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March 16, 1997
Onward, Christian SoldierBy STEPHEN W. SEARS
Stonewall Jackson's religious faith energized his military character
STONEWALL JACKSON
The Man, the Soldier, the Legend.
By James I. Robertson Jr.
Illustrated. 950 pp. New York:
Macmillan Publishing USA. $40.
hen Stonewall Jackson died on May 10, 1863, of wounds suffered in the Battle of Chancellorsville, the Civil War was barely half over. Two years of struggle had yet to be endured. After the war finally did end in 1865, a good many Southerners looked back in search of the turning point that had set them on the long road to defeat. Brushing aside Gettysburg and Vicksburg and Sharpsburg, they settled on the day Stonewall died. If only he had lived! How different everything might have been. . . .
This wishful thinking is with us still, and has surely helped generate readers for the sizable Jackson literature. By my count, two dozen writers have attempted biographies, and there are any number of special studies, monographs and essays. Now going straight to the head of the class of Jackson biographers, and likely to remain there, is James I. Robertson Jr.
Mr. Robertson, the Alumni Distinguished Professor in History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, tells us that he has been nourishing this mighty oak of a book for seven years. Before that he had produced a history of the Stonewall Brigade, Jackson's first command, and a biography of Jackson's fellow general A. P. Hill. In the process, he appears to have investigated every nook and cranny of Confederate history and every scrap of evidence relating to the general who at the peak of his fame, he writes, ''was arguably the most famous field commander in the world.'' The result, ''Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend,'' gives us far and away the sharpest picture we have ever had of this enigmatic figure.
There is method in including the legend along with the man and the soldier. Thomas J. Jackson poses a major problem for biographers. His military correspondence is bare bones and uninformative, as are the reports of his campaigns. His private writings offer even less. ''What do you want with military news?'' he chided his wife. His passion for secrecy was legendary. Consequently, a great deal of what we know of Jackson is what witnesses remembered him saying and doing (or thought they remembered), and with the subject long dead these recollections all too often became embroidered. Certain Jackson staff members and lieutenants dined out for years on tales of his eccentricities. In biography after biography the same ''facts'' were churned anew to explain what Jackson really felt, what he really believed, what he was really like.
Mr. Robertson has tracked down all this source material -- finding a good deal that is new along the way -- and, equally important, has subjected all of it to rigorous testing. Myths are exploded, anecdotes crumbled. What remains as fact is highly distilled. For those readers interested in who among the Jackson witnesses were naughty and who were nice, Mr. Robertson minces no words.
Young Tom Jackson, he tells us, had it tough from the beginning. Raised an orphan in far western Virginia, he entered West Point probably the most ill prepared of his fellows. But he sweated out his lessons with an intensity that awed his classmates, and by graduation in 1846 had clawed his way into the top third in class ranking. In the Mexican War he awed his comrades again by his fearlessness under fire. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 Jackson was a professor at Virginia Military Institute, where he did poorly at teaching everything except obedience. He was deadly serious about the fighting to come. ''My advice,'' he told his cadets, ''is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.''
Stonewall Jackson would fight in 16 Civil War engagements, and his nickname dates from the first one, at Manassas, where troops were rallied by the cry ''Look, men, there is Jackson standing like a stone wall!'' By the time of the last one, Mr. Robertson writes, ''his fame flashed across his own Southern Confederacy, soared over the land of his enemies and traveled even beyond the seas.'' To explain this meteoric rise, he takes as his text the prediction of one of Jackson's wartime aides, James Power Smith: ''The religion of Stonewall Jackson will be the chief and most effective way into the secret spring of the character and career of this strong man.''
Jackson was fanatical in his Presbyterian faith, and it energized his military thought and character. Theology was the only subject he genuinely enjoyed discussing. His dispatches invariably credited an ever-kind Providence. Assigning his fate to God's hands, he acted utterly fearlessly on the battlefield -- and expected the same of everyone else in Confederate gray. Jackson's God smiled south, blessing him with the strength of Joshua to smite the Amalekites without mercy. Previous biographers have ignored or soft-pedaled this mercilessness in war, but Mr. Robertson underlines it as a source of Jackson's fierce battlefield leadership.
This fanatical religiosity had drawbacks. It warped Jackson's judgment of men, leading to poor appointments; it was said he preferred good Presbyterians to good soldiers. It branded him holier-than-thou, with an intolerance for others' frailties, and this spilled over onto the battlefield to generate truly senseless confrontations with his lieutenants. One such, with General Hill, led Hill to rage at ''that crazy old Presbyterian fool'' and seek to escape from Jackson's command. Another lieutenant, reading in a Jackson dispatch that ''God blessed our arms with victory,'' remarked irreverently, ''I suppose it is true, but we would have had no victory if we hadn't fought like the devil!''
For Civil War buffs, Mr. Robertson provides plenty of debating points about Jackson's two most-discussed campaigns -- in the Shenandoah Valley in the spring of 1862 and, immediately afterward, in the Seven Days battle before Richmond. Here was Stonewall Jackson at his best, then at his worst. Whatever the debate might conclude, Mr. Robertson's evidence reveals Jackson's steady growth as a commander. He honed the skills developed against mediocre generals in the valley to defeat better generals in later battles. His inability to mesh his talents with those of Robert E. Lee in the Seven Days was transmuted in time into a matchless partnership. That partnership reached its apogee at Chancellorsville -- and then ended with shocking suddenness. Lee said it best: ''I do not know how to replace him.''
Stephen W. Sears is the author of ''To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign'' and, most recently, ''Chancellorsville.''
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