On a lighter note, Mary Anna writes about Jackson’s fondness for dancing, “in the privacy and freedom of his own home in Lexington, he used frequently to dance the polka for exercise, but no eye but that of his wife was ever permitted to witness this recreation”. She tells a very amusing story about one of Jackson’s servants, Hattie.

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During the war she was traveling alone, and while changing trains she saw a man pick up her little, old hair trunk – her own personal property, containing all her valuables – and suspecting his honesty, with a determination to stand up for her rights, she called out to him peremptorily: “Put down that trunk; that’s General Jackson’s trunk!”

One of the best descriptions of Jackson ever written was by a Confederate artilleryman, William Page Carter [Life and Letters, pages 379-380]. Carter tells of his first sight of Jackson coming on the field at Fredericksburg in the winter of 1862. “A general officer, mounted upon a superb bay horse and followed by a single courier, rode up through our guns. Looking neither to the right nor the left, he rode straight to the front, halted, and seemed gazing intently on the enemy’s line of battle on the old telegraph road.

“The outfit before me, from top to toe, cap, coat, pants, top-boots, horse and furniture, were all of the new order of things. [All were a recent gift from General J.E.B. Stuart.] But there was something about the man that did not look so new, after all. He appeared to be an old-time friend of all this turmoil around him. As he had done us the honor to make an afternoon call on the artillery, I thought it becoming in some one to say something on the occasion. No one did, however; so, although a somewhat bashful and weak-kneed youngster, I plucked up courage enough to venture the remark that those big guns over the river had been knocking us about pretty considerably during the day. He quickly turned his head, and I knew in an instant who it was before me. The clear-cut, chiselled features; the thin, compressed, and determined lips; the neatly trimmed chestnut beard; the calm, steadfast eye, that could fathom the tide of battle in a moment; the countenance to command respect, and, in time of war, to give the soldier that confidence he so much craves from a superior officer, were all there. And there was one I had heard so much of and had longed so much to see, whose battle front I was then to look upon for the first time, but not, however, the last. As I said before, he turned his head quickly, and looking me all over in about two seconds, he rode up the line and away quietly and as silently as he came, his little courier hard upon his heels, and this was my first sight of Stonewall Jackson.”

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