Recently Discovered Memoir about Gen. T. J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson

By Mary Roy Dawson Edwards | Civil War Times  | 3 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

General Thomas J. Jackson is fascinating for many reasons. He was a brilliant tactician, a very determined student, a man intent on improving himself, a man enamored of home and family, a Virginia gentleman. In today’s language, Jackson’s vision of how the Civil War should be fought would be called guerilla warfare.

Housed in Special Collections, University of Virginia Library are two memoirs about Jackson written by Clement Daniels Fishburne (1832-1907), a good friend from Lexington, Virginia. One is quite short, just twenty-one pages (MSS # 3569), and the other is eighty-three pages long (MSS # 2341). The shorter document has been overlooked, perhaps having been confused with the longer one. However, it is well worth looking at because of the many insights into this complex man, General “Stonewall” Jackson.

It is in fact a letter, written in response to an inquiry from a University of Virginia professor, Dr. P. B. Barringer, whose mother, Eugenia, was a sister of Jackson’s second wife, Mary Anna Morrison Jackson. It begins:

“Charlottesville Va. 8th April 1903.

Dr. P. B. Barringer
University of Va
Dear Ari: Your favor of 27th ulto. has been received in which you suggest that I “knew General Stonewall Jackson perhaps better than any man now living” and in which you ask that I write out “the things I know in order that they may be incorporated in some history of this peculiar and peculiarly great man”.”

The other person who knew Jackson better than anyone else was his second wife, Mary Anna. She was the daughter of the Rev. Dr. R. H. Morrison, the first president of Davidson College in North Carolina and Mary Graham, whose brother, William, was Gov. of North Carolina, a U.S. Senator, and Secretary of the Navy during President Fillmore’s administration. Her sister, Isabella, was married to General D. H. Hill. The very intelligent Mary Anna wrote an excellent biography of General Jackson, Life and Letters of General Thomas J. Jackson, published in 1892 by Harper & Brothers, N. Y.

This article will include the entire short memoir of Clement Daniels Fishburne’s and some excerpts from Mary Anna Morrison Jackson’s book that give even more insight into General Thomas J. Jackson. The memoir continues:

“By reason of your relationship to him through his widow who was your mother’s sister, you already know as much about him (and more) than I do, but I shall gladly give you such facts as I have in memory which were known to me and which have never been made public, though in doing thus it may be necessary to speak of myself more than I care to speak. I shall do this as little as may be consistent with my effort to show that I speak only what I knew of him. Your letter suggests that “our relations were intimate”, whether this was correct, strictly, or not, they were very cordial and pleasant.

I saw him first in Lexington Va. in the fall of 1851, in which year he was elected Professor of Natural Philosophy and Artillery practice in the Virginia Military Institute; a state school located near that town. [Major D. H. Hill, on the faculty of Washington College, having served with Jackson in Mexico, recommended him for the job. Life and Letters, pages 55-56.]

I was a student in Washington College, an institution presided over by Revd. Dr. Geo. Junkin and located between the Military Institute and the town. I was at that time a shy and awkward sophomore and was introduced to him by Mr. John B. Lyle who kept a bookstore on Main Street in Lexington. Mr Lyle was an alumnus of Washington College, a courteous & jolly and loveable old bachelor, a kinsman of many of the best and most cultivated people of the town and the County of Rockbridge. He had Chambers back of his book store in which he kept and sold such books as were called for by book-lovers in the community and by the students in the two Institutions, Washington College and the V.M.I. Mr. Lyle’s book store had become a sort of Club-house in which assembled frequently the professional men of the town, the professors and officers of the College & Institute and every genteel young man of the community, especially much of them as had any taste for music, of which Mr. Lyle was a great lover. By reason of the fact that my eldest brother, who had been several years before a student at the College, was an intimate friend of Mr Lyle, I became a welcome visitor at this Club-house and there I was introduced, incidentally, to General (then Major) Jackson. He had served during the Mexican War: beginning as 2nd Lieut and was brevetted twice, or three times, for gallantry and at the close of it was known as “Major”. He served in Florida and elsewhere and was with the Army in Florida when he was called to Lexington Va.

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Tags: American Civil War, Historical Discoveries, Historical Figures

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