Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 30, 1994 TAG: 9401300006
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D-12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GARY RHODES THE FREE LANCE-STAR
DATELINE: FREDERICKSBURG (AP) LENGTH: Medium
The years have been unkind to many Civil War leaders, but not the mighty Stonewall.
"He's always been the great military commander," said Frank O'Reilly, historian at the plantation office in Caroline County where a pneumonia-racked Jackson met his maker on May 10, 1863. "What has been happening recently is that people are starting to fill in the details of his personal life."
The new scholarship has confirmed what much of the old scholarship only hinted. That is that Jackson made a remarkable transformation "from an awkward introvert to an aggressive commander . . . a consummate military professional," in the words of O'Reilly.
Jackson was much more than a military leader. After helping win great victories for the Confederacy at Bull Run, Fredericksburg and in the Shenandoah Valley, he came to embody the new country's supposed invincibility.
The high-water mark of Jackson's soldiering career, the flank march and attack at Chancellorsville in Spotsylvania County, also was the Confederacy's high-water mark. He was wounded accidentally by his own horror-stricken men in that chaotic battle and died of pneumonia about a week later at age 39.
Within months of Jackson's death, the South suffered a severe setback from which it never recovered. Without Gen. Robert E. Lee's valued "right arm" at Gettysburg, the Confederates ceded the high ground to the North, prompting a frustrated Lee to make a suicidal attack across open fields on the third day of the battle.
Would Jackson's presence have made a difference?
"That question is impossible to answer," said O'Reilly.
"It would be a stretch to say that Jackson's death was the ultimate factor in the war's outcome. I believe Jackson would have been more aggressive than his successor, Richard Ewell, at Gettysburg. If he had fought there and seized the high ground at Cemetery Hill that Ewell failed to take, Gettysburg probably wouldn't have been the great battle that it turned out to be."
Instead of meeting Lee's challenge so forcefully in the small Pennsylvania town, the Union army would have stayed put in its well-fortified position across the Mason-Dixon line in Maryland, O'Reilly speculated.
Of course, die-hard secessionists have always pictured a much different chain of events. With Jackson in his element of blitzkrieg-style warfare, they figure, Washington or New York would have been in flames within months. And 1863 would have stood alongside 1066 and 1776 as one of history's most momentous years.
Jackson held that theory himself.
Jackson grew up on the frontier in present-day West Virginia. He was known for his eccentricity, repeatedly baffling fellow cadets at West Point, comrades in arms in the Mexican War and students at Virginia Military Institute with his strange ways.
Had the North and South kept cranking out compromises on slavery, Jackson might have remained "Tom Fool," the nickname given him by a VMI cadet, for the rest of his life.
But when war came in 1861, and Jackson stood like "a stonewall" behind Bernard Bee's retreating men at the Battle of First Manassas, the towering hero Stonewall was born.
"He was a man who always seized the initiative," said O'Reilly. "He would pay any price to keep the drive going."
Jackson was revered by soldiers and civilians alike during the war. Even Northerners held him in high regard, provided they were a safe distance from the fighting.
More than a century later, Jackson's name is still magic. His shrine in Caroline attracted 35,000 visitors last year, many of them from overseas. The British especially are intrigued by this American warrior of Scotch-Irish descent, according to O'Neill.
A team of Soviet generals also paid its quiet respects not long ago. They didn't ask many questions, apparently because they already knew all the minutiae of Jackson's life.
Jackson's methods of war still are studied worldwide, even though weaponry has undergone a sea change since his times. The flank attack of U.S.-led forces in the Persian Gulf War was said to be pure Jackson.
In Lexington, the Jackson House entertained about the same number of guests as the shrine last year. History buffs get a better sense of Jackson, the man, there. He experienced the best and worst of times in the picturesque Shenandoah Valley town, including the personally devastating death of his first wife, Elinor Junkin, daughter of Washington College President George Junkin.
"Of course, Robert E. Lee is still very much respected, but because of his aristocratic background he was expected to succeed," said Michael Lynn, director of the Jackson House. "Stonewall Jackson's background is more like that of a lot of other people. He has more of an Everyman quality about him."
by CNB