APRIL 27, 1861:
Major General Robert E. Lee orders Colonel Thomas Jonathan
Jackson to take charge of the troops at Harper's Ferry, Virginia and expedite
the removal of the armory machinery to Richmond. Jackson is also ordered to
better organize the militia companies in the area and assemble them into larger
units.
“T.J.” Jackson, who would become famed as “Stonewall” Jackson evolved
into one of the finest and truly legendary Confederate commanders of the Civil
War. Jackson was a complex man. He tended toward the idiosyncratic, and some
who knew him called him “Old Tom Fool.”
He was also more respectfully known as
“Old Blue Light” because his light blue eyes would shine in battle---otherwise
he was a dispassionate soldier. He always kept an index finger in the air “to
balance himself” after a joint of that finger was shot off. He did not drink. He
compulsively sucked lemons. He avoided pepper because he claimed it weakened
his left leg.
A sternly religious man and a born-again Christian, he prayed
many times daily, believing that God vouchsafed him victories and that defeats
were by way of moral chastisement. He was said to have looked out on the
carnage of Antietam and affirmed, “God has been good to us this day.”
And yet,
he hated war, and many of his comments reflected this, but when his men freed a
captured Union Color Sergeant “because he was so brave,” Jackson is said to
have replied, “I don’t want them brave, I want them dead.” Some reports say he
executed the man.
He was a slaveowner who was morally uncomfortable with slavery;
before the war he had even taught at a Sunday School for black children in open
defiance of Virginia State law.
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