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A Crazy Deacon was the only one of Lee's generals who had shown brilliance and had won a decisive engagement. Thomas Jonathan ("Stonewall") Jackson, 38, a mediocre instructor at Virginia Military Institute, a devout Presbyterian deacon, had been wounded in the hand at Manassas and had fought for the rest of the day with one arm upraised to stop the bleeding. Some of his men thought he was invoking the blessing of heaven. When another officer rode up to say, "General, they are beating us back," Jackson replied: "Sir, we'll give them the bayonet."
Freeman's narrative of Jackson's first Valley Campaign is perhaps the best thing in Lee's Lieutenants. Among his fresh details is the fact that Jackson dug out an expert cartographer and had him make good maps of the whole Blue Ridge region. He also drew up tables that would show him at a glance the distance between any two points in his territory. Other officers, unaware of Deacon Jackson's attentive preparations, sometimes agreed with Cavalryman "Dick" Ewell that he was crazy.
Jackson's gentle domestic manners, his low voice, soft blue eyes and intellectual forehead, his delight in theological discussion, all masked the most furious fighter of the Confederacy. If retreat was necessary, he prayed that "a kind Providence may enable us to inflict a terrible wound." An officer who rode with him noted: "In advance, his trains were left far behind. In retreat, he would fight for a wheelbarrow." He marched and starved his men, if necessary, without mercy.
Jackson, like Johnston, was wary of councils of war. He exasperated other officers by telling them little or nothing of his plans. His defeat of the Union General Banks, and his capture of Winchester in May, 1862, was accomplished through a long chain of decisions and actions that involved the closest kind of calculation; he probably struck Banks's rear on the only day he could have done so. To reach the ridges south of Winchester before the Union forces could man them, he drove his men beyond exhaustion. "I am obliged to sweat them tonight," he said, "that I may save their blood tomorrow."
Other Confederate officers ("Jeb" Stuart, D. H. Hill, Jubal Early) had shown gallantry and what Freeman calls "the feel of action." In 1861-62, "Old Blue Light" Jackson alone showed generalship.
Lee's Lieutenant at Heart is Douglas Southall Freeman, the amazing editor of the Richmond News Leader. "Dr." Freeman to Richmond, less by virtue of his youthful Ph.D. than in recognition of his Nestorian standing in the community, he knows more about the Army of Northern Virginia than any man alive and has for years lectured on his subject at the Army War College in Washington. Now 56, Freeman adheres to a famous daily schedule that would tax the nerves of "Old Pete" Longstreet.