J. William Jones, Personal Reminiscences
We’re still fighting the war, at least in books.
I looked around for what has been written about one of my favorites, Personal Reminiscences of General Robert E. Lee by the Reverend J. William Jones, D.D. I started with David Eicher’s The Civil War in Books: An Analytical Bibliography (1997), which I keep to the left of my writing desk. He doesn’t place Jones’ Personal Reminiscences among the fifteen volumes he lists with Lee as subject. Instead, he dismisses it as “a highly partisan, eulogistic, and poetical hodgepodge of material that exhaustively attempts to document Lee’s absolute perfection.” I couldn’t agree with Eicher more which is why Jones’ book is one of my favorites.
Shortly after the death of President Lee in October 1870, the faculty of Washington College voted two things: to keep Lee’s college office just as he had left it, and to appoint a committee which would gather material for “a memorial volume, which shall contain a suitable notice of the death and the funeral obsequies of Gen’l R. E. Lee, and of the public’s expression of sympathy and respect upon the occasion.” Once published, proceeds from sale of the work would go toward a monument over Lee’s grave in the college chapel. (We know it today as Edward Valentine’s famous recumbent statue.)
The committee, all professors at the college, chose the Rev. J. William Jones to collect material for the book. Jones had been a chaplain in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia; after the war he took the pulpit of Lexington’s Baptist church. He became a good friend of Lee, and was a fitting choice as compiler of what came to be called “Mr. Jones’ book.”
By 1874 Jones had enough material to compile his manuscript, which Mrs. Lee read. The faculty gave the go-ahead, and Personal Reminiscences was published in 1874 by D. Appleton of New York.
The title suggests that the “personal reminiscences” are by Dr. Jones alone. Far from it. The opening section, “The Soldier,” fills almost eighty pages with eulogistic speeches by Generals Early, Gordon, Hampton and others; tributes from Northern and foreign newspapers at the time of Lee’s death; plus excerpts from Greeley’s and Swinton’s early books on the war. Chapter II, “The College President,” consists of several faculty members’ reflections.
The bulk of the book is divided into chapters hinging on Lee’s character and qualities, such as “Duty, the Key-Note of his Life,” and “His Modest Humility, Simplicity, and Gentleness.” For these Jones reprinted Lee’s letters, excerpted from eulogists’ speeches, scoured Southern newspapers, and corresponded with Confederate officers for recollections. His compilations allow Nevins, Robertson and Wiley, in their Civil War Books (1967, 1969), to judge Jones’ volume as “useful for those seeking minutiae” about Lee. Dr. Freeman went further, terming it an “indispensable early work,” most useful as a sourcebook for its many anecdotes and stories about the general.
And stories there are. Jones found in the Confederate press the story of how on a Petersburg train a young soldier, his wounded arm in a sling, was having trouble putting on his overcoat. “In the midst of his efforts an officer rose from his seat, advanced to him, and very carefully and tenderly assisted him, drawing the coat gently over his wounded arm, and buttoning it comfortably.” Of course the officer was General Lee.
Another of my favorites comes from Lee’s presidential years. To the father of a misbehaving student Lee once wrote a letter of rebuke. It was couched in language so polite, however, that a professor reading it suggested that the lad’s father would completely miss the point of the reprimand. “The old hero looked very much perplexed,” Jones explains, “but presently replied; ‘Well, sir, I cannot help it; if a gentleman can’t understand the language of a gentleman, he must remain in ignorance, for a gentleman cannot write in any other way.’”
In his Preface Jones wrote that he hoped his work on Lee would “give all a higher appreciation of his noble character” and “his shining virtues.” Still offering this and more, Personal Reminiscences has been reprinted by the United States Historical Society Press (Richmond, 1989). In his Introduction, Prof. Taylor Sanders of Washington & Lee is perfectly on the mark. Besides offering a look into nineteenth-century funereal traditions, “in its own way this book is also a relic from a long-lost past. Like a literary time capsule, it preserves for all time how those closest to Lee—his friends, his faculty and his family—wished the General to be remembered.”
Here’s another story. While inspecting the Petersburg lines,
Lee and his officers started drawing enemy artillery fire. Lee told them to retire to safer places, even as they saw him walk across a yard “and stoop down to pick up tenderly some small object, and place it gently upon a tree over his head.” As Jones writes, “it was afterward ascertained that the object which had attracted his attention under the enemy’s fire, was an unfledged sparrow that had fallen from its nest.”
I’ve told this story plenty of times, and I always tell my listeners that it really doesn’t matter if General Robert E. Lee actually saved a sparrow under fire. The point is that Southerners wanted to believe that their kindly hero saved that little bird. In the end, and in the shadowy realm of Civil War memory, that’s all that really matters.
Steve Davis of Atlanta is a regular contributor to Civil War News and is the Book Review Editor. His new book, A Long and Bloody Task: The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton through Kennesaw Mountain to the Chattahoochee River May 5-July 18, 1864, was published as part of Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War paperback series.
The companion volume, All The Fighting They Want: The Atlanta Campaign From Peachtree Creek To The City’s Surrender, July 18-September 2, 1864, will be published early this spring.