REBEL YELL

Wide-ranging biography of the larger-than-life Confederate leader, a “sobersided, regulation-bound general” who emerges as an ever stranger figure with the passage of years.

Texas-based journalist and historian Gwynne, having documented the free-riding Comanches of the plains (Empire of the Summer Moon, 2010), turns to another famed cavalry culture: namely, that of the residents of the valley of Virginia at the time that sectional divisions broke into open civil war. Few cavalrymen were as farsighted and successful as Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson (1824-1863), who carried a preternatural seriousness and piety with him at all times. As Gwynne writes, Jackson imagined as he was washing that he was cleansing himself in the blood of Christ and while dressing, might “pray to be cloaked in the Savior’s righteousness.” Jackson’s relentless Christianity did not halt him in the least from assuming the role of avenging angel Robert E. Lee’s right-hand man, whose death before Gettysburg deflated the Army of Northern Virginia and marked the beginning of the end of the Southern cause. By the author’s account, Jackson was a caring yet hard, nearly tyrannical leader who pushed his men to the limit yet placed himself in every danger he subjected them to. He also habitually denied himself creature comforts in an effort to remain pure, though, as Gwynne points out, sometimes his explanations were less pious than all that. He did not partake of intoxicating drinks, he told a junior officer, “because I like the taste of them, and when I discovered that to be the case I made up my mind at once to do without them altogether.”

A satisfying biography though less exhaustive in its approach than Robert Krick’s Conquering the Valley (1996) and somewhat less fluent than James Robertson’s Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend (1997).