BOOK REVIEW

Robertson, James I. Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend (1997)

Robertson, James I. Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend (1997)

At the time of his death in May 1863, Lieutenant General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson was the best-known Civil War commander. Revered in the South and dreaded in the North, Jackson so personified the Confederacy's infantry prowess that his portrait was boasted on the highest-denomination account handed out by the Richmond government. The ink was scarcely dry on the submit papers at Appomattox when a legion of historians, biographers and memorialists of all stripes started to turn out a little hill of publications dedicated to his life and exploits. Now, with his new publication, Stonewall Jackson: The Man, The Soldier, The Legend (MacMillan, New York, 1997, $40), James I. Robertson crests a differentiated vocation dedicated to the study of the Civil War with a wealthy, in-depth production of Jackson in all his complexity, tragedy and glory.

Drawing on the information he built up through years of revising the conflict in Virginia and the Stonewall Brigade in specific, Robertson conferred all renowned repositories of Jackson-related components and found out some that had stayed untouched. Especially cooperative was a treasure trove of new data established in the Stonewall Jackson Collection at Tulane University that had stayed unconsulted since it was bequeathed to the university in the 1920s. Through this initial source material, Robertson advanced to re-create Jackson's public life and personal sorrows.

As Robertson sees it, Jackson's conclusion to support the Confederacy was natural. Jackson had arrive to accept as factual that the North was decimating the American humanity that the framers of the Constitution had created. As for slavery, his measurements of the Bible had assured him that God had destined some peoples as bondsmen, and God's arrangements were after questioning. ...