Blood Image: Turner Ashby in the Civil War and the Southern Mind

Preface

PREFACE T his is a book about the image of a Confederate cavalry leader. Necessarily it contains biography, although it is not wholly or primarily a biography; necessarily it contains military history, but it is not a military study. It approaches its subject as a living symbol, a vivid and powerful representation of what Confederates in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia saw as the purpose and meaning of their Civil War. Unlike many studies that emphasize Confederate myth making as a function of the Lost Cause, the book argues that the symbol’s emotional force was born of images and ideals current in southern culture before the outbreak of war. As the biographical sections illustrate, they were images and ideals that Turner Ashby himself strove to achieve and to maintain. Conventional wisdom interprets Ashby as a minor figure of the Civil War who died before Americans in his time knew how uncivilly brutal their war would become. But he is forgotten in hindsight only, and much of the contemporary emotion invested in Ashby was a redirection of the brutality that admirers felt and understood to be inherent in partisan, border warfare. At the time of his death in 1862, Ashby was one of the xii Preface most feared and admired fighting men of the war, North or South. Certainly there were other, greater figures, but some of these were men whose public reputations were comparatively unsullied by the blood of combat. A few (Robert E. Lee and P. G. T. Beauregard among them) were still being bludgeoned by newspaper ink. Fighting generals such as Ben McCulloch and Albert Sidney Johnston were already dead. J. E. B. Stuart, Ashby’s closest rival in life, would soon catapult past him in the pantheon of gray cavalry heroes thanks in large measure to his celebrated ride around the Union army a week after Ashby’s death. Even on that ride, claimed one of Stuart’s troopers in the Richmond Dispatch of June 17, 1862, were ‘‘many emulous of the fame which now enshrines the hallowed name of the lamented Ashby, and burn to avenge his untimely fall.’’ All of these generals have their biographies. Most of them have been studied as soldiers, with some biographers more or less proceeding from the assumption that their subjects were soldiers waiting for a war. I have tried to study Ashby as a southern man at war—particularly as an antebellum Virginian at war—rather than as a soldier. I have asked questions about what Ashby’s followers expected of him and what they wanted him to be, questions that may be considered social and cultural. Where they illustrate the development of his image or significance of the ideals, military engagements and events in Ashby’s military life are described in detail. But I have not tried to make a definitive account based upon military analysis. Biography gets a little more attention. There is more here on Ashby’s early life than in any of the five previous Ashby biographies. I do not pretend to be authoritative in part because the way leading in that direction is obstructed. Personal motives, emotions, and even events in Ashby ’s surviving letters are remarkably skeletal. If Ashby wrote more often and with more cogency than earlier accounts implied, he was also by nature a silent man. His public life before the war did not generate many newspaper notices or public documents. Other evidence is also limited, although I have relied on previously unused material on Ashby the antebellum vigilante leader and Ashby the merchant. That said, it remains my opinion that the lack of suitable, meaningful sources will always hinder any effort in traditional biography. Yet my approach is my choice. Ashby the image was just as important Preface xiii if not more important than Ashby the man. Some of the ideals associated with him and his image were broadly American, some broadly southern; some were particularly or especially Virginian, and some relied on the singular features of the Shenandoah Valley. All varied in appeal, especially by class. Ashby’s image also included several, sometimes conflicting ideals—silent gentle horseman and vengeful partisan chieftain foremost among them. I have attempted to show that the ideals were elastic enough to reconcile conflicting wartime images. With him and through him, the ideals continued to assert themselves in their antebellum form. They were vivid enough to motivate...