In the after years, gazing out the window of his office at Washington College or riding his horse Traveller across the rolling fields, Robert E. Lee often spoke of his fallen subordinate Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. The words varied, but the sentiment remained the same. “If I had had Stonewall Jackson with me,” he told one visitor, “so far as man can see, I should have won the Battle of Gettysburg.” Despite the many mishaps and failures of nerve that caused that critical Confederate loss, Lee had no doubt of the alternative outcome. He even imagined Stonewall beside him in later battles, facing down Ulysses S. Grant in the Wilderness: “If Jackson had been alive and there, he would have crushed the enemy.”
For Lee, and for Americans ever since, the untimely death of Stonewall Jackson is the great “what if” of Civil War history. A former professor at the Virginia Military Institute, Jackson shaped the course of the conflict in the war's Eastern Theater with his aggressive tactics, and his absence changed not only Confederate operations and Southern morale but the methods of his superior, Gen. Lee. In “The Great Partnership: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the Fate of the Confederacy,” Christian B. Keller re-examines the professional and personal relationship between the two gray chieftains. Mr. Keller, a professor of history at the U.S. Army War College, has written an intriguing blend of battlefield history, leadership manual, and character portrait of Lee and Jackson.
Read Full Article »