she married
a Captain Woodson; but her second matrimonial venture was not more
fortunate than her first. Her husband’s means were small, and necessity
soon compelled her to commit her two boys to the care of their father’s
relatives.
1831 Within a year the children stood round her dying bed, and at a
very early age our little Virginian found himself a penniless orphan.
But, as he never regretted his poverty, so he never forgot his mother.
To the latest hour of his life he loved to recall her memory, and years
after she had passed away her influence still remained. Her beauty, her
counsels, their last parting, and her happy death, for she was a woman
of deep religious feeling, made a profound impression on him. To his
childhood’s fancy she was the embodiment of every grace; and so strong
had been the sympathy between them, that even in the midst of his
campaigns she was seldom absent from his thoughts. After her death the
children found a home with their father’s half-brother, who had
inherited the family estates, and was one of the largest slave-owners
in the district. Their surroundings, however, could hardly be called
luxurious. Life on the Ohio was very different from life on the coast.
The western counties of Virginia were still practically on the frontier
of the United States. The axe had thinned the interminable woods; mills
were busy on each mountain stream, and the sunny valleys were rich in
fruit and corn. But as yet there was little traffic. Steam had not yet
come to open up the wilderness. The population was small and widely
scattered; and the country was cut off as much by nature as by distance
from the older civilisation of the East. The parallel ranges of the
Alleghenies, with their pathless forests and great canyons, were a
formidable barrier to all intercourse. The West was a world in itself.
The only outlets eastward were the valleys of the Potomac and the
James, the one leading to Washington, the other to Richmond; and so
seldom were they used that the yeomen of the Ohio uplands were almost
as much opposed, both in character and in mode of life, to the planters
beyond the Blue Ridge, as the Covenanters of Bothwell Brig to the
gentlemen of Dundee’s Life Guards.
Although the sturdy independence and simple habits of
the borderers were not affected by contact with wealthier communities,
isolation was not in every way a blessing. Served by throngs of slaves,
the great landowners of East Virginia found leisure to cultivate the
arts which make life more pleasant. The rambling houses on the banks of
the James, the Rappahannock, and the Potomac, built on the model of
English manors, had their libraries and picture-galleries. A classical
academy was the boast of every town, and a university training was
considered as essential to the son of a planter as to the heir of an
English squire. A true aristocracy, in habit and in lineage, the
gentlemen of Virginia long swayed the councils of the nation, and among
them were many who were intimate with the best representatives of
European culture. Beyond the Alleghenies there were no facilities for
education; and even had opportunities offered few would have had the
leisure to enjoy them. Labour was scarce, either slave or hired. The
owners of farms were their own managers and overseers, and young men
had to serve a practical apprenticeship to lumbering and agriculture.
To this rule, despite his uncle’s wealth, Jackson was no exception. He
had to fight his own battle, to rub shoulders with all sorts and
conditions of men, and to hold his own as best he could.
It was a hard school, then, in which he grew to manhood. But for that
very reason it was a good school for the future soldier. For a man who
has to push his own way in the world, more especially if he has to
carve it with his sword, a boyhood passed amidst surroundings which
boast of no luxury and demand much endurance, is the best probation.
Von Moltke has recorded that the comfortless routine of the Military
Academy at Copenhagen inured him to privation, and Jackson learned the
great lesson of self-reliance in the rough life of his uncle’s
homestead.
The story of his early years is soon told. As a blue-eyed child, with
long fair hair, he was curiously thoughtful and exceedingly
affectionate. His temper was generous and cheerful. His truthfulness
was proverbial, and his little sister found in him the kindest of
playmates
and the sturdiest of protectors. He was distinguished, too, for his
politeness, although good manners were by no means rare in the rustic
West. The manly courtesy of the true American is no exotic product; nor
is the universal deference to woman peculiar to any single class. The
farmer of the backwoods might be ignorant of the conventionalities, but
the simplicity and unselfishness which are the root of all good
breeding could be learned in West Virginia as readily as in Richmond.
Once, tempted by his brother, the boy left his adopted home, and the
two children, for the elder was no more than twelve, wandered down the
Ohio to the Mississippi, and spent the summer on a lonely and malarious
island, cutting wood for passing steamers. No one opposed their going,
and it seems to have been considered quite natural in that independent
community that the veriest urchins should be allowed to seek their
fortunes for themselves. Returning, ragged and fever-stricken, the
little adventurers submitted once more to the routine of the farm and
to the intermittent studies of a country school. After his failure as a
man of business, our small hero showed no further inclination to seek
his fortunes far afield. He was fond of his home. His uncle, attracted
by his steadiness and good sense, treated him more as a companion than
a child; and in everything connected with the farm, as well as in the
sports of the country side, the boy took the keenest interest. Delicate
by nature, with a tendency to consumption inherited from his mother,
his physique and constitution benefited by a life of constant exercise
and wholesome toil. At school he was a leader in every game, and his
proficiency in the saddle proved him a true Virginian. Fox-hunting and
horse-racing were popular amusements, and his uncle not only kept a
stable of well-bred horses, but had a four-mile race-course on his own
grounds. As a light-weight jockey the future general was a useful
member of the household, and it was the opinion of the neighbourhood
that “if a horse had any winning qualities whatever in him, young
Jackson never failed to bring them out.”
In the management of the estate he learned early to put
his shoulder to the wheel. Transporting timber from the forest to the
saw-mill was one of his most frequent tasks, and tradition records that
if a tree were to be moved from ground of unusual difficulty, or if
there were one more gigantic than the rest, the party of labourers was
put under his control, and the work was sure to be effected.
One who knew him well has described his character. “He was a youth of
exemplary habits, of indomitable will and undoubted courage. He was not
what is nowadays termed brilliant, but he was one of those untiring,
matter-of-fact persons who would never give up an undertaking until he
accomplished his object. He learned slowly, but what he got into his
head he never forgot. He was not quick to decide, except when excited,
and then, when he made up his mind to do a thing, he did it on short
notice and in quick time. Once, while on his way to school, an
overgrown rustic behaved rudely to one of the school-girls. Jackson
fired up, and told him he must apologise at once or he would thrash
him. The big fellow, supposing that he was more than a match for him,
refused, whereupon Jackson pitched into him, and gave him a severe
pounding.”
His surroundings, then, although neither refined nor elevating, were
not unwholesome; but of the moral influences to which he was subjected,
so much cannot be said, while the stock of piety that the original
settlers brought with them had not entirely vanished. There was much
irregularity of life; few men gave any thought to religion, and young
Jackson drifted with the tide. Yet there was something that preserved
him from contamination. His uncle, kindest of guardians, though
irreligious and a sportsman, was scrupulously exacting in matters of
integrity and veracity. His associates included the most respectable,
yet the morals of the sporting fraternity of a frontier settlement are
not likely to have been edifying. That his nephew, as he himself
declares, was an ardent frequenter of races, “house-raisings,”[3] and
country dances is hardly surprising, and it is assuredly no ground
whatever for reproach. Nor is it strange that, amid much laxity, he
should have retained
his integrity, that his regard for truth should have remained
untarnished, and that he should have consistently held aloof from all
that was mean and vile. His mother was no mere memory to that
affectionate nature.
His good qualities, however, would scarcely of themselves have done
more than raise him to a respectable rank amongst the farmers of West
Virginia. A spur was wanting to urge him beyond the limits of so
contracted an existence, and that spur was supplied by an honourable
ambition. Penniless and dependent as he was, he still remembered that
his ancestors had been distinguished beyond the confines of their
native county, and this legitimate pride in his own people, a far-off
reflection, perhaps, of the traditional Scottish attitude towards name
and pedigree, exercised a marked influence on his whole career. “To
prove himself worthy of his forefathers was the purpose of his early
manhood. It gives us a key to many of the singularities of his
character; to his hunger for self-improvement; to his punctilious
observance, from a boy, of the essentials of gentlemanly bearing, and
to the uniform assertion of his self-respect.”[4]
1841 It was his openly expressed wish for larger advantages than those
offered by a country school that brought about his opportunity. In
1841, at the age of seventeen, he became a constable of the county. A
sort of minor sheriff, he had to execute the decrees of the justices,
to serve their warrants, to collect small debts, and to summon
witnesses. It was a curious office for a boy, but a year or two before
he had been seized with some obscure form of dyspepsia, and the idea
that a life on horseback, which his duties necessitated, might restore