Cover image for Rebel yell : the violence, passion, and redemption of Stonewall Jackson
Title:
Rebel yell : the violence, passion, and redemption of Stonewall Jackson
ISBN:
9781451673289

9781451673296
Edition:
First Scribner hardcover edition.
Physical Description:
xi, 672 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
Contents:
Legends of spring -- pt. 1. The unimagined war. Away to Richmond -- The imperfect logic of war -- Fate intervenes -- Discipline and other novel ideas -- A brilliant retreat -- Maneuvers, large and small -- All green alike -- The bullet's song -- Scream of the furies -- pt. 2. The man within the man. Glory and darkness -- A very small, very bitter fight -- A highly unusual man -- The embattled professor -- Deliberately and ingeniously cloaked -- An upright citizen -- pt. 3. Valley of the shadow of death. Where is the thunder of war? -- A preternatural calm -- A season of storms -- A looming peril -- The realm of the possible -- A jagged line of blood -- The shooting war -- A fool's paradise -- Hazards of command -- Hunter as prey -- The professor's time/speed/distance equation -- A lethal footrace -- The taking of Winchester -- Lincoln's perfect trap -- A strange fondness for traps -- Slaughter in a small place -- pt. 4. Stirrings of a legend. Acclaim, and a new mission -- The hilljack and the society boy -- The defense of Richmond -- Victory by any other name -- In which everything changes -- No backing out this day -- The hum of a beehive -- At bay on his baptismal soil -- The mongrel, barefooted crew -- The blood-washed ground -- Stonewall Jackson's way -- pt. 5. All that is ever given to a man. Winter of dreams -- Cometh the hour, cometh the man -- "An iron sabre vowed to an iron lord" -- Immortality -- Appendix: Other lives, other destinies.
Summary:
Stonewall Jackson has long been a figure of legend and romance. As much as any person in the Confederate pantheon, even Robert E. Lee, he embodies the romantic Southern notion of the virtuous lost cause. Jackson is also considered, without argument, one of our country's greatest military figures. His brilliance at the art of war tied Abraham Lincoln and the Union high command in knots and threatened the ultimate success of the Union armies. Jackson's strategic innovations shattered the conventional wisdom of how war was waged. He was so far ahead of his time that his techniques would be studied generations into the future. In April 1862, Jackson was merely another Confederate general in an army fighting what seemed to be a losing cause. By June he had engineered perhaps the greatest military campaign in American history and was one of the most famous men in the Western world. He had, moreover, given the Confederate cause what it had recently lacked -- hope -- and struck fear into the hearts of the Union. Gwynne delves deep into Jackson's private life, including the loss of his young beloved first wife and his regimented personal habits. It traces Jackson's brilliant twenty-four-month career in the Civil War, the period that encompasses his rise from obscurity to fame and legend; his stunning effect on the course of the war itself; and his tragic death, which caused both North and South to grieve the loss of a remarkable American hero.
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