"If you're interested, there's a book about one of the murders," she said and reached
below the counter. She rooted for a moment in a box and brought out a paperback called
Eight Bullets, which she passed to me for examination. It was about two hikers who were
shot in Pennsylvania in 1988. "We don't keep it out because, you know, it's kind of
upsetting, especially now," she said apologetically.
I bought it, and as she handed me my change I mentioned to her the thought that if
the women in Shenandoah had survived they would be passing through about now.
"Yeah," she said, "I'd thought about that."
It was drizzling when I stepped back outside. I went up to Schoolhouse Ridge to have
a look at the battlefield. It was a large, parklike hilltop with a wandering path lined at
intervals with information boards describing charges and last-ditch stands and other
confused, noisy action. The battle for Harpers Ferry was the finest moment for Stonewall
Jackson (he who had last come to town to hang John Brown) because it was here,
through some deft maneuvering and a bit of luck, that he managed to capture 12,500
Union troops, more American soldiers than would be captured in a single action until
Bataan and Corregidor in World War II.
Now Stonewall Jackson is a man worth taking an interest in. Few people in history have
achieved greater fame in a shorter period with less useful activity in the brainbox than
Gen. Thomas J. Jackson. His idiosyncrasies were legendary. He was hopelessly, but
inventively, hypochondriacal. One of his more engaging physiological beliefs was that one
arm was bigger than the other, and in consequence he always walked and rode with that
arm raised, so that his blood would drain into his body. He was a champion sleeper. More
than once he fell asleep at the dinner table with food in his mouth. At the Battle of White
Oak Swamp, his lieutenants found it all but impossible to rouse him and lifted him,
insensible, on to his horse, where he continued to slumber while shells exploded around
him. He took obsessive zeal in recording captured goods and would defend them at all
costs. His list of materiel liberated from the Union Army during the 1862 Shenandoah
campaign included "six handkerchiefs, two and three quarter dozen neckties, and one
bottle of red ink." He drove his superiors and fellow officers to fury, partly by repeatedly
disobeying instructions and partly by his paranoid habit of refusing to divulge his
strategies, such as they were, to anyone. One officer under his command was ordered to
withdraw from the town of Gordonsville, where he was on the brink of a signal victory,
and march on the double to Staunton. Arriving in Staunton, he found fresh orders to go at
once to Mount Crawford. There he was told to return to Gordonsville.
It was largely because of his habit of marching troops all over the Shenandoah Valley
in an illogical and inexplicable fashion that Jackson earned a reputation among bewildered
enemy officers for wiliness. His ineradicable fame rests almost entirely on the fact that he
had a couple of small but inspiring victories when elsewhere Southern troops were being
slaughtered and routed and by dint of having the best nickname any soldier has ever
enjoyed. He was unquestionably brave, but in fact it is altogether possible that he was
given that nickname not for gallantry and daring but for standing inert, like a stone wall,
when a charge was called for. Gen. Barnard Bee, who gave him the name at the First
Battle of Manassas, was killed before the day was out, so the matter will remain forever
unresolvable.
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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