# Stonewall Jackson A Confederate Lieutenant General — born Thomas Jonathan Jackson, 1824, West Virginia frontier — who commanded the Second Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia under [[Robert E. Lee]] from 1862 until his death in May 1863 from wounds inflicted by friendly fire at the Battle of Chancellorsville. The "Stonewall" nickname comes from First Manassas (July 1861), where Confederate Brigadier General Bernard Bee reportedly rallied his troops with the line "There stands Jackson like a stone wall." Pre-war career: U.S. Army officer (Mexican War service); Virginia Military Institute professor of natural and experimental philosophy and instructor of artillery (1851–1861). The vault entry exists primarily because of Jackson's **iconographic position** in the [[Lost Cause]] cultural-political infrastructure rather than because of his [[American Civil War]] military career as such. Where [[Robert E. Lee]] became the marble-man hero of the Lost Cause's gentlemanly-virtue strain, Jackson was selected as the **religious-warrior icon** — a devoutly Presbyterian Confederate general whose battlefield prowess could be coded as evidence of providential favor on the Confederate cause. The pairing of Lee (gentleman) and Jackson (Christian warrior) became a recurring iconographic structure of [[United Daughters of the Confederacy]]-organized monumentation and of postwar Lost Cause hagiography. Charlottesville, Virginia, had Lee and Jackson statues separately (the Lee statue was the focus of the 2017 [[Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally]]; Jackson's statue in Court Square was also removed in 2021); Richmond's Monument Avenue and many other Southern-city installations followed the same pairing. Like Lee, Jackson's historical reputation has been substantially reassessed by 20th- and 21st-century scholarship. Jackson did own slaves; his religious conduct toward his slaves (Sunday-school instruction, etc.) has been the subject of substantial scholarly debate about whether such conduct was meaningfully ameliorative within the slave system. His battlefield record — particularly the 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaign — remains an object of military-historical study, but the scholarly consensus distinguishes between assessing his military skills and accepting the Lost Cause iconographic deployment of his memory. For the Right Wing KB, Jackson is the **secondary iconographic figure** in the Confederate-monument infrastructure. His monuments have been substantially less politically-foregrounded than Lee's in the post-2015 removal wave but follow the same pattern: erected during the 1890s–1920s Lost Cause monument-construction boom, removed in significant numbers since 2015 in response to the broader political-cultural reassessment. ## Biography **Thomas Jonathan Jackson** was born **January 21, 1824** in **Clarksburg, Virginia** (now West Virginia) — son of a lawyer who died when Jackson was two, leaving the family in poverty. Raised by an uncle at Jackson's Mill in Lewis County after his mother's death in 1831. The orphaned-frontier-youth-to-military-hero biography became a central element of Lost Cause hagiography. He entered **West Point** in 1842, graduating **17th of 59** in the class of 1846 — a mediocre standing but notable given his lack of formal preparatory education. He served in the **[[Mexican-American War]]** (1846–1848) with distinction, earning two brevet promotions at Chapultepec. He resigned from the Army in 1851 and became **Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy** (physics) and **Instructor of Artillery** at the **Virginia Military Institute** in Lexington, Virginia — a position he held for a decade. By most accounts he was a poor teacher: rigid, pedantic, and unpopular with cadets. Jackson was a devout **Presbyterian** — his religiosity was intense even by antebellum standards. He organized and taught a Sunday school for enslaved people in Lexington, an act subsequently mythologized by Lost Cause writers as evidence of benevolent racial attitudes but more accurately understood as consistent with the paternalist-slaveholder ideology that regarded religious instruction as a slaveholder's duty. ## Civil War Service Jackson entered Confederate service in April 1861 as a colonel of Virginia militia. His brigade's performance at **First Manassas** (July 21, 1861) — where they held the Confederate line on Henry House Hill — earned him the **"Stonewall"** nickname (attributed to Brigadier General Barnard Bee's rallying cry, though scholars debate whether Bee intended it as praise or criticism of Jackson's failure to advance). His **1862 Shenandoah Valley Campaign** (March–June 1862) is one of the most-studied campaigns in military history: with ~17,000 troops, Jackson maneuvered against three separate Union forces totaling ~60,000, winning five battles and tying down Union forces that might otherwise have reinforced McClellan's Peninsula Campaign against Richmond. The campaign established Jackson's reputation for aggressive speed, deception, and the exploitation of interior lines. The **Lee-Jackson partnership** — Lee as overall commander, Jackson as his most aggressive corps commander — produced the Army of Northern Virginia's most successful campaigns: **Second Manassas** (August 1862), **Antietam/Sharpsburg** (September 1862), **Fredericksburg** (December 1862), and **Chancellorsville** (May 1863). ## Death at Chancellorsville (May 1863) At the **Battle of Chancellorsville** (May 1–3, 1863), Jackson led a devastating flank attack on the Union XI Corps on May 2 — one of the war's most tactically brilliant maneuvers. Returning from a nighttime reconnaissance, Jackson was **shot by his own men** — soldiers of the 18th North Carolina Infantry who mistook his party for Union cavalry. He was hit three times, requiring amputation of his left arm. Lee reportedly said, "He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right arm." Jackson developed pneumonia and died on **May 10, 1863** at age **39** at Guinea Station, Virginia. His last words: "Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees." ## Lost Cause Iconography The Lost Cause project selected Jackson as the **religious-warrior complement** to [[Robert E. Lee]]'s gentleman-statesman figure. Where Lee embodied aristocratic virtue, Jackson embodied providential martial valor — the devout Christian soldier whose battlefield prowess could be read as divine favor on the Confederate cause. The **Lee-Jackson iconographic pairing** became a recurring structure in [[United Daughters of the Confederacy]]-organized monumentation: cities across the South erected paired Lee and Jackson statues, and Virginia observed a combined **Lee-Jackson Day** holiday until 2020 (when the General Assembly separated the observances and eventually eliminated them). ## Monument Removals The Jackson monument in **Charlottesville** (Court Square) was removed on **July 10, 2021** alongside the Lee statue. The **VMI Jackson statue** — which stood on the parade ground of the institution where Jackson taught — was removed in **December 2020** following a broader racial-reckoning process at VMI that included investigations into institutional racism and the resignation of VMI's superintendent. The **Richmond Monument Avenue Jackson statue** was removed in **July 2020**. [[Stone Mountain]]'s carving (featuring Lee, Jackson, and [[Jefferson Davis]]) remains as of 2026 — Georgia law prohibits its alteration. ## KB Significance Jackson is the **secondary iconographic figure** (after Lee) in the Confederate-monument cultural-political infrastructure. The Lee-Jackson pairing — gentleman and warrior, secular virtue and religious devotion — provided the Lost Cause with a complementary mythology that addressed both the aristocratic-Southern and the evangelical-Christian strands of Confederate memory. Jackson's monument removals have followed Lee's but with less individual political salience; the VMI removal is analytically interesting because it required an institution that had employed Jackson to confront his legacy directly. ## See Also - [[Robert E. Lee]] - [[Jefferson Davis]] - [[Confederate Monuments]] - [[The Lost Cause]] - [[Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally]]