Racist, rebel, revolutionary, warmonger, traitor, totalitarian, slaveholder, psychopath, and southern Confederate — Stonewall Jackson died on this day in history. Jackson passed away eight days after Confederate soldiers mistook him for “a damned Yankee” and shot him three times. After a surgeon amputated his arm, devout southerners demonstrated their Christian ethic by giving the limb a decent burial, unlike the hundreds of thousands of slaves who died in obscurity. But Jackson never recovered. He died of pneumonia on May 10, 1863.
Pastor Douglas Wilson of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, idolizes Stonewall Jackson for his military genius and his religion:
I have it on good authority that if you were to visit me in my office at Anselm House today, I would be happy to show you my portraits of Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart. When our clamoring multiculturalists want me to back away from the facts, I want to do my best imitation of Stonewall at First Manassas. (Blog & Mablog, Reseerch Perfesser, November 21, 2005)
I don’t count because I have a picture of Stonewall Jackson in my office. . . . If you tripped and fell over my earlier statement about Stonewall, then perhaps it is because you are more concerned about a gnat in north Idaho than about the caravan of camels that our evangelical leadership specialize in swallowing. (Blog & Mablog, This Crimson Carnage, May 16, 2016)
Now if Thabiti knew that I have a picture of Stonewall Jackson on the bulletin board in my office, this claim might be, to use Thabiti’s phrase, “a special multi-flavored variety of insane.” (Blog & Mablog, On Not Blowing Sunshine, August 15, 2016)
Study Stonewall Jackson if you want to understand Doug Wilson’s paradigm. You can start with this excerpt from the 1992 winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History, The Destructive War:
A CONFEDERATE GENERAL, Thomas Jonathan Jackson, epitomized for many of his contemporaries the pursuit of Confederate independence through aggressive warfare. The sobriquet “Stonewall,” which he and the First Virginia Brigade acquired by virtue of their stand during the first battle of Bull Run, did not fit with Jackson’s approach to fighting in later campaigns. Movement and risk pervaded his operations. To stop the Federal war effort, Jackson believed, Southerners should quickly make its cost as high as possible. He would have preferred that Confederates take no prisoners but kill every Yankee soldier they could reach. In January 1861 he wrote that, if Virginia were invaded, its people should “defend it with a terrific resistance — even to taking no prisoners.” Governor Letcher recalled later in the war that a week after the state seceded, Jackson had urged on him the policy of flying the black flag, “proposing to set the example himself.” This policy would also make Southerners fight desperately because they would know that capture meant death. . . .
The evidence for describing Jackson’s conception of war in Pennsylvania comes from postwar recollections of those who heard him. Their accounts agreed that he wanted the army not just to subsist itself but to wreak destruction. He said in September 1862 that “he desired to get in Pennsylvania & give them a taste of war . . . they were so near and yet so bitter.”. . . Early in the war he told General Gustavus W. Smith that Confederates should “destroy industrial establishments wherever we found them, break up the lines of interior commercial intercourse, close the coal mines, seize and, if necessary, destroy the manufactories and commerce of Philadelphia, and of other large cities within our reach; take and hold the narrow neck of country between Pittsburg and Lake Erie, subsist mainly on the country we traverse, and making unrelenting war amidst their homes, force the people North to understand what it will cost them to hold the South in the Union at bayonet’s point.”
Almost every assessment of Stonewall Jackson by those who knew him during the war, both admirers and detractors, stressed one quality: relentlessness. He ordered hard marches; he denied applications for furloughs; he severely punished infractions of discipline; he arrested officers who departed from his instructions; he ordered soldiers absent without leave to be brought back to the army in irons; he had deserters shot — during three days in August 1862, thirteen of his men were executed; he tried to kill as many of the enemy as possible, and he did not shrink from getting his own men killed doing it. Jackson did not go through the Civil War’s often-described transition from notions of chivalric gallantry to brutal attrition. For him the war was always earnest, massed, and lethal. His preference for invasion across the Mason-Dixon line complimented, in strategy, his preference for the tactical offensive in battle. He favorably endorsed John D. Imboden’s proposal to form a regiment of rangers to fight a guerrilla war in western Virginia, where, Imboden said, “I shall expect to hunt Yankees as I would wild beasts.” Jackson cautioned Robert L. Dabney about this partisan warfare: “The difficulty consists in finding sufficient patriotic nerve in men to join in such service.” (Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans [New York: Random House, 1991], 40–41.)
Stonewall Jackson was a ruthless killing machine, who kept the Sabbath.