General Jackson's Unlikely Legacy. free porn video

Please note that this is not an erotic story but rather a story of Civil War and Civil Rights. Please forgive me if you have come looking for titillation and found it not. This is a different kind of story but an adventure nevertheless.

General Jackson’s Unlikely Legacy.


It would, I suppose, be hard to discern the link between a peaceful English park full of happy revellers in the year 2012 and a tortured bloody battlefield in North America in 1861. It would take, in fact, the sort of mind used to connecting up apparently unrelated dots; the sort of mind that sees seemingly unconnected events as part of the great sweep of human history; the sort of mind that sees the evolution of human culture through a lens of change and relishes the delicious ironies of history and the meanings each culture places upon the myths and legacies of its heritage. It would take the mind of a historian and story teller; a mind rather like that that I have chanced to have been born with.

The whole crazy notion occurred to me just the other day when I attended the annual LGBT rights festival in a sun drenched park in the city of Hull in Northern England. My friends and I were just sitting around on the grass and drinking in the atmosphere and flying the T flag in LGBT. The crazy English weather had gone completely loopy on us. After seemingly weeks of intermittent rain we feared the worst but astonishingly the weekend dawned in glorious sunshine and by Sunday the temperature had climbed well into the thirties. All the weeks of rain had done was ensure a thick and verdant lawn of grass in the park; more luxurious than a deep pelted rug. We took our shoes off and gave our feet a treat.

There were over ten thousand people in the park for the festival we were told and it felt like it. It had cost just eight pounds for the two days of non stop entertainment, a remarkably reasonable price considering, and everybody seemed to have turned up to take advantage. A huge gathering of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders was inevitably going to be a colourful event. That wasn’t the whole story however. As I sat there sharing a bottle of wine and listening to the music from the main stage I became aware of other undercurrents and significances in the whole affair.

I think it was the police that got me thinking. Any big event like that was obviously going to require policing and there was a considerable police presence. This is not to say the police presence was in any way intrusive or unwelcome you understand. It was anything but in fact. I’ll come back to the police force later but let me say now that the Humberside Police authority has had to take some stick over the years but on this occasion they were absolutely wonderful; supportive, protective and extraordinarily in harmony with the festival. It was that that started me to think. It started me to think how much the world has moved on; how much things have changed. It started me to think about the evolution of society and the odd way that icons and legends of the past become metamorphosised into symbols of the present. By the odd and convoluted paths of my curious brain it started me to think about General Jackson. Let me try to explain.

In what I can only describe as a breathtaking example of the ironies of history, Thomas Jonathon Jackson was the great grandc***d of slaves! His great grandfather, John Jackson was an Irish protestant from County Londonderry in Ulster. In the 1740s John was living in London, England and was convicted of stealing £170. That was a substantial sum at the time and the theft of it a capital crime. John was exceedingly lucky to escape the hangman’s noose. Instead he was sentenced to seven years indenture in the American colonies. In other words he was being sent as a slave to North America. In 1749 he was transported aboard the prison ship Litchfield across the Atlantic, chained in a hold under conditions not dissimilar to those suffered by millions of unfortunate captive Africans sent to the New World as slaves.

It may have been a little less crowded aboard Litchfield than the average “blackbirder” for there were only 150 convicts aboard. There must have been also some mingling of the sexes for, while on passage, John met one Elizabeth Cummins who was also being transported for a similar sentence of indenture and by the time the ship made harbour in Annapolis Maryland, the two were hopelessly in love. It was a love that had to endure their many separations over the next years as they were moved around in servitude but endure it did and they married in 1755, moved west across the Blue Ridge Mountains to settle in Virginia and had eight c***dren.

There was no going home for John and Elizabeth of course and they embraced their new homeland completely. In 1775 civil conflict broke out in the American colonies largely over the constitutionality of certain taxes imposed upon the colonies by the British crown government on the other side of the Atlantic. This expanded into the Revolutionary War and John was an early recruit for the rebel forces together with his two teenage sons.

This war lasted some eight years and of course would lead to the creation of an independent United States of America. The war does not really concern us here except in the precedents it would apparently establish for another conflict over eighty years later. It would seem for instance that it enshrined the rights of American states to rebel over what they considered to be unconstitutional interference with their own laws and to take up arms in defence of those rights. It also seemed to suggest a template for successful rebellion: the way by which a rebellion might prevail over a nation more powerful than itself. Most of all it seemed to establish a revolutionary principle; that men had the right to take up arms in defence of their freedom against tyranny. All these precedents would be raised as holy writ in another war eighty years later but, as we shall see, there were very fundamental differences between the two conflicts.

In any case John Jackson distinguished himself in the Revolutionary War, fighting at the Battle of King’s Mountain in 1780 and rising to the rank of captain. After the war he served as an officer in the Virginia Militia. There was soldiering in the Jackson bloodline. John’s second son, Edward also fought as a young soldier in the Revolutionary War and survived to father a number of c***dren himself. His third son was called Jonathon Jackson who proved no less fertile than his father and grandfather. His third c***d was Thomas Jonathon Jackson, the man we have come to see in this story.

Thomas’ father was an attorney in 1824 when he was born but Thomas barely ever knew him. His elder sister, Elizabeth, and his father both died of typhoid fever in 1826 when he was just two years old. His mother Julia was pregnant at the time with her fourth c***d and she gave birth to a daughter, Laura-Ann, the day after her husband died. Julia with a newborn baby and two young c***dren to care for alone, was in a desperate situation and forced to sell the family property to pay off the family debts. But she was a tough lady and after moving into a one bed-roomed rented house she managed to support her young family for the next four years by sewing and teaching; two of the very few professions open to a widowed woman of her age. It would be pleasant to record that her struggle was successful but there is a streak of tragedy running along this family line and their misfortunes were by no means over.

In 1830 Julia’s luck seemed to have changed when she remarried, once again to an attorney, called Blake Woodson. It was however a disaster. For one thing Woodson despised his three stepc***dren and wanted nothing to do with them. Secondly the family continued to suffer financial worries. The worst catastrophe to strike was in 1831, when, married for only a year, Julia produced a son to her new husband. It cost Julia her life for she died shortly afterwards of complications from the c***dbirth. Woodson refused to accept responsibility for her three c***dren from her previous marriage and the three Jackson c***dren found themselves orphaned. It was not yet the end of woes for this ill fated family.

Thomas and Laura-Ann ended up at their Uncle Cummins Jackson’s grist mill in Lewis County, West Virginia, while Thomas’ elder brother Warren was sent to live with relatives on his mother’s side of the family. Warren continued the family penchant for tragedy by dying of tuberculosis in 1841 aged just twenty years. For Thomas and Laura-Ann, life at Jackson’s Mill seems to have been one of the few happy times of their c***dhood. Certainly it was the place for which Thomas held the greatest affection and was as close to being a home as he had ever known. Their sojourn at the mill lasted some four years before the two siblings were separated. Laura-Ann was sent to her mother’s relations and Thomas went to live with his Aunt Polly and her husband Isaac Brake on a farm some four miles from Clarksburg.

It was a miserable time for young Thomas. He was treated as a pariah in the family and suffered verbal and physical abuse. He stuck it out for over a year before doing something about it and what he did demonstrates possibly more than anything the nascent qualities that would come to characterise the man he would become. He ran away from the family but his cousin caught up with him in Clarksburg and admonished him to return to the Brake’s farm. He adopted the sullen resistance for which he would become famous and replied, “Maybe I ought to ma-am, but I am not going to.” Instead he turned around and, in a feat of determination and endurance that would become all too familiar to the veterans that served under him later, he walked the eighteen miles back, through rough country, to his Uncle’s mill. He was twelve years old!

Thomas remained at the Mill for the next seven years. They were seven years that forged the character of this young man. His uncle was not a particularly affectionate man, indeed he was very strict with Thomas, but nevertheless the young man looked up to him as his mentor and teacher. The family was strictly Presbyterian and Thomas was brought up in an evangelical zeal bordering on fanaticism which imprinted an unquestioning religious devotion in him. He herded sheep on his Uncle’s property and drove the ox teams to harvest the wheat and corn. His attendance at school was sporadic but he was taught by his uncle and educated himself from borrowed books that he would read by the light of burning pine knots late into the night. It was those burning pine knots and desire for education that would lead to one of the most curious, enigmatically illuminating episodes of his young life.

In common with most well to do landowners of his age in Virginia, Cummins Jackson owned slaves. It was with one of these slaves that Thomas made a startling and dangerous pact. In return for the pine knots that Thomas relied upon for his reading he agreed to teach the slave to read and write. This was entirely i*****l. Ever since Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in Southampton County in 1831 it had been i*****l under Virginia law to teach literacy to any African slave, free black or mulatto. Educated black and coloured people were a threat to the very institution of slavery.

That Thomas chose to ignore this law illustrates the ambiguous attitudes he harboured towards slavery. On the one hand he personally found slavery disagreeable but his religious upbringing instilled an acceptance of it in him. It was an article of faith among the Presbyterian church of Virginia that the institution of slavery was ordained by God himself and that slavery was the rightful place of those people of African descent within a God fearing Christian society. Thomas believed this crap in the same way that over a century and a half later, the church would still believe that natural homosexual people were abominations in the eyes of God and thus accursed in the view of righteous Christians. The slave in the story here profited from Thomas’ tuition. Once he had achieved literacy he ran away via the “Underground Railroad” to freedom in Canada. Doubtless the preachers would denounce his heinous crime against God from the pulpit and point out the dangers of raising the black man above the desirable state of ignorance necessary for his subservience to the Christian white man.

In teaching the slave, Thomas seems to have found some sort of vocation for, in his later years at Jackson’s Mill, he became a school teacher in spite of his own indifferent education. In 1842 that education was just barely enough to gain Thomas entrance to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. He was well behind the other students of course and started at the bottom of his class. That stubborn streak of determination in him however served him well and he became one of the hardest working students at the academy. He graduated in 1846, 17th out of 59 in his class and it was said of him that had he stayed another year he would have graduated first. One thing he never really learned very well at West Point was horsemanship. In spite of sharing a room with George Stoneman, who would later become a cavalry general in the Union Army of the Civil War, Thomas was an indifferent rider.

Nearly as soon as he had graduated and attained the rank of Second Lieutenant in the Ist United States Artillery Regiment, Thomas was sent away to war. The American Mexican War of 1846 to 1848 was a handy little business for the United States and one of the most profitable military endeavours ever carried out by its armed forces. Victory in the war led to the acquisition of a vast region encompassing the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, a huge expansion in the territory of the United States, yet it seems oddly overlooked these days. Perhaps it has been quietly brushed under the carpet. It was after all a pretty aggressive land grab that comes perilously close to forced colonisation which sits uncomfortably with the United States’ anti colonial self imagery. It’s a bit of an embarrassment in other words that, however nicely you dress it up, the war was little more than a straightforward territorial conquest aimed at expanding the United States to the Pacific at the cost of a post colonial nation state on its south western borders. Just to sweeten its successful acquisition of this enormous swathe of land, in 1848, the very year that California became a part of the United States, a man called James W Marshall, a foreman working at the construction of a lumber mill at Sutter’s Mill near Coloma on the American River flowing from the Sierra Nevada mountains, discovered a shiny yellow metal in the tailrace of the mill and precipitated the great gold rush of 1849.

Young Lieutenant Jackson had a generally good war in 1846-8. He distinguished himself in combat but there are incidents which once again illustrate the maddeningly contradictory nature of this often baffling man. He rose to become Second Lieutenant in regular army rank but also obtained several brevet promotions (temporary ranks authorized by warrant on an officer usually for the duration of military campaigns but not affecting their permanent rank or seniority). He showed himself to be a thinking soldier during the assault on Chapultepec Castle by refusing to obey a command to withdraw his troops (an ironic display of stubbornness when viewed in retrospect!) on the grounds that withdrawal was more hazardous than continuing his outnumbered artillery duel with the enemy. In fact this was entirely the correct decision. He had disobeyed a bad order and a brigade was later able to exploit the advantage his stand had produced. In contrast however, during the assault on Mexico City, he was given an equally bad order to open fire on a civilian throng. This time his strength of character abandoned him and he obeyed in spite of his disagreement with the order. Thomas was always full of these bewildering contradictions.

Nevertheless he finished up the war with a fine reputation, reaching the brevet rank of major and having been awarded more brevet promotions than nearly any other officer in the army. He came to the notice of senior officers as a competent aggressive commander. One officer he met during this war would come to have profound consequences for Thomas in his later career. This was a tall handsome staff officer, of great charm and old fashioned courtesy, who also distinguished himself during the American Mexican war. His name was Robert Edward Lee.

Following the war there was a long period of peace and Thomas sought meaningful military employment. His teaching days at Jackson’s Mill were his guidance in this for, in 1851, he accepted a new teaching post at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia; the oldest state supported military college in the United States. He was to become a professor in Natural and Experimental Philosophy (whatever that meant) and an instructor in artillery. He produced very high quality work and indeed some of his teachings, encompassing as they do such essential military qualities of discipline, reconnaissance and tactical mobility, are still taught at the VMI. In spite of this he was an unpopular teacher known to his students as old “Tom Fool”. His lectures were delivered woodenly by rote memory with little illuminating explanation and he was a strict disciplinarian who lacked the ability to endear himself to his students or to inspire them. He was frequently lampooned by his students for his eccentricities and religious fervour and there was even an attempt to have him removed as a teacher by a group of alumni in 1856.

Despite his shortcomings as a teacher Thomas found personal happiness and stability in his life during his tenure at the Institute. It was not achieved without heartbreak however. In 1853 he married Elinor Junkin, the daughter of the president of Washington College in Lexington. They moved into an annex built on to the president’s own residence; a residence later occupied by Robert E Lee when he in turn became president of the college. The marriage was a very short one. The old Jackson family curse came back to haunt the newly wed couple for the following year Elinor gave birth to a stillborn son and then died an hour later from the haemorrhaging caused by the birth.

In 1857 Thomas married again. His new bride was Mary Anna Morrison from North Carolina whose father was the president of Davidson College. Mary was the great love of Thomas’ life. It is curiously endearing that this normally taciturn gruff man, not known for his displays of human emotion, found a tender side of him touched by his wife. His tender, affectionate letters to her still survive to give us an insight into the gentler feelings of this bewilderingly enigmatic man’s character. Inevitably however the ill fortune of the Jackson family rose again. Their first daughter. Mary Graham, was born in April 1858. She died a month later. They had a second daughter in 1862. This girl did survive infancy but Thomas never saw her grow up. She was less than a year old when he marched off to battle at a place called Chancellorsville.

Perhaps the most telling insights from this domestic interlude in Thomas’ life are illustrated by his relationship with the African-American population of Lexington. In a continuation of his earlier teaching of a slave at his Uncle’s mill, Thomas organised and ran a Sunday School in 1856 for black people at his Presbyterian church. He and his wife both taught at this school and it would seem that his teaching efforts here were far more appreciated than those at the Military Institute. Indeed he seems to have completely ignored the legality of teaching coloured people and he became revered among the African-Americans of Lexington both slaves and free blacks for his efforts to educate them. Doubtless he was motivated by religious zeal for he considered it a sacred duty to extend the word of the gospels to the coloured population. He considered the African race to be ignorant and that may sound racist (and it was racist) but it was also a statement of fact. Black people in Virginia in the 1850s were ignorant; deliberately so as education was consciously denied to them. To his great credit Thomas attempted to redress that shameful policy of denying education to black people and cared not that he contravened Virginia law in doing so. It is a major point in his favour that he was beloved and revered by the black people of Lexington for his championship of their betterment and all the more baffling that he would one day fight so hard and long to maintain the disgraceful institution that kept them enslaved.

Thomas and his family were wealthy enough to possess their own slaves. In fact they had six altogether and it is interesting to see how they came by them. They had a female slave called Hetty and her two teenage sons, George and Cyrus, which they obtained as wedding presents. It may shock us into dumbfounded silence now to think that a little over 150 years ago in America a human being could be given to somebody as a wedding present in the same way as we might now give a fish slice or a tea set but this was routine in the Southern States at that time. Then there was Albert. Albert actually begged Thomas to buy him and allow him to work toward his freedom. Thomas seems to have agreed to allow Albert to do this and Albert was hired out as a waiter in a Lexington Hotel and for functions at the VMI. Amy, who became the Jackson household’s cook and housekeeper (all the best cooks in the Southern States were slaves at this time and their contribution to Southern cuisine has been deep and long lasting), was another slave who asked Thomas to buy her from the auction block. Finally there was little Emma. Emma was six years old and had, what we would call today, a learning disability. Thomas doesn’t seem to have paid much if anything for her but took her off the hands of an aging widow and gave her to his wife as a coming home present. It is hard to see what use the household could have made of a very young handicapped c***d and the overwhelming feeling is that Thomas took the c***d in through compassion, almost as if he adopted her.

All of this begs the question as to just how Thomas regarded the institution of slavery; an institution which, after all, he would, by the machinations of fate, become a champion of. Dr James Robertson Jr of the Virginia Centre for Civil War Studies has summarised it by saying “Jackson neither apologized for nor spoke in favor of the practice of slavery. He probably opposed the institution. Yet in his mind the Creator had sanctioned slavery, and man had no moral right to challenge its existence. The good Christian slaveholder was one who treated his servants fairly and humanely at all times.” It is probably as close as we’re going to get to this complex man’s ambiguity towards the terrible injustice that he would be called upon to defend.

In 1859 Thomas bought a brick town house at 8 East Washington Street in Lexington. It was the only house he ever possessed but his tenure of it was to be short lived. Two years later war would break out and he would never return to the house. That same year of 1859 saw some of the opening reverberations of the convulsion that would tear the country apart. A fanatical abolitionist named John Brown led a madcap, ill-advised raid on an armoury at Harper’s Ferry at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers on the borders of Virginia and Maryland.

In spite of his martyrdom in the name of slave emancipation John Brown was hardly an exemplary example of a noble crusader. In fact he had forged a reputation as an advocate of v******e and cold blooded murder during the vicious conflict that had been convulsing the State of Kansas since 1854. To most Americans the first shots of the Civil War were fired in anger at Fort Sumter on April 12th 1861 but, in so called “Bleeding Kansas”, something as close to civil war as makes no difference had been raging for the best part of seven years between pro-slavery and emancipation militias prior to that date. Brown had shown himself to be equal to the ruthless nature of that bitter conflict most notably with the massacre of five unarmed men with broadswords at Pottawatomie in 1856. It is a further tarnish on his reputation that the first man murdered during the raid on Harper’s Ferry was not a white pro-slavery enemy but in fact a free black man called Hayward Shepherd who was a baggage handler on the east bound Baltimore and Ohio train approaching the town who was gunned down whilst trying to warn the passengers as Brown’s men attempted to stop the train.

The whole Harper’s Ferry affair was a misconceived almost farcical endeavour and after three days holed up under siege in the armoury Brown and his surviving followers finally surrendered to an assault by a company of U.S Marines. The same people keep running into each other through this story for the officer commanding this company was Thomas’ old mentor from the American-Mexican war: Robert E Lee. One of the lieutenants involved in the assault was one James Ewell Brown Stuart, later to become the most famous cavalry commander in the Confederate forces of the Civil War.

Thomas’ role in this sorry affair was to command a small detachment of twenty one artillery cadets from the VMI and two howitzers at the subsequent trial and martyrdom of Brown at Charlestown. With tensions rising high, the state of Virginia had beefed up its military presence around the trial fearing outbreaks of unrest. Brown was hanged on the 2nd of December in 1859 and while Thomas (now a major) hardly had much in the way of a military command he could at least have boasted to be present at the lighting of the tinderbox that would plunge the nation into civil war just fifteen months later.

The final deed that pushed the country over the brink towards war came as a result of the presidential election in 1860. The Republican party had nominated a man riding on a platform opposed to the expansion of slavery beyond the institution’s southern heartland. It all sounded very like a move toward emancipation to the slave holding states of the American south and the new Republican candidate rapidly became their bête noir. The candidate was a previously little known politician from Kentucky. His name was Abraham Lincoln.

The country polarised around the election with the northern, non slave holding, states rallying to Lincoln’s banner and the southern states bitterly opposed to him and falling behind the Democratic candidate. It is incredible that in the latter part of the twentieth century the Democratic Party of the United States would become the champion of civil rights for African Americans and the overwhelming majority of people of African descent would vote Democrat. Yet in 1860 the Democratic Party was anything but its later metamorphosis. It was pro-slavery and ran its campaign with an unadulterated racism that would appal anybody today; waving banners depicting innocent looking white girls being pawed by grotesquely caricatured black men being encouraged by Lincoln. The world, as we shall see, changes.

Some parts change faster than others. After Lincoln was elected in 1860 the divisions in the country became profound and irreconcilable. On the 20th of December the State of South Carolina formally seceded from the Union. The States were United no longer. By the 1st February 1861 South Carolina had been joined by Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. On the 4th of February these seven sates declared themselves to be a separate sovereign nation; the Confederate States of America. After the opening rounds of conflict had been fired in anger at Fort Sumter they were joined by North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee and, pertinently, Virginia. Thomas of course was a Virginian although ironically he came from the North West of Virginia; a region that would later secede from the rest of the state to align with the north and become the new state of West Virginia.

The eleven states that constituted the new Confederacy claimed their authority to rebel against the United States upon the precedent set by their forefathers in the Revolutionary War. They saw it as a new revolution in exactly the same way that the states of America had revolted eighty years ago to cast off the perceived tyranny of its masters. But the world had changed dramatically in those intervening eighty years. The revolution, the real revolution, had occurred not in the southern states but in the north; a revolution being mirrored across the Atlantic in America’s old masters, Great Britain. The southern rebellion of 1861 was not so much a revolutionary one but a reactionary backlash to a changing world. The north was the changing society; industrialising, becoming more urban, less controlled by a landed gentry. It was the society of railroads, telegraphs, industrial conurbations, new means of mass production and rapidly changing societal values. The south remained mired in an essentially agrarian economy dominated by wealthy landowners who ruled their fiefs in a way that would have been instantly recognisable to the aristocratic hierarchy who had lorded over the European lands that America had cast aside eighty years earlier, prior to the industrial revolution.

The Southern States never seemed to understand how the world had changed outside its blinkered little fantasy land of southern gentry lording it over their vast plantations. Ironically the major cash crop of their gentry’s wealth, cotton, had kick-started the new revolution in the textile mills of old England yet when they sent emissaries to England seeking recognition for their new Confederacy they found little sympathy among the new classes ruling the industrial towns of Lancashire for a country dedicated to an antiquated feudalism. They were a backwater; in a sense the last throw of the dice for feudal gentry in the western world. The world was changing and they were desperately trying to hold back the course of change and cling on to what they possessed.

The ruling hierarchy of the South did possess great wealth. Even while resisting the winds of industrial change sweeping the world they had nevertheless become rich from it. The mill towns consumed all the cotton they could send and the rich landowners fantasised that the world could not live without them. They also possessed the one thing that made all this wealth possible; the very workforce that tended and harvested their great cotton plantations; slaves; some four million human beings held in bondage under the lash to pluck the cotton from the fields to maintain their masters’ lives of pampered luxury. Now the changing world was threatening to take their slaves away from them. This last bastion, of feudalism in America, stood up to declare that they would rather die than let such an outrage occur.

Of course the landed gentry of the South did a disproportionately small amount of the dying in the war they started. It was commonly said by the Confederate foot soldiers of the Civil War that it was a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight. Wealth and slaves were held by a rich minority. In the 1860 census there were around 393,975 slaveholders in the Southern and Border States or about eight percent of the white population. Of these slaveholders 88% held less than 20 slaves and 50% held fewer than five. Less than one percent of all slaveholders (that’s around three to four thousand landowners) owned more than 200 slaves on their estates. Overwhelmingly the men who did the fighting and the dying for the cause of Southern slavery had never owned a slave in their lives and probably never would have done. For all the noble talk of State rights and freedoms the Civil War was a conflict perpetrated by the avarice of wealthy slave owners and paid for in blood by poor men fighting for a cause that didn’t belong to them.

It is a little vague how Thomas, who possessed at best an ambiguous attitude to the institution of slavery, would come to fight in the armies defending it. It is probable that he simply became part of the Confederate army because he was a Virginian and served in a Virginian military academy. Certainly his old friend and mentor Robert E Lee joined for that very reason; a loyalty to his own state and Robert was even less sound on the institution of slavery than Thomas. In fact Robert found the whole notion of slavery disagreeable and immoral and had in fact freed all his own family’s slaves prior to the outbreak of war. The two greatest champions of slavery were in fact two men who, at the very best, possessed a distasteful tolerance of it.

After the opening salvos of the war had been sounded at Fort Sumter on the 12th of April 1861 Thomas had just fifteen days to put his affairs in order before once again marching off to war. He provided for his family and his slaves, said a last farewell to his house on East Washington Street (he would never live there again), kissed his beloved Mary and then, on the orders of Governor John Letcher, travelled to Harper’s Ferry to take command and to raise a brigade. This brigade, consisting of the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 27th and 33rd Virginia Infantry Regiments, was Thomas’ greatest creation and would rise to become the most famous and decorated infantry brigade in the entire Confederate army. It was largely recruited from men in and around the Shenandoah Valley, the very theatre of war where both it and Thomas would forge their greatest triumphs and reputation. It was also the brigade that would one day carry Thomas’ most famous name into battle but, in the spring and early summer of 1861, Thomas had yet to acquire that name. That name was to become attached to him at the end of the third week in July in the first great battle of the Civil War.

There are two rivers called Bull Run in the United States of America. One is a fast flowing river up in Oregon but the one everybody has heard of rises in the Bull Run Mountains of Loudon County in Virginia. It’s not much of a river to tell the truth and were it not for the events of 1861 and 1862 it would have remained happily obscure. It’s only some thirty odd miles long before it flows into the Occoquan River which in its turn is a tributary of the Potomac. By the time Bull Run draws near the city of Manassas it’s little more than a wide sluggish creek but across this river was fought the first major land battle of the American Civil War.

The battle is called “First Battle of Bull Run but that’s only its name on the Union side of the conflict. To the confused exasperation of any historian studying the American Civil War, battles were often given different names on opposite sides of the conflict. Thus the battle the Confederates called “Shiloh” was the “Battle of Pittsburgh Landing” to the Union and the battle the Union called “Antietam” was named “Sharpsburg” on the Confederate side. Thus the two battles of Bull Run were called First and Second Manassas in the Confederate South. Manassas wasn’t any more significant than the Bull Run river in fact. It’s a small city of just short of 38,000 people today but back in 1861 it was little more than a railway junction.

It’s worth taking a look in more detail at this battle because it was not only Thomas’ first battle of the war (he had been involved in a few skirmishes prior to this) but it is also the place where he acquired his name. Before Bull Run he was virtually an unknown; a man without a name. After Bull Run he had one of the most famous nicknames in American history; a name that would become part of the American language. How he actually acquired that name is still a matter of controversy to this day however and the word he bequeathed to the national lexicon is still tainted by the contradictory nature of it.

As any American high school student who didn’t actually fall into complete u*********sness during his school history lessons will tell you, the first Battle of Bull Run was a crushing Confederate victory. It wasn’t meant to be that way. Brigadier General Irwin Mcdowell’s Union Army of North Eastern Virginia was, at 35,000 strong, the largest field army ever gathered together in the history of North America to that point. It was substantially larger than the 22,000 men that General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard (there’s a name to conjure with!) could field against him in the Confederate Army of the Potomac. Moreover the Union had a further 18,000 men under Major General Robert Patterson to pin down Joseph E Johnston’s 12,000 men in the Shenandoah Valley. Had these forces been even remotely handled with competence the great Southern rebellion could have been over barely as soon as it had begun.

But it wasn’t! The whole campaign went tits up before hardly a shot had been fired in anger. Patterson fannied about in the Shenandoah Valley like an old hen and utterly failed to engage Johnston’s army with the result that Johnston was able to place his entire command on railway trains and rush them eastwards to reinforce Beauregard. They would still never have arrived in time for the battle had McDowell got his arse into gear and made anything like a decent pace towards Bull Run. He was reluctant to commit to battle because he feared his troops were too green. President Lincoln urged him on by pointing out correctly that the Confederate troops facing him were just as green as his own were. It didn’t seem to spur him on the greater effort. Instead he dithered about and crept up to the battlefield at a speed that would have shamed a stranded turtle. Just to compound his tardiness he then started having vapours about his communications and duly despatched five thousand men from his army to cover his rear! In essence Union bungling had reduced a massive superiority in numbers to something approaching parity before the battle had even begun.

For all that, McDowell’s attack on the Bull Run river came within a whisker of success. Military bungling was by no means confined to the Union command. In spite of his long forewarning of the impending assault Beauregard completely misread McDowell’s intentions. He concentrated the bulk of his army along the river covering the approaches to the fords and bridges on the right flank of the battlefield certain that McDowell would wish to capture the railroads concentrated in that part of the battlefield. Instead McDowell launched his attack several miles upstream. Ten thousand Union soldiers battered into around four and a half thousand surprised rebels and pushed them back. Some Confederate troops broke and ran. For a critical period it seemed as if McDowell was on the verge of a resounding success.

The whole Union logistic train had been swollen by hundreds of prominent citizens, Senators, Congressmen, newspaper reporters, and anybody with the wherewithal to hire a carriage in Washington, had come to witness the battle as if war was some kind of bizarre spectator sport. This retinue of useless mouths were sending jubilant telegraphs back to the capital predicting impending victory. Nobody had yet heard of Thomas Jackson.

Thomas was a relatively late arrival at the battle. He didn’t actually take up a position with his brigade until around noon by which time the Confederate forces were fighting a series of increasingly desperate delaying actions against heavy union attacks. The rebels were attempting to regroup on a hill topped by the house of an aging, bedridden widow called Judith Henry who was sadly killed when a cannonball demolished her bedroom. It was on this focal hill that Thomas deployed his men and it was on this hill where he won his name.

What exactly happened has never been decided one way or another to anybody’s satisfaction and the only man that could have given a conclusive answer died shortly after in the battle. Thomas had positioned his brigade and 13 field guns on the reverse slope of the hill. It was a clever deployment for each time his guns fired they rolled back down the reverse slope with the recoil and could be reloaded in safety from cover. Also they were in range of the Union’s guns and, for once, the short range nullified the inherent advantage of the Union’s superior rifled cannon over the Confederate smooth bore pieces. In fact most of the Union rounds were flying harmlessly over the rebel’s heads. Thomas was a bit of an expert when it came to positioning his artillery.

In any case, having planted himself just where he wanted to be, Thomas was damned if he was going to move. It was his same stubborn refusal to back out of a position that we first saw at Chapultepec in 1847. It was this obstinacy; this refusal to budge an inch that earned him his title. The man who gave it to him was a certain Confederate Brigadier General Barnard Elliot Bee.

Just how and why Bee gave him the name is distinctly open to question however. The story that became popularised; the one that made such heroic reading in the Richmond Enquirer after the battle, shows Thomas as the hero of the day whose stubborn resistance inspired the faltering Confederate line to hold fast in the face of the Union assault. In this version Bee is supposed to have pointed to Thomas and his brigade on Henry Hill and shouted, “"There is Jackson standing like a stone wall. Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer. Rally behind the Virginians!" All stirring stuff no doubt and just the kind of thing the Southern public wanted to hear. However there is an alternative account that is quite different. In this version Bee was not admiring Thomas’’ heroic stand but becoming increasingly frustrated by Thomas’ refusal to move from his position to come to the aid of Bee’s own forces. He therefore shouted "Look at Jackson standing there like a damned stone wall!" We don’t know which story is true and Bee himself can shed no light on the matter for he was killed shortly after.

Now whichever of those stories you accept (and I have my own opinion as to which is the more believable) it nevertheless is the incident that gave Thomas his name. He would be “Stonewall” Jackson forever more and a new word had entered the American vocabulary. The word itself however is tainted in subtle ways by the manner in which it was coined. To “stonewall” came to mean to stubbornly resist; obstinately refuse to budge or to cooperate. It has the additional flavour however of meaning to refuse to move in a bad cause; to resist change: a reactionary obstinacy of an old guard in defiance of needful progress. In view of later events I shall come to describe this meaning to the word is deliciously ironic.

Certainly Bull Run was a confused affair and it was one of Thomas’s regiments that eventually turned the course of the battle in a typically muddled way. The 33rd Virginia regiment attacked a pair of Union guns under the command of an artillery commander called Griffin. In these early days of the war the uniforms on each side had not yet become standardised and the 33rd wore blue uniforms causing the Union troops to mistake them for their own until they were on top of them and had over-run the guns. The 33rd then fell on the flank of the 11th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment and Thomas, seeing the opportunity flung two more of his regiments into the fray. After bitter fighting the last Union troops were forced off Henry Hill by four o’clock in the afternoon and the battle had turned decisively in favour of the Confederacy. Beauregard ordered his entire line forward and the Union front collapsed. The retreat over the Bull Run river turned into a rout and the Washington notables were scrabbling for every horse and wagon they could lay hands on to flee back to the capital.

In many respects the Confederate victory at Bull Run was a national tragedy. The legacy of the battle would have profound consequences. Its boost to Southern morale was immediate and enormous and led to the fondly held belief in the superiority of Southern arms over their Northern opponents. It was a misguided belief for the North drew a different lesson from the battle. It hardened Northern resolve and fostered a determination to start to take the war seriously; to mobilise its full resources of manpower and massive industrial output to prosecute all out war. In that respect it was a tragedy for the South, for that determination to bring the full might of Northern resources to bear would lead to the ruination and ravaging of the Southern homelands. Had the South lost the battle perhaps it would have been spared the disasters which would befall it and for an outcome that would have been the same in any case. There was a further tragedy of course. Had the Confederacy lost the battle decisively the whole war might have come to an end there and then. The nation might have been spared the years of bloodletting to come and the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men.

Although dwarfed by the carnage to come over the next few years, the butcher’s bill at Bull Run was, up until then, the bloodiest battle yet fought on American soil. 847 men lost their lives on both sides and another 4,031 men were wounded, captured or listed as missing. Apart from a new name Thomas himself carried away a souvenir of the battle. It was a curiosity of Thomas that he would raise his hand high in the midst of battle. Some thought it an eccentricity; others thought it an impeachment to the Almighty. It was also a pretty silly thing to do. He was struck in the hand by a Union bullet which carried away some of the bone in one finger. He refused point blank to have the finger amputated.

If it was at Bull Run where Thomas earned his name it was in the Shenandoah Valley where he won his reputation. Newly promoted to Major General, Thomas was ordered to take command of the Valley District with his headquarters at Winchester. In the spring of 1862 the valley was threatened by a Union army under the command of Major General Nathaniel P Banks. The Shenandoah Valley suited Thomas and his men down to the ground. Many of his veterans indeed came from the valley and they knew its terrain intimately. Moreover Thomas had never lost that steely determination on the march he had learned when hiking back to his uncle’s mill when he was twelve years old. His men covered ground at a remarkable pace; crossing mountains and passes and forever turning up where least expected by the bewildered Union troops.

It was Thomas at his brilliant best. Old “Tom Fool” no longer, he demonstrated all the wile and cunning of a fox; running rings around his opponents in a campaign that is still hailed as a classic to this day. His army never numbered more than 17,000 men yet, apart from a minor setback at Kernstown, he outmanoeuvred, out thought and outfought a Union force of 60,000 men winning five battles in the space of 48 days. Nathaniel Banks was outclassed.

For all Thomas’ brilliance in the Shenandoah Valley, the theatre was essentially a sideshow. The real crisis in the late spring and early summer of 1862 was looming to the east where an enormous union army, assembled and trained by General George B McClellan, was threatening to break out from the Virginia peninsular and march on the Confederate capital of Richmond itself. On the last day of May and the first of June an inconclusive battle called the Battle of Seven Pines was fought on this peninsular. Although it was the largest battle in the eastern theatre up until this point and cost a total of 11,000 casualties between the two sides, little was decided.

There was one very significant change on the Confederate side however. The Confederate Army of Virginia’s commander Joseph E Johnston, was riding on his horse around dusk on the first day of the battle when he was struck in the shoulder by a bullet and almost immediately after by a shell fragment that hit him in the chest. He fell from his horse severely wounded and was evacuated to Richmond. In the fighting the following day Johnston’s replacement, Major General G. W Smith proved to be indecisive and unimpressive. The day after the battle therefore President Jefferson Davis decided to replace him. The man he sent to take command was none other than Thomas’ old friend and mentor from the Mexican American war, Robert Edward Lee.

To begin with, Lee’s new appointment was not popular with the troops or the public in Richmond. He was perceived to be an overly cautious and timid commander nicknamed “Granny Lee” by his men. A more inaccurate assessment of his fighting character would be hard to imagine. Lee set about immediately in shoring up the defences around Richmond, digging a massive network of entrenchments. For this he was ridiculed by the public and press as “Excavating Lee” or the “King of Spades”.

Certainly Lee did not appear to be of great martial calibre. He was a conservative, rather mild sort of man, always impeccably dressed, of courteous and genteel manner, dignified and kindly. He was a charming and affable, if reserved sort of gentleman. He was just the kind of man you would have liked to have had as a dinner guest but these qualities hardly seemed to fit him for the role of a fighting general facing the crisis of early summer 1862 when McClellan seemed poised to swoop down on Richmond and crush the Confederacy for good. This outward facade was an illusion however. Beneath his well mannered exterior Lee was a cunning and aggressive fighter with the instincts of a gambler willing to risk all on the toss of a dice. He was, without question, the best general in the entire Confederate army.

His opponent in the peninsular was an entirely different character. McClellan was feisty and belligerent sounding with an ego a mile wide and given to self aggrandizement; revelling in his reputation as the “Napoleon of the North”. To give him his due, the well trained and equipped Union Army of the Potomac was virtually entirely his creation. But having forged this formidable weapon he would prove in combat to be the least suitable man to wield it. He was a nervous old hen on a battlefield, cautious to and beyond the point of timidity; continuously failing to exploit his own numerical superiority and, believing always that he was outnumbered, bleating incessantly for reinforcements he didn’t need. Against Lee he was out of his depth.

Lee, facing a far more numerous enemy, did need reinforcements and the most significant force available to him in his defence of Richmond was away in the Shenandoah Valley. Lee recalled it to the eastern front and Thomas brought his army eastwards to the peninsular. With that act, one of military history’s great double acts was brought into being.

It is an often seen common thread throughout military history where a great commander has a brilliant and dynamic subordinate; a sort of sword held in the clenched fist of the commander to be unleashed and allowed to rampage at the decisive moment; Eisenhower had his Patton, Slim had his Wingate, Marlborough his Prinz Eugen, Guderian his Rommel and so on. Of course later in this same war came another famous duo; the devastating combination of Ulysses S Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. In this way Thomas was Robert Lee’s sword; the man he could rely on to land the decisive coup on the battlefield. Of course the analogy shouldn’t be taken too far. Lee also possessed the services of General James Longstreet whose role in Lee’s successes are often underestimated. Longstreet was of a more defensive mindset than Thomas’ daring offensive instincts and it is often said that Jackson was Lee’s hammer and Longstreet his anvil. This is another analogy that can be over emphasised for sometimes, most notably at the Second Battle of Bull Run, the roles were reversed. Also, in James Ewell Brown Stuart, Lee possessed one of the most outstanding cavalry commanders of the war.

Nevertheless there was, it has to be said, a very special relationship between Thomas and his superior officer. Lee, in spite of his tactical brilliance, was prone to certain faults. One of those faults came from one of the very qualities that made him such an agreeably pleasant companion. His orders were frequently so courteously and deferentially phrased that his subordinates often took them to be suggestions rather than direct commands and failed in consequence to carry them out. With Thomas, Lee had no such problem. There was a deep, almost telepathic understanding between the two men and Lee would come to refer to Thomas as his right hand. Whenever Lee wanted somebody to perform the outrageously audacious, Thomas was the man he called upon to perform the task.

On the face of it, two men of more different character would be hard to imagine. Lee was a courteous, genteel man of great charm, suave and impeccably mannered. Thomas was a gruff eccentric not known for his social graces to put it mildly. He is even suspected by some psychologists of suffering from Asperger’s syndrome and certainly some of his peculiarities are eye opening. He was known for instance to fall asleep with food still in his mouth and carried a life long conviction that one of his arms was longer than the other! The story that Thomas sucked lemons continuously to relieve his dyspepsia is almost certainly untrue however. For one thing lemons were hard to come by in the war ravaged economy of the Confederate States. Thomas regarded them as a treat for he loved all kinds of fruit, particularly peaches.

Even the physical appearance of the two men was in sharp contrast. Lee was invariably well turned out, wearing his dress uniforms with quiet dignity and studied grace. Thomas on the other hand looked little different from any other bedraggled member of his army in tattered old uniform and battered old boots. Lee looked every inch the gentleman, Thomas looked like a tramp. There is a lovely story that illustrates Thomas’ dress sense. Just before the Battle of Fredericksburg the dashing cavalry officer, J.E.B Stuart, presented Thomas with a fine new General’s coat he had had made at the best tailors in Richmond. Thomas’ old coat was threadbare and lacking buttons but he liked it and at first didn’t want to wear the new coat. His staff insisted on him wearing it to dinner however and he gruffly agreed with great reluctance. In the event half the army turned out to see him dressed in his new finery, so unusual was the sight. Thomas was so embarrassed by the whole affair that he refused to wear the coat for months afterwards.

In spite of their apparent differences there was nevertheless a deep mutual respect between the two men. Thomas was the one man who could share Robert Lee’s visionary battlefield concepts. Alone among his subordinates Thomas was the commander to whom Lee could give deliberately non detailed orders and expect him to carry out his wishes completely. It was a deadly combination and the bane of nearly every Union commander that faced it.

There is one other similarity I must mention. Lee’s own attitude toward slavery, the very institution for which the South fought to defend, was every bit as ambiguous as Thomas’ was. Robert’s own wife and daughter ran an i*****l school for slaves on their Arlington plantation and Lee himself abhorred slavery although, in common with Thomas, regarded it as a condition ordained by God. His own views can be read in a letter he wrote to his wife in 1856, long before the war. “In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.” Lee himself liberated his own slaves and was a spokesmen for the cause of freeing black slaves and enlisting them in the Confederate army late in the war when ever growing Northern numerical superiority threatened to overwhelm the reeling Confederacy. It is a supreme irony therefore that, among all the Generals in the Confederate army, the two men who fought the hardest and most effectively to maintain the odious institution of slavery were the two men with the greatest moral misgivings concerning it.

For all that the relationship between Thomas and Robert would flourish into a great partnership, it got off to a slow start. About the best thing that Thomas did in the peninsular campaign was to turn up at all. His shifting of his army from the Shenandoah Valley to join Lee facing McClellan was a triumph of logistics and his surprise arrival in front of the Union armies caused even more vapours than usual to consume General McClellan with doubt and finally convinced him, erroneously, that the Confederate forces outnumbered him heavily. Lee, sensing his opponent’s timidity and knowing he could not win a battle of attrition against the larger Union army, demonstrated that gambler’s nerve he would come to be famous for. He swung over to the offensive, leaving his defences of Richmond relatively weak in order to concentrate his forces against the weak points in McClellan’s flank. So began the battle known as the “Seven Days Battle”.

Thomas was not at his best in this battle. It is likely he was exhausted from the exertions of his Valley campaign and further wilted by his feat in moving his army east in such a hurry. Whatever the reason, his performance at Seven Days was quite poor. His troops fought well enough but Thomas himself seemed uncharacteristically lethargic and hesitant. Lee’s overall plan was complex and required the close cooperation and adherence of his junior officers. He didn’t get it and Thomas, on this occasion, must bear some of the blame for that. As a result Lee failed to gain the victory he had hoped for.

It was nevertheless a victory of sorts. It’s an old adage in war that the battle lost is the battle you think you have lost. McClellan’s troops fought well and absorbed pretty much everything the Confederate armies threw at them. Seven Days was an appalling bloodbath for both sides but on the butcher’s slab the Union army came out ahead of the game inflicting over 20,000 casualties including 3,494 killed, 15,758 wounded and 952 captured or missing as against their own losses of 1,734 dead, 8,062 wounded and 6,053 captured or missing. They did not lose the Battle of Seven Days. The battle was lost in the mind of General George McClellan. Convinced to the end that he was holding out against overwhelming Confederate superiority when in fact his army heavily outnumbered their opponents he ordered a retreat until his army was safely back across the James River. Richmond was safe and the Confederate jubilation was enormous. Robert Lee was no longer “Granny Lee” but “Marse Robert” and would be until the end of his days. Only the most sober of judges would have thoughtfully noted that his strategic victory had been obtained at the cost of terrible casualties; casualties the smaller pool of manpower available to the Confederacy could ill afford in any protracted war with the North.

After the Seven Days battle Lee reorganised his army into two major wings; one under Longstreet and the other under Thomas. It was a combination that would serve him well during the hot and bloody days of the summer of 1862. With McClellan neutralised and retreating from the peninsular Lee turned his attention North to the Union Army of Virginia under the command of Major General John Pope standing between him and the Union capital of Washington. The Northern Virginia Campaign was a brilliant campaign for Lee and his army. In early August, at the Battle of Cedar Mountain, Thomas met his old foe, Nathaniel Banks, once more and beat him... again.

Lee concentrated both his wings together and pushed forward toward the Rappahannock River sending his brilliant cavalry commander, J.E.B Stuart to raid into the Union rear. The raids revealed the reinforcement of Pope and McClellan’s armies to over 130,000 men, more than twice the size of the Confederate army. It also revealed the weakness in Pope’s right flank which Lee exploited, pushing him back on the Rappahannock River where the two armies skirmished for a few days towards the end of August. It was here that Lee pulled off one of those audacious gambles for which he would become famous, dividing his army and sending half of it under Stuart and Thomas to turn Pope’s flank once more. Thomas fulfilled his commanding officer’s faith in him admirably, striking deep to over-run the Union supply depot of Manassas Junction and causing Pope to abandon his defensive line of the Rappahannock and fall back toward Manassas. Lee then contrived to reunite the two wings of his army and marched them to face Pope close to where the whole bloody war might be said to have really started in earnest on the Bull Run River.

The Second Battle of Bull Run was, in some ways, an even greater disaster for the Union than the first although in the event not as great a disaster as it might have been. With McClellan neutralised in the peninsular Lee had been able to rush Major General Hill’s force of 12,000 men to reinforce Thomas’ wing of the Confederate army. It was this wing that bore the brunt of the early part of the battle and Thomas’ old Brigade now forever more the “Stonewall” brigade were in the thick of the fighting around Brawner’s Farm on the 28th of August. Thomas held an advantage in this early part of the battle but was unable to press home his localised superiority and by the following day had fallen back on the defensive around a feature known as Stony Ridge. Here he faced the full fury of the Union assault and here he stood throughout that critical day until Longstreet came up on his right flank this time to play the hammer to Thomas’ anvil. Battered against Thomas’ obdurate defence and now reeling from Longstreet’s counter attack the Union assault collapsed and, by late afternoon on the 30th of August, the Union army was retreating abjectly back towards Centreville.

Pope had lost some 10,000 men killed and wounded from his army of 62,000 but at least his withdrawal was less chaotic than the Union retreat after the first battle of Bull Run. Lee had pulled off another memorable victory but it was a victory tempered by his own casualties; some 1,300 dead and another 7,000 wounded from his smaller force of 50,000 men. Moreover he had failed in one important regard. Pope’s army was not destroyed. The public in Washington were having the vapours once more and there was something approaching panic in the capital but Pope’s army was still intact. It was battered and bruised from its mauling on the Bull Run river but it was still larger than Lee’s own depleted army and still a formidable force to be reckoned with. Add to that McClellan’s forces, which that General had disgracefully failed to use in support of Pope, and Lee still faced overwhelming odds.

To conclude the Virginia campaign Lee sent Thomas to try and destroy the remnants of Pope’s army at the Battle of Chantilly at the beginning of September by cutting their line of retreat. It was a bit of an inconclusive affair that added something over 2,000 casualties to the overall butcher’s bill on both sides. Thomas failed to cut off Pope’s Army of Virginia and it retreated safely back to be absorbed into McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. The Confederate army declared themselves to be the tactical victors since at the end of the day they held the battlefield but in reality nothing much was changed. There was still a powerful Union army across the Potomac river between them and Washington.

The Virginia campaign and its tally of dazzling victories however had imbibed Lee’s Army of