Jubal Early: Unionist Delegate Turned Architect of the Lost Cause Myth

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Jubal Early was born in Virginia in 1816 to a well-connected slaveholding family and lost his mother as a teenager. At West Point he was so argumentative that Lewis Armistead broke a plate over his head. In the Mexican-American War he helped govern occupied Monterrey and developed rheumatoid arthritis that left him stooped and in pain for life. Back in Virginia he became a Commonwealth attorney who never bought land or married, though he had four children with Julia McNeely. At the 1861 secession convention he twice voted against leaving the Union and was mocked as the Terrapin from Franklin, then joined the Confederacy after Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers.

Early's counterattack at Fredericksburg won Lee's trust, and Lee called him his bad old man. In 1863 his troops captured York, Pennsylvania, and seized more than 500 free Black people to send south into slavery. In 1864 he reached Fort Stevens outside Washington, extorted $200,000 from Frederick, Maryland, and burned Chambersburg. Philip Sheridan defeated him in the Shenandoah, and after hesitating at Cedar Creek he blamed his hungry men. In exile and later in Lynchburg he built the Southern Historical Society into the engine of the Lost Cause.

• Lincoln came under fire at Fort Stevens, the only sitting president to do so, and Early later said they had scared him terribly.
• Over 500 buildings burned in Chambersburg after the town could not pay his ransom.
• Lee relieved Early of command shortly before Appomattox, citing public opinion.
• He fled through Texas, Mexico and Cuba to Canada and wore only Confederate gray suits after returning.
• He used the society's journal to blame James Longstreet for Gettysburg and died in 1894 after a fall at the Lynchburg post office.