To his wife his inward graces idealised his outward seeming; but others, noting his peculiarities, and deceived by his modesty, saw little that was remarkable and much that was singular in the staid professor. Few detected, beneath that quiet demeanour and absent manner, the existence of energy incarnate and an iron will; and still fewer beheld, in the plain figure of the Presbyterian deacon, the potential leader of great armies, inspiring the devotion of his soldiers, and riding in the forefront of victorious battle.
[1] Amongst these may be mentioned Grant, Sherman, and McClellan. Lee himself, as an engineer, had but small acquaintance with regimental life. The men who saved India for England in the Great mutiny were of the same type.
[2] Cooke, p. 28.
[3] Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson, p. 108.
[4] Marion Crawford.
[5] Oliver Cromwell, by Frederic Harrison, p. 29.
Chapter IV
SECESSION. 1860–61
1861 Jackson spent ten years at Lexington, and he was just five-and-thirty when he left it. For ten years he had seen no more of military service than the drills of the cadet battalion. He had lost all touch with the army. His name had been forgotten, except by his comrades of the Mexican campaign, and he had hardly seen a regular soldier since he resigned his commission. But, even from a military point of view, those ten years had not been wasted. His mind had a wider grasp, and his brain was more active. Striving to fit himself for such duties as might devolve on him, should he be summoned to the field, like all great men and all practical men he had gone to the best masters. In the campaigns of Napoleon he had found instruction in the highest branch of his profession, and had made his own the methods of war which the greatest of modern soldiers both preached and practised. Maturer years and the search for wisdom had steadied his restless daring; and his devotion to duty, always remarkable, had become a second nature. His health, under careful and self-imposed treatment, had much improved, and the year 1861 found him in the prime of physical and mental vigour. Already it had become apparent that his life at Lexington was soon to end. The Damascus blade was not to rust upon the shelf. During the winter of 1860–61 the probability of a conflict between the free and slave-holding States, that is, between North and South, had become almost a certainty. South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, had formally seceded from the Union; and establishing a Provisional Government, with Jefferson Davis as President, at Montgomery in Alabama, had proclaimed a new Republic, under the title of the Confederate States of America. In order to explain Jackson’s attitude at this momentous crisis, it will be necessary to discuss the action of Virginia, and to investigate the motives which led her to take the side she did.
Forces which it was impossible to curb, and which but few detected, were at the root of the secession movement. The ostensible cause was the future status of the negro.