Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson was a master tactician and one of the South’s most successful generals during the Civil War. His death in 1863 following the Battle of Chancellorsville was a severe blow to both the military operations and the morale of the Confederacy.
Jackson, the son of attorney Jonathan Jackson and his wife, Julia Beckwith Neale Jackson, was born on January 21, 1824, in Clarksburg, Virginia (now West Virginia). When he was two years old, his father and older sister, Elizabeth, died of typhoid fever. The next day his mother, Julia, gave birth to his younger sister, Laura. Jonathan Jackson’s death left the family impoverished. Julia Jackson was forced to sell their property and move into a small rented house. She supported her children by teaching and taking in mending. In 1830, she married Blake Woodson. Woodson apparently did not care for the children, and there were continual money problems. Thomas and Laura went to live with their uncle, Cummins Jackson, in Jackson’s Mill, Virginia (now West Virginia). Julia died of complications from childbirth on December 4, 1831. Thomas and Laura later separated; she was sent to live with her mother’s family and he went to live with his father’s sister, Polly, and her husband Isaac Brake on a farm near Clarksburg. The Brakes did not treat him well, and after a year, he ran away, returning to his uncle’s farm in Jackson’s Mill. Jackson attended school only sporadically and was mostly self-taught.
When Jackson was eighteen, he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. His lack of formal schooling handicapped him at first, but he persevered, graduating seventeenth in a class of fifty-nine in 1846. He was immediately sent to fight in the United States’ war with Mexico as a second lieutenant in the First U.S. Artillery, commanded by General Winfield Scott. While in Mexico he fought in the battles of Contreras, Chapultepec, and Mexico City. His determination and bravery won him three promotions during the war, the last being brevet major.
Gettysburg
As the “High Water Mark of the South,” the Battle of Gettysburg looms large in the American legendary imagination, perhaps most notably among those of Southern descent. The largest battle ever fought in North America, the carnage of July 1–3, 1863, ended with more than 50,000 casualties, all of them, of course, American. Although it was not a great victory for either side, the South could ill bear its share of the losses. A cultural touchstone to this day, the sleepy town of around 8,000 annually plays host to well over a million visitors a year, as well as to annual reenactments of the battle and regular, ongoing living history encampments.
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In 1849, Jackson returned to the United States, where he served at army posts in Pennsylvania, New York, and Florida. Two years later, he retired from the military to teach natural and experimental philosophy (a subject closely related to present-day physics) at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington, Virginia. He was also responsible for drilling the cadets in artillery tactics. According to the VMI archives, he was neither a popular nor a very competent teacher. He was socially awkward, and also somewhat of a hypochondriac. He ate and slept very little. He was a staunch Presbyterian and organized a Sunday school for Lexington’s slave population. On August 4, 1853, Jackson married Elinor Junkin, who was the daughter of Presbyterian minister and Washington College president Dr. George Junkin. They were married only a little over a year when Elinor died in childbirth on October 22, 1854. The baby, a son, was stillborn.
In 1857, Jackson married Mary Anna Morrison of North Carolina, the daughter of Robert Hall Morrison, founder of Davidson College. They lived in Lexington, and Jackson continued his work at VMI. Their first daughter, Mary Graham, born on April 30, 1858, died when she was less than a month old. In November 1859, Jackson accompanied the troops who stood guard at the execution of abolitionist John Brown following his raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry.
When Virginia seceded from the Union in April 1861, Jackson left Lexington to take the VMI cadets to Richmond. Later that month he returned to Harper’s Ferry to organize the troops of what would later be called the “Stonewall Brigade.” These were the Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Thirty-third Virginia Infantry Regiments and the Rockbridge Artillery. He was promoted to brigadier general, and participated in the Battle of First Manassas (the First Battle of Bull Run) in July 1861. It was there that he received his famous nickname. During the battle, Confederate troops began to retreat in the face of an overwhelming Union attack. Jackson’s troops, however, held their ground, and General Barnard Bee was moved to shout to his own fleeing troops, “Look, men, there is Jackson standing like a stone wall.” In the course of the battle, Jackson’s troops managed to stop the Union assault, while suffering many casualties.
He had soon gained a reputation as a brave and skillful leader. In October 1861, he was promoted to major general and made commander of the Valley of Virginia (Shenandoah Valley). During the Valley Campaign in May and June 1862, Union forces outnumbered Jackson’s Confederates three to one. Nevertheless, Jackson made use of complicated maneuvers and deceptive tactics to defeat the three Union armies that were sent to take the Shenandoah Valley. He won major victories at Front Royal, Winchester, Cross Keys, and Port Republic. He was then ordered to join General Robert E. Lee in the Peninsula, in eastern Virginia.
Lee’s army stood against the overwhelming forces of General George McClellan in the Seven Days Battles, fought for the possession of Richmond, the Confederate capital. For unknown reasons, still debated by military historians, Jackson’s leadership faltered during this most crucial campaign. He soon regained his skill and reputation, however, and at the Battle of Cedar Mountain, he once again used his foot cavalry in quick maneuvers that outwitted the enemy. Cedar Mountain was quickly followed by Clark’s Mountain and Second Manassas (Second Bull Run). In August 1862, following Second Manassas, Robert E. Lee mounted an invasion of the North and began the Maryland campaign. Jackson joined the rest of the army in Sharpsburg, Maryland, where they faced McClellan in the Battle of Antietam. Jackson and the Confederates were able to hold their positions, but in the face of overwhelming losses, Lee withdrew back across the Potomac River to save his army.
In October 1862, Robert E. Lee split his army into two corps. He promoted Jackson to lieutenant general and put him in command of the Second Corps, half of the Army of Northern Virginia. In November of that year, Mary Anna gave birth to their only child, Julia Laura Jackson. On December 13, Jackson led the Second Corps in a decisive victory at the Battle of Fredericksburg (Virginia).
One of Jackson’s most brilliant performances was to be his last. The Confederates faced the Union troops at Chancellorsville, near Fredericksburg. Jackson and Lee, in a daring move, once again split the Confederate army. On May 1, 1863, Jackson took a majority of the troops on a flanking maneuver around the Union army to attack it from the rear. His attack decimated the Union troops. On the night of May 2, while out planning the next day’s attack, Jackson and his staff were returning to camp when Confederate sentries, mistaking them for Union cavalry, opened fired. Jackson was wounded in the left arm, and it was amputated. On May 4, he was moved to a field hospital near Guiney Station, thirty miles from the battlefield. As he was recovering, he contracted pneumonia, leading to his death at the age of thirty-nine on May 10, 1863. He was buried in Lexington five days later. Interestingly, his amputated arm was not taken to Lexington, but buried in the family cemetery at Ellwood, the estate of Rev. Beverly Tucker Lacy, which was near the field hospital where Jackson was first taken. The site is now owned by the National Park Service.
Jackson’s Southern loyalty destroyed his close relationship with his sister, Laura Jackson Arnold, a Union sympathizer. By this time her hometown of Beverly, formerly part of Virginia, was part of the newly formed state of West Virginia. She cared for wounded Union soldiers there in her home after her husband divorced her in objection to her Northern allegiance.
Lee, Robert E. (1807–1870)
Perhaps no single figure captures the mythos associated with the doomed glory of the Confederacy as does General Robert E. Lee. Lee’s legendary star has continued to ascend further into the folkloric firmament of the popular American imagination with each passing year, especially among certain Southerners and those who embrace the trappings of the Confederacy from the somewhat skewed perspective that these are appropriate symbols of rebellion against perceived excesses of the contemporary federal government. Lee enjoyed many great successes in the field, often against superior Union forces, providing the genesis for his mythic stature. After Gettysburg in 1863, his fortunes turned; he surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865. Although Lee’s family home in Arlington was seized and converted into a National Cemetery, Lee himself became the iconic president of what since has been renamed Washington and Lee University.
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Mary Anna Jackson never remarried. She settled in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she was known as the “Widow of the Confederacy.” She died on March 24, 1915. Their only daughter, Julia, married William E. Christian in 1885. She died only four years later, leaving behind a daughter, Julia, and a son, Jonathan. Although Stonewall Jackson left behind a small family by nineteenth-century standards, he acquired legendary status because of the many stories that circulated during and after the war about his endurance, his military genius, and his considerable piety. To Southerners traumatized by defeat in the Civil War, Stonewall Jackson provided a symbol that served as a validation of their lost way of life.
Nancy Snell Griffith
See also Forrest, Nathan Bedford; Legends
Further Reading
Davis, William C. 1996. The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Farwell, Byron. 1992. Stonewall: A Biography of General Thomas J. Jackson. New York: W. W. Norton.
Hettle, Wallace. 2011. Inventing Stonewall Jackson: A Civil War Hero in History and Memory. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Robertson, James I., Jr. 1997. Stonewall Jackson: The Man, The Soldier, The Legend. New York: Macmillan Publishing.
Wert, Jeffry D. 1987. From Winchester to Cedar Creek: The Shenandoah Campaign of 1864. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.