"Inventing Stonewall Jackson: Robert Lewis Dabney, Martyrdom, and the Reconstruction of Southern Manhood"

Wallace Hettle, University of Northern Iowa

This paper examines the life and thought of Presbyterian theologian Robert Lewis Dabney by focusing on his biography of General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.  Commissioned by Jackson’s widow, Dabney’s 1866 life of Jackson left an indelible mark on the literature of the Confederacy, shaping especially the writings of Jackson’s subsequent biographers Douglass Southall Freeman and G. F. R. Henderson.

Dabney’s attempted to invent an image of Jackson as a martyr, and portrayed Jackson (who had been a good friend) as a sacred figure.  But like any martyrology, Dabney’s book tells us as much about the author as its subject.  While Dabney ultimately became famous as a defender of the Lost Cause and social hierarchy, his portrait of Jackson portrays the general as a profoundly ambitious professional man who hungered for worldly success.

Dabney’s work stands in contrast to his contemporary, the rival Jackson biographer John Esten Cooke, whose portraits of Jackson portrayed a stern and eccentric Confederate Cromwell.  By contrast, Dabney’s Jackson combines the virtues of evangelical virtue with a penchant for personal striving worthy of a Confederate Horatio Alger story.   This theme in Dabney’s writing on Jackson belies the theologian’s reputation as a strident defender of social hierarchy, and invites a rethinking of Dabney’s contribution to southern intellectual life.  This paper argues that Dabney’s biography of Jackson makes sense if understood within the framework of the minister’s own antebellum career, which exemplified the very values of striving highlighted in his biography of Jackson.  Dabney’s life of Jackson thus works as both biography and autobiography.