That seemed simple enough to me until I attended the Clark County Historical Society’s second Civil War Symposium.
One of the speakers was Jonathan Noyalas, who teaches history at Lord Fairfax Community College in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.
Noyalas had an interesting argument: Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson may have got his nickname standing like a stone wall at the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861, but it’s not how he made his reputation.
That was made, Noyalas said, when an outnumbered Jackson outfoxed and outfought Union forces in the Shenadoah Valley in the spring of 1862.
The fledgling Confederacy had suffered a series of losses, and its most revered commander, Robert E. Lee, had yet to lead an army into battle.
Union troops were massing for an attack on the Confederate capital of Richmond, and with the South teetering, Jackson tied up enough Union troops in the valley to weaken the effort.
Victory in those dire circumstances made Jackson “an iconic figure” in the South, Noyalas said.
Things got more interesting when Noyalas added that many Southern Christians saw Jackson as “an instrument in the Lord’s hands.”
Back then, this was deadly serious stuff, as is made clear by one of Noyalas’ sources, George C. Rable, author of “God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War.”
Rable tells us that some Southerners saw Jackson, a pious Christian, as a Moses, Gideon or Joshua figure. Rable writes that this caused a Virginia woman to worry about Jackson.
“My only fear,” she wrote, “is that people are in danger of worshipping Gen. Jackson instead of God, who rules over all.
“If we idolize him, he will be taken from us.”
That happened May 10, 1863, eight days after Jackson was shot not by a Yankee, but by Confederate guards who, unable to see uniforms in the dark, suspected him of being one.
Just before dying, the delirious Jackson barked out some orders, smiled and uttered these lyrical, much quoted lines: “Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees.”
Which brings us back to dots and story lines.
Back then, the Virginia woman plotted the dots along a Biblical story line in which Jackson was killed because Southerners had made of him a false idol.
It’s a theory we are likely to dismiss as idle thought. But if we dismiss her thoughts on that basis, we dismiss a basis for understanding history.
It’s in the context of such beliefs that Abraham Lincoln said the “great scourge” of that war may have been God’s punishment on the nation for the sin of slavery.
Sometimes understanding things that don’t seem to fit our story lines are necessary to understanding people of another time — not to mention our own.
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