Note: I read Gwynne's Rebel Yell last summer and wrote this review. I have not been able to find another use for the review so I'm sharing it here. You can also read the seven part series on the piety of Jackson I did back in 2011 after reading Dabney's Life and Campaigns (Part one, two, three, four a, four b, five, six, seven).
S.
C. Gwynne, Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of
Stonewall Jackson (Scribner, 2014):
672 pp.
In a bibliographic
appendix to this work, the author notes that there have been no less than eight
significant biographies of famed Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson
since 1864. To these now may be added
this contemporary work by journalist S. C. Gwynne, author of the celebrated 2010
book Empire of the Summer Moon, a
biography of the lesser known Comanche chief Quanah Parker. Gwynne’s new biography is a compelling
portrait of Jackson with plentiful contemporary relevance.
Gwynne, by and large,
presents a sympathetic portrait of Jackson, giving special attention to and
admiration for his military tactics during the early years of the American
civil war. Gwynne traces Jackson’s life
from his upbringing as an orphan in western Virginia (which later became the
state of West Virginia), to his enrollment as an ill prepared student at West
Point where, by dint of hard work, he rose to graduate seventeenth in his
celebrated class, to his heroism in the Mexican-American War, to his
appointment as an overall ineffective physics professor at Virginia Military
Institute (VMI), to his meteoric rise to national and international fame as a
general in the Confederate army, who won one unlikely battle after another
against superior forces until he was mortally wounded by what today would be
termed “friendly fire” in the aftermath of his stunning 1863 victory at Second
Manassas.
Gwynne also gives
intriguing insights into Jackson’s personal life. This includes details about his close
relationship with his beloved sister Laura, whose pro-Union sympathies later
led to their permanent breaking of ties.
It also includes descriptions of Jackson as a family man who grieved the
loss of his first wife Ellie, who died delivering their stillborn son. His beloved father-in-law, George Junkin, the
Presbyterian minister and President of what was then Washington College, who
had served as a mentor and surrogate father to Jackson, also allied with the
Union and moved North before the war began.
Gwynne also describes Jackson’s friendship with his sister-in-law, the
poetess Maggie Junkin, and speculates that the two of them might have married
had they not adhered to the high Presbyterian interpretation of the Old
Testament which forbad a man’s re-marriage to a sister-in-law on the basis of
“lines of separation.” Eventually,
Jackson did happily remarry Anna Jackson, and he was able briefly to meet their
beloved newborn daughter in the days before his death.
Much attention is also
given to Jackson’s staunch Calvinistic and Presbyterian faith. In the pre-war
years he served as a deacon in the Lexington, Virginia Presbyterian church and
organized a Sunday School for slaves, despite the disfavor this brought from
some of his fellow white gentry who held that such educational gatherings were
illegal.
Gwynne presents Jackson
as a man of contradictions. In the pre-war years he was, in fact, not an advocate
of Southern secession. His aversion to
war came from the fact that he was a military man. He knew war would be incalculably gruesome
and costly. Once the war began, however,
he was a furious and committed commander.
In civilian life he was a hypochondriac who suffered with various
ailments and sought eccentric treatments.
In the war years these phantom maladies disappeared, and he drove his
body and those of his troops to exhaustion.
He could be warm and affectionate with close family but was often
socially awkward in public and a stern disciplinarian with underlings. In the
pre-war classroom he was an ineffective teacher whom his pupils called “Tom Fool”
behind his back, but once the war began he proved himself a natural leader of
men and a brilliant tactician.
Gwynne is particularly
admiring of Jackson as a military leader.
He suggests that Jackson’s success on the battlefield came from his
willingness to drive his men to the limits of their physical abilities and his
willingness to engage in vicious and costly battles (unlike many of his
Northern counterparts). Gwynne also
suggests that Jackson advocated with his reluctant Southern superiors for
“black flag” (take no prisoners) and “throw away the scabbard” (total war)
tactics against their Union adversaries, to hasten the war’s end. He also suggests that the North’s use of such
tactics under Meade and Sherman did bring the war to an eventual end, long
after Jackson was gone.
The book’s opening
includes a compelling comparison between Jackson and the abolitionist John
Brown, whose execution Jackson providentially witnessed while supervising a
squad of VMI cadets sent to serve as extra security guards. According to Gwynne:
Both
Brown and Jackson were hard, righteous, and uncompromising men, religious
warriors in the tradition of Oliver Cromwell, the ardently Christian political
and military leader in the English Civil War. Both believed beyond doubt that
God was on their side. Both believed
that they were agents of God and that by killing the enemy they were doing his
work (p. 24).
Though some might take exception
to any comparison between the orderly Jackson and the vigilante Brown, Gwynne’s
point in the comparison is to highlight the role that Jackson’s ardent
Christian faith and his unfailing confidence in the sovereignty of God had in fundamentally
shaping his character and propelling his legacy.
Special attention is
naturally given near the book’s conclusion to the aftermath of Jackson’s death,
the unparalleled outbreak of grief and despair this provoked in the South, and
its contribution to the Southern “Lost Cause” sentiment. Gwynne suggests that Jackson’s death “triggered
the first great national outpouring of grief for a fallen leader in the
country’s history” (p. 556), inciting mourning that far exceeded the deaths of
the American founding fathers. Even his
Northern adversaries, including the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, eulogized
Jackson as a Christian gentleman, despite their grave disagreement with his
commitment to the Southern cause. Gwynne
also draws an intriguing comparison between the draining emotional reaction to
Jackson’s death in the South and the parallel reaction to Lincoln’s death a few
years later in the North (pp. 557-558).
Gwynne’s book has
become even timelier given social and cultural events transpiring after its
publication, including recent debate over the flying of the Confederate battle
flag, in the aftermath of racially motivated violence. Two anecdotes are worth mentioning. The first is that in the pre-war years a
crude secession flag with the words “Hurrah for South Carolina” was hoisted in
Lextington on a flagpole where the American flag usually hung, but Jackson
ordered it removed (p. 28). The second is that Jackson’s casket was draped not
in the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia but in what was then the
newly authorized national flag of the confederacy, which featured the familiar
crossed bars of the battle flag on a pure white background (p. 553). Given Jackson’s sense of the importance of
obedience to lawful authority (cf. Romans 13), it is unlikely that on principle
he would have sanctioned in the post-war years the flying of the Confederate flag
in deference to the American flag.
Gwynne especially
succeeds in this book in reminding us that Jackson and others of his era were
men of their times and that it is unwise to judge them simplistically or
anachronistically. In his description of Jackson leading the VMI
cadets off to Richmond to join the Southern army, for example, Gwynne offers
this observation:
If
the cadets who marched to Richmond with Thomas Jackson four days later had been
asked why they were doing it, few would have replied that it was because of
their convictions about slavery, or their beliefs about state sovereignty or
any of the other great national questions that had been debated for so
long. They would have told you then—as
most of Stonewall Jackson’s soldiers in the army of the Confederate States of
America would have told you later—that they were fighting to repel the invaders, to drive the Northern agressors from their
homeland. That is why Virginia went
to war. The great and complicated
political reasons for secession, thundered about in Congress and in state
legislatures, were not their reasons, which were more like those expressed by a
captive Confederate soldier, who was not a slaveholder, to his puzzled Union
captors. “I’m fighting because you’re
down here,” he said. To Jackson, Lincoln
had launched a war of aggression against sovereign states. That was why he fought, why he believed that
God could not possibly be on the side of the aggressor (pp. 30-31).
Indeed, through his
compelling portrait of Stonewall Jackson Gwynne reminds us that the historical
and cultural circumstances surrounding the American Civil War and the
individuals who were swept up in the events of the times are more complicated
than often popularly imagined or appreciated.
Jeffrey
T. Riddle, Pastor, Christ Reformed Baptist Church, Louisa, Virginia
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