A Rebel's Recollections

by George Cary Eggleston

I saw him for the last time during the war, at Amelia Court House, in the midst of the final retreat, and I shall never forget the heart-broken expression his face wore, or the still sadder tones of his voice as he gave me the instructions I had come to ask. The army was in utter confusion. It was already evident that we were being beaten back upon James River and could never hope to reach the Roanoke, on which stream alone there might be a possibility of making a stand. General Sheridan was harassing our broken columns at every step, and destroying us piecemeal. Worse than all, General Lee had been deserted by the terrified government in the very moment of his supreme need, and the food had been snatched from the mouths of the famished troops (as is more fully explained in another chapter) that the flight of the president and his followers might be hastened. The load put thus upon Lee's shoulders was a very heavy one for so conscientious a man as he to bear; and knowing, as every Southerner does, his habit of taking upon himself all blame for whatever went awry, we cannot wonder that he was sinking under the burden. His face was still calm, as it always was, but his carriage was no longer erect, as his soldiers had been used to see it. The troubles of those last days had already plowed great furrows in his forehead. His eyes were red as if with weeping; his cheeks sunken and haggard; his face colorless. No one who looked upon him then, as he stood there in full view of the disastrous end, can ever forget the intense agony written upon his features. And yet he was calm, self-possessed, and deliberate. Failure and the sufferings of his men grieved him sorely, but they could not daunt him, and his moral greatness was never more manifest than during those last terrible days. Even in the final correspondence with General Grant, Lee's manliness and courage and ability to endure lie on the surface, and it is not the least honorable thing in General Grant's history that he showed himself capable of appreciating the character of this manly foeman, as he did when he returned Lee's surrendered sword with the remark that he knew of no one so worthy as its owner to wear it.

After the war the man who had commanded the Southern armies remained master of all Southern hearts, and there can be no doubt that the wise advice he gave in reply to the hundreds of letters sent him prevented many mistakes and much suffering. The young men of the South were naturally disheartened, and a general exodus to Mexico, Brazil, and the Argentine Republic was seriously contemplated. General Lee's advice, "Stay at home, go to work, and hold your land," effectually prevented this saddest of all blunders; and his example was no less efficacious than his words, in recommending a diligent attention to business as the best possible cure for the evils wrought by the war.

From the chieftain who commanded our armies to his son and successor in the presidency of Washington-Lee University, the transition is a natural one; and, while it is my purpose, in these reminiscences, to say as little as possible of men still living, I may at least refer to General G. W. Custis Lee as the only man I ever heard of who tried to decline a promotion from brigadier to major general, for the reason that he thought there were others better entitled than he to the honor. I have it from good authority that President Davis went in person to young Lee's head-quarters to entreat a reconsideration of that officer's determination to refuse the honor, and that he succeeded with difficulty in pressing the promotion upon the singularly modest gentleman. Whether or not this younger Lee has inherited his father's military genius we have no means of knowing, but we are left in no uncertainty as to his possession of his father's manliness and modesty, and personal worth.

Jackson was always a surprise. Nobody ever understood him, and nobody has ever been quite able to account for him. The members of his own staff, of whom I happen to have known one or two intimately, seem to have failed, quite as completely as the rest of the world, to penetrate his singular and contradictory character. His biographer, Mr. John Esten Cooke, read him more perfectly perhaps than any one else, but even he, in writing of the hero, evidently views him from the outside. Dr. Dabney, another of Jackson's historians, gives us a glimpse of the man, in one single aspect of his character, which may be a clew to the whole. He says there are three kinds of courage, of which two only are bravery. These three varieties of courage are, first, that of the man who is simply insensible of danger; second, that of men who, understanding, appreciating, and fearing danger, meet it boldly nevertheless, from motives of pride; and third, the courage of men keenly alive to danger, who face it simply from a high sense of duty.[2] Of this latter kind, the biographer tells us, was Jackson's courage, and certainly there can be no better clew to his character than this. Whatever other mysteries there may have been about the man, it is clear that his well-nigh morbid devotion to duty was his ruling characteristic.

But nobody ever understood him fully, and he was a perpetual surprise to friend and foe alike. The cadets and the graduates of the Virginia Military Institute, who had known him as a professor there, held him in small esteem at the outset. I talked with many of them, and found no dissent whatever from the opinion that General Gilham and General Smith were the great men of the institute, and that Jackson, whom they irreverently nicknamed Tom Fool Jackson, could never be anything more than a martinet colonel, half soldier and half preacher. They were unanimous in prophesying his greatness after the fact, but of the two or three score with whom I talked on the subject at the beginning of the war, not one even suspected its possibility until after he had won his sobriquet "Stonewall" at Manassas.

It is natural enough that such a man should be credited in the end with qualities which he did not possess, and that much of the praise awarded him should be improperly placed; and in his case this seems to have been the fact. He is much more frequently spoken of as the great marcher than as the great fighter of the Confederate armies, and it is commonly said that he had an especial genius for being always on time. And yet General Lee himself said in the presence of a distinguished officer from whose lips I heard it, that Jackson was by no means so rapid a marcher as Longstreet, and that he had an unfortunate habit of never being on time. Without doubt he was, next to Lee, the greatest military genius we had, and his system of grand tactics was more Napoleonic than was that of any other officer on either side; but it would appear from this that while he has not been praised beyond his deserving, he has at least been commended mistakenly.

The affection his soldiers bore him has always been an enigma. He was stern and hard as a disciplinarian, cold in his manner, unprepossessing in appearance, and utterly lacking in the apparent enthusiasm which excites enthusiasm in others. He had never been able to win the affection of the cadets at Lexington, and had hardly won even their respect. And yet his soldiers almost worshiped him. Perhaps it was because he was so terribly in earnest, or it may have been because he was so generally successful,—for there are few things men admire more than success,—but whatever the cause was, no fact could be more evident than that Stonewall Jackson was the most enthusiastically loved man, except Lee, in the Confederate service, and that he shared with Lee the generous admiration even of his foes. His strong religious bent, his devotion to a form of religion the most gloomy,—for his Calvinism amounted to very little less than fatalism, and his men called him "old blue-light,"—his strictness of life, and his utter lack of vivacity and humor, would have been an impassable barrier between any other man and such troops as he commanded. He was Cromwell at the head of an army composed of men of the world, and there would seem to have been nothing in common between him and them; and yet Cromwell's psalm-singing followers never held their chief in higher regard or heartier affection than that with which these rollicking young planters cherished their sad-eyed and sober-faced leader. They even rejoiced in his extreme religiosity, and held it in some sort a work of supererogation, sufficient to atone for their own worldly-mindedness. They were never more devoted to him than when transgressing the very principles upon which his life was ordered; and when any of his men indulged in dram-drinking, a practice from which he always rigidly abstained, his health was sure to be the first toast given. On one occasion, a soldier who had imbibed enthusiasm with his whisky, feeling the inadequacy of the devotion shown by drinking to an absent chief, marched, canteen in hand, to Jackson's tent, and gaining admission proposed as a sentiment, "Here's to you, general! May I live to see you stand on the highest pinnacle of Mount Ararat, and hear you give the command, 'By the right of nations front into empires,—worlds, right face!'"

I should not venture to relate this anecdote at all, did I not get it at first hands from an officer who was present at the time. It will serve, at least, to show the sentiments of extravagant admiration with which Jackson's men regarded him, whether it shall be sufficient to bring a smile to the reader's lips or not.

The first time I ever saw General Ewell, I narrowly missed making it impossible that there should ever be a General Ewell at all. He was a colonel then, and was in command of the camp of instruction at Ashland. I was posted as a sentinel, and my orders were peremptory to permit nobody to ride through the gate at which I was stationed. Colonel Ewell, dressed in a rough citizen's suit, without side-arms or other insignia of military rank, undertook to pass the forbidden portal. I commanded him to halt, but he cursed me instead, and attempted to ride over me. Drawing my pistol, cocking it, and placing its muzzle against his breast, I replied with more of vigor than courtesy in my speech, and forced him back, threatening and firmly intending to pull my trigger if he should resist in the least. He yielded himself to arrest, and I called the officer of the guard. Ewell was livid with rage, and ordered the officer to place me in irons at once, uttering maledictions upon me which it would not do to repeat here. The officer of the guard was a manly fellow, however, and refused even to remove me from the post.

"The sentinel has done only his duty," he replied, "and if he had shot you, Colonel Ewell, you would have had only yourself to blame. I have here your written order that the sentinels at this gate shall allow nobody to pass through it on horseback, on any pretense whatever; and yet you come in citizen's clothes, a stranger to the guard, and try to ride him down when he insists upon obeying the orders you have given him."