Historians' attempts to understand legendary Confederate General
Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson have proved uneven at best and often
contentious. An occasionally enigmatic and eccentric college
professor before the Civil War, Jackson died midway through the
conflict, leaving behind no memoirs and relatively few surviving
letters or documents. In Inventing Stonewall Jackson, Wallace
Hettle offers an innovative and distinctive approach to
interpreting Stonewall by examining the lives and agendas of those
authors who shape our current understanding of General Jackson.
Newspaper reporters, friends, relatives, and fellow soldiers
first wrote about Jackson immediately following the Civil War. Most
of them, according to Hettle, used portions of their own life
stories to frame that of the mythic general. Hettle argues that the
legend of Jackson's rise from poverty to power was likely inspired
by the rags-to-riches history of his first biographer, Robert Lewis
Dabney. Dabney's own successes and Presbyterian beliefs probably
shaped his account of Jackson's life as much as any factual
research. Many other authors inserted personal values into their
stories of Stonewall, perplexing generations of historians and
writers.
Subsequent biographers contributed their own layers to Jackson's
myth and eventually a composite history of the general came to
exist in the popular imagination. Later writers, such as the
liberal suffragist Mary Johnston, who wrote a novel about Jackson,
and the literary critic Allen Tate, who penned a laudatory
biography, further shaped Stonewall's myth. As recently as 2003,
the film Gods and Generals, which featured Jackson as the key
protagonist, affirmed the longevity and power of his image.
Impeccable research and nuanced analysis enable Hettle to use
American culture and memory to reframe the Stonewall Jackson
narrative and provide new ways to understand the long and contended
legacy of one of the Civil War's most popular Confederate
heroes.
General
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