Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A Romantic’s Civil War: John Esten Cooke, Stonewall Jackson, andthe Idealof Individual“Genius”

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 67; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1540-6563.2005.00118.x

1540-6563

Wallace Hettle,

American History and Culture

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1. On visitors to Jackson's grave, see http://www.civilwaralbum.com/misc/lexington_va1.htm. Accessed on 5 January 2005; Jeff Shaara, Gods and Generals (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), 19, 235, 289; Allan Carpenter, Stonewall Jackson: The Eccentric Genius (Vero Beach, Fla.: Rourke Publications, 1987). 2. On Jackson's portrait in the Confederate press, see J. Tracy Power, “ ‘There Stands Jackson Like a Stone Wall’: The Image of General Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson in the Confederate Mind, July 1861–November 1861” (Master's Thesis, University of South Carolina, 1984). My own survey of Confederate newspapers in the first two years of the war found little evidence for Jackson's eccentricity. For a muted discussion of Jackson's personality, see the correspondent “Hermes.” 3. Robert Lewis Dabney, The Life of and Campaigns of Lt. General T. J. (Stonewall) Jackson (New York: Blelock and Co., 1866; reprint, 1983); Mary Anna Jackson, Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson (Louisville: Prentice Press, 1895). 4. John Esten Cooke, Stonewall Jackson and the Old Stonewall Brigade, ed. Richard Barksdale Harwell (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1954), 10; Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War, ed. Richard Barksdale Harwell (New York: Arno Press, 1955), 52. The best recent biography of Jackson also casts doubt on the “the lemon myth.” See James I. Robertson, Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, The Soldier, The Legend (New York: Macmillian, 1997), ix. 5. Carl Halliday, quoted in Introduction, John Esten Cooke, Poe as a Literary Critic, ed. N. Bryllion Fagin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1946), viii. 6. Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (New York: Albert A. Knopf, 1973), 339–40. 7. Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 12; Gaines Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, The Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South 1865 to 1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). 8. Mary Jo Bratton, “John Esten Cooke and His ‘Confederate Lies,’ Southern Literary Journal 13.2 (1981): 161–67.9. John Esten Cooke to George William Bagby, 6 July 1859, Cooke Papers, Virginia Historical Society. 10. G. Buodoni Wuffin, “I Go To See John Esten Cooke,”Native Virginian, 29 May 1866, clipping in Barett Waller Collection, UV. 11. John Esten Cooke, The Virginia Comedians (1854; reprint, Ridgewood, N. J., Gregg Press, 1968), I: 22. 12. Cooke, Virginia Comedians, I: 41, 60, 18. 13. Cooke, Virginia Comedians, II: 279. 14. John Esten Cooke to Rufus Wilmot Griswold, 28 May 1855, Cooke Papers, Library of Congress (LC). 15. Newspaper clipping, 24 August 1857 in Barrett Waller Collection, UV; Harper’s, IX (November 1854), 858–59; Southern Literary Messenger, XX (October 1854), 638. 16. John Esten Cooke, The Virginia Comedians, I: 106–07. 17. Ibid., 181. 18. William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (1957; reprint, New York: G. Braziller, 1963), 304. 19. Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 23; Scott Caspar, Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth‐Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 209, 202, 7; John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Political Nationalism, 1830–1860 (New York: Norton, 1992), 141–76. On Scott, see Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (1949; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 72–77. 20. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self‐Reliance” (1841), Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 259. 21. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero‐Worship, (1841; reprint, London: Macmillian, 1963), 17, 257. 22. Thomas Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, 4 vols. (1845; reprint, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1897). 23. John Esten Cooke, “Thomas Jefferson,”Southern Literary Messenger 39 (May 1860): 338.24. John Esten Cooke, The Youth of Jefferson, or a Chronicle of College Scrapes (New York: Redfield, 1854); Merill Petersen, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 152. 25. John Esten Cooke, “The Cocked‐Hat Gentry,”Putnam's Monthly Magazine IV (March, 1854): 263.26. Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (1980; reprint Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 69; Harry Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 46–47; James Oakes, “From Republicanism to Liberalism: Ideological Change and the Crisis of the Old South,”American Quarterly 37.4 (Autumn 1985): 551–71.27. George W. Bagby, “Unkind but Complete Destruction of John Esten Cooke, Novelist,”Richmond Whig, 9 August 1859, quoted in John O. Beaty, John Esten Cooke, Virginian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1922), 69. 28. Cooke quoted in John O. Beaty, John Esten Cooke, Virginian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1922), 109. As Beaty notes, the loss of this diary left the first two years of Cooke's war service largely unrecorded. See Beaty, 77. 29. John Esten Cooke diary, quoted 31 January, 26 March 1863, in Jay B. Hubbell, ed. “The War Diary of John Esten Cooke,”Civil War History VII (November 1941): 525–40.30. John Esten Cooke, Civil War Diary, n. d. Duke University Library (DUL); Stuart quoted in Emory Thomas, Bold Dragoon: The Life of J. E. B. Stuart (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 94. 31. Cooke Civil War diary, n. d., DUL. 32. John Esten Cooke quoted in George Cary Eggleston, Recollections of a Varied Life (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1910), 70–71. 33. John Esten Cooke in Richard Barksdale Harwell, ed., Stonewall Jackson and the Old Stonewall Brigade (1863; reprint Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1954), 8–9. 34. Ibid., 39–40. 35. Ibid., 36–41. 36. Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 667. 37. Cooke, Stonewall Jackson and the Old Stonewall Brigade, 40–43. 38. Ibid., 26–27. 39. Ibid., 10–11. 40. Ibid., 24–25. 41. Ibid., 10. After many years, Jackson's widow Mary Anna Jackson denied that Jackson was ever in the habit of sucking lemons. See Mary Anna Jackson, quoted in New York Times, 29 October 1911. 42. Cooke, Stonewall Jackson and the Old Stonewall Brigade, 20–25. 43. New York Herald, 10 September 1862; New York Times, 21 September 1862. 44. Margaret Junkin Preston, War Journal, 3 July 1862 in Elizabeth Preston Allan, The Life and Letters of Margaret J. Preston (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903), 143; John A. Harman to Asher W. Harman, 27 April 1862, Jedediah Hotchkiss Papers, LC; Richard S. Ewell to Lizzie Ewell, 13 March 1862, Richard S. Ewell Papers, LC, quoted in J. Tracy Power, “ ‘There Stands Jackson Like a Stonewall:’ The Image of General Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson in the Confederate Mind, July 1861–November 1861” (MA Thesis, University of South Carolina, 1984), 41. 45. John Esten Cooke, “The Adventures of a ms. Life of Jackson,” newspaper clipping in Cooke scrapbook, Cooke Collection, Library of Congress (LC). 46. Notebook, n.d. circa 1863, Cooke Collection, UV; Richmond Record, 24 September 1863, in John Esten Cooke notebook, UV; OR Series I, Vol. XXXIX, part 2, 7. 47. Cooke, Stonewall Jackson, 16. 48. Ibid., 111. 49. Ibid., 108, 271. 50. Ibid., 19; Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), 7–16. See also James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 77–89. 51. Cooke, Stonewall Jackson, 17. 52. Dabney, Life and Campaigns, 711–28. 53. Cooke, Stonewall Jackson, 194–95. 54. Beaty, John Esten Cooke, Virginian, 85. 55. John Esten Cooke, unpublished ms. on the women of the Confederacy, UV. 56. John Esten Cooke to Mrs. Sally Duval, 19 June 1866, Barrett‐Cooke Collection, UV; John Esten Cooke to Thomas S. Snead, 16 April 1866, Cooke Collection, LC. 57. John Esten Cooke, Southern Literary Messenger, July 1854, 446; John R. Welsh, ed., Autobiographical Memo (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1969), 1–3. 58. John Esten Cooke, The Wearing of the Gray (1867; reprint, Gaithersburg, Md.: Olde Soldier Books, 1988); Advertisement, Petersburg Index, 4 March 1867. On Cooke's portrait of Stuart, see Paul Escott, “The Uses of Gallantry: Virginians and the Origins of J. E. B. Stuart's Historical Image,”Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 103.1 (1995): 47–72.59. John Esten Cooke to E. A. Duyckinck, 15 July 1865, New York Public Library (NYPL). 60. Beaty, John Esten Cooke, 89–91. 61. John Esten Cooke to E. A. Duyckinck, 7 December 1865, NYPL; John Esten Cooke, Notebook, 21 December 1865, Cooke Collection, UV. 62. John Esten Cooke, “Notebook 1865–66,” Cooke Collection, UV; John Esten Cooke, Notebook, 21 December 1865, Cooke Collection, UV. 63. Cooke, Surry of Eagle's Nest (1866, reprint, Ridgewood, N.J., Gregg Press, 1968), 81. 64. Ibid., 138. 65. Ibid., 458. 66. Ibid., 459–60. 67. Ibid., 79; Albert W. Newsport to John Esten Cooke, 29 May 1868, in Barrett Waller Collection, UV; F. J. Huntington to John Esten Cooke, 15 July 1867, Cooke Papers, DUL. 68. Beaty, John Esten Cooke, Virginian, 89–91; John Esten Cooke to E. A. Duyckinck, November 28, 1865, NYPL. 69. John Esten Cooke, Stonewall Jackson: A Military Biography (New York: D. Appleton, 1866), 9–10, 13. 70. Cooke, Stonewall Jackson, 44. 71. Ibid., 196–97. 72. Bratton, Southern Literary Journal, 86. 73. Boston Atheneum, 29 December 1866, quoted in William Edward Walker, “John Esten Cooke: A Critical Biography” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1957), 493. 74. William Gilmore Simms to John Esten Cooke, 2 December 1868, Cooke Family Papers, DUL; “On the Road to Despotism,” unpublished ms. 1870, 118–19, Cooke Family Papers, DUL; 1870 US Census, Clarke County, Virginia, 19 July 1870. 75. New York Record and Vindicator, 8 December 1868, Barrett Waller Collection, UV. 76. John Esten Cooke, Hilt to Hilt (New York: Carleton, 1868); John Esten Cooke, Mohun, or the Last Days of Lee and His Paladins (New York: F. J. Huntington, 1869); John Esten Cooke, Hammer and Rapier (1870; reprint, New York: Carleton, 1898); John Esten Cooke, A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1871). 77. F. J. Huntington to John Esten Cooke, 24 April 1868, Cooke Papers, DUL. 78. On Jackson as a relentless warrior, see Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Albert A. Knopf, 1991), 73–75. For a more sympathetic portrait of Jackson see Robertson, Jr., Stonewall Jackson. 79. John Esten Cooke to George William Bagby, 16 July 1879, Bagby Family Papers, Virginia Historical Society. 80. Blight, Race and Reunion, 156–57; John Esten Cooke Journal, 31 March 1866, UV. 81. New York Times, 10 April 1871. 82. John Esten Cooke Notebook, 18 April 1874, Cooke Papers, UV. 83. George Cary Eggleston to John Esten Cooke, 31 July 1881, Barrett‐Eggleston Papers, UV. 84. Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York: Albert A. Knopf, 1970); Mrs. L. H. Harris, Atlanta Constitution, 22 November 1903. 85. Beaty, John Esten Cooke, 163. 86. Wallace Hettle, “The Minister, the Martyr, and the Maxim: Robert Lewis Dabney and Stonewall Jackson Biography,”Civil War History 49.4 (December 2003): 353–71.87. G. F. R. Henderson, Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War (1898; reprint, New York: De Capo, 1988), 15, 49–50. 88. Mary Johnston, The Long Roll (1911; reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 60–61, 321. 89. G. F. R. Henderson, Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War (1898; reprint, New York: De Capo, 1988), xvi; Douglass Southall Freeman, The South to Posterity: An Introduction to the Writing of Confederate History (1939; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univeristy Press, 1998), 50. 90. For accounts of Jackson as a misunderstood eccentric genius, see Allan Tate, Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier (1928; reprint, Nashville: J. S. Sanders & Co., 1991), 50–54; Burke Davis, They Called Him Stonewall: A Life of Lieutenant General T. J. Jackson, C. S. A. (New York: Burford Books, 1954), 109–16; Frank E. Vandiver, Mighty Stonewall (1957; reprint, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1988), 228, 237, 266, 308. Jackson's quirks are downplayed in Robertson's recent account.