Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson

by S.C. Gwynne

Zachary Taylor was an authentic war hero, but his passing had more effect on sectional politics than on anything vital to the fate of his country. Washington died at sixty-seven and was buried quietly and with no fanfare in 1799, as was Jefferson (eighty-three) in 1826. John Adams, who died at ninety the same year, drew four thousand to a church in Quincy, Massachusetts. William Henry Harrison, also a war hero, was the first sitting president to die in office and the first to get a state funeral. But it was a quiet, small-scale affair. None of these men died on the battlefield or during a war at the height of his fame with the very survival of his nation on the line. The closest parallel might have been George Washington’s death on the battlefield at Yorktown in 1781. Like Jackson’s death, it would have shattered the country’s emotions and encouraged its enemies. Washington, of course, died in his bed at home eighteen years later. Though history seems to have forgotten it—in part because the Confederacy exists no more and in part because Northerners never counted it as a “nation” anyway—the fact is that Jackson triggered the first great national outpouring of grief for a fallen leader in the country’s history.