How Did General Barnard Bee Give Jackson the Nickname of “Stonewall”?

By Stephen Davis · Originally published July 2018 · p. 7

Publisher’s note: We start with this issue an occasional column, “Fact or Fiction,” on legends of the Civil War. Some of them, as we all know, can be proven as factual and some fictional; most are debatable, even to this day. We decided to start with a well-known legend, how Confederate Lt. Gen. Thomas J. Jackson got his famous nickname of “Stonewall.”

To address the question in the war literature, we turned to James I. Robertson Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend (1997): “Look men! There is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer. Follow me!” (p. 264). Thus does Dr. Robertson provide the narrative of one of the Civil War’s most legendary incidents. I heard “Bud” speak at the Atlanta Civil War Round Table, Nov. 10, 1998. During his address, I noted his statement, “I believe Jackson was the last great American who truly believed in the power of prayer.” (I wrote it at the time in his book, sitting in the audience.) Dr. Robertson’s biography is, of course, the first place to go on Stonewalliana. In an endnote (pp. 835-36), he adds, “Precisely what Bee said will never be known with absolute authority.” (The general was mortally wounded shortly after making his exclamation.) Robertson adds that another early interpretation, which he terms “the most realistic,” has it this way: “Look at Jackson’s brigade standing like a stone wall! Rally on the Virginians.”1 Bee’s words, quoted above, and accepted by Robertson (minus “Rally on the Virginians”), first appeared in the Charleston Mercury on July 25, four days after the battle. They are thus cited by Dr. Freeman in Lee’s Lieutenants (vol. 1, p. 82).2 The article was written by Leonidas W. Spratt, a Mercury correspondent with Beauregard’s army. After the battle he wrote down what he had seen and heard; Spratt got the quotation from General Bee’s principal aide.3 The Mercury/Spratt account, by the way, quickly worked its way into the Jacksonian literature. John Esten Cooke, author of arguably the first book-length biography (published by Ayres and Wade in Richmond in 1863, pirated and republished in New York the following year) quoted Mercury/Spratt precisely: “There is Jackson standing like a stonewall! Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer. Follow me!” Then, in 1866, there came out Robert L. Dabney’s Life and Campaigns of Lieut.-Gen. Thomas Jonathan Jackson (Stonewall Jackson) with the same wording, but adding “Rally:” “There is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginians! Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer. Follow me.”4 Other Confederates nearby, though, had a different recollection. One of them was Maj. William M. Robins of the 4th Alabama. “I am one of those who heard General Barnard E. Bee utter the words which gave Jackson the name of ‘Stonewall,’” he wrote after the war for a Richmond newspaper. Robins remembered that on the afternoon of July 21, Bee called to the 4th Alabama, one of his regiments, “Yonder stands Jackson like a stone wall. Let us go to his assistance.” Robins adds, “It is not true that General Bee said ‘rally behind the Virginians,’ or behind anybody else. It is not true that he was rallying his men at all, for they were not retiring.”5 Significantly, John Hennessy, longtime historian at Manassas National Battlefield Park, accepts Robins’ version in his The First Battle of Manassas: An End to Innocence July 18–21, 1861 (1989).6 A third version of Bee’s statement also circulates. As Dr. Robertson relates, Confederate Maj. Chase Whiting, no friend of Jackson’s, told another officer that Jackson had refused to advance to help Bee during the battle: “In a passionate expression of anger he [Bee] denounced him for standing, like a stone wall and allowing them to be sacrificed.” Hudson Strode, in his biography of Jefferson Davis, mentions this: “Bee’s brother-in-law and aidede-camp, James Hill, who was with him when he fell and at his deathbed, declared that Bee, in his excitement and despair, condemned Jackson for refusing to move to his aid.”7 In his biography of Jackson, Frank Vandiver uses the traditional story (Spratt, Charleston Mercury) of the nickname’s origin.8 But I well remember decades ago (Nov. 12, 1976—I got him to sign his book) when Professor Vandiver spoke to the Atlanta Civil War Round Table, how he got us all laughing when he related what General Bee could have said: “There stands Jackson like a stone wall! Why the hell isn’t he coming to help us!?” Commenting on this negative connotation of “Stonewall,” James V. Murfin, writing in Civil War Times Illustrated, July 1962, observed, “even if General Bee were speaking contemptuously of the brigade or Jackson, the later exploits of the unit and its commander turned the name of ‘Stonewall’ into one of shining honor.”9 To our readers: do you have a Civil War event, shrouded in myth or legend, subject to differing version in the war literature, that you’d like to write about? Email your article (up to 750 words, including your sources) to Jack Melton (mail@CivilWarNews. com) or Steve Davis ([email protected]). We hope to print “Fact or Fiction” in future issues of Civil War News. Sources: 1. James I. Robertson, Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1996), 264, 835-36 n.37. 2. Douglas Southall Freeman,

Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command, 3 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942-44), vol. 1, 733-34. J. Cutler Andrews, The South Reports the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 84 (on Spratt). John O. Beaty, John Esten Cooke, Virginian (Port Washington NY: Kennikat Press, 1965 [1922]), 87-88; [John Esten Cooke], The Life of Stonewall Jackson…by a Virginian (New York: Charles B. Richardson, 1864), 31; R. L. Dabney, Life and Campaigns of Lieut.-Gen. Thomas J. Jackson (Stonewall Jackson) (Harrisonburg, VA: Sprinkle Publications, 1983 [1866]), 222. “[From the Richmond Dispatch, July 29, 1891.] The Soubriquet ‘Stonewall.’ How It Was Acquired,” Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. 19 (1891), 164-67. John Hennessy, The First Battle of Manassas: An End to Innocence July 18–21, 1861 (Lynchburg VA: H. E. Howard, 1989), 83, 152 n.52; John Hennessy, “Stonewall’s Nickname: Fact or Fable,” Civil War, vol. 8, no. 2 (March-April 1990), 15. Freeman, Lee’s Lieutenants, vol. 1, 734; Robertson, Stonewall Jackson, 835 n.37; Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis Confederate President (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1959), 119. Frank E. Vandiver, Mighty Stonewall (New York: McGraw Hill, 1957), 161. See also Vandiver, Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the Confederacy (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1970), 82. James V. Murfin, “How Stonewall Got His Name,” Civil War Times Illustrated, vol. 1, no. 4 (July 1962), 39-40.