A few nights ago, I was watching PBS and there was a “filler” piece about famous people born in West Virginia. One of the names mentioned was Stonewall Jackson. I wasn’t aware that he was born in West Virginia, but he’s always been an interesting historical character to me, so what the heck — today’s subject is Stonewall Jackson.
Confederate Civil War General Stonewall Jackson had a brilliant military mind and was Robert E. Lee’s most trusted lieutenant. But first off, let’s get this West Virginia thing squared away. A little of my extensive research determined that Stonewall Jackson is not a West Virginian. He was born in Clarksburg Virginia. Granted that today this is part of West Virginia, but West Virginia wasn’t a state at the time and didn’t become a state until over a month after his death.
Thomas Jonathan Jackson was given the name Thomas Jackson at birth — no middle name. So he gave himself a middle name. He was the only child in his family that didn’t have a middle name and it bothered him, especially when he was to enroll at the United States Military Academy at West Point. So when his turn came to sign his name, he added his deceased father’s name to his own — Thomas Jonathan Jackson.
He earned the name “Stonewall” during the first Battle of Bull Run — Jackson’s men faced overwhelming odds, but with their commander in the lead, the small band of Confederates held their ground. General Bernard Bee looked across the battlefield and shouted to his men, “Look! There stands Jackson like a stone wall.” That was enough to rally the Confederate forces for a counterattack that ended in a rout of the Union forces.
Jackson did have a brilliant military mind… but the rest of him was kind of a mess. He had lots of quirky personal habits and he was a hopeless hypochondriac. He was so obsessed with his physical health that most people thought he was a bit nutty. Some of his physical eccentricities included:
He believed his left arm was heaver that the right, so he would often — even in the heat of battle — raise his left arm in the air to allow the blood to flow equally through his body and establish a state of equilibrium.
He convinced himself that he would perform at his peak only when his bodily organs were “stacked” properly — in an upright position. His study in Lexington, Virginia had no chairs at all. Whenever he’d did sit down, he never allowed his body to rest against the back of the chair.
He was terribly concerned about his self-diagnosed “dyspepsia,” or indigestion, so he maintained a diet that consisted almost completely of fruits and vegetables. Whenever his troops overran Union camps, the general grabbed up as much fresh produce as he could.
Since his boyhood, he suffered from poor eyesight — so he devised his own unique “treatment.” He would dip his head into a basin of cold water with his eyes wide open, staying there till his breath gave out.
Even though he may have earned his nickname “Stonewall,” due to his steadfastness in the face of the enemy, he was remembered by President Ulysses Grant as a “fanatic” who was delusional and who fancied that an evil spirit had taken possession of him.
Stonewall Jackson is probably one of the few people to have different parts of his body buried and marked with gravestones in two different places. When the general was accidentally shot in the left arm by his own troops in the Battle of Chancellorsville, the arm had to be amputated. It was buried in a graveyard about a mile from the field hospital. Jackson died eight days later, and his body (minus the arm) was sent home to Lexington for burial. He was only 39 when he died. To be killed by friendly fire is a tragedy — but if he’d lived to an older age, just think of all the new ailments he might have contracted…. some of them might even have been real.
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