On Thomas J. Jackson, from the Columbus Dispatch:
Historian Bevin Alexander is a Virginian but doesn’t count himself among William Faulkner’s unvanquished Southerners — despite the title of his new book: How the South Could Have Won the Civil War...And, an excerpt of poem about Ulysses S. Grant in National Review titled "GENERAL GRANT":
“To use an old Southern phrase, we are well shut of our selfish aristocrats, who tried until the last to hold on to the unpaid labor of slaves so as to get and keep their wealth.
“The elimination of slavery and the aristocrats who fed on it was a glorious and long-overdue advance.”
The advance, Alexander posits, could easily have been delayed or thwarted had the Confederates done one simple thing: listened to Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.
Robert E. Lee gets most of the accolades when historians gauge the brilliance (or lack thereof) of Civil War generals North and South. But to Alexander, the only true genius, the only visionary general, was Jackson.
The advent of the minie ball rifle — accurate to a quarter-mile, four times farther than the musket — created what Alexander calls “a new kind of war,” one that called on new tactics to replace those perfected during the Napoleonic Wars.
Jackson,not Lee, understood this, imploring Confederate President Jefferson Davis to wage war on the civilian population of the North on the one hand and beseeching Lee to outflank Union forces on the other.
Even three brutal years into the war, Lee was ignoring Jackson’s advice; witness the folly of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg.
The textbook for the new kind of war was laid out by Jackson in his masterly Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862, characterized by skilled deception and troop movement.
...In Alexander’s estimation, “War is fundamentally a struggle between two intellects rather than a conflict of masses.” And Jackson was a great general because “great generals avoid battles whenever they can.”
But avoidance is unheroic, and stealth in war unmanly.
“Our language reflects how strongly we feel about this — ‘stab in the back,’ ‘backbiter’ and ‘blindsiding’ are all pejorative terms,” Alexander writes. “Reflecting the human tendency to be direct rather than devious or circuitous, most generals throughout history have been unsubtle warriors who attacked the enemy right in front of them.”
Unfortunately, Jackson was a reluctant chronicler of his theories about warfare, and they mostly died with him after the battle of Chancellorsville.
Lest we think too harshly of our Civil War generals, it is important to remember that half a century later, during World War I, the preferred method of battle was the frontal attack.
The warriors had learned little from America’s bloodiest confrontation.
It is not hard to admire him.
There is always something in Grant
that speaks of simple dignity
along the lines of Rembrandt’s self-portraits,
without the overtones of glory
that the champions of Southern history
seek so avidly for their heroes:
The shattered petals,
the blood across the peach blossoms — Shiloh,
where modern war
broke upon the world.
They are part of the reason.
So is the grinding, war-weary attrition,
dragged from the Wilderness
to the siege of Petersburg,
taking all summer and winter,
into the spring.
To find no glory in any of it is to
overspeak the truth,
as is the invocation of duty,
self-sacrifice and commitment,
as an explanation, complete.
On any canvas worthy of the paint
there is no such thing;
although at the distance
of almost a century and a half,
I would be remiss
in not siding with those
who call him
America’s greatest soldier.
Much of the rest is elusive,
and as far from his impressive resting place
as is the ribbon of a distant river
disappearing into a distant forest.
— WILLIAM W. RUNYEON
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