Statues should be replaced with memorials
The Civil War divided the nation. It also divided families, including the family of President Abraham Lincoln.
The family of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson was no exception. Stonewall and a beloved sister, both of whom grew up an hour’s drive south of us in Clarksburg, W.Va., found themselves on opposite sides of the great national divide. But their falling out may provide a way out of the thicket of bruised emotions and violent confrontations that are currently roiling the nation.
As the statues and other memorials that honor the Confederate States of America and its leaders such as Jackson and Robert E. Lee fall to the wayside, they should be replaced by public commemorations and remembrances which enhance, rather than obscure, the causes and consequences of our four-year long national nightmare.
The full human drama of America at war with itself is intrinsically more interesting and ultimately more engaging than lionizations in stone.
As Lincoln well knew, the Civil War was nothing less than an attempt to unite our principles with our practices. The attempt failed, of course, yet it pushed us closer to the first principle laid out in our first founding document — that “all men are created equal.”
Now, for a brief history of the Jacksons, brother and sister Thomas (Stonewall) and Laura.
The first thing to know is that they grew up largely without parents: their mother and father both died young. Death also claimed two siblings. Farmed out to relatives, Thomas and Laura, it appears, were unusually close as children and young adults.
From West Point, where he was studying for a military career, Thomas spoke of being “deprived” of his “only” sister’s company.
In a letter on Nov. 25, 1845, from West Point, the future rebel general exhaulted in “still” living “in the heart of an amiable and much admired sister.”
From Texas three years later, where he was quartered as part of the U.S. forces about to fight in Mexico, Jackson declared that Laura’s kindness toward him was “indelibly written on my heart and memory.”
And after hearing from Laura that she was desperately ill, he wrote her from Mexico City in February 1848, that should she succumb he would see her someday in heaven where they would be reunited with their parents and two lost siblings to “live in a state … uncontaminated by mortality.”
The two Jacksons were exchanging letters at least as late as 1860, just months before the rebel cannonading of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor and the start of the Civil War.
In the breakup of the Union, Jackson chose to desert the U.S. Army. He became a favorite of Confederate General-in-Chief Robert E. Lee, another Virginian who chose to leave his post.
Though married to a husband sympathetic to the South, Laura remained true to her country. As war raged in and around Beverly, W.Va., where the couple lived, Laura showed her loyalty by caring for wounded Union soldiers in her home.
Her husband told an acquaintance that he could not dissuade her, that “hell” itself “could … not govern a Jackson.”
General Jackson died of wounds sustained at Chancellorsville in the spring of 1863. It was a grievous blow to the Confederacy. Lee could have used Jackson to good affect at Gettysburg that summer.
A Union soldier was there when Laura got word of her brother’s passing. “She seemed depressed,” he recalled, “but she said she would rather know he was dead than have him a leader in the rebel army.”
A statue of General Jackson stands outside the courthouse in Clarksburg. A city official recently told a local TV station that it was staying; the city had yet to hear a word of complaint.
The statue, erected in 1953, apparently presents a striking picture of Stonewall, “the bottom flaps of his coat whipping the wind” as he gallops into battle. No doubt, he will be victorious.
Statues comfort the committed. Narrative speaks to something deeper, more meaningful — to the human heart in conflict, to borrow a phrase from William Faulkner, a fine Southern lad.
The split between Thomas and Laura Jackson as a result of the war must have been painful for both. It’s a story that bears memorializing. The Civil War produced thousands of stories equally compelling.
We need something more in our town squares than granite tributes to men on horseback riding off in defense of slavery. We need engagingly-told public narratives that are fairly and honestly wrought about the motives, methods and measures of the people who lived in that unique and captivating era.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail .com.