Most readers wishing to bone up on Confederate Lt. Gen. Thomas J. Jackson, or check on a specific fact about his life, will probably turn first to James I. Robertson, Jr., Stonewall Jackson (1997). From the last generation is to be remembered Frank E. Mighty Stonewall Vandiver’s (1957). Both Robertson and Vandiver rank as professional historians. In another tier are the good works by Burke Davis, They Called Him Stonewall (1954), and Lenoir Chambers, Stonewall Jackson (2 volumes, 1959). Chambers was editor of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. Also a gifted writer, Davis was author of biographies of Lee and Stuart as well as other famous American soldiers.
Lost in the shuffle, perhaps also in memory, is Allen Tate’s Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier (1928). Through the years Tate’s work has remained one of my favorites for several reasons. But first about Tate.
Born in Kentucky in 1899, he entered Vanderbilt in 1918, taking freshman writing from John Crowe Ransom. By the time of his graduation he was already a professional poet, editor, critic, and founder (with Ransom and Donald Davidson) of The Fugitive magazine.
In 1930 the “Fugitive group”— Ransom, Tate, Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren, along with other Southern writers—published I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. The controversial work collected a dozen essays defending various aspects of Southern life and culture, but generally advocating the superiority of an agrarian society’s lifestyle over the industrial, urban culture of the North. They seized upon the Old South as metaphor in their critique of modern society, at least as they perceived it in 1930’s America.
Which brings us to Stonewall Jackson. Tate intended his book to be both biographical narrative and cultural commentary, purposes that make it a bit complicated.
In tracing Jackson’s prewar life and his record as a Confederate general, the author is always looking toward Chancellorsville, Jackson’s greatest battle and historic Southern victory. The very site of the engagement, the Wilderness, allows Tate to use the destruction of forests to symbolize the rape of the land that would ensue after the Civil War. While the thick woods aided Jackson’s troops by concealing their march, Federals were busy chopping trees down for their fortifications. As he got his men into position for their attack, Jackson listened to the sound of axes. “The chopping continued. General Hill rejoined Jackson’s party,” Tate writes. “There was no talk; only the steady chopping in the distance.”
Tate similarly turns to the industrialism and scientism in which he criticized Northerners for having placed too much confidence. Bitterness turns to humor as the author describes Hooker’s elaborate aerial reconnaissance and telegraph systems: “As the sun rose on the morning of May 1st a dense fog around Fredericksburg hid the Confederate movements from Sedgwick’s aeronauts; the telegraph broke down.”
Then there is Stonewall himself. Tate sees the famed Confederate chieftain’s violent determination to kill the enemy as the kind of resolution Southerners would have to adopt in opposing the materialism and industrialism of the modern North. Jackson’s strong religious faith also serves the author; Stonewall was “the good soldier,” as he put it in his subtitle. Tate quotes the general before a battle as predicting victory “by the vigorous use of the bayonet, and the blessing of divine Providence.” Jackson was the embodiment of “active faith,” a concept Tate adopted to reflect the kind of religion he maintained that Southerners should practice. When Tate asserted that “the South would not have been defeated had she possessed a sufficient faith in her own kind of God,” as he wrote in an essay, “Religion and the Old South,” he was thinking of Stonewall’s God.
Active faith meant unswerving confidence and unbridled courage—“mystical optimism,” as Tate put it. The author tells of the moment at Chancellorsville when word reached Jackson that a Federal sortie had cut the Confederate army in two: “Jackson gave the calamity as much attention as he would have given the news that a war-canoe full of South Sea Islanders was setting out to capture Richmond!”
Even in death, Stonewall Jackson is Tate’s metaphoric hero. “Doctor, Anna tells me I am to die today. Is it so?” he asks Dr. McGuire. “Yes,” was the reply. “Very good, very good,” Stonewall says; “it is all right.” Jackson’s calm acceptance of his life’s end is a basic element of active faith. An aging Confederate says it best in Tate’s poem, “To the Lacedemonians,” when he observes, “there is no civilization
without death….It is a privilege to be dead.” For Confederate soldiers, and for Jackson particularly, death in the heroic tradition is sublime—in striking contrast to moderners’ abhorrence and fear of their mortality.
Reading Allen Tate’s Stonewall Jackson in these ways helps one consider the question of Tate’s life and career: how could a Southern intellectual become so enamored of the Confederate cause? In April 1927, Tate wrote his friend Donald Davidson that he had contracted with a New York publisher for his proposed work on Jackson. He closed his letter by writing, “Since I’m convinced that the South would have won had Jackson not been killed, I’m doing a stirring partisan account of the Revolution. The Stars & Bars forever!”
Davidson closed his letter of reply: “Yes, I’m all for you. We’ll whup the Yankees yet.”
Stephen Davis’ article, “Simply Criminal,” on the battle of Pickett’s Mill, appears in the May 2019 issue of America’s Civil War. Civil War News of January 2019 also carried Steve’s article about an incident of that battle—how Union soldiers complained that all the bugling from Willich’s brigade alerted Confederates of their march to Pickett’s Mill. He and Bill Hendrick are working on a book on the Atlanta Daily intelligencer, leading wartime newspaper in the city.
• Lecturer • Author • Course Instructor
Match The Number
With The Letter
1. Bohemian Brigade 2. Quaker gun 3. Shoddy 4. Invalid Corps 5. Marye’s Heights 6. Whistling Dick 7. Corduroy road 8. French leave 9. Bombproof 10. Hot shot
A. An 18-pounder smoothbore deployed in the water battery at Vicksburg.
B. An imitation gun made of wood, painted black.
C. Being absent without officers’ permission.
Send your book(s) for review to: CWN Book Review Editor Stephen Davis 3670 Falling Leaf Lane, Cumming, GA 30041-2087
D. Solid shot heated in a furnace to set fires among wooden targets.
E. A place of refuge from artillery fire.
F. A road surface constructed of small tree trunks, laid down in muddy or swampy areas.
G. An inferior wool that fell apart soon after issue, used in early Union uniforms.
H. Soldiers incapacitated by wounds or sickness but still on duty.
I. An elevated area on the outskirts of Fredericksburg, Va.
J. A nickname for newspaper correspondents who traveled with an army.
Answers found on page 42.
A First-hand Account of the Daily Life of Soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia
A South Carolina Upcountry Saga: The Civil War Letters of Barham Bobo Foster and his Family 1860–1863. Edited by A. Gibert Kennedy. Maps, photos, notes, index, 360 pages, 2019. University of South Carolina Press, www.sc.edu/uscpress. $49.95 hardbound.
The Foster family first arrived in upstate South Carolina in the 1790s. By the 1820s the family owned a successful (and still-standing) inn and tavern in what is now Spartanburg (John C. Calhoun was a frequent guest) as well as a plantation in Cross Anchor, S.C.
Barham Bobo Foster was born in the tavern in 1817. Twenty years later he was married and had settled down on a plantation near Glenn Springs, S.C. He served in the state militia, the South Carolina state legislature and was a county treasurer.
The letters start with the South Carolina Secession Convention in Charleston in December 1860 and are written primarily by Foster, who served as a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Army, and by his sons Capt. Lewis Perrin Foster and Corporal James “Tony” Anthony Foster. They are arranged chronologically.
In the earliest letters we see the sons training in Charleston and Columbia. As was typical of letters written in this very early stage of the war, they are full of bravado and optimism. Upon his arrival in Virginia, Lewis wrote, “I have never seen such soldiers than I have of the confederate army. Most of them volunteers for 2 years or the war. They seem resolute and determined to do or die. They never seem to doubt their success and I don’t think such men can be whipped at all.” Interestingly, Lewis makes note of a female drill officer from a Zouave regiment.
But as the war goes on, things did not go as well as the men expected. Perhaps no other topic takes up more of the letters than the subject of disease. The writers and/or the men in their units contracted just about every illness one could imagine: the measles, mumps, typhoid, diphtheria, dysentery, etc., which took the lives of many of their comrades in arms. Also, price gouging was a common occurrence, both at home and in camp, while requests for clothes and swords were frequent. Food was a constant problem as well.
Anyone looking for new insight into any of the major figures of the war will be disappointed, though Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard’s name is constantly misspelled as “Boureguard.”
The letters to home end on December 10, 1862, prior to the battle of Fredericksburg. Lt. Col. B. B. Foster resigned his commission in late Januaryearly February 1862 for medical
Titles By Stephen Davis
The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton through Kennesaw Mountain to the Chattahoochee River May 5–July 18, 1864 Davis’ narrative history of the Atlanta Campaign is divided into two paperbacks from Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War Series. Volume One, A Long and Bloody Task, carries Sherman’s forces from Dalton in northwest Georgia to the Chattahoochee River. There the Confederate government was forced to relieve its army commander, Joseph E. Johnston, and replace him with Gen. John B. Hood.
All the Fighting They Want
With the Yankee army five miles outside of Atlanta, Hood promised not to give up with city without a fight— which is all President Jefferson Davis asked. Davis’ companion volume, All the Fighting They Want, describes Hood’s efforts to defend Atlanta. Its fall in early September 1864 was a mortal blow to Confederate hopes for independence and a big boost to Lincoln’s hopes for presidential reelection.
reasons. Tony was killed in action at the battle of Maryland Heights on September 13, 1862, while Capt. Lewis Foster was killed in action at Fredericksburg. The last letters from Lewis read like they were written by a different person from the one who boasted about the Confederate army a year and a half earlier; the grim realities and uncertainties of war had set in.
On the whole, this collection of letters gives a fascinating and interesting look into the Army of Northern Virginia in the war’s early years from the eyes of men living in camp. Anyone interested in life in the Confederate army should read this book.
Tom Elmore’s family has lived in South Carolina’s upstate for over two centuries, and it is very likely that some of his ancestors knew some of the people mentioned in this book. Currently Elmore is studying the lives of Irish and Scottish immigrants living in his home town of Columbia during the antebellum period.