C12| Saturday/Sunday, August 17 - 18, 2019 ** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.**
BYRUSSELLS.BONDS
I
N 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 aggres-
sive tactics, and his absence changed
not only Confederate operations and
Southern morale but the methods of his
superior, Gen. Lee. In “The Great Part-
nership: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jack-
son, 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 por-
trait of Lee and Jackson.
Earlier books on the two famous
commanders are legion. Lee’s biogra-
phies range from D.S. Freeman’s Pulitzer
Prize-winning “R.E. Lee” (1934) to Eliza-
beth Brown Pryor’s revealing look at the
general’s correspondence, “Reading the
Man”; while Jackson’s story has been
told by James I. Robertson and in S.C.
Gwynne’s recent and highly readable
“Rebel Yell” (2014). The Confederate
high command has also been explored in
books such as Freeman’s “Lee’s Lieuten-
ants” (1942) and Joseph T. Glatthaar’s
“General Lee’s Army: From Victory to
Collapse” (2008). Yet Mr. Keller’s study
is not a comprehensive dual biography,
nor is it a mere retilling of familiar
ground on the Army of Northern Vir-
ginia; rather, it is a crisp, balanced and
insightful analysis of the pressures of
command and a compelling exploration
of what was and what might have been.
Mr. Keller recognizes at the outset
the danger of casting a Lost Cause halo
on his famous subjects, with the “rever-
ent mythologizing of the Confederate
leadership” that idolizes the “saintly Lee
or the flawless Jackson” and blames the
Rebel defeat, as did Lee himself at
Appomattox, on the “overwhelming
numbers and resources” of the Union.
But there is nonetheless much to be
learned from this “partnership unique
in the American Civil War,” he writes,
urging readers to put aside “modern
political sensitivities” or judgments
about the Southern cause.
Mr. Keller raises the curtain in the
spring of 1862, when Jackson—already
famous as “Stonewall” for his hilltop
stand at Manassas and exhausted from
his brilliant campaign in the Shenan-
doah Valley—joined Lee on Virginia’s
York-James Peninsula on the eve of the
series of battles that would become
known as the Seven Days. Over the next
year Jackson and Lee strung together a
spectacular series of victories—Second
Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellors-
ville—along with the bloody “non-
defeat” at Antietam.
Lee and Jackson, though both Virgin-
ians, came from opposite ends of the
expansive Old Dominion—the former
born to an elite Tidewater family, the
latter brought up in the rough country
of what would later be West Virginia.
Eschewing postwar accounts written by
officers prone to self-justification or sub-
ordinates fawning over their former
chiefs, Mr. Keller focuses on contempo-
rary diaries, correspondence and official
reports. “I often think how these two
men,” one staff officer wrote, “so utterly
different in their characteristics and
style should not only be such friends
and have such confidence in each other,
but should each seem to be the perfect
military leader.”
Despite his status as a Southern icon,
Lee remains a cipher—“the courtly, un-knowable aristocrat,” filmmaker Ken
Burns called him—and his command
style was direct and assertive yet often
curiously hands-off. Lee “would tell [his
subordinates] what he wanted accom-
plished—often in careful consultation
with them—and then leave it to their
own devices to ensure those objectives
were achieved,” Mr. Keller writes. This
broad discretion and trust explain why
the scrupulously loyal and hard-driving
Stonewall was (usually) so effective.
Mr. Keller’s peek inside the tent-flap at
Lee’s headquarters at times reads like a
business book, the gray-haired executive
setting goals for the organization, tack-
ling voluminous paperwork, struggling
with high-level operations and succes-
sion planning.
Even more fascinating is the ruth-
less, eccentric Stonewall. Mr. Keller
weaves in small anecdotes about his
peculiarities, physical quirks and fu-
rious determination—Jackson putting
his ear to the ground to listen for the
tramp of hoped-for reinforcements; fall-
ing asleep at his writing desk while
signing orders; collapsing and groan-
ing dramatically when Lee delayed an
attack against his advice. Lee himself
seemed bemused by the odd, humorless
professor who was also a cold-eyed
killer. Visiting a distant relative, Lee
introduced a blushing Jackson to a par-
lor of ladies: “You would scarce believe,
my dear cousin,” he said, “that amiable
gentleman, who sits near you smiling
so pleasantly, was one of the most cruel
and inhuman men you ever saw.”One linchpin of the two officers’
relationship was their steadfast Chris-
tian faith, and a thoughtful exploration
of religion sets Mr. Keller’s book apart
from other command studies. Although
they differed in denomination—Lee
an Episcopalian, Jackson a fervent Pres-
byterian—the two shared a belief that
“all events occurred according to the
wishes of Providence” and that “a
Christian army and Confederacy would
be blessed.” Faith deepened the trust
and respect Lee and Jackson had for
each other and established a quiet con-
fidence in plans and outcomes—though
Mr. Keller wryly notes that Jackson’s
“devotion to killing the enemy” was
“probably not supportable in much of
the New Testament.”
The Lee-Jackson partnership reached
its zenith in the Virginia woods in May
1863, and Mr. Keller recounts almost
hour by hour Jackson and Lee’s joint
planning and execution of the Battle of
Chancellorsville. Facing the overconfi-
dent Union Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker,
Lee divided his army and sent Jackson’s
corps on a daring roundabout march to
strike the unguarded Union flank. This
looping left hook landed hard, and Jack-
son’s soldiers drove the crumbling blue
regiments before them. “They did run
and make no mistake about it—but I will
never blame them,” a Tar Heel soldier
wrote. “I reckon the Devil himself would
have run with Jackson in his rear.”
But the battle soon known as “Lee’s
Masterpiece” came at a grave cost as
Jackson, reconnoitering beyond hisThe Great Partnership
By Christian B. Keller
Pegasus, 328 pages, $28.95
lines after nightfall, was wounded by
friendly fire. Doctors amputated his left
arm, but he soon contracted pneu-
monia. A week after the battle, he was
gone. Jackson’s absence would lead to
a reorganization of the Army of North-
ern Virginia and a search for someone
to fill his place—along with a realiza-
tion, shocking to citizens across the
South, that they might fail in their bid
for independence. There was now a
perception, Mr. Keller writes, “that the
croak of doom could be heard, however
faintly, reverberating from a small
room at Guiney’s Station, Virginia.”
Though Mr. Keller dislikes the busi-
ness school penchant for “lessons
learned,” he recaps several principles
embodied by the Rebel generals that can
be applied in modern battlefields and
boardrooms. Among these are the roles
of strategic leader and key strategic
adviser, the value of friendship within
command teams, and the importance of
“adjusting the leadership style to ac-
count for risk.” The brilliant early suc-
cesses and later missed opportunities of
Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia
bring to mind Goethe’s remark that
history is “a mishmash of error and
violence.” And “The Great Partnership”
makes clear that—Lost Cause myths and
controversy aside—Civil War history
remains haunted by the ghost of Stone-
wall Jackson.Mr. Bonds is the author of “War
Like the Thunderbolt: The Battle
and Burning of Atlanta.”Brothers in Arms
HIGH COMMAND ‘The Last Meeting of Lee and Jackson’ (1879), chromolithograph by Turnbull Bros.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESSBOOKS
‘So great is my confidence in General Lee that I am willing to follow him blindfolded.’—GEN. THOMAS J. ‘STONEWALL’ JACKSON
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