Stonewall Jackson

Biography

Thomas Jonathan Jackson was born in Clarksburg, then in Virginia, in 1824. His father and a sister died of typhoid when he was a small child and his mother died a few years later, so he grew up largely with relatives at Jackson's Mill, where he received little formal schooling and later taught at a local school. He entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1842 near the bottom of his class and graduated seventeenth of fifty-nine in 1846.

As an artillery officer in the Mexican-American War he served at Veracruz, Contreras, Chapultepec and Mexico City and earned brevet promotion to major. After a brief posting in Florida he joined the faculty of the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington in 1851 as professor of natural and experimental philosophy and instructor of artillery. He was an unpopular teacher, a devout Presbyterian and a slave owner, and in 1859 he commanded VMI cadet artillery at the execution of John Brown.

When Virginia seceded in 1861 he joined the Confederate forces and took command at Harpers Ferry of the brigade that became known as the Stonewall Brigade. His stand at the First Battle of Bull Run earned him his nickname. In 1862 his campaign in the Shenandoah Valley tied down much larger Union forces, and he then served under Robert E. Lee in the Seven Days, Second Bull Run, Antietam and Fredericksburg campaigns, rising to lieutenant general in command of the Second Corps.

At Chancellorsville in May 1863 he led a flank march that routed the Union right, but on the night of 2 May he was shot by Confederate sentries who mistook his party for Union cavalry. His left arm was amputated and he died of pneumonia on 10 May 1863. He was buried in Lexington, and his reputation later became a central element of the Lost Cause interpretation of the war.