Tag: Civil War

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John Brown! Kansas.

Porte Crayon (David Hunter Strother), En route for Harper’s Ferry, 1859, wood engraving, Harper’s Weekly, Library of Congress.

The events that led up to the Civil War are a mess, which I guess is the way they should be, but their level of complication is greater than the level of my willingness to learn them. From the founding of the nation to the firing on Fort Sumner there’s all this complicated stuff that happened, dates, compromises, court decisions, slave revolts, expansions, and these then-famous people with now dimly remembered names like Taylor and Pierce and Webster and Calhoun and Clay. They made speeches and policy and enacted laws and whatnot, and all of what they did was overshadowed by the now inexplicable and then intransigent desire of Southerners to maintain a cruel and immoral institution. I have in the back of my mind the suspicion that notwithstanding the absence of any given incident, at the end of the day the War would have happened whatever came before, maybe sooner, maybe later, but the War was inevitable.

I’ve boiled the sequence of what happened down in my own pretty little head to a few things. It’s my litany, useful to me but simplified. In 1807, Congress, at the urging of President Jefferson, voted to ban the importation of new slaves. Congress, both North and South, voted for the ban. They believed that if they stopped African importation, slavery would collapse because it was economically unsustainable. Forty years later, that vote would have been impossible.

Samuel Morris, Eli Whitney, 1822, oil on canvas, Yale University Art Gallery.

Two things intervened that would have made that vote impossible. The same year as the ban, Eli Whitney received a patent for a cotton gin, which made industrial agricultural cotton production profitable in the Deep South, Land of Cotton, not forgotten. Industrial agricultural production of cotton meant that slavery not only wouldn’t collapse, but that it was economically desirable, both for the Deep South, producing cotton, and the upper South, producing slaves through natural increase and selling them down South, and in Northern and European mills, weaving cotton. It is not an accident that for Jim in Huckleberry Finn, the threat of being sold down-river to New Orleans is both real and terrifying.

The second intervening event again involved Mr. Whitney. In 1801, Whitney demonstrated the value of interchangeable parts in firearm production, and after his death in 1825 his family fire arms company produced muskets with interchangeable parts. Interchangeable parts helped spur the North’s conversion from agriculture and artisan production to factory industry. Neither idea, the gin or the parts, was exactly new with Whitney, but there you are. In North America he gets the credit, and because of cotton and factories the North and South went different ways.

A new map of the United States. Upon which are delineated its vast works of internal communication, routes across the continent &c, 1852, Philadelphia, Lippincott, Grambo & Co., Library of Congress.

At the same time the economic engines were changing there was westward expansion. It’s hard now to imagine us as anything other than 50 states with amber waves of grain from sea to shining sea, but when Napoleon pawned off Louisiana in 1804, Mississippi (1817) and Alabama (1819) weren’t yet states. Florida (1821) still belonged to the Spanish, or was it the English? In 1804 America the Beautiful was the original 13 Colonies, the Ohio Territory (1803), Kentucky (1791) and Tennessee (1796).

With the Louisiana Purchase things boomed. Texas was annexed in 1845 . The cession of Mexican lands after the Mexican-American War (which Northern progressives saw as a war of Southern aggression to expand slavery) added the Southwest, and treaties with England settled the northern boundary between the U.S. and Canada. Because of control of Congress, there was constant trauma over whether new territories would be slave or free.

Complicating the expansion there was the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Dred Scott held that regardless of where a black slave stood, North or South, state laws could not supersede the property rights of the slaveholder. The black man or woman was not a citizen but a slave, always, even in Ohio, even in Maine.

And there were the first battles, the first blood, in Kansas.

My father wasn’t a cussing man. At least around his family there was no profanity, no curses, but he did from time to time need an exclamation and his exclamation was usually John Brown! I suppose it was something he’d picked up in East Texas from his father, or his uncles, and we heard it so often that we never noticed it until my older sister married and her new husband made fun of it. It was fair game I guess, but still, it ruined John Brown!, and probably for that reason I never say it.

I guess because of my father’s mild expletive I always knew who John Brown was, or at least knew that he had led a raid on Harper’s Ferry to kick off the Civil War. I was fertile soil in college when I read Stephen Oates’ Brown biography, To Purge This Land with Blood. Still, it was a startling book. Brown was a violent zealot, the first modern terrorist. Brown was right, his opponents’ defense of slavery morally indefensible. Brown was charismatic, reasonably well educated, deeply religious, and a failure at most things he attempted. Oddly, he worked in a tannery with U.S. Grant’s father, and like Grant’s father for a time was a tanner. He farmed. He tried to broker wool. He was mad, or not, but certainly he was monomaniacally opposed to slavery. He believed in the equality of whites and blacks, and he believed that only blood could end slavery and bring about equality.

Photographs of John Brown, Wikimedia Commons.

He was a murderer in Kansas. He was a murderer in a good cause. He was a murderer.

One of the events that led to the War was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. It probably seemed a good idea at the time: Congress couldn’t agree on whether Kansas and Nebraska should be slave or free, so they took themselves off the hook by letting Kansans decide for themselves. It turned out it wasn’t a good idea: It was a really bad idea. For some, pro-slavery and abolitionists both, it became a matter of missionary zeal to go to Kansas, and that was how John Brown got there. He went to fight a war. The pro-slave side struck first, by sending pro-slave Ruffians–that was the shorthand for white Southern Thugs—across the border from Missouri to steal the local elections and pack the Kansas legislature. There was a resident pro-free state majority, but the pro-slave interlopers, with the support of President Franklin Pierce and his territorial governor, controlled the polls.

On May 21, 1856, the pro-slavery sheriff of Douglas County, Kansas, and his 100-strong pro-slavery posse raided Lawrence, Kansas, an anti-slavery stronghold founded and supported with New England abolitionist money. Only one person died (and him part of the posse and by accident), but Sheriff Jones’s posse burnt the Free State Hotel, trashed the newspapers, looted the town, and took three prisoners. On May 24 Captain Brown, Old Brown as he was known (he was 56 which on the frontier was ancient), led a band that included four of his sons against pro-slavery settlers along Pottawatomie Creek in eastern Kansas, not far from where Kansas City stands today. Brown’s party hacked five pro-slavery settlers to death. It was an execution, like something a radical jihadist would film for distribution via the internet. Brown did not participate in the hacking, he left that for his sons and the rest of the party, but he did shoot one settler through the forehead to make certain he was dead. The Pottawatomie Massacre was in retaliation for the raid on Lawrence. None of the murdered men had been on the Lawrence raid.

John Steuart Curry, Tragic Prelude, 1937, egg tempera and oil mural, Kansas State Capitol, Topeka, Kansas.

Lawrence would be raided once again in 1863 by Quantrill’s raiders, a quasi-military group of Confederate-sympathizing calvary. The Quantrill raid was The culmination of the Kansas guerrilla warfare that began with John Brown’s raid on Potawattomie Creek. You may recall that the hero of True Grit, Deputy Marshall Rooster Cogburn, rode with Quantrill, as did Jesse James. More than 180 civilians were murdered in the raid.

When I was thinking about John Brown and Kansas I went through the 1859 Harper’s Weeklies published immediately after the raid on Harper’s Ferry. Harper’s Weekly was the most widely circulated magazine of its day, and on its back page included amusing cartoons. It was so influential that it is largely responsible for the American adoration of Santa Claus and Christmas. Abolitionists called it Harper’s Weakly.

In an October issue, about two weeks after John Brown’s raid, I found a cartoon of a well-dressed man and woman seated across from each other at a table in a bright and draperied room. “I say, Peg,” says the man, “just give me two or three of your Eyelashes to finish off this Black Palmer; there’s a good Girl!” I hope Peg gave him the eyelashes, and I hope he traveled to the Catskills and caught brookies with that very Black Palmer. Even in the middle of it boys would be boys, and I hope he survived the War. I hope that six years later at the end of the horror he and Peg sat once again across that lovely table in that lovely room, and he tied Black Palmers and dreamed of Catskill streams.

Mary Orvis Marbury, Favorite Flies and Their Histories, Plate A, 1892, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Ma. Fly 2 is the Soldier Palmer, which is a red version of the Hackle Palmer, which is black. Ms. Marbury (who dedicated the book to her father, C.F.) says that “‘palmer’ has, from this, come to be applied to all bodies of artificial flies made to resemble the hairy caterpillar.” The referenced “this” is the wandering, the palmering or pilgriming, of the caterpillar.

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The Waw

General Jubilation T. Cornpone, from Li’l Abner, Paramount Studios, 1959.

Before we went to Vicksburg I listened to Jeff Shaara’s novelization of the Siege of Vicksburg, Chain of Thunder, because Vicksburg is a good place to think about the effect of the Civil War on the white South. The citizens of Vicksburg were besieged, starved, bombed. They lived in caves. They ate rats. From May 18 through July 4, 1863, the War was in their home, and if the War began for the defense of slavery it ended with the failure of that defense and other things besides: a deep and culturally inbred resentment of the invader, and conviction as to the superior virtues of the defeated. The misery of invasion still resonated in 1971 when Joan Baez’s cover of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down was at the top of the charts. The Band’s version is pretty good too.

And notwithstanding the modern world the resentment and conviction probably aren’t done yet either.

From The General, 1926, MGM. The General is the funniest movie ever made and is in the public domain because somebody didn’t bother renewing the copyright. Go figure.

From Twain’s Life on the Mississippi:

IN the North one hears the war mentioned, in social conversation, once a month; sometimes as often as once a week; but as a distinct subject for talk, it has long ago been relieved of duty. There are sufficient reasons for this. Given a dinner company of six gentlemen to-day, it can easily happen that four of them—and possibly five—were not in the field at all. So the chances are four to two, or five to one, that the war will at no time during the evening become the topic of conversation; and the chances are still greater that if it become the topic it will remain so but a little while. If you add six ladies to the company, you have added six people who saw so little of the dread realities of the war that they ran out of talk concerning them years ago, and now would soon weary of the war topic if you brought it up.

The case is very different in the South. There, every man you meet was in the war; and every lady you meet saw the war. The war is the great chief topic of conversation. The interest in it is vivid and constant; the interest in other topics is fleeting. Mention of the war will wake up a dull company and set their tongues going, when nearly any other topic would fail. In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere: they date from it. All day long you hear things ‘placed’ as having happened since the waw; or du’in’ the waw; or befo’ the waw; or right aftah the waw; or ’bout two yeahs or five yeahs or ten yeahs befo’ the waw or aftah the waw. It shows how intimately every individual was visited, in his own person, by that tremendous episode.

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, ch. 26, 1883, James R. Osgood & Co., Boston, Ma.

There’s a strange statue in AsiaTown in West Houston, a larger-than-life bronze of a South Vietnamese infantryman in full battle gear walking side by side with a bronze American G.I., also in full battle gear. It’s the Memorial to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. The statue is in a district where not long ago a Vietnamese city council member was defeated at least in part because he had accompanied a former mayor on a trade mission to Vietnam. He visited the Yankees. Sometimes it’s just hard to get over it. Ask the Scots or the Irish or any given Cuban in Miami. Go visit Napoleon’s Tomb. Visit Quebec. Not everyone’s a good loser.

Now mind, there is no defense of the Lost Cause, there’s no getting over the moral indefensibility of many of my ancestors going to war to defend slavery: to paraphrase Grant, pretty brave guys but man did their cause suck, and for black Americans it really sucked.

University of Alabama Students burn desegregation literature, 1956, Library of Congress.

Beginning in the 1950s and 60s, with desegregation and voting and civil rights, our insights into the causes and effects of the War changed, or should have changed, not just in the South but the North as well. Maybe they did for some, but its symbols also became the symbols for a new conflict, or at least a refocused conflict carried over from the old. Notwithstanding that it was during the centennial of the War, I’m not buying that in 1962 Dixiecrats in South Carolina for the first time raised the battle flag at the state capitol because they got hyped up about history. I do suspect that a television show starring a Dodge Charger named the General Lee with a battle flag on its roof was dreamed up in Hollywood as a live-action cartoon, was innocent if naive, and that if anyone should be offended it should be white Southerners, but there you are: there are no longer any frivolous uses of that flag, and there are certainly no innocent uses. I may miss General Jubilation T. Cornpone in the Sunday funnies, but you can’t go home again.

* * *

Meantime we’re packing for Mississippi, and Saturday we drove to New Braunfels where I caught a nice rainbow on a red and black zebra midge under a flashback pheasant tail under a tan worm under some weight under a bobber, and I caught it right at the top of a run, right where it was supposed to be. Plus notwithstanding all that hardware I only got tangled twice. On the way out of town we ate at Krause’s, which has reopened and constructed a great beer hall next to the old restaurant. At our shared table we met a couple from New Braunfels with a place for rent in Arroyo City, on the Laguna Madre. Kris loves fishing the Laguna Madre. Unlike Florida I can catch fish on the Laguna Madre. She was ready to move to Arroyo City.

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Mississippi

I read too much Faulkner too early, and I didn’t understand much of it. I had an excuse for reading it: Faulkner and I were both born on September 25, different years but it seemed like Kismet. Kismet maybe, but Kismet didn’t aid comprehension. Do you know how incomprehensible Henry Sutpen or Joe Christmas can be to a young man? To an old man?

I had this notion that Faulkner would help me understand the South and what it meant to be Southern. Faulkner taught me many things: how to spell ya’ll, that classy folk come from Virginia and failed folk slide off to Texas, and that well-placed Southern dialect sholy is fun, if only in my head. He taught me that if a white guy had black ancestors then all sorts of hijinx will ensue, and that folk, black and white and in-between, are going to die violently. Because blood, maybe, or maybe just cultural failure.

Carl Van Vechten, William Faulkner, 1954, Library of Congress.

I suspect you can’t be filled with a young man’s optimism and get much out of Faulkner, except maybe The Reivers (which oddly enough is his old man’s novel). Faulkner didn’t write about glories, he wrote about failures. Notwithstanding my expectations, Absolom, Absalom! wasn’t Gone with the Wind, Intruder in the Dust wasn’t To Kill a Mockingbird. He wrote about the failures of history, personal and social, old and new, and that’s not the sort of message a young man will understand. At least I didn’t.

I don’t remember Faulkner ever talking about fishing. Maybe Faulkner should have written about fishing. I would have understood not catching fish.

Mississippi State Flag, Museum of Mississippi History.

All that incomprehensible Faulkner gave me an early and perhaps strangely skewed focus on Mississippi. Other than my friend Byron and a couple of quick drive-throughs, I haven’t had a lot of personal contact with Mississippi except Faulkner, and Byron, an expat (once for money and once for love), always seemed equally entranced with and reticent about the place–and notwithstanding a strong literary inclination has refused to read Faulkner. I had at least one second great-grandfather who landed in antebellum Marshall County, Mississippi, near Memphis at the top of the state. He stayed there long enough to marry a second great-grandmother in 1845, apparently his cousin, and then the two slid off to Texas in time for the birth of my great grandfather in 1848. Their sojourn in Marshall County was pretty much a drive-through. They didn’t start in Mississippi and they didn’t stay long after they got there.

Immediately west of Marshall County the Mississippi Delta runs for 200 miles south from the Tennessee border along the east side of the Mississippi River, to Vicksburg. At its widest the Delta spreads east for 80 miles. It is an alluvial plain, and has the richest soil on earth. West of the river there’s the Arkansas Delta, culturally and geologically and economically similar to the Mississippi Delta, but nobody talks much about Arkansas. It’s Mississippi that grabs the imagination.

Delta wealth was built on slave labor growing cotton. Cotton is still rich enough, but agriculture is mechanized, and doesn’t require the labor force that in the 19th century worked the land. Of the Delta counties 42 are considered distressed, only four are not. Why is Arkansas glad there’s a Mississippi? Because Arkansas isn’t last on every list.

Robert Johnson, c. 1935, Wikipedia.

Mississippi isn’t old, which is another thing I didn’t understand in Faulkner. Antebellum Mississippi was still the Wild West, and Faulkner knew it. In the 1850 census there were 606,526 people, less my second great grandparents who had GTT, having boomed from a population of 7600 in 1800. By 1900, the population was 1.797 million, 2.967 million in 2018. Statewide the population is 59.1 percent white, 37 percent black. About one-third of the Mississippi African American population lives in the Delta, where the African American population is 46 percent of the total. Some Delta counties are 85 percent African American. On the other side of the state, in Alcorn County, the population is 87 percent white. It’s not important, except that it highlights what is often not obvious about Mississippi: Mississippi isn’t one thing.

Jimmie Rodgers, 1935, Wikipedia.

But it is some things: it is the poorest state in the Union, between whites and blacks the most racially complex and more often than not the most tragic, the place where income, education, health care, poverty, life expectancy, teenage pregnancy, STDs, and history walk extreme racial and class divides. Within the state there’s a division between east and west, with the coast thrown in for good measure. A hundred years ago the Mississippi east was populist and progressive, and the Mississippi west was Dixiecrat planters controlling the votes of African Americans. Now things are flipped. In the 2016 presidential election Mississippi voted 57.86 percent for President Trump, but unlike much of the rest of the nation the split wasn’t urban/rural, the split was Delta and southwestern counties versus most of everybody else, black versus white. This map lays it out:

2016 Mississippi election map, stolen from Wikipedia. Forgive me.

Mississippi is also the source of some of our best good things. It’s the place of the Blues, B.B. King, Jimmie Rodgers, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Robert Johnson. It’s the place of a good half-dozen of our finest writers, past and present, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, Walker Percy, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, and Jesmyn Ward, all are from Mississippi. There are whole hosts of novelists like John Grisham and Greg Iles who write pretty good if mostly forgettable novels. It can be argued that as the principal home of the blues it’s the principal home of rock-and-roll. It is certainly the home of Elvis (and directly across the River from Natchez in Louisiana Jerry Lee Lewis). All of this in one of the least literate states in the nation. Where the heck did all that come from?

Mississippi also gave us Jefferson Davis, the post-Reconstruction Mississippi Plan, 589 lynchings (539 of blacks–the most in the South), Emmett Till, and more than its fair share of the violence of the Civil Rights Movement.

We go to Ocean Springs in March to fish the salt marshes with Richard Schmidt. Ocean Springs is apparently the most charming city on that odd geographic panhandle that makes up the Mississippi Coast, Biloxi having been taken over by casinos, and it’s about an hour east of New Orleans. It is also the site of the 1699 French landing in Mississippi/Louisiana by Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d’Iberville. Who doesn’t like to say Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d’Iberville? The French accomplished many things in Louisiana, including the decimation of the Native American population by disease and warfare, the eradication of the Natchez Indians, and the introduction of African slavery. They didn’t accomplish permanent French settlement, losing out to the English who lost out to the Spanish who lost out to the new Americans, though the French did found Biloxi and Natchez. And New Orleans.

Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville. National Library and Archives of Quebec.

On pretty much a whim over the long Martin Luther King holiday we drove to Mississippi and visited Natchez, Vicksburg, and Jackson. Oddly, Natchez is closer to Houston than my hometown in Texas, but driving six hours west from Houston through Fort Worth and Wichita Falls is a decidedly different experience from driving through Louisiana and Mississippi. Natchez is full of sometimes pretty and sometimes magnificent Antebellum homes turned into bed and breakfasts, but as Byron had pointed out to me, nobody wants to stay in the slave quarters. We didn’t fish–it was cold, and there was flooding because of winter rains. At the Vicksburg National Battlefield, I realized that my Union great-great grandfather from Missouri via Eastern Tennessee was probably shooting at one or more of my Confederate great-great grandfathers. I could have ended right there on that battlefield more than 90 years before I got started.

At a popular restaurant in Vicksburg black and white Saturday night diners ate under decidedly Lost Cause paintings of the Siege. On the flip side, a popular country-clubby restaurant in Jackson populated by black and white churchgoers, Char, was decorated with old photos. Prominent in the entry of the place was a copy of a 60s photo of Medgar Evers. As I recall I had the catfish, or maybe the fried chicken. I definitely had the fried green tomatoes. I also kept wondering if I’d misidentified the portrait photo of Medgar Evers. It is a strange place, Mississippi, and the past there really is never dead. But black and white diners are eating happily at Sunday brunch under a photo of Medgar Evers. I reckon things are changing.

Maybe someday soon I’ll make my pilgrimage to Oxford and finally understand Faulkner.

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Smallmouth. South Fork Shenandoah River, May 14, 2018.

Before Monday I had caught two smallmouth in the Devil’s River in South Texas.  Now I don’t know how many smallmouth I’ve caught. I’ve caught a lot of smallmouth.

I booked C.T. Campbell through Murray’s Flyshop in Edinburg, Virginia.  C.T. has his own guide service, Page Valley Fly Fishing, but I booked through Murray’s where C.T. contracts.  Most important, C.T. has a McKenzie boat. I’ve fished out of rafts before and I will fish out of rafts again, but for comfort give me a drift boat any day.

The Shenandoah is an A-list river, appearing in the first volume of Chris Santella’s Fifty Places to Fly Fish Before You Die. Harry Murray, of Murray’s Flyshop, suggested the river to Santella, but the author seems oddly apologetic that the river is full of smallmouth not trout. As someone who fishes trout relatively rarely, that just didn’t signify.  In Virginia I already knew I wanted to fish either the James or the Shenandoah River.  I thought about the James because what river is more important in America than the James? Ok, the Mississippi, but besides that.  I thought about the Shenandoah because I’ve been humming that tune since the 1965 Jimmy Stewart movie. I thought about wading the North Fork without a guide, but went with the South Fork of the Shenandoah when C.T. had an opening.

The Shenandoah Valley looks like the Shenandoah Valley is supposed to look: a little wild, a lot lovely. It seems a gentler wildness than the American west, but certainly wild enough. C.T. has the perfect background and demeanor for a river guide.  He grew up fishing in Western Virginia. He went to college there. He spent 34 years working for the National Park Service in Shenandoah National Park.  If you mention Stonewall Jackson, C.T.  doesn’t look at you like you’re an idiot.  He tells you a story about Stonewall Jackson’s troop movements. He told us the number of black bears per square mile through the Valley.  He told us about the tree kills from the eastern ash bark beetle and the hemlock wooly adelgild. He talked birds and birds and birds with Kris. We stopped a long while to watch a bald eagle guarding its nest.

You see that big blob in the middle of that terrible photo? That’s an eagle’s nest and it’s huge.  The blurry thing with the white head above it is the eagle. Kris dragged her 600mm lens to Virginia, but she didn’t have it with her in the boat.

Kris tells me by the way that when the bald eagle was named, “bald” meant “white,” not “hairless.”

We put in at Alma and floated seven miles downriver to Whitehouse Landing. I think I got that right. C.T. told us that during Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah campaign the bridges were burned at both Alma and Whitehouse Landing, which means that that there had been bridges where we put in and took out since before 1862. There was still traffic on the bridges, but we saw nobody on the rivers until the last landing.

We talked about our kids.  We talked about Patagonia versus Simms, and how the old Simms sandals made by Keen were great. We talked about the geography of Virginia.  Kris and I fished and C.T. rowed and told us where to cast.  We caught smallmouth,  then we caught more smallmouth, then we caught some smallmouth. The largest was about a pound, but who cares? We caught a lot of smallmouth.

C.T. said it was too early for poppers, and that everything  now was white streamers. We fished white Shenk’s streamers from Murray’s on 6 weights with floating lines and 2X 9’ leaders; they started as 9’ anyway. Over time I’d tied in bits and pieces of tippet until everything except the 2X was approximate.  Later in the morning I switched to a white dragon tail I’d tied up for largemouth. The smallmouth liked it, but there were lots of short takes. We talked about whether a stinger hook would work, but I’d read it ruined the action.  I’ve ordered some mini dragon tails, but I suspect they’re the regular size with a couple of inches of the fat end cut off. I’ll tie up some and send them along to C.T.

Google Earth

* * *

Late in the day we heard thunder. I shuttled C.T. back to his truck and Kris stayed with the boat–it was supposed to be easy duty.  While we were driving though the heavens opened.  Kris got soaked.  I got soaked in the short run from the car to where Kris stood drenched with the boat, but I forebore mentioning that terrible inconvenience to Kris. C.T. insisted he didn’t need help loading the boat in the rain and the wind and the lightning, and we gladly took him at his word, left him wrestling the boat, and fled for West Virginia. We also left a sweater and vest in his truck, which was a future pain for him, but things were in a bit of disarray. I also had to drive with wet socks and cold feet. I didn’t mention that to Kris either.

* * *

On Thursday, three days later and after West Virginia, it was still raining hard in Virginia. The mountain rivers may have been ok but we canceled our trip for Shenandoah Valley trout with Mossy Creek Outfitters.  We spent the night at Silver Lake Bed & Breakfast, near Harrisonburg, and finally got to eat breakfast at a bed and breakfast. We never do. We’re usually long gone before breakfast is served.

We drove Thursday to Harper’s Ferry National Historical Park, but I’ll save John Brown for Kansas.  The Shenandoah joins the Potomac at Harper’s Ferry, and the two rivers were running high and muddy. On Saturday while I’m writing this it’s still raining, and watching the Potomac out the window of our room in the Watergate Hotel there’s no more fishing gonna happen.

* * *

I’m fascinated by Stonewall Jackson, and in the Shenandoah Valley Jackson is everywhere. There’s a statue of a mounted Stonewall installed by the State of Virginia in the prime position on the First Bull Run Battlefield, superhero muscles bulging, facing down the Union artillery.  It should be moved to the entrance of the Shenandoah.

In Winchester there is the Stonewall Jackson Headquarters Museum. The Stonewall Jackson Highway runs through Front Royal. In Harrisonburg there was the Stonewall Jackson Inn, now closed but much loved, at least on the internet. In Monterey there was a Stonewall Jackson General Store.  Lexington, where Jackson taught at the Virginia Military Institute, is all Stonewall all the time, including a Stonewall Jackson Hotel.

Jackson was a nutcase: a hypochondriac, ruthless to his own men and the Union forces, obsessed with defeating the enemy, and madly religious. If Lee fought for the South out of misplaced loyalty, and others because of belief in the rightness of the cause, Jackson fought for the Confederacy because he believed God ordained it. He was an old school Presbyterian Calvinist, if such a thing could be anything but old school.

He also could not remain awake in church: he would sleep through sermons sitting rigidly upright. I’ve tried to emulate that in my own life, both at church and the opera. He sucked on lemons constantly, believed the blood pooled on the left side of his body (requiring him to hold his left arm in the air), and he would not or could not communicate anything of his plans to his subordinates. At VMI, he wrote out his lectures and read them aloud in a dull monotone.  If interrupted, he would begin again from the beginning.  He was hated as a teacher. He wasn’t exactly popular with his subordinates as a general. There are good arguments that he had Apsberger’s syndrome.

“Chancellorsville” Portrait, taken April 26, 1863. Library of Congress.

His 1862 Shenandoah campaign was brilliant, defeating the Union forces by superior knowledge of the terrain, by ruthlessly driving his troops, and by battle aggression.  It probably didn’t hurt that he had no empathy for others.

”Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees.” Stonewall Jackson memorial window, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, Roanoke, Virginia.