His real qualities were devotion, duty, and determination. Gordon, who fought alongside Jackson, concluded that there were “in all his mental and moral characteristics the most perfect harmony.”īecause Jackson lived in another time-a time that has little in common with life today, he remains somewhat difficult to understand. Each of those ingredients, in acceptable measurement, existed in his makeup. Jackson was a fascinating mixture of contrasts: eccentricity and excellence, ambition and humility, restlessness and repose, wrathfulness and righteousness. The general does not deserve such judgments. Jackson was more simple than complex, yet generations of historians and writers have sought to make him into a “loose cannon,” an unpredictable figure of inconsistencies. He was an artillerist who excelled in infantry tactics, a devout Christian merciless in battle, an adult who loved the company of children, a man of odd habits but with an inflexible sense of duty. Jackson was extraordinary to many, enigmatic to others. Lee also possessed military genius and religious devotion, but even the faith of Lee paled in comparison to that of his principal lieutenant. “To attempt to portray the life of Jackson while leaving out the religious element would be like undertaking to describe Switzerland without making mention of the Alps.” I never knew of any one whose reverence for Deity was so all pervading, and who felt so completely his entire dependence upon God.” Well-known American Presbyterian cleric Moses D. In some respects I doubt whether he ever had an equal.”Ĭonfederate General Daniel Harvey Hill commented of Jackson in an 1863 letter: “The striking characteristic of his mind was his profound reverence for divine and human authority. I will go even further than that-as a campaigner in the field he never had a superior. Lord Roberts, commander-in-chief of the British armies, observed early in the 20 th Century: “In my opinion Stonewall Jackson was one of the greatest natural military geniuses the world ever saw.

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