Photo of the Day: Minute Man at Twilight, Lexington MA

I took this photo in October 2008, while staying just outside Boston. The afternoon light was waning fast when I came to the town green at Lexington, but I wanted to maximize my photos, as I wasn’t sure how many more opportunities I would have at this point in my trip to catch this sight.

Naturally, I would have preferred to have shot this when light was more abundant so the facial features would be more apparent. But in another sense, I like it as is. The essence of the Minute Man, after all, was vigilance, at all hours of the day or night.

In fact, twilight and beyond can be when dangers to liberty can most readily occur, when they are least visibility and when concentration is most relaxed.

This Minute Man statue stands at the intersection of Bedford Street and Massachusetts Avenue. It is commonly called the “Lexington Minute Man” statue to distinguish it from the other one by Daniel Chester French in nearby Concord—featuring on its base a stanza from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” commemorating “the spot where the embattled farmer stood.”

The Lexington Minute Man was created by the English-born American sculptor Henry Hudson Kitson.

Massachusetts Travel Journal—Day Two (Minute Man National Park and Concord)

Breathless traveling from one end of this blustery, gray day to the other for me. After being fortified for the day by a great breakfast at my Lexington B&B, I headed toward Minute Man National Historical Park. This was what I had wanted to see the most yesterday anyway, and I felt as if I hadn’t even scratched the surface of this subject. I didn’t realize how right I was.

But first, a word of caution. For any prospective historical travelers reading this, make sure you understand that, if you hope to see certain sites associated with literary figures here, you do so before the end of October. Both the Ralph Waldo Emerson House and The Wayside—an establishment associated with three different Concord literary figures (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Harriet Lothrop/Margaret Sidney)—were closed for the season.

At some point, maybe later in the year, I’ll write about the two literary homes I did get to see—Orchard House, the home of the Alcott family for 20 years, and Hawthorne’s Old Manse. But for now, I’m going to concentrate on the sites associated with the Battles of Lexington and Concord that occurred on April 19, 1775.

Minute Man Park sprawls across several towns—Lexington, Lincoln (where the Visitors Center is located), and Concord. It’s fitting because, as Longfellow’s poem about Paul Revere’s ride indicates, the alarm was spread “to every Middlesex village and farm.”

Nowadays, historians decry Longfellow for taking poetic license. (One instance was “One if by land, two if by sea”—the signal was not meant for Revere, but was devised by him for others.) But when it comes to myth, everybody’s gotten into the act, from both sides of the historical spectrum. From the far right, the Militia Movement made its impact felt with the ghastly Oklahoma City bombing; from the far left, Michael Moore diminished any effectiveness he might have made in his case against George W. Bush by calling Iraqi insurgents/terrorists “the Revolution, the Minutemen.”

But visiting the park made me aware that there are two other ways that the events of Lexington and Concord can speak to us. One is the issue of intelligence gathering and dissemination; the other, how news is reported of atrocities.

If there’s one thing that the last decade has demonstrated to Americans, it’s the extreme inadequacy of our intelligence system. At the dawn of the American Revolution, the British and Americans struggled to set up their own networks, with varying degrees of success.

British General Thomas Gage sought to make use of several relatives of his American-born wife, Margaret, as well as a source far more insidious because he was so highly placed: Dr. Benjamin Church, a member of the patriot inner circle. After all that effort, however, everything came to naught. As Lt. Frederick MacKenzie of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers noted afterward: “The fact is, General Gage…had no conception the Rebels would oppose the King’s troops in the manner that they did.”

(Incidentally, MacKenzie is a fascinating study in his own right. The son of a Dublin merchant, he had received his first commission 20 years before. He drew the only contemporaneous map of the day’s events, and the diary he assiduously kept has likewise served historians trying to make sense of this chaotic day.)

One colonist who fared far better than Gage in creating an intelligence system was Dr. Joseph Warren. What a loss when this patriot was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill. In the period leading up to the war, he had been one of the most intelligent, energetic and resourceful members of the Committees of Correspondence. He showed his talents anew in the 48 hours before that fateful day of April 19, 1775.

From an informer, Warren got wind that Gage was planning a raid on the rebel supplies in Concord. He immediately made plans to alert the two leading radicals, Samuel Adams and John Hancock. He sent William Dawes on one long, primarily land-based route, going through Brookline and Roxbury—but, because that route involved so much danger, he dispatched a second messenger, Paul Revere, going by boat until he mounted a waiting horse.

Both Dawes and Revere made it to Lexington, but it took a third rider—yet another surgeon, Samuel Prescott—to make it to Concord. Ten redcoats came upon the trio, around 1:30 am. Dawes wheeled around and got back to Lexington; Revere was detained by the British before being released without his horse; Prescott—who had been out courting a lady when he bumped into Revere and agreed to help out—got the news to the colonists in Concord.)

And now, about the atrocity stories.

Whoever fires the first shot in a war usually gets the onus for whatever happens next. (That’s why Abraham Lincoln was so careful to maneuver the South into firing the first shot at Fort Sumter.) Warren wanted to make sure that the news spread instantly about the British firing first.

The trouble was that at Lexington, people are still not sure who fired first. At North Bridge in Concord, at least one jumpy British soldier let loose with his rifle, against express orders not to shoot. Then all hell broke loose.

To spread news of the atrocities, Dr. Warren made sure riders were spreading the word as far as New York and Boston within 48 hours of the event, and that his version of the events (the British fired first, without provocation, in both instances) reached London on a fast ship, the Quero, by May 29—two weeks before General Gage’s account reached England.

This Day in Civil War History (Stonewall Jackson Dies)

May 10, 1863—Eight days after being wounded at twilight at the Battle of Chancellorsville and having an arm amputated in an effort to save his life, Confederate General Stonewall Jackson died in mid-afternoon, attended by his friend, surgeon Hunter McGuire. 

In his last few hours, his mind began to wander, until he finally smiled and said, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”

After lying in state in Richmond, Jackson’s casket was brought by canal back to Lexington, Va., the college town where he had lived and taught for nearly a decade before joining the rebel cause.

There, the professor once nicknamed “Tom Fool” for his eccentricities was laid out overnight in his old Virginia Military Institute (VMI) lecture room, which had not been used from the day he rode off to war.

As they laid to rest the fallen soldier in Oak Grove Cemetery, Lexington recalled how Jackson had marched his army 25 miles, across river or mountain, falling on the enemy’s flanks before nightfall, in the Shenandoah campaign the prior year; how in the same campaign he beat four different Union leaders, all with forces that outnumbered his; how his sleepy eyes filled with intensity just before an attack, earning him the nickname “Old Blue Light”; and how, awakened in the midst of a war council with Lee and his lieutenants and asked what to do about the besieging Union Army, answered: “Why, drive them into the river, of course.” 

People argued, then and later, about who nicknamed him “Stonewall” at the first Battle of Manassas, but all remarked on the irony that this most offensive-minded general became famous because of a defensive stand there.

I dealt briefly with Jackson in my post on the Battle of Chancellorsville, but I thought it would be good to revisit him today, only this time focusing on his life—and especially the personality that sometimes gets lost in his extraordinary military exploits.

Lexington, Va.: “Stonewall Country”

The best fix on this personality, I think, is to visit Lexington, as I did nearly a decade ago—or, as I came to think of it after seeing a local sign on Main Street, “Stonewall Country.” 

After a few seconds, I realized that the sign referred to a residential realty firm, but in a symbolic sense this region belongs heart and soul to Thomas Jonathan Jackson.

Lexington gave its sympathies to the two greatest Confederate heroes, both of whom made their marks at local colleges and are buried within less than a mile of each other here: Robert E. Lee, who after the war headed Washington University (later renamed Washington and Lee University in his honor) and Stonewall Jackson.

More than any other town, Lexington can claim Jackson legitimately as its own. In a real sense, it was the setting of his formative years.

So frustrated with the peacetime U.S. army that he quit, Jackson came here at loose ends in 1851, hoping for a new career as a military instructor. 

He was a spiritual seeker with no solid core of faith; a bachelor without a wife, children, or even parents since the age of seven; an ordinary young man with few strong political convictions.

By the time he rode off from Lexington in 1861, Jackson had absorbed centuries of military tactics and taught them to unformed cadets; developed an almost mystical attachment to the Presbyterian Church; lost a wife and child, only to start another family; and cast his lot with a new young republic, upholding slavery and ready to overthrow the Union he had sworn to defend as a cadet years earlier.

Accompanying this post is a photo that I took off the Web of Jackson statue by Moses Ezekiel (VMI 1866, a corporal who guarded his corpse before its burial), which stands sentinel before Jackson Arch. 

It captures the general at Chancellorsville—a quietly confident master of war about to announce words that still echo proudly down the generations in the school where he taught: “The Institute will be heard from today." 

It was a far cry from the campus instructor who drove his restless young students to distraction (and frequent laughter) with his emphasis on memorization and recitation, his inflexible stare, his monotone, and his clumsiness in wielding scientific instruments.

VMI has a number of items related to Jackson in its museum inside Jackson Memorial Hall, but I thought, for space reasons, that I’d concentrate on the house where he lived not far from the campus.

Before the Legend, an Eccentric Bourgeois

VMI may illustrate Jackson’s tendencies as a military man and educator, but the Stonewall Jackson House shows his tendencies as an aspiring bourgeois. The Stonewall Jackson Foundation has restored the home on 8 East Washington Street back to how it looked in the general’s time: a modest but comfortable Victorian American home, the only home he ever owned.

Thomas and Mary Anna Jackson (daughter of a college president, just like his first wife, who died during childbirth) bought the brick-and-stone structure for $3,000. Ranging from $1,200 to $1,350 a year in his time at VMI, his salary could be stretched, if they economized, enough to accommodate Jackson’s middle-class aspirations.

Jackson started with outside business interests—a one-third interest in a local tannery, as well as a 20-acre farm on the outskirts of town. In his backyard, after his artillery class had ended for the afternoon, Jackson tended to his vegetable garden. 

Today, the garden is filled with a profusion of plants: potatoes, early scarlet horn carrots, salsify, and silesia lettuce (the only vegetable variety specifically mentioned in Jackson’s surviving letters).

Part of the reason for Jackson’s interest in agriculture related to his bouts of poor health. Jackson scholars and enthusiasts still debate where his actual ailments left off and where his hypochondria began. 

Nevertheless, it is true, as his sister-in-law Margaret Junkin Preston noted, that he “studied his physical nature with a physician’s scrutiny,” and became a creature of habit as a result.

His condition, Jackson felt, might be alleviated if he sat up ramrod straight, without his spine touching the back of a chair, or if he ate a wide assortment of fruits and vegetables he grew for himself and his family.

Acquaintances would also be astonished when, in the middle of a conversation, he would raise his arm and keep it aloft for several minutes. “One of my legs is bigger than the other—and so is this arm,” he once informed a friend. “I raise my arm so the blood will run back in my body and lighten its load. It’s a cure I’ve discovered. Everything has a cure.”

The strict physical and mental regimen that Jackson developed to combat these and other ills can be seen in several objects in the house. 

Upstairs is a walking stick, made of Brussels sprouts for durability, that Jackson used every morning on a brisk three-or-four mile walk, taken in all kinds of weather. Just down the hallway are two steamer trunks—reminders of the frequent trips that Thomas and Mary Anna took to spas in the North and South.

Most important is Jackson’s study. Its centerpiece is a chair facing a wall. Here he sat in the morning, reading books in preparation for a lecture, only to review the work again in the evening. 

Only this time, because he believed artificial light damaged his eyes, he memorized the lessons without a book for an hour, facing the wall with eyes closed, leaving strict instructions with his wife not to disturb him during this time.

Jackson’s students correctly surmised that he was highly eccentric. But his house hinted at how he overcame this – through relentless application of will. A saying copied down in his personal motto became his byword: “You may be whatever you resolve to be.”

The Jackson family’s slaves lived upstairs in their house. As with so much else about the “peculiar institution,” the professor’s relationship with African-Americans was close but contradictory.

Jackson astonished more than a few fellow Lexington whites by tipping his hat to blacks on the street. The most slaves he ever owned were six, and in his short life he bought the freedom of two of these. 

In order to teach them the Bible, he taught them how to read—a crime at this time in Virginia, which had enacted this punitive legislation after the 1831 slave revolt led by the literate preacher Nat Turner. 

Prayer sessions drew so many slaves that Jackson eventually set up a Sunday school run out of the Lexington Presbyterian Church, which he funded even while away at war.

You may find yourself anywhere else in the South—or, for that matter, elsewhere in Lexington, at VMI or the cemetery where Jackson is buried—and understand how large the general looms in the “Lost Cause” mythology of the South. 

But if you want a sense of him as the eccentric, contradictory personality behind the legend and genius of war, there’s no better place to go than the Stonewall Jackson House.