Bud and Old Jack: A Review and an Appreciation

Bud and Old Jack: A Review and an Appreciation Richard M. McMurry Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend. By James I. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Macmillan, 1997. Pp. xiv, 952.$4?.??.) Wrra the possible exception of Robert E. Lee, no military figure of the American Civil War—indeed, of all American history—is as widely known, admired, and even revered as is Thomas Jonathan Jackson. To posterity he is best known as "Stonewall"; to his soldiers he was more often "Old Jack." He was virtually unknown outside his small hometown when the Civil War began. Two years later he was a soldier of worldwide renown. ' Much about Jackson's life story is compelling—an impoverished and orphaned boy, a struggling college student who literally sweated out his lessons, a Mexican War hero, an eccentric college professor, a religious fanatic (so some would say), a loving husband and doting father, and a mighty warrior struck down on the battlefield at the hour of his greatest victory. The outlines of Jackson's life have long been known, and writers have dissected his military campaigns in exhausting detail. In this massive biography, James I. "Bud" Robertson, Jr., does not alter the general story of Jackson's life or of his part in the war. He does, however, add a great deal to what we know about Jackson's early years and gives us a significantly more complete picture of a man who, at second or third glance, turns out to have been far more complex , more likeable, and much deeper than we had thought. At the same time Robertson demonstrates that many long-accepted stories about Jackson are nothing more than "a host of exaggerations, fabrications, and outright untruths" (x). Many of them originated in the unreliable (but oft-cited) postwar writings of such men as John Esten Cooke, Henry Kyd Douglas, and RichardTaylor. Robertson performs the valuable service of laying many ofthese 1 Many thanks to friends Gary and Eileen Gallagher and Jack Davis for reading this essay and making several valuable suggestions. Civil War History, Vol. xliv No. 1 © 1998 by The Kent State University Press BUD AND OLD JACK53 tales to rest, although if matters run true to form it will be years before lazy historians cease repeating them. (See, for example, 858?. 109 and 877?. 27.)2 Robertson devotes the first two hundred pages (of 762 pages of text) to Jackson's life prior to the Civil War. Much of the detail in these early pages, especially the information on Jackson's family, is new and the product of Robertson's exhaustive research in little-used and even previously unknown sources. Jackson was born in Clarksburg (now West Virginia) in 1 824. His father died when he was two. His stepfather was "harsh and verbally abusive" to the boy and "encouraged" him and his sister "to seek homes elsewhere." When Jackson was seven, poverty forced his mother to send the two children off to be raised by bachelor uncles. Within a year or so Jackson's sister was shunted on to other relatives. "Still shy of his twelfth birthday, the lad had faced the deaths of an infant sister, his father, his mother, and his stepfather—while at the same time being separated from his brother and remaining sister." His uncles gave him food, clothing, and shelter, but they did not provide for his emotional health (9, 15). These experiences of what Robertson has called Jackson's "incredibly sad, traumatic and lonely childhood" left their mark.3 Jackson was "never a child" in that he had a secure child's opportunity to experience childhood. He was "lonely and uncertain" and enjoyed "only glimpses of boyhood." In the closing pages ofthe book, Robertson returns to this theme when he writes of"the lonely childhood—the absence of maternal love," the "forlorn childhood." and "the sad remembrances of his own earlier years" that "were with Jackson always." The denial of love to a child is one form of abuse. In that sense, Robertson maintains, Jackson was an abused child (8, 12, 15, 649, 650, 753). While working on the book, Robertson composed a description of Jackson's troubled youth...