Searching for Stonewall Jackson: A Quest for Legacy in a Divided America by Ben Cleary
Searching for Stonewall Jackson: A Quest for Legacy in a Divided America by Ben Cleary
Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson was the embodiment of Southern contradictions. He was a slave owner who fought and died, at least in part, to perpetuate slavery, yet he founded an African American Sunday school and personally taught classes there for more than five years. For all his sternness and rigidity, Jackson was a deeply thoughtful and incredibly intelligent man. But his reputation and mythic status, then and now, was due to more than military success. In a deeply religious age, he was revered for a piety that was far beyond the norm. How did one man melt his religion with the institution of slavery? How did he reconcile it with the business of killing, at which he so excelled?
In Searching for Stonewall Jackson, Ben Cleary examines not only Jackson's life but his own, contemplating what it means to be a white Southerner in the twenty-first century. Now, as statues commemorating the Civil War are toppled and Confederate flags torn down, Cleary walks the famous battlefields, following in the footsteps of his subject as he questions the legacy of Stonewall Jackson and the South's Lost Cause at a time when the contentions of politics, civil rights, and social justice are at a fever pitch.
Combining nuanced, authoritative research with deeply personal stories of life in the modern American South, Searching for Stonewall Jackson is a thrilling, vivid portrait of a soldier, a war, and a country still contending with its past.
Twelve, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2019
THIS IS A BRAND NEW BOOK. THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE TOP PAGE EDGES.