From Cooke’s Books to Krick’s Licks

By Stephen Davis · Originally published November 2018 · pp. 16–38

By Stephen Davis Book Review Editor’s note: I wish here to pay respect to the memory of my good friend of many years, Bob Maher, longtime president of the Civil War Education Association. Bob passed away in late July after a long illness. Two decades ago Bob invited me to speak at one of his great Civil War meetings. It was the CWEA’s Second Annual Mississippi Valley Civil War Symposium, held in September 1996 at St. Louis. The topic I chose was “From Cooke’s Books to Krick’s Licks: A Century of Reading on the Army of Northern Virginia.” I still have the paper—yes, this was before PowerPoint. I pulled it from my files and print portions of it for this year’s “Book Issue.” Whether you know it or not, we are all members of a learned profession. None of us here today would be a Civil War buff were it not for books. I bet each one of us can name the most important book we read, maybe as a kid, that got us interested in the war. Moreover, and this is another sign of a professional, we’re still reading, our continuing education, keeping up with the latest biography or battle book. That’s why it made so much sense to Bob and me that we should have at this meeting a sort of book-chat. But what to call it? Various ideas I gave Bob on a title included, “The Civil War’s Best Books: God Knows What They Are”; “Judging a Book

by Its Cover: A Recommended Reading List on the War;” “The Kodachrome Bookshelf: Snapshots of Civil War Classics”; “From Epitaph to Monograph: Recommended Reading on the Southern War for Independence”; or, “100 Best Books on the Civil War: Yeah, Sez Who?” We decided, as you can tell, on some notable books about the Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederacy’s most storied fighting force. Its record of resounding victories under General Robert E. Lee against superior numbers seemed to overcast the judgement of Appomattox. In this regard, John B. Gordon told an audience in 1870 that Lee’s army was never really defeated”: the rest of the South had simply collapsed. Colonel Charles S. Venable, speaking before an association of Lee’s veterans, said that the true history of the Army of Northern Virginia would show that it had “laid down its army not conquered, but wearied with victory.” Thank goodness Joe Johnston was wounded at Seven Pines! Steve Woodworth, in his Davis and Lee at War (1995), reminds us that President Davis’ choice of Lee to succeed Johnston after Seven Pines, especially as it was by no means obvious at the time, was not only Davis’ best decision of the war, but “probably deserves to be ranked with the few most brilliant command decisions of military history.” Lee took command of the

Confederate army in Virginia when the Yankees had gotten to within a few miles of Richmond. Soon he launched his string of attacking battles against McClellan in the Seven Days. Altogether, this week of fighting tells us much about Lee. Clifford Dowdey’s account of the Seven Days’ Battles (1964) still holds value; Dowdey also wrote a biography of Lee, published in 1965. As Stephen Sears points out in his excellent To the Gates of Richmond (1992), Lee still believed in the Napoleonic notion that an enemy army could be destroyed in battle. Given this as his goal, Lee was ready to suffer the 20,000 casualties that he did, from Oak Grove on June 25 to Malvern Hill on July 1. Most importantly, he saved the Confederate capital from a siege/bombardment, and possible capture by McClellan’s army. With the Army of the Potomac cowering on the banks of the James below Richmond, Lee turned his attention to a new army that Lincoln had assembled in central Virginia. Its commander was John Pope, brought east after his victory at Island No. 10 on the Mississippi. Robert K. Krick is the historian of the battle of Cedar Mountain, August 9, when Jackson attacked part of Pope’s army. At St. Louis, Bob Krick was in the audience. I called out to him that Jay Pryor, a descendant of Capt. Shep Pryor of the 12th Georgia, whose letters he quotes in his book, was once my neighbor; Jay let me read the letters in typescript. Now they’re in book form: A Post of Honor: The Pryor Letters, 1861–1863 (1989). Gary Gallagher includes the Pryor letters in his list of the 100 best Civil War books (in his opinion), published in Civil War Magazine back in February 1995. Stonewall and his foot cavalry got behind Pope’s army and picnicked at his huge supply base at Manassas Junction. Pope then began attacking Jackson just as Lee and Longstreet brought up the other half of the army. On the afternoon of August 30, they launched a powerful flank attack that, as John Hennessy recounts in his definitive study of the Second Manassas Campaign (1993) came closer to destroying an enemy army than any of Lee’s other battles. One quickly sees the dedication to cause of Lee’s soldiers in their postwar writings. Private William Andrew Fletcher of the 5th Texas fought at Second Manassas and Lee’s other battles. “Our conscience was clear,” he wrote of his motivation and service; “we knew we had committed no wrong for self-preservation born in man is one of his strongest traits, and if killing an invader in one’s country is not self-preservation, please define.” Fletcher’s memoir was edited by Bell Wiley and published by the University of Texas in 1954 as Rebel Private Front and Rear. Randolph McKim, a very well-educated native of Baltimore, who rose from private to first lieutenant with the 1st Maryland Infantry, explained in his Recollections (1910) why Marylanders would fight with Lee. “We were compelled to choose between the love of the Union and the love of liberty… Believing as we did that the war was a war of subjugation, and that it meant, if successful, the destruction of our liberties, the issue in our minds was clear…. the Union without Liberty, or Liberty without the Union.” I love stories about General Lee. It doesn’t matter to me if an incident really happened, so long as its story tells something about the general. Thus, in Armistead Long’s Memoirs of Robert E. Lee (1887), there is the tale of how General Lee, at a battery position in the Richmond-Petersburg lines that had come under enemy fire, risked his life to pick up an unfledged sparrow and put it back on a tree limb. The story was so poignant that Long commissioned the great illustrator William Ludwell Sheppard to render a drawing of “General Lee and the Sparrow” for his book. (Decades ago, in graduate school, serving as a teaching assistant, I was taking roll in a history class. I called one student’s name: Army Long. I asked him, “Are you descended from Armistead Lindsay Long, late of the Army of Northern Virginia?” By Jove, he was!) Love of animals was one of Lee’s salient characteristics. The indices for Dr. Freeman’s biography include a baker’s dozen of incidents illustrating the trait. Dabney Maury, in his Recollections of a Virginian [the 1894 Scribner’s edition is in my library!] suggests another of Lee’s admirable qualities, his quiet way of giving admonition or rebuke. One evening, Lee with his aide prepared to dine with another general at the home of a hospitable farmer. Dinner that night consisted of bacon, greens and cornbread, to which was added a slice of fine roast beef sent to General Lee by a good lady of the neighborhood. The three sat down to dinner, and Lee asked his guest, “General, what may I offer you?” “Some of the bacon and greens, thank you.” Then came the aide’s turn. “Captain Smith, what will you have?” “Beef, if you please, General.” Lee suavely transferred the slice of beef to the plate of the young man, who calmly ate it up. Lee offered not a hint of remonstrance at this display of bad manners. But more than a year later, the general again was invited to dinner at a local home; again he took with him the aforementioned beef-eater. When dinner was served, there happened to be a fine roast on the table. When the proud host inquired of Lee what he would have, the general looked at his aide-de-camp, and smiling, kindly replied, “I will thank you for a piece of that beef, if Captain Smith does not want all of it.” In 1996 the University of Nebraska Press published a huge collection of essays on Lee, edited by Gary Gallagher. One that stands out to me is that by William C. Davis, on Lee’s important relationship with President Davis, which Jack wisely terms “a model civil-military team surpassing any of the war, even Lincoln and Grant, and matched in our national history only by that between Franklin D. Roosevelt and George C. Marshall in World War II.” Wow. [I sometimes use distinctly Southern words like fixin’. A few years ago, when I was invited to address President Jimmy Carter and his family on the battle of Atlanta, I remember that Mrs. Carter laughed at my use of the word. She explained that back in the days, during White House social functions, she would wander the room, listening for the word fixin’; then she would know she was speaking to Southerners. So also do I sometimes use Northern words, like the only one Joe Garagiola could say with effect: kibosh.] Robert E. Lee’s most brilliant victory of the entire war was his kiboshing of Joe Hooker at Chancellorsville. But it brought heavy grief because of the mortal wounding of Stonewall Jackson. John Esten Cooke, who served as staff officer in Lee’s army, tells us in The Wearing of the Gray (1867), how Jackson had a habit of lifting his right arm aloft, then letting it fall suddenly to his side. Cooke thought he might have been silently praying. [James I. Robertson Jr. supports Cooke’s assumption. When Dr. Robertson addressed the Atlanta Civil War Round Table, I had my copy of his biography. In it I wrote down what he announced: “I believe Jackson was the last great American who truly believed in the power of prayer.”] Back when I was raising two strapping boys, we celebrated General Jackson’s birthday, January 21, with a big ice cream cake from Baskin-Robbins. But there was a catch. After the dinner dishes were cleared, and before dessert was served, I compelled my two sons to hear me recite (once more) a passage from Allen Tate’s great Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier, published in 1928. I’d drag them through my reading of a passage from Tate’s biography, about how Jackson, as a young professor at VMI, joined the local debating society in Lexington in order to develop his skills at public speaking (which was very difficult for him). Jackson worked hard at it, as he did at everything, and asked to be put on the program. He had his presentation perfectly memorized, and was therefore ready when the day of the debate arrived. Tate tells the story: “The Society was assembled. It was Major Jackson’s turn to speak. He rose and stood behind his chair. He began to speak….He spoke two or three sentences, and stopped…..He began to speak over again; when he got to where he had stopped before he stopped again. He repeated this three or four times…..He could not get beyond the unhappy word. But he showed no embarrassment, no concern for the embarrassment of the audience. He walked round from behind his chair and sat down. He had done his duty; he had prepared his debate; he had learned it; he had been on time to the meeting of the society; he had made an honest effort to speak. He would have preferred to succeed in his speech, but he was quite satisfied with having tried. He had sat down in full complacency. In a few minutes—as was his habit of recent years when he had no particular duty to perform—he fell sound asleep.” It was Jackson’s extraordinary sense of self-discipline that allowed him to ask so much of his men. It is amazing to me what he got his troops to achieve in a forced march. As Bob Tanner reminds us in his excellent study of Jackson’s Valley Campaign (1976; 1996), the general very sternly regulated his infantry column’s rate of march, allowing for an exactly ten-minute rest each hour, no breaking of ranks, precisely one hour for lunch, marching with proper distances and absolutely no straggling. Major Robert Stiles tells this one in his 4 Years with Marse Robert (1904), how one evening after a hard day’s march, Jubal Early got this note: Headquarters 2d Corps, Army of Northern Virginia. To Gen. Jubal A. Early, Commanding Division: General— General Jackson’s compliments to Gen. Early, and he would like to be informed why he saw so many stragglers in rear of your division to-day. Respectfully, A. S. Pendleton, A.A.G., 2d Corps Old Jube shot back this written response: Headquarters, Early’s Division, Army of Northern Virginia To Col. A. S.Pendleton, A.A.G., 2d Corps Colonel— General Early’s compliments to General Jackson, and he takes pleasure in informing him that he saw so many stragglers in rear of my division to-day, probably because he rode in rear of my division. Respectfully, Jubal A. Early, Commanding. [Back when I had a day-job, my friends at work knew how I always cited this episode to remind them how we see only what we are in a position to see….] After the war, the nickname of Jackson’s “Foot Cavalry” became a badge of honor for veterans of the ANVA. Thus John Worsham proudly entitled his reminiscence One of Jackson’s Foot Cavalry (published in 1912), which the late Bell Wiley called “one of the most absorbing and informative memoirs” he had seen. I can’t count the times I’ve read to the high school classes I used to teach, or the audiences I still address, Worsham’s bone-chilling description of how a solid round shot killed four men in a whack. John O. Casler’s Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade (1893)—which was termed by Dr. Robertson “the most famous memoir by a private soldier…in all of Confederate history”—relates Casler’s observation that in a battle Jackson would accept courier reports, write out a message or two, and hand them back without uttering a single word. From this habit, Casler concluded that General Jackson clearly kept his own counsel. It was Casler, in his memoir, who gave us the wellknown anecdote of how Jim, the general’s cook and camp servant, knew that whenever Jackson got up at night and prayed, he should immediately pack his haversack,

“cos den I knowed dere wuz a move on hand.” Along with Jackson, James Longstreet was another of Lee’s chief lieutenants. Pete has taken a black eye, I’m afraid, in the postwar writing of ex-Confederates as they constructed what we now call the Lost Cause legend. Particularly damaging was the contention that Longstreet obstructed Lee’s plans to win the battle of Gettysburg. Gaines Foster, in his Ghosts of the Confederacy (1987) imagines how the Virginia Lost Cause gang, so intent on writing in the Southern Historical Society Papers, and deifying Lee, entranced themselves into believing they could deny the shame of Confederate defeat. Dr. Foster likens the phenomenon to the “Ghost Dance” of the Plains Indians, who believed that white culture would disappear if the Indians only believed and danced. Thus Foster imagines Jubal Early, J. William Jones and other true believers, wearing their gray ghost shirts and clutching volumes of the S.H.S.P., formed a circle around a recumbent statue of Lee, dancing back and forth, chanting, on one foot, “overwhelmed by numbers,” and on the other, “betrayed by Longstreet,” waiting for an undefeated, resurrected Lee to rise and lead them to victory. (It’s a hilarious image, though Gaines has told me that some of his academic colleagues were not amused.) Jack Davis was in the St. Louis audience that day, and during my talk I thanked him for his leadership of the multi-volume series, The Image of War: 1861–1865 (1981), edited with Bell Wiley, my college mentor, as Senior Consulting Editor. Despite the abundance of picture books on the war—and I regret they are growing in abundance without much new scholarship on wartime illustrations and photography—The Image of War, I am happy to say, ranks with the great-granddaddy of its genre, Francis Trevelyan Miller’s Photographic History of the Civil War, published in 1911. I’m running out of space, so I’ll close this column by offering the brain teaser that I threw out to the audience at Bob Maher’s St. Louis meeting in ‘96. I offered six bottles of modestly-priced American beer for the first CWEA registrant who could answer this conundrum, which one sees in Mary Boykin Chesnut’s famous Diary from Dixie: “What is the difference between the Prince of Wales, an orphan, a bald-headed man and a gorilla? (No one won the beer.) Answers are on page 38.

Answers to Mrs. Chesnut’s conundrum: “Prince of Wales, an heir apparent. Orphan, ne’er a parent. Bald-headed man, no hair apparent. Gorilla has a hairy parent” (Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, p. 518).