Lee and His Generals: Essays in Honor of T. Harry Williams

Jubal Early: Confederate in the Attic

Jubal Early: Confederate in the Attic Thomas E. Schott Ever since the 1870s, when an utterly unreconstructed Jubal A. Early was rendering far better service to the Confederate States than he ever did in a major general’s uniform, his grizzled, bearded countenance has been the face of the Lost Cause. An interconnected bundle of partisan interpretations of the American Civil War that virtually exonerated the Southern states from any part in its origins and the Confederate army from any part in losing it, the Lost Cause survives today largely as an echo of its earlier days. And Early? He is but a barely visible shadow of what he once was. He was not an easy man to like. “Hail, fellow, well met” hardly describes Jubal Anderson Early. He himself admitted, “I was never what is called a popular man.” It’s not difficult to understand why. Of all the Confederacy’s high-ranking generals, Early was one of the most disliked. He is habitually described as being dogmatic and opinionated about everything, constantly carping in a “a piping treble” voice, and as having a sour, irritable disposition. And a biting, sarcastic tongue, which he used to lash both his troops and his enemies, of which he had many. One of his staff officers described him as having a “grim” air and with subordinates, “abrupt, rough, peremptory, and formidable .” As General John B. Gordon delicately put it, Early had “a pungent style of commenting on things he did not like,” which for one of the most profane officers in the Confederate high command is almost complimentary. Old age did not soften him; four years before his death at age seventy-seven, U.S. Army Major General George Crook described the feeble old man as still “bitter and violent as an adder.”1 To these lovable traits, Early added an arresting physical appearance and pronounced eccentricity. Rheumatism he contracted as a young man in Mexico messed up his back; he walked severely stooped the rest of his life. Prematurely gray, he always looked older than he was. His utter indifference to his Thomas E. Schott 230 appearance produced gems of description from witnesses. “His face with the whiskers he always wore,” wrote a Confederate soldier, “looked like a malignant and very hairy spider. . . . On his head he wore the queerest imaginable old gray felt hat, almost like one of the hats a clown wears in a circus, with a single feather, like the tail feather of a rooster stuck in it.” (After the war, Early wore nothing but Confederate gray suits—“I never go back on my colors ,” he said—and gold cuff buttons with the Confederate flag enameled on them.) In a country saturated with religion, Early was decidedly irreligious. In the midst of Victorian sexual mores, Early never married but lived openly for almost twenty years with a woman in his hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia , and had four children by her.2 But for all this, the general was not without compensating virtues. No one doubted his physical courage—he was “one of the coolest and most imperturbable of men under fire,” said Gordon—or his loyalty. Self-reliant and intelligent, he had amazing energy and a prodigious capacity for work. He was also doggedly motivated. During the war, Lee, who called Early “my bad old man,” had great confidence in him and relied on him heavily in difficult and critical positions. People who knew Early well testified to his great generosity to innumerable individuals and organizations, even churches, as well as to his wit and finely developed sense of humor.3 One searches in vain for some traumatic event in Early’s childhood or youth to illuminate his “exclusive and repellent” characteristics in maturity. His biographer sees them as products of “his extreme vulnerability . . . his overdeveloped regard for what other people thought of him,” a trait he inwardly and fiercely denied. The emotional energy it required to do this obscured his softer side and produced a “profound pessimism” that “robbed his life of any substantial enjoyment other than his love for his family.”4 Certainly there was nothing in his childhood or youth that could have predicted this. He was born into privilege, the second son of ten children, on November 3, 1816, in Franklin County, Virginia. Not only was his father a successful large planter, but Early was closely related to some of the biggest, most prosperous slaveholders in the state. So his youthful years were blessed...