Stonewall Jackson

Death moved through the family fast. His sister Elizabeth died of typhoid in March 1826 with two-year-old Thomas at the bedside, and his father, who nursed her, died of the same fever three weeks later. His mother remarried, then died in December 1831 after childbirth, into an unmarked grave in a homemade coffin. When an uncle came to collect the children, the boy hid in the woods until nightfall. He grew up at Jackson's Mill under a half-uncle who ran a grist mill, worked the farm, and got what schooling he could. He made a bargain with one of his uncle's enslaved men: pine knots to read by, for reading lessons. Teaching him was a crime in Virginia. Jackson taught him anyway, and the man used it to reach Canada.

He came out of West Point 17th of 59 in 1846, fought at Veracruz and Chapultepec, and spent 10 years at the Virginia Military Institute reciting memorized lectures to cadets who called him Tom Fool. In December 1859 he commanded two howitzers and 21 of those cadets at the hanging of John Brown. Then Virginia seceded and the rigidity became an instrument: First Manassas gave him the name, the Shenandoah Valley in 1862 gave him the reputation, and Chancellorsville killed him. BriefHistory carries the campaigns and the legend they built. What follows is the household underneath.

In 1855 he organized Sunday school classes for Black Lexingtonians, enslaved and free, and broke Virginia law a second time by encouraging them to read. He also owned six people. Harriet and her teenage sons Cyrus and George came to him in his second wife's dowry, and he and Anna probably sold two of them in 1857 to pay for a larger house. Emma, a four-year-old orphan with a learning disability, was handed over by an aged widow and presented to Anna as a gift. His widow's 1895 memoir claims two others asked to be bought, a claim historians read as part of her long campaign to separate him from the institution. He took slavery to be divinely sanctioned, which was ordinary among the men he lived beside.

The arm the surgeons took off was buried by itself at a house called Ellwood, a long way from the rest of him at Lexington. What grew around the grave was the Lost Cause. Virginia made his birthday a state holiday in 1904, put him on the only Confederate banknote to carry a general, and cut him into Stone Mountain. The unwinding was fast. Richmond pulled the Monument Avenue statue down on July 1, 2020, the holiday ended that month, and VMI hauled its statue off the parade ground on December 7. Charlottesville removed its 1921 equestrian in July 2021 and gave it to a Los Angeles nonprofit, where Kara Walker cut it into a sculpture called Unmanned Drone.

Stonewall Jackson's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Sunday school classes for Black Lexingtonians other
  Enslaved and free, taught to read in violation of Virginia law 1855
• First Battle of Bull Run mission
  His brigade held, and Barnard Bee's comparison to a stone wall stuck 1861
• Shenandoah Valley Campaign mission
  Still set as a study in maneuver at military academies 1862
• The flanking march at Chancellorsville mission
  It broke the Union right, and the ride back through the dark killed him 1863

• March 26, 1827 aged 3 His father dies of typhoid, three weeks after his sister
• December 4, 1831 aged 7 His mother dies after childbirth and goes into an unmarked grave He was seven. He and his sister Laura were sent to relatives at Jackson's Mill.
• 1846 aged ~22 Graduates 17th of 59 from West Point A classmate said that if the course had run one year longer he would have finished first.
• 1851 aged ~27 Begins 10 years teaching at the Virginia Military Institute Alumni tried to have him removed in 1856.
• October 22, 1854 aged 30 His first wife Elinor dies hours after delivering a stillborn son
• December 2, 1859 aged 35 Commands two howitzers at the hanging of John Brown Twenty-one VMI cadets manned them at the governor's request.
• July 21, 1861 aged 37 Holds at First Manassas and acquires a nickname
• May 2, 1863 aged 39 Shot by his own pickets at Chancellorsville and loses his left arm The ball recovered from him was 67 caliber, a Confederate size — one of the earliest uses of forensic ballistics.
• May 10, 1863 aged 39 Dies of pneumonia in a plantation office at Guinea Station

• John Brown 1800–1859
  Militant abolitionist whose raid on Harpers Ferry sharpened sectional conflict preceding the Civil War. guarded his execution
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. took up arms against
• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. argued against everything he fought for
• George S. Patton 1885–1945
  Armored commander whose aggressive leadership made him one of the most prominent American generals of World War II. idolized him
• Kara Walker b. 1969
  Contemporary artist whose silhouette installations confront the brutal history of American slavery and racism. remade his statue