Unapologetic Confederate
Is Cooke’s Wearing a memoir, a history, or a romantic novel? Well,
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it’s a little of each. It’s also one of the most elegant books written by a Confederate about the war.
Cooke was the consummate Virginian. Born at Winchester in 1830, he was nine when his father, a lawyer, moved his large family to Richmond. There John Esten (pron. EEstin) received good early schooling, but his father’s limited finances kept him from entering the University. He read law under his father’s tutelage, and in 1851 joined the practice of “John R. Cooke & Jno. Esten Cooke.”
The younger Cooke’s real interest, however, was writing, in which he showed early talent. He published his first poem at eighteen. A novel about French chivalry, written in 1847, was later serialized in the Southern Literary Messenger, Richmond’s esteemed magazine. Publication of other novels by Harper & Brothers in New York, largely historical romances set in Virginia, allowed Cooke to give up law practice for literature. By the time of the war, he enjoyed prestige as one of the South’s leading writers.
Cooke had joined the Richmond Howitzers even before John Brown’s raid. After Sumter he became sergeant in the Howitzers, and commanded a gun at Manassas. Promoted to captain, he joined the staff of Jeb Stuart, to whom he was related by marriage.
Service in Lee’s army gave Cooke the war experiences he began to soon write about. In early 1863 a series of articles, entitled “Outlines from the Outpost,” began appearing in Richmond’s Southern Illustrated News. One of these, “Stonewall Jackson, and the Old Stonewall Brigade,” demonstrates Cooke’s qualities as Southern author.
• Headmired Jackson. Stonewall was “the military leader of masterly genius.”
• Confederates were superheroes. “They marched, and fought, and triumphed, like war machines, which felt no need of rest, or food, or sleep.”
• Yankees were incompetent on the battlefield, especially against Stonewall. They brought into battle their best troops, “only to have them put to rout. They advanced with the most magnificent trains of supplies, only to have them captured. They brought to the contest new uniforms – only to have them covered with the mud and opprobrium of defeat and disaster.”
• The Confederate cause was noble. “The flag of the Republic must be borne aloft in triumph tho’ the dearest and most precious blood of the Southern land be poured forth like water.”
You get the idea. Cooke was an unapologetic Confederate, serving to the very end (and never wounded). After General Stuart’s death at Yellow Tavern, he was assigned to Brig. Gen. William N. Pendleton’s staff as inspector-general of horse artillery He surrendered in this capacity at Appomattox. He buried his silver spurs there rather than give them over to the Yankees.
Penniless at the end of the war, Cooke had to resume writing quickly. That meant for New York publishers, which in turn meant that he had to soften his tone when he wrote about his former enemies. He compiled his “Outlines” articles, plus others he had written, added in more, and thus developed Wearing of the Gray: Being Personal Portraits, Scenes & Adventures of the War, which was published by E. B. Treat of New York in 1867.
The book carries 47 articles under such headings as “Personal Portraits.” Staff service in Lee’s army had allowed Cooke to meet lots of leading officers, and he described
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them all as chivalrous, brave and noble. His compliments could be repetitious, but they were sincere. He admired Jeb Stuart the most, and dedicated Wearing to Stuart’s memory. Describing Stuart’s “boyish gaiety,” he recounted how Jeb loved to laugh, joke and sing. Douglas Southall Freeman once wrote, “Cooke ‘caught’ Stuart precisely….Nothing that has been written since Cooke’s day has changed a line in the laughing face of Stuart.” Cooke wrote of others just as touchingly. In Wearing he ends his sketch of John Mosby by recounting a scene he must have witnessed: Mosby alone, standing at Stuart’s grave in Hollywood Cemetery, breaking down in tears.
allows Cooke to write a lot about Stuart, but also “Jackson’s Death- Wound” – Cooke was one of the first Southern writers to recount the fatal incident at Chancellorsville.
the Outpost” reprints most of his Southern Illustrated News columns, but some of them didn’t make the cut for the New York publisher. One wartime article deriding Yankee generals (Nathaniel Banks as “a shoemaker, I believe, from Massachusetts”) was excluded from Wearing. Cooke was ever the novelist, and even some of his reminiscences in Wearing have tinges of fiction. For one he even brought in a Colonel Surry and May Beverly, characters in one of his antebellum Virginia romances. We may excuse this: if it’s not straight history, it’s still in the spirit of fun.
course hardened Cooke, as one sees in his “Latter Days” section. “The war grows tedious,” he wrote in “On the Road to Petersburg.” At Appomattox Cooke saw an army which had been numbers, worn out by starvation and exhaustion. But he could still see heroism and gallantry. “The South is prouder of Lee to-day,” he wrote A section called “In the Cavalry”
The section called “Outlines from
The grind of war and the South’s
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One of the reasons I enjoy rereading Wearing of the Gray is its timelessness. We live in a politically correct world today, in which relics of the Southern War for Independence are being taken down, moved away and packed into closets. For me, John Esten Cooke’s writing, with its unabashed Confederatism, is a welcome antidote.
Stephen Davis is a longtime Civil Warrior and avid book collector. His two paperbacks on the Atlanta Campaign, A Long and Bloody Task and All the Fighting They Want, will be published this summer as part of Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War Series.