Dabney, p. 248. CH. XXII. tion and a trouble" and that he would not accept it except in the light of a duty. He seemed incapable of gratitude to anything mortal; reminding one of Philip II., who built a monastery to God and St. Laurence to commemorate a victory and sent the generals who had won it to the scaffold. His efforts at evangelizing the negroes, of which so much is made by his eulogists, had a peculiar character. He established and carried on a Sunday school for them with unflinching zeal, but he was too sincere an adherent of slavery to give anything Ibid., p. 93. but oral instruction; the alphabet was too dangerous an engine to trust in their hands; they received their hymns, catechisms, and texts directly from the lips of their teachers-as was the general custom in the South. Yet on one occasion he went among the free blacks and encouraged them to contribute out of their poverty for the funds of Ibid., p. 95. the Bible Society. Professor Dabney says, "He required all his slaves to attend the domestic worship of his family, morning and evening; and succeeded, where so many Christian masters have found entire success apparently impossible, in securing the presence of every one." But in the same paragraph, the eulogist naively gives the key of his success: "Absolute obedience was the rule of his household; and if he found chastisement was necessary to secure this, it was faithfully administered." In all these singular traits of character we discern a striking resemblance to another of the remarkable personages of this great conflict. If John Brown of Ossawatomie had been bred in a slave State and had received a West Point training, it is hard to see in what particular he would have CH. XXII. differed from Stonewall Jackson.1 It was natural that such a character as this should play a great part in a civil war. With his early training to the military art, his knowledge of details rendered unusually accurate by ten years of teaching, his memory extraordinarily strengthened by the exercise to which it had been subjected, a temperament of the greatest eagerness and ardor in the pursuit of his purposes, a will of iron, an energy which knew no fatigue and required no stimulus, a devotion to the supposed interests of his section heightened by his frank hatred and contempt of his enemy, a feeling of invincibility and a disregard of danger natural to one who had no doubt of the continual presence of the Lord of Hosts by his side, helping him plant his batteries and array his columns for attack, and above all, an intense love of fighting for its own sake, and for the sake of fame, Jackson," for which he longed with a devouring thirst; all 2 1 Like John Brown he had faith in pikes as effective weapons in default of guns; and at the beginning of his Valley Campaign made a requisition for a thousand, which General Lee ordered to be sent him.-Lee to Gorgas, April 9, 1862. W. R. Vol. XII., Part III., pp. 844, 845. 2 The singular ferocity of hatred towards his adversaries is shown in an anecdote which would be incredible if it were related by one less intimate and less devoted than Jackson's adjutant and . biographer, R. L. Dabney, D.D. Once, in Jackson's presence, Col. Patton expressed his admiration of the bravery of a Federal squad who had all been surrounded and killed in a gallant charge. He 3 Dabney relates that on one Daniels, "Life of Stonewall p. 277. CH. XXII. these qualities combined to make him the first of the subordinate Southern leaders, a soldier incomparable for any employment where energy, celerity, and audacity were desired. He won great credit at the battle of Bull Run, but his first independent campaign resulted in signal defeat. In March, 1862, he was ordered by General Johnston to occupy the attention of Banks in the Shenandoah Valley. He advanced rapidly in pursuance of what he understood to be the spirit of his orders, and came in view of Shields's division at Kernstown, near Winchester, on the 22d of March. A brief skirmish took place that evening, in the course of which General Shields was severely wounded, his arm being broken by the fragment of a shell. He retired to Winchester, and General Nathan Kimball remained on the field in active command of the division. The next day, although it was Sunday, Jackson, thinking he had his enemy at a disadvantage, and unaware either of his numbers or his disposition, attacked Kimball with great impetuosity, but met with a severe repulse. Kimball, who was ably seconded by Colonels Jeremiah C. Sullivan and Erastus B. Tyler, not only beat off the attack of Jackson from both his flanks, but at the right moment assumed the offensive, and after a hotly contested fight, lasting two hours, as what terrestrial measure he might But he did not fail to notice the revelation made of Jackson's master passion by nature, in the object he had chosen to express the value of his heavenly inheritance. It was fame! Not wealth, nor domestic joys, nor literature, but well-earned fame!" |