John Esten Cooke and Confederate Defeat

JOHN ESTEN COOKE AND CONFEDERATE DEFEAT Steve Davis Southerners responded to Appomattox in a variety of ways. Some "unreconstructed rebels" fled the country rather than submit to military rule. In his diary fireater Edmund Ruffin repeated his hatred for the Yankee race, then blew out his brains. Less defiant Southerners yielded to defeat with varying degrees of animosity. Some scalawags even lent a hand to the new order. But eventually there arose among Southerners a determination to justify their past struggle. Whether this stemmed from a wish to defend their own actions, pay tribute to fallen heroes, or to insure for the Confederacy a proper place in history is not crucial. What is important is that Southerners set to work to vindicate the Confederate experience .1 Much of this burden naturally fell on professional writers and men of letters. Of this group John Esten Cooke stands foremost. This popular romantic novelist was highly esteemed in his time, and was probably the best paid Southern writer before 1870. Unfortunately , little interest in his work remains today. As Philip Van Doren Stem observes, only the most ardent student of American literature can derive satisfaction from Cooke's flowery Victorian melodramas.2 Even the author's best work, The Virginia Comedians, is long out of print, though perhaps undeservedly so. Still, stylistic errors and improbable plots cannot overshadow the charm of Cooke's sketches of his native state and its society. Cooke's work before the war represented Virginia as a natural garden, filled with chivalric gentlemen and beautiful young maidens . The author took pride in the men Virginia had given to the nation—Washington, Jefferson, Randolph, Marshall, Madison, Monroe . Because of his admiration for these Virginians, Cooke liked to write historical romances in which he wove his romantic adventures around historical figures. For example, in The Youth of Jefferson (1854), Cooke follows young Tom Jefferson, student at William and Mary, as he pays court to young ladies, some of whom 1 Thomas J. Pressly, Americans ¡nterpret Their Civil War (Princeton, 1962), 101103 ; Donald J. Sobol, Two Fhgs Flying (New York, Publishers, 1960), 16. 2 John Esten Cooke, Wearing of the Gray, ed. by Philip Van Doren Stem (Bloomington , 1959), xii. 66 never existed.3 By 1860, when he was thirty, Cooke had written seven major novels of this type plus other stories, articles, and reviews, many of which appeared in The Southern Literary Messenger . In the late fifties, when war seemed imminent, Cooke resolved to serve his state and joined a home guard unit, the Richmond Howitzers. After Fort Sumter, Virginia seceded and the Howitzers were organized into a battalion, with Cooke elected as sergeant. At Manassas he commanded a gun and thereafter received the rank of lieutenant. In the summer of 1862 he was commissioned captain and transferred to the staff of cavalry leader "Jeb" Stuart. As aide-de-camp, Cooke became well-acquainted with a number of high-ranking Confederate officers, particularly Stuart and Stonewall Jackson. Cooke filled diaries and notebooks with his firsthand observations of these figures and predicted, "If I get thro' this war I will have much to write of . . . if." This cautious optimism was well founded; Cooke served from Manassas to Appomattox without receiving a wound. Besides laying aside material for future novels, Cooke contributed articles during the war to Richmond papers. In some of these pieces the author chastised the government for its failure to develop a more aggressive strategy. Though his criticisms were subtle, they had unfortunate consequences. When Stuart recommended Cooke to be major on his staff, a measure which Lee personally approved, the government refused to authorize Cooke's promotion. The Secretary of War stated that Stuart's staff already possessed its quota of majors, but the probable reason was that Cooke's writings had displeased the administration (especially when they appeared in the Messenger, which persistently criticized President Davis). His failure to gain promotion grieved him, but Cooke never formally protested this slight. He seems never to have perceived that his writings probably cost him the promotion. Though his friends called him "Major," Cooke was still captain of artillery at the end of the war. Through the first years Cooke sincerely...