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Thomas Jonathan Jackson
1824 - 1863
The American Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson was a
Confederate hero and one of the outstanding Civil War generals.
Thomas Jackson was born on Jan. 21, 1824, at Clarksburg, Va.
After the deaths of his father in 1826 and his mother in 1831,
he was raised by his uncle. He went to local schools and then
attended the U.S. Military Academy (1842-1846), graduating in
time to join the 1st Artillery Regiment as a brevet second
lieutenant in the Mexican War. Following service at the siege of
Veracruz and at Cerro Gordo, he became a second lieutenant and
transferred to a light field battery. While engaged in the
fighting around Mexico City, Jackson received promotion to first
lieutenant and later won brevets to captain and major.
Military Instructor
After the Mexican War, Jackson served at Ft. Columbus and at Ft.
Hamilton. In 1851 he accepted a position as professor of
philosophy and artillery tactics at Virginia Military Institute,
where he proved a dedicated but inept instructor.
On Aug. 4, 1853, Jackson married Elinor Junkin of Lexington, Va.,
who died, with her baby, in childbirth in October 1854. After a
tour of Europe in 1856, he married Mary Anna Morrison; they had
a daughter. In December 1859 he commanded the cadet artillery at
the hanging of abolitionist John Brown. He voted for John C.
Breckinridge, the presidential candidate of the Southern
Democrats in 1860, but hoped the Union would not be dissolved.
First Bull Run
When Virginia seceded from the Union in April 1861, Jackson
traveled to Richmond with the cadet corps. The state government
immediately commissioned him a colonel and sent him to Harpers
Ferry. There he relinquished command to Joseph E. Johnston and
became a brigade commander and brigadier general. At the First
Battle of Bull Run on July 21, when Jackson's brigade reinforced
the Confederate left to stem the Union attack, Gen. Bernard E.
Bee rallied his men with the words, "There is Jackson standing
like a stone wall." The Confederates drove back the Union
advance, and Jackson won a new name.
Shenandoah Valley Campaigns
In October 1861 Jackson became a major general, and in November
he received command of the Shenandoah Valley district of
Virginia. On March 23 his attack on the Federal army at
Kernstown forced the diversion of troops intended to reinforce
the Union army moving against Richmond.
Jackson attacked an enemy force at McDowell in May 1862 and then
struck another Union army at Front Royal, driving it back to the
Potomac. He withdrew and fought off converging Union armies at
Cross Keys and at Port Republic. Thus, with 16,000 men he had
diverted 60,000 Federal troops from the Richmond campaign.
Seven Days Battles
Jackson then joined his forces with those of Gen. Robert E. Lee
outside Richmond and began the Seven Days Battles to defend the
Confederate capital against Gen. George McClellan's army. Tired
and unfamiliar with the country, Jackson moved slowly and failed
to flank the enemy position at Beaver Dam Creek. His troops did
participate in the successful attack at Gaines's Mill on June 27
and pursued the Union army to White Oak Swamp. There, because of
personal fatigue, he again failed to press the Union retreat as
expected. Some of his men were among those repulsed at Malvern
Hill on July 1.
Second Bull Run
In mid-July of 1862 Lee detached Jackson and his men to meet the
advance of a new Union army under Gen. John Pope in northern
Virginia. At Cedar Run on August 9 Jackson defeated part of that
command. He led his force around the Union right flank and
destroyed its supply base at Manassas on August 27. He then
withdrew to Groveton, where he held off attacks while waiting
for Lee. When Lee had reunited his forces, Jackson's men joined
in a successful counterattack that drove the Union army from the
field in the Second Battle of Bull Run on June 30.
Harpers Ferry, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg
In September 1862 Lee advanced into Maryland and sent Jackson
ahead with five divisions to capture the Union garrison of
11,000 men at Harpers Ferry. Jackson surrounded the town, which
surrendered on September 15, then hurried north to help Lee beat
off Union attacks at Sharpsburg on September 17. Lee withdrew
into Virginia after the battle to recruit and reorganize his
army. In October, Jackson received promotion to lieutenant
general and became commander of the new 2d Corps.
In November 1862 the Confederate army moved east to meet a Union
advance at Fredericksburg, Va. Lee placed his troops on the
hills south of the town, with Jackson's corps on the right. On
December 13 Gen. Ambrose Burnside attacked across the
Rappahannock River with two columns, one aimed at Jackson's
position. Though Burnside broke through a gap between two
Confederate brigades, reinforcements drove the attackers back to
the river. The entire Union assault was repulsed with heavy
losses.
Chancellorsville and Mortal Injury
In late April 1863 Gen. Joseph Hooker decided to turn the
Confederate left flank by crossing the Rappahannock River above
Fredericksburg, while part of Lee's 1st Corps had been diverted
to southern Virginia and North Carolina. Lee sent Jackson's
corps around the Union position at Chancellorsville to strike it
from the rear. Late in the afternoon of May 2, Jackson launched
an attack that routed the Union right wing and drove it back
almost to Chancellorsville. As Jackson returned with his staff
from scouting Union lines, his left arm was broken by shots from
his own men who mistook the riders for Union troops. The arm
required amputation before Jackson was removed south to Guiney's
Station, Va., for rest and recovery. There he developed
pneumonia and died on May 10, 1863.
Stonewall Jackson was a masterful military strategist. He
campaigned with aggressiveness and audacity; he moved rapidly;
he was tenacious in defense and pursuit. His victories made him
a hero in the Confederacy and won him the accolades of military
historians, who consider him among America's greatest generals.
~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~
Jackson, Gen Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ (1824-63), hard-driving,
Cromwell-like Confederate general, and sole undisputed military
genius of the American civil war. Convinced that God intended
him for some great purpose, he became a terror to the Union and
an inspiration to the Confederacy by his implementation of the
axiom ‘move swiftly, strike vigorously and secure all the fruits
of victory’. He graduated from West Point in 1846, but left the
army to teach at the Virginia Military Institute in 1851.
Appointed a Confederate brigadier general in 1861, he earned his
nickname at first Bull Run where his brigade was described as
standing like a stone wall. After the 1862 Shenandoah Valley
campaign he was marked for greatness and became Lee's principal
lieutenant.
As Fuller put it, he ‘possessed the brutality essential in war’.
More even than Sherman, he did not wish merely to defeat but to
punish the enemy. There was none of Lee's courtliness in his
make-up, and his own men were either useful to his purposes or
not worthy of consideration. He was impatient with weariness or
even illness, harshly unforgiving of desertion, and inclined to
attribute any battlefield failure to cowardice. On several
occasions he gave battle with subordinate commanders awaiting
court martial. Apart from a weakness for fresh fruit, his only
passion was to fulfil the predestination of his implacable God.
During the Shenandoah campaign he refined an ability to
‘mystify, mislead and surprise’ not only the enemy but his own
officers and men. Aware of his inability to convince others of
the rightness of his ideas, he used ambassadors to advocate his
strategic concepts with his superiors, without success. His most
persuasive argument was the fait accompli, notably at
Chancellorsville where he improved on Lee's bold concept of a
flank march by announcing that he would take two-thirds of the
army from his momentarily nonplussed commander. Many judged that
he took insane risks, but more than any other Confederate
commander he was acutely aware that these were necessary to
overcome the imbalance of forces.
Although without peer in the conception of battle, he was not a
tactical innovator. At first and second Bull Run he made use of
the reverse slope to protect his badly outnumbered men, but on
other occasions he exposed them to needless casualties, and he
was slow to learn that the increased range of rifle fire made
the forward deployment of artillery suicidal. Like other
Confederate commanders, he paid little attention to training or
to assembling the staff that he needed more than most to bring
about the co-ordination and ruthless execution that so often
escaped him. He believed that natural selection—or as in his own
case, divine dispensation—would provide, and it seldom did.
His greatest success also encompassed the most glaring failure
of his secretive style of generalship, when at Chancellorsville
his mortal wounding aborted his plan to cut off the Union
retreat. It is doubtful that it would have produced the
annihilation he intended, but he appears to have been alone in
appreciating that only thus could the war be won. Lee's last
message to him said that for the good of the country he would
have chosen to be struck down in his stead. His own last words
resonate poignantly over the years: ‘Let us cross over the river
and rest under the shade of the trees.’
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This web page was last updated on:
11 December, 2008
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