Stonewall Jackson

American military leader

• Born: January 21, 1824
• Birthplace: Clarksburg, Virginia (now West Virginia)
• Died: May 10, 1863
• Place of death: Guinea Station, Virginia

The ablest and most renowned of Robert E. Lee’s lieutenants, Jackson led daring marches and employed do-or-die battle tactics that resulted in key victories that helped to sustain the Confederacy through the first two years of the Civil War.

Early Life

Thomas Jonathan Jackson was born in a hilly, heavily forested region of what later became West Virginia that was sparsely populated by the Scotch-Irish settlers who were his forebears. Self-reliance was thrust upon the boy at an early age; the third of four children, he was orphaned by the age of seven. Taken in by an uncle, Cummins Jackson, he grew up in a farm environment in which he acquired numerous practical skills but little schooling. Even as a teenager, however, Jackson clearly demonstrated the traits of physical courage, uncompromising moral integrity, and high ambition serviced by an iron will. Resolved to improve his lot by education, Jackson obtained an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. The shambling young man from the hills cut a poor figure among the generally more sophisticated and better educated cadets. Yet, impervious to taunts, he earned the respect of his classmates by perseverance and phenomenal concentration, finishing seventeenth in a class of fifty-nine.

Shortly after he was graduated in 1846, Jackson was ordered to Mexico as a second lieutenant of artillery. He took part in the siege of Veracruz and distinguished himself in several battles during the advance on Mexico City in the summer of 1847. Jackson’s courage and effectiveness brought admiration from his superiors and a rapid succession of promotions; by the end of the war, at the age of twenty-two, he had attained the rank of brevet major. A photograph taken of him at that time shows a man with a trim figure (Jackson stood about five feet, ten inches, and weighed about 150 pounds) and a pleasant, earnest face characterized chiefly by the firm set of the mouth and clear, deep-set eyes that gaze out solemnly beneath a prominent brow. (The flowing beard that would give Jackson the appearance of an Old Testament prophet was to come later.)

Assigned to Fort Hamilton, New York, in 1848, Jackson entered the routine existence of a peacetime army garrison for the next two years. During this time, however, he became more and more deeply involved in religious pursuits. Jackson came to think of his rather frail health, with its persistent digestive disorders, as a visitation of Providence to lead him into more righteous ways. He was baptized, unsure whether he had been as a child, and from that time on, the course of his life was inseparable from his sense of consecration to the will of the Almighty.

Life’s Work

In the spring of 1851, an instructor’s position at the Virginia Military Institute, founded twelve years earlier on the model of West Point, became available. Jackson was nominated for it, and, bored with his work as a peacetime army officer, he resigned his commission and reported to Lexington in July, 1851, to take up the duties of a professor of natural philosophy (or, in modern terminology, general science) and artillery tactics for the next nine years.

Not by any account an inspiring teacher, Jackson nevertheless mastered topics in which he had no formal credentials, thereby earning at least the grudging respect of his students. Jackson also came to be regarded as something of an eccentric for his rigid ways and odd personal mannerisms—for example, his habit of frequently raising his left arm, ostensibly to improve circulation, and his silent grimace serving in place of a laugh—which would be remarked on by his troops during the Civil War and give color and distinction to the legend of “Old Jack.”

Settled in his new life, Jackson turned his thoughts to marriage. Seeking a wife from the religious community of Lexington, in 1853 he married Eleanor Junkin, the daughter of the Reverend Dr. George Junkin. The union was tragically brief; Eleanor died the next year in childbirth. Two years later and after a summer tour of Europe that restored him from the lethargy of mourning, Jackson courted and married Mary Anna Morrison, the daughter of another clergyman, who would remain his devoted wife until his death and would eventually bear him a daughter.

Life for the Jacksons during the next three years was characterized by affection, tranquillity, and a mutual sense of religious purpose (Jackson was by now a deacon of the Presbyterian Church and maintained a Sunday school for black slaves). The impending events of the Civil War were to bring all that to an end. Although not a champion of either slavery or secession, Jackson felt loyalty deeply rooted to his native soil, and when Virginia seceded from the Union, his course was clear.

In April, 1861, Jackson was commissioned a colonel in the newly formed Confederate army and took command at Harpers Ferry. Within three weeks, he distinguished himself by establishing strict military order for the rather undisciplined garrison of raw, untrained soldiers and by capturing a large number of Northern locomotives and freight cars for use by the Confederate army.

Some three months later, Jackson earned the sobriquet of “Stonewall” at the Battle of First Manassas (or Bull Run). In this opening major conflict of the war, an army of some thirty-five thousand Federal troops under General Irvin McDowell marched south from Washington to crush the rebellion. On July 21, after some preliminary fighting, McDowell made his main attack near Manassas Junction. As the defending Confederates fell back toward Jackson’s brigade, which was holding the ridge above Bull Run, General Barnard E. Bee rallied his troops with the cry “Look yonder! There is Jackson and his brigade standing like a stone wall!” Later in the day, it was Jackson’s brigade that broke the Union line with a furious bayonet charge, thus halting General McDowell’s offensive and forcing a rethinking of strategy in Washington.

With a huge increase in the Union army, the new strategy called for a seaborne assault upon Richmond via the Jamestown Peninsula, led by George McClellan (a classmate of Jackson at West Point) and supported by a secondary force coming down the Shenandoah Valley under the command of Nathaniel Prentiss Banks . Jackson, now a major general, correctly surmised that a diversion up the Shenandoah Valley would not only neutralize Banks but also threaten Washington and thus divert troops from McClellan’s peninsular offensive. Beginning in March, 1862, Jackson led his troops in a succession of battles renowned in military history as the Valley Campaign. Utilizing the tactics of deception, rapid forced marches, and hit-and-run assaults and retreats, Jackson blunted the Federal advance down the Shenandoah Valley, alarmed Washington, and consequently stalled McClellan’s attack upon Richmond.

Jackson’s victories continued to inspire the South and dismay the North during the year 1862. In August, Jackson played the pivotal role in defeating the new Union offensive led by General John Pope at the Second Battle of Manassas. In December, at the Battle of Fredericksburg, he and James Longstreet shared the responsibility for the Confederate victory over the forces of General Ambrose Burnside.

In the spring of 1863, the Union forces, under yet another commander, Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker, gathered for a massive offensive upon Richmond. Robert E. Lee, outnumbered two to one, decided to risk his defense on a hazardous division of his forces, with a corps led by Jackson, now a lieutenant general, tasked with flanking Hooker’s army. On the evening of May 2, 1863, the unsuspecting Union Eleventh Corps was routed by Jackson’s attack some four miles west of Chancellorsville. Darkness brought a lull to the fighting, during which Jackson and a small staff reconnoitered the battlefield to determine a route for a further Confederate advance. Returning to its own lines, however, Jackson’s scouting party, in one of the great ironic moments of history, was mistaken for a Union cavalry patrol and fired upon. Hit by several musket balls, Jackson fell, his left arm shattered. Amputation failed to save his life, and on May 10, 1863, he succumbed to pneumonia. His last words uttered in a final, sublime moment of lucidity were, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”

Significance

Jackson’s death was a mortal blow to the Confederacy. In subsequent battles in the eastern theater, the absence of his leadership was sorely missed; Lee was to remark later that if he had had Jackson at Gettysburg, he would have won that crucial battle. Beyond such speculation, however, there is no doubt that the loss of such an inspiring leader—by far the most popular commander on either side—seriously undermined Confederate morale.

Jackson’s charismatic popularity was the product of both his brilliant generalship and his singular force of character. Merciless in driving his own troops and ruthless in pursuit of his enemy, he nevertheless was admired by both for his legendary courage, integrity, and lack of egoistical motive. Lee venerated his memory, referring to him as “the great and good Jackson.”

Jackson’s battles (in particular, the Valley Campaign) have been studied as models by successive generations of military students in the United States and Europe. Jackson understood and applied the principles of mass and maneuver as well as any commander in history, concentrating his forces at decisive points against numerically superior but more dispersed opponents. Beyond his significance as a tactical genius, however, “Stonewall” passed early into the realm of national epic, defining an ideal of valor for generations of American youths.

Bibliography

Chambers, Lenoir. Stonewall Jackson. 2 vols. New York: William Morrow, 1959. Comprehensive, detailed biography. A lucid, graceful writer, Chambers brings admirable clarity and insight to his subject.

Churchill, Winston L. S. The American Civil War. New York: Fairfax Press, 1985. A reprint of the chapters on the American Civil War in Churchill’s four-volume A History of the English Speaking Peoples (1956-1958). In any edition, Churchill’s brief history of the Civil War is a masterpiece and focuses especially well on the significance of Jackson’s role.

Clark, Champ. Decoying the Yanks: Jackson’s Valley Campaign. Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life Books, 1984. As the title suggests, primarily a history of Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign in the spring of 1862. Contains, however, a good short biography of Jackson in his early years as well. Lavishly illustrated with contemporary photographs, paintings, and drawings, the book gives a vivid account of the most spectacular achievement of Jackson’s generalship.

Farwell, Byron. Stonewall: A Biography of General Thomas J. Jackson. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Thorough, balanced, and well-written account of Jackson’s life.

Henderson, G. F. R. Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War. 2 vols. New York: Longmans, Green, 1898. A classic biography of Jackson. Henderson’s thoughtful, elegant study has gone through numerous editions and is still, after more than three-quarters of a century, a valuable resource cited in virtually every work on Jackson that has appeared since its publication.

Robertson, James I., Jr. Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend. New York: Macmillan, 1997. Robertson, a Civil War historian, recounts the details of Jackson’s life and military career, depicting his subject as a great military strategist and a man of strong religious faith.

Tate, Allen. Stonewall Jackson, the Good Soldier. New York: Minton, Balch, 1928. Reprint. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957. Short biography for the general reader by a leading southern man of letters. Tate’s Confederate sympathies date the book but also provide an interesting partisan slant; he excoriates Jefferson Davis for not unleashing Jackson at decisive points that might have turned the tide for the Confederacy.

Vandiver, Frank. Mighty Stonewall. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957. Comprehensive, well-balanced one-volume biography of Jackson by a respected Civil War historian. Vandiver’s research is thorough, while his lively, anecdotal presentation brings to life the historical events for the reader.

Wheeler, Richard. We Knew Stonewall Jackson. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1977. Extremely useful, well-conceived book of excerpts from contemporary accounts of Jackson linked by the author’s commentary. In effect, an economical, accurate, short biography in which the author’s sources speak for themselves.