 Good evening. Welcome. I'm Mark Uptigrove, the director of the LBJ Presidential Library, and I want to welcome you all here tonight for what is the last of our programs of 2015. It's been a great year, and thanks for making it so. Tonight we welcome back to our stage, S. C. Gwynne, who will be talking about his latest New York Times best-selling book, Rebel Yell, The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, of which the Wall Street Journal wrote, Gwynne's easy loping style wraps itself effortlessly around the particulars of Stonewall Jackson's life, from his back of the mountain upbringing to the outburst of military genius in the Civil War. The result is a narrative vivid with details and insight. Many of you will remember when Sam joined us several years ago to discuss his best-selling book, Empire of the Summer Moon, the story of Quana Parker and the rise and fall of the Comanches, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, to say that that book was successful hardly does it justice. Sam spent most of the last 14 years as a writer at large for Texas Monthly, and prior to that worked for Time Magazine as a senior editor and bureau chief. Earlier in his career, he served as a teacher and international banker. The latter stint resulted in two critically acclaimed books, Selling Money and Outlaw Bank. Leading tonight's discussion with Sam will be Talmadge Boston, a well-known Dallas attorney and the author of three books in his own right, Raising the Bar, the Crucial Role of the Lawyer in Society, 1939, Baseball's Tipping Point, and Baseball and the Baby Boomer. He has also moderated discussions with, among others, Henry Kissinger, Michael Lewis, Ken Burns, and Frank DeFord. Before I bring out Sam and Talmadge, Sam has given us an actual rebel yell that we will hear by audio tape, so I will ask the booth to play you a rebel yell, which is the sound of the rebel yell that you would hear during the Civil War. So if that didn't scare the hell out of you, I can guarantee it scared the hell out of Yankee troops. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming to the stage S. C. Gwynne and Talmadge Boston. Good evening and welcome. Sam, let's start with the title of your book, Rebel Yell. We just heard it and we know that Stonewall Jackson started the yell at First Manassas when he told his troops, when you charge yell-like furies, and that, as you describe it, feral, eerie, corkscrewing sound that sounded like it was coming from the pit of hell worked so well that the Confederate troops used it in battles throughout the Civil War. But what caused you to choose Rebel Yell as the title for your book about Stonewall Jackson? Well, it was, you know, when I was looking around for a title, I discovered that he had been, his men had been the first one to do it and they had done it in his request. And by the way, I don't know if Virginia country boys thought the furies were Greek vengeance deities. I'm not sure they knew that, but whatever they thought it was, they did it and they yelled. And so I found that out and I thought, and I immediately thought, well that's the best title I've ever heard my entire life, Rebel Yell for a book. So, and I thought, okay, and 700 other people have already used it as a title for a Civil War book. So, and we live in the age of Google, Google, and I hit the thing and it was like 600,000 hits and I just went, oh, give me a break. And then I realized as I went through it, they were all Billy Idol, you know? The rock star did the song Rebel Yell. No one had done it. So it was there. So to me, it was just this miraculous, I mean, one, it was closely associated with Jackson himself. I think that, you know, we'll get into this, I suppose, but, you know, he was, you know, he gave the South a sort of a myth of hope and invincibility at a time when they didn't have it. And so it was in a spiritual sense, I guess, a yell, a yell of the underdog. Now, I think most people know that typically the big bucks in writing biographies these days go to people who write presidential biographies. And to use oilfield lingo, books on presidents are proven developed acreage. Yet you've chosen to be a semi-wildcat-er, stepping out into less developed territory with your coverage of Quanta Parker first and now Stonewall Jackson, who are two lesser covered historical figures. Were you thinking like a wildcat-er when you chose to write about Stonewall Jackson and Quanta Parker with a mindset of high risk, high reward? With Quanta, I didn't really think there was going to be a higher reward and I never actually thought of it that way because I just was, it was just something I wanted to do. It's one of those rare things where, I mean, I'm working at Texas Monthly, I'm an executive editor, I have good life and, you know, I just, I sort of said to myself, I said that, you know, I reminded myself that when I was younger, I had been an ambitious person and that I sort of, that even though I was doing well at Texas Monthly, I hadn't really been swinging from the fence since I sort of thought of it that way and so the Comanche Book was really that. I didn't really, I just wanted to do it. I just really wanted to do it and so I did it and I, however, once you have an international bestseller, the equation changes and for this one it was quite a different model because now the expectations, which were zero on Empire of the Summer Moon, I mean, the first printing there was 6,000 or something or less. The first printing here was 75,000. I mean, it's different levels of expectations. So yeah, I mean, I just, it with Rebel Yell, here's what happened. I mean, I wish this upon all writers, if you do happen to have a bestseller, it was my third book and the other two were not bestsellers, but a window opens if however briefly and the window is that you can sort of maybe do what you want or you'll be allowed to do what you want. And so I went back with Jackson and I just went back and tried to think of the most interesting thing, the person that in my past just captivated me and to me he was the great story of transformation in the Civil War. I mean, 14 months from obscure eccentric physics professor to the most famous military man in the world, you know, say no more. So that was it. Well, your book describes how Stonewall Jackson had a dual personality in many respects. He was fundamentally unrevealed and self-contained when he was around men, whereas he was able to open up with select women. He was, as you said, a social misfit nerd before the war and this glorious military leader during the war. He owned six slaves and yet he had started what proved to be a large Sunday school class for slaves at his church in Lexington. He hated the prospect of war and yet when the war started he was the ultimate attack dog. He was a devout Christian yet in wartime he became a remorseless killer. Can we compare him to Hector in the Iliad who was really two men, a ferocious warrior who inspired affection and trust from his comrades but who had the capacity to turn it off, turn his war mindset off and become a gentle, loving, thoughtful family man when he wasn't in war? Well, you've given me a very complex equation there and in fact what you just described was Jackson and the reason I think one of the holds he has on the American imagination is he was a tremendously complex person. When you think of some of the great generals who were complex people, MacArthur was one, Patton was another, but yeah he was, it is hard to resolve all these contradictions that are inside of him and his devout Christianity among others which is really the key to him. You have a man who in what you alluded to at the beginning there and well in Lexington at the beginning of the war, I mean he was just seen as kind of the odd major. He was the, you know, he was a bit of a hypochondriac and eccentric and he did, you know, he kind of obsessed about his own health and he was painfully shy and he was as a teacher the worst teacher that anyone had ever seen and he was, you know, in his classes and as a teacher he would call you to the blackboard for your recitation for a brutally difficult lesson in what we would now call physics and then if you missed anything or had a problem he would simply quote back to you the text that he had committed to memory and so you would think that maybe a stickler, this was another part of the two sides of his personality, the stickler for discipline like that, sorry a stickler for detail like that would have been a stickler for discipline too, but in fact the reverse was true, turns his back, spitballs everywhere, cadets mimicking his strange step from behind him, trussing cadets up, this is a Virginia military institute where he taught, trussing cadets up on the door so that they would tip over when he came in, removing the lynch pins from the cannons in his artillery class so the cannons would go spinning down the hill with the professor and so you had this guy that was kind of a, you know, a loser, I mean he was one of that great undifferentiated massive people that weren't, you know, that good at anything and one of the things he really wasn't good at was leadership. Again, you know, you brought up so many points in what you just said, that question that we may have to get to them as we go because this idea of Jackson, he did have a bit of a dual personality because with his two wives and one of his wife's sister he was this entirely different guy who spoke Spanish baby talk and, you know, in the house and was joyous and had a different view of things and everyone in Lexington and the war would have been astonished to know that that's what he was like in private. McCanton argument also being made that Stonewall Jackson had a lot of Achilles in him, the man who wanted to fly the black flag and take no prisoners who told his VMI students in time of war they should draw the sword and throw away the scabbard. The man comfortable with as you call it headlong man wasting aggressiveness and a man who after a battle whether it was Malvern Hill or Antietam wanted to keep on fighting and just didn't want to stop. So was he unique among the Confederate generals for his hyper aggressive approach to warfare? He was very unusual among any generals early in the war and early in the civil war began it was there was really no model for it the a lot of these generals had been in the Mexican war and so there was that kind of that war as a model but things had changed weapons had changed it was not the same war there were trains among other things that were that hadn't been there before and so Jackson to me was this sort of model he was one of the first generals I think who really appreciated one how hard the war was going to be how bitter how ruthless how cruel how violent how absolutely shattering it was going to be he got that quickly and one of the reasons he advocated a black flag war meaning take no prisoners in the north that he wanted to go burn Philly and burn Pittsburgh and burn Baltimore right away the theory was make them feel the pain so badly that they would have to come to terms well we sort of did the same thing in Japan in World War two but Jackson was this Jackson was one of the first who really embraced exactly what the war was going to require so you saw him doing these marches that nobody the likes of which nobody ever heard of being able to march men for huge distances in the Romney campaign through ice men barefoot in the ice Jackson didn't care he pushed them he marched them he was he was he was an advocate of total war early on he was as you said he had to be restrained in fact he got him killed at Chancellorsville he wanted to drive hooker into the Rappahannock in the darkness and that's what got him killed by his own men but he was a prototype in the war there was another general in the west in theater Ulysses S Grant who was in similar in some ways this extremely aggressive decisive style of command I mean so many of these generals in the early war were they lacked what Grant would have called moral courage and you know that this idea that you can make a decision and stick with it this idea that you make a decision that might endanger your your army you might get the army might be destroyed it might be captured you and your generals might be killed you could make a decision and and you were in a land that you didn't know in a terrain that you didn't know against men who wanted to kill you who were off somewhere in a place that you didn't know highly risky highly volatile Jackson had this uncanny sense of not only decisive grasp of terrain decisiveness I'll just give you one story and then I'll stop here but there was a union general named Robert Patterson early in the war and he's he's crossing over from Maryland into Virginia and he's pursuing Joseph Johnston at that point and the high command in Washington is trying to get Patterson to move to get him to go and just go get him you know go get him tiger and and Patterson wouldn't do it and he was goaded and goaded and goaded and and finally he sent it a wire back to Winfield Scott and he said look if you want me to do this I'll tell you what you send me an order and in that order you specify exactly what you want me to do where I'm but where I'm going to advance to how I'm going to advance where I'm going to be standing what I'm going to do and then I'll be happy to do it so Patterson's point was he didn't want the responsibility if Winfield Scott took it yes he sacrificed the army who knows what was going to happen to it but that kind of moral courage Jackson was both unbelievably aggressive I would say he's possibly the most aggressive commander America's ever produced but also willing at all times to be decisive and to take that responsibility for for a decision which of course did as Grant suggested bear huge moral consequences not only for his side his men his officers and himself that was a long answer now you've used the word once already but your book frequently describes Jackson's transformation his being a different person altogether even a transfiguration when he prepared for battle or was on the eve of battle or was in battle when as you say the light of battle shined its radiance upon him so as far as history's most esteemed war heroes go was Jackson's extreme transformation in battle unusual or is that what the great warriors do I think a lot of the the great generals were very brave men by definition almost you couldn't be well as my expertise is the civil war here but you really couldn't be a great general without being a very brave person as I said because for one thing generals died at a much higher rate than the than the grunts down below did so it was it was your own skin that you were risking so Jackson was I mean when Jackson went into battle is what you're talking about they said he kind of glowed with the light of battle it brought out something different in him he was he was a transformed man and it's interesting if you look at his career because he really there were two things that it turns out that he was he had a talent for and one was god and religion his real calling should have been presbyterian minister I mean he thought about god all day long he consecrated every act that he did to god he prayed during battle the most lost one of his fingers praying during battle prayed in his tent he was not god was not outside of or somewhere else god was god was completely within and permeated his life he should have been a presbyterian minister he was the worst white he was as bad a public speaker as he was a teacher for one thing and he had no social skills he was and he realized that to be a pastor you couldn't really do that so in that sense he was a failure he was not an outright failure in the sense of having tried it but he did do it on a small scale at the at the sunday school for slaves in lexington but he was a he just you know he hadn't succeeded so there you put that so that's one thing that he was good out okay the other thing that he was good at was war now in the mexican war the bravery that he showed was so extraordinary it was just absolutely astonishing you can have to picture this near mexico city there's a big battle going on the mexicans are defending mexico city and and the american troops are marching in and there's a point at which the mexicans have focused all of their firepower their their their guns their artillery and their and their musket fire and everything else on this one particular patch of road and in and there's a moment when jackson ends up out there all by himself everybody else's duct for cover because there's way too much lead and stuff flying around there but jackson standing there literally alone with 110 in the middle of that road in this hail storm he and and it was funny because he said as he stood there when everybody else diving for cover and getting out of there he was saying to the men men it's fine it's perfectly safe come out here and join me which he later said was the only lie he ever told uh he was incredibly dangerous but the point was he this was witnessed because it was so extraordinary and because of the way it was set up it was witnessed by a division commander it was witnessed by a lot of people he was singled out he was promoted for it he was uh it was an extraordinary piece of bravery but there's there's the blue light there's the that that glow of battle and war that he was good at so so but what happens next uh we just said that he couldn't be the presbytery minister that he should have been probably he goes into the peacetime army he's not suited to the peacetime army it doesn't work he has a very bad time of it in florida actually he causes trouble and he it's not his place and then he goes to become a professor at a military institute of physics which is not his place either he's no good at that either so we have these things that he's good at right that he sort of doesn't get to do and one of these you know he was famous for being obsessed with his health and all this things wrong with him physically well all those things magically disappear when the war starts strangely enough but he you know it's it's anyway he uh he was he was very much transformed by the war and i think my one of my arguments is that he really this was his calling this he was really good at this he knew everything about war he was great at every aspect of it really good at administration administration good at marching and maneuver uh as a tactician he was okay i mean he was b plus tactician but at almost everything he was absolutely flat brilliant at it and so what happened during the war and this happened to other people too uh grant being in Sherman being famous failures before the war who suddenly this other talent gets brought out and so uh so Jackson was not not unique i mean in a war that in a war where transformations were you know common the civil war made a specialty out of transforming people right in most cases it was the glorious senator or congressman or or businessman who ended up as a cowardly or incompetent general and quickly washed out there's a whole bunch of political generals that that happened reverse transformation reverse transformation then you had the famous ones like Grant you know sitting on his leaning on the broom in his father's store in Galena Illinois a few months before the war a failure at everything he'd done Sherman teaching at a little uh military school in Louisiana a failure in all of his business ventures at those guys were transformed the other way now talking about his faith and his being a presbyterian when when you say the word presbyterian the word that pops into most people's mind is predestination the theology that everything that happens in life has already been set in stone by an all-knowing all-powerful god so was it Jackson's presbyterian belief in predestination that empowered his ferocious and often reckless courage in battle uh well he would have probably answered that question yes i mean one of the things that um one of after Jackson was always riding into the heat of whatever it was and standing there amid the shell fire he should have been killed 10 times over um he was always doing that and and and at some point one of his staff said you know general how how can you do that um you know that's that's how can you stand there just or sit on your horse there and what he said was he said was i've never felt safer in my whole life he said the reason i feel so safe is because god has appointed the hour for my death and that is there's has already been appointed it's already going to happen it's predestined anything about it is predestined now he wasn't his beliefs were not and i would argue not entirely predestinary and he did there was plenty of wiggle room in the middle there but but yeah in that sense he believed that um that everything was in the hands of god he believed that all of his battles were in the hands of god he believed that he never he did not deserve credit for any of his victories he not only believed that but he thought that if he were given credit it was a form of idolatry of sort of worshiping a false idol in this case him and it would actually result in the fall of the confederacy now besides his devotion to god his other all-consuming focus during wartime was on a soldier's duty duty was duty you shirked it at your own peril and this obsession with duty caused him to refuse a soldier's request to attend his child's funeral and to be in conflict with soldiers from generals to his vmi friends who crossed him or who retreated without orders so among the great military leaders of the civil war was jackson's all-consuming focus on duty atypical or was is that the norm for a soldier highly atypical um his idea of what duty was was quite strict and and and did extend to his his generals who he often fought with and often put under arrest and um he he arrested his more of his generals more of his current he just arrested people whenever they did not do what he believed was duty and and to just you asked was he unique or something i'll give you just one example robert ely never arrested any general not a single general jackson was doing it every other day it seemed for a while at one point he had half the you know the general staff in in half of the generals in some form of arrest but uh yeah he had a very very clear in particular sense of duty i think it got in his way um but uh he i would say he was at an extreme yeah now one of the tools that you use in making the image of stonewall jackson so vivid in the book is to compare and contrast him with other key historic figures of the time a really cool comparison with the abolitionist john brown comparisons with with us grant and contrasting him with mclellan and then in the end just an unbelievable comparison between stonewall jackson and abraham lincoln so it's drawing these parallels between people part of your process and bringing your story into clear focus of the of the characters you're trying to portray it was very much so and and i discovered that the technique or we didn't discover the technique but i discovered that i could use the technique in writing my book empire the summer moonland i decided that the best way to look at my my character randall mckenzie who was this great indian fighter that nobody ever heard of was to twin him with custer who was the really bad indian fighter that everybody had heard of both were civil war heroes and so i i did it in that book i just twin them and i paired them as a way to show it and so i did it again in this book and as you say john brown jackson uh jackson mclellan jackson and george mclellan was the great early union general and he and jackson were both members of class of 1846 the class that produced 22 generals 12 union and 10 confederate out of 59 graduates 22 generals out of 59 quite a class and here you had so so mclellan mclellan by the time mclellan's it is is a borderline genius he's very very smart and he comes in he's already been to the university of pennsylvania and graduated by the age of 16 when he starts west point which by the way is the best engineering school in the country he's his father's a prominent doctor he's a philadelphia blue blood right and so on the other hand you have jackson orphan hillbilly from apalachia or whatever he was a completely different case jackson basically mclellan came in at at the top of his class and left at the top of his class jackson came in at 164th and barely made the cuts as he went and so i just compare the two it's an interesting comparison among other things you know by the end of course mclellan mclellan graduates second in the class and is disappointed in that but he's he's the the valedictorian or ever the class and he he sort of goes out the way he came in jackson meanwhile started out and was called the immortals the people who couldn't do anything the people who are almost certainly going to wash out and west point was brutal at washing people out i mean you're going from 164 people down to 59 just every every year they just whacked them well they they had exams and if you didn't pass the exams you were gone so here's my theory about jackson so jackson comes in to the finest engineering school in the country with a a very spotty rural western virginia now west virginia education i mean a really bad education i think and it's hard to get equivalencies here but i would think it might be an eighth grade education as we would conceive of it if that if that and the math that he had was i don't he had had no algebra as far as i know so that actually let's just imagine for the moment somebody coming in to the university of texas engineering school the seventh grade education no math just think about that for a moment think of how smart you would have to be to perform now jackson rose jackson made the first couple cutoffs he made by the skin of his teeth but by the end he was 17th out of 59 rising fast that the the hardest course of all he got a fourth in fourth out of his class i mean people there said that he another year he might have led the class but he was it was an extraordinary act of will to do that to be able to get through that um and i think you know going to ut engineering on on that kind of education is a good comparison so so anyway that was true and then i'll say one more thing about you know lincoln uh one of the things i think most historians have missed about jackson's death it was the first great outpouring of grief for a fallen leader in american history and it's it's sort of jarring to hear that because you think oh wait a second try to think wait i'm going to add him but in fact it really was um you know franklin was old and obese when he died he got 20 000 people in philadelphia you know uh washington adams jefferson had very modest funerals as old men zack taylor got 100 000 in washington out to his funeral procession but he was a president who hadn't been there very long and jackson's death absolutely transformed the entire south i mean it shattered the south uh it was it was uh a very close comparison to the death of lincoln almost exactly two years later which of course is over shadow jackson's death in history but to look at the two is is really unlike my comparison of say jackson to mclell and where they're polar opposites here there's so many similarities at least in the the effect of the death you had you know they they they became uh the sort of sim the symbolism of their death i guess was was was similar there was there were the their funerals were the funerals that all these hundreds of thousands of young men would never have uh when they returned home symbolically by train it was the journey home that the young men would never have there was all of this i mean it was kind of there they were the vessels into which the uh the pent up heart ache as i write in the book of the nation could be poured and and uh uh drew gilpin faus called lincoln's uh what happened after lincoln's death the national funeral and the national funeral was exactly what it was for the confederacy um and the and before i stop here i'll say just one more thing the uh the when the trains were when the trains were going home you had you had of course lincoln going to new york you had jackson going to lynchberg uh the scale uh the scale was was vastly different but um when lincoln died generally the south still hated him uh they they thought he would they would have had a better deal with him than who came after him but they they hated him in jackson curiously there were many outpourings of admiration and and and genuine mourning in the north even among abolitionists um people a lot of people in the north well thought he was fighting in the wrong cause but thought he was a christian gentleman and a brilliant warrior and kind of in some cases they were kind of proud to claim him and somebody once said to have fought against him was just after having fought under him now another tool that you use to bring stonewall jackson to life is identifying historical tipping points the battle of winchester is the tipping point for the birth of the myth and legend of stonewall jackson the battle of second manassas is almost the tipping point for de facto confederate independence lincoln's emancipation proclamation is the tipping point for the union's finally becoming impassioned about winning the war and finally jackson's death as the tipping point for the south's declined towards certain defeat so is that the historian's job to identify the precise moment or event when momentum shifts and the tide turns yes and and it is something that i find missing in a lot of history that that sense of just stepping back a little bit and saying that here is what this means here is what second manassas meant here is here is what um uh for example when i was talking about the romney campaign which is it's it's this winter campaign it's a it's a it's not a success and jackson ends up resigning it's it's messy he's meddled with by richmond and so what i but with romney to me i think it's my job to point out which i do in the book i say yeah but if you were look if you're paying close attention this was an example this was an exercise of a new style of command that nobody had ever seen before men were going to be made to march that way they were going to be made to die they were going to follow the leader and they were going to do what he said and they were going to take risks and all these things it was a completely new concept in command at that point that it wasn't what people thought this was about um soldiers freezing to death um and in the 18 degree weather with 30 mile an hour winds and if you go to something like uh and of course if this is less this is obvious all historians have pointed this out but you know the battle of antedom which jackson fought fought in was uh was in a larger historical sense about giving link and the ability to issue the emancipation proclamation so yeah i i think that that those those meaningful uh those those meaningful moments the battle of winchester is what put him on the map it you know again this is 14 well by 14 months into the war we had already had the battle of winchester by that point jackson was being compared to napoleon jackson was the most famous military man in the western world uh this was the valley campaign and so i say you it's my job to point out say hey winchester changed everything suddenly you have this man who is uh who embodies the the hope for the beleaguered south yeah as i read all that and just as the union soldiers feared the sound of the rebel yell after winchester they feared the sound of the name stonewall jackson because of there's some there's some great moments too where you can see that what's at play is not anything real but it's the idea of jackson um you can see it at hooker in the first day of chancellorsville where he you know he he suddenly finds out that it's jackson and not these other two generals in the field against him and it affects your decision-making suddenly they were thinking you know we're going to change my tactics which in fact change the battle the best example of this that i can think of is um there's a moment after harpers ferry where jackson swallows an entire union army hole in harpers ferry and there's a moment where there's this big union army coming through this ridge um toward harpers ferry and between them and the garrison harpers ferry they vastly outnumber jackson they had gone in the outnumber and they out everything jackson and and um and there's a moment when here they come here come the union troops through the pass on to what should have been certain victory and suddenly they hear all these the rebel yell people give them the rebel yell the the rebels are going crazy the union guys say what are you guys celebrating for and they said well the the sound of gunfire just stopped from harpers ferry that means that jackson has taken harpers ferry and at this point it was entirely the idea of jackson this this mysterious remote sort of magical force that had just eaten another union army hole and the union general stops just stops and the colonel can't make him move that's the end of it there was a bunch of that and i think that that that when you are in war i think in general when when the your your opponent is is known one of the reasons that lee did what or could do what he did early on against the union forces is because it was a reverse effect he knew who mclellan was now in an interview in last sunday's dallas morning news you were asked if there were any lessons from the life of stonewall jackson that we can apply today and your answer surprisingly to me at least was i can't make any direct contacts with 2014 though you went on to explain why jackson still lives on today but aren't there lessons to be learned for on how to be a great leader in 2014 that can be learned and better understood by knowing how stonewall jackson went about taking care of his business his leadership business during the civil war you know there are i i didn't i didn't take i i didn't take the question that they asked me that way i thought they were trying to link it to current events oh okay and i can't link it to afghanistan although many people we've had discussions about the command trees in afghanistan but um but uh uh no i think yes absolutely jackson jackson's um uh i tell people some great lessons one arrest all your generals two don't don't care a whit for what you do to your men punish them make them march in snow and hurt them never tell any of your staff anything about what you're doing even in the middle of battle okay i'm this is all true i'm not making this up jackson had a very eccentric style but as i was saying earlier there the things that you would you know could trot out at a management seminar in 2014 um are this uh remarkable decisiveness remarkable ability to use command ability to use his his his authority and his command um i would say aggressiveness speed all the things that you know the patent studied him closely the german studied him closely and acted accordingly uh speed um deception um again this is when you're looking at if you're looking at like say the corporate world these things would be very helpful to you you know decide what you do stick by your gun stick to what you're doing um he's he was a in some ways he was a leader a great leader in spite of himself he was he was uh he wasn't perfect he was flawed um and yet uh you know there were there questions when when uh when uh jackson's brother-in-law dh hill it was a confederate general was asked why the men follow jackson so blindly and and uh he said well because he wins and that was hill was a cynical guy and that was a cynical sort of answer and i think that you could maybe make the same statement about nick saban what you want to play for nick saban well why do you want to play for nick saban well he wins uh he may not he didn't have to be mother teresa he doesn't have to be anything else he has to win so that that was part of it but he also but jackson was i compare him in the book to long street so lee's two main lieutenants in the early war were jackson and james longstreet and longstreet was the plotter i mean he was a good fighter and he was brave and and he but he was a color not not a very colorful personality and he was just longstreet jackson on the other hand was i mean he was he was remote generally speaking from his men he was he got prayed in battle prayed in the middle of battle he was jackson was about as i was saying sort of magic and mystery and and other things and and and you know longstreet inspired respect among the union troops jackson it was fear and awe and uh i'm not sure how good a management that lesson lesson that is well you know he wasn't into pomp and circumstances he was humble i mean you know you read good to great right these are the traits but that is true you'd be back to that's a good point i i'm the humility the willing to give credit to others um all of that was i think a significant yeah i'm glad you brought up the next saving because another way to look at jackson's relevance as a role model for leadership in 2014 as i read it was to compare him to to ut's head football coach charlie strong who you profiled in texas monthly a year ago because let me rattle off some of these things i thought my gosh he cared little about the opinions of others paren alums he firmly stripped the companies of their independence and hammered them together into regiments a team effort he imposed an unforgiving program of drill and instruction and got rid of the whiskey he required officers to remain habitually with their commands like the coach is sleeping in the dorms his penalties were prompt and inexorable such that rules were rules violations or violations and consequences must follow he was all about scrupulous honesty meticulous accountability cool professionalism and his obsession with detail was seen as proof of an iron will these are all about stonewall jackson that's what we've been reading in the sports pages about charlie strong that's that's brilliant okay that's flat brilliant okay i i never i i could never have made that connection you just made it and you're exactly right everything that he said was my description of jackson but it applies exactly so you're exactly right but that was it's it's hard for me sometimes to to sort of get a handle on because there's so much to jackson but you you you put your finger on it there there's it there it's it's also it's all those things that you said and there's a complete and utter consistency all the time of it there is never it's sort of like you know michael corley owner you and the godfather it's not you know it's not personal it's a business and it wasn't if jackson was going to take you out and shoot you and your guys for having come to him and said look the draft is up we're out of here that was not personal with him that was and and you knew it and you knew you would be shot and uh he wasn't he he was very evenhanded when he had his first command in harper's ferry he had to break the militias because the war started out where everybody thought this is going to be a hoot and they were all them they were all these old militias and the militias all had generals and the generals had plumes in their hats and sabers and entirages and they would pass out whiskey and cigars and and they believed they were going to retain their authority and jackson just absolutely broke them on the wheel but he did it he did it fairly and he did it consistently and they all went to richman to complain and get rid of him and it didn't work and he came back but he was he was a terrifically even-handed administrator and it was all and he and so much of the war of the when you see the the dramatics of the early war generals with big egos doing things they shouldn't be doing and another 2014 relevant lesson that to me was triggered by jackson's life story is the importance of choosing a career path that allows a person to fully use his strengths fulfill his destiny do what he was born to do and get into a mode of what contemporary psychologists call flow and your book makes clear that during wartime stonewall jackson was absolutely in a perfect state of flow whenever he led his troops into battle so you use the word redemption the violence passion and redemption of stonewall jackson i had to redemption has many different definitions and so i looked it up and were you defining redemption as jackson's ultimate fulfillment of his human potential or if that's not it tell me what the redemption is about no that's one meaning of it but i would start that with i mean i use the word very deliberately and and the first the first sense of it would be purely religious jackson was a devout christian therefore he saw himself as a sinner and therefore a sinner to be redeemed by the grace of god and he believed that he would be redeemed by the grace of god after when he died and he actually looked forward to that as as a devout christian he looked forward to that to that moment so redeemed in that very specific sense that he would be and he believed he would be with then there's the other side which you hinted at the more secular side of the word redeemed which might be redeemed from his own failures redeemed from his own ordinariness perhaps perhaps fulfill fulfilling things that he had that he should have done or wanted to do i mean the civil war hadn't come along he would have been a forgotten VMI professor that no one would ever even thought about yeah a nice little guy with a little job and just the odd major he would have been and uh no it's uh the uh there's a moment there's a lot it's longer than a moment but in the winter of 1862 1863 um jackson was the the battle of fredericksburg had just been fought resounding confederate victory and the confederate army was camped um up on the hills near the rapahannock near near fredericksburg and jackson at that point was uh he just had this string of of great victories and even the loss and tedum was a drawn battle against twice their size he and lee had done absolutely extraordinary things and he had fulfilled everything that you could have imagined he that a military man could have wanted he was famous he was a rock star he was swarmed in public women were would literally throw themselves on him to get buttons on his coat and locks of his hair men were stealing hairs from his horse's tail um i had a description of my book by jeb jeb seward's uh chief of staff where who's mistaken for him he describes like fleeing through this town with this mob and pursuit and he gets in a hotel and he's got to barricade himself into the hotel that's how famous jackson was well jackson didn't like that but it was a fulfillment of of source the other fulfillment this is much more interesting to me was that he in the winter of 1862 1863 jackson almost single-handedly i don't say that's too extreme jackson was the principal driving force behind the unbelievable wave of christian revivals that swept through the confederate army that winter there were going to be more to come in the war but this is jackson's last winter on earth he refused to be the frontman he refused to preach he refused to require any of his men to go to church services he didn't do any of that but he re actively recruited and financed this the regimental chaplains which is really the way which is really the way he pushed into the army he uh he uh he was very aggressive with this he used his own money to to finance literature and everything again he was behind the scenes he would go to the services but in that winter you suddenly saw chapels being built everywhere and generals like lian jackson and all these services and these great revivals and and even though he couldn't have been that presbyterian minister that he should have been and wanted to be in fact he what he sustained i mean he was was had more of an effect on people than many of the you know this was the era of course of the great great revivals and and great preachers and the revivals in some ways he had more of an effect than they did so we can talk about this i think all under the general banner of of redemption yeah now a huge part of stonewall jackson's story was his historic partnership with robert e lee lee being the tactician jackson being quote the iron fist and a righteous tool of destruction and on page five sixty you say that after jackson's death robert e lee would never again be so brilliant is it accurate to say that lee's high historic historical legacy came about in large part because he had stonewall jackson's and his heroics in his toolkit it depends on what you look at in the larger sense yes i mean lee had what he said was the greatest executive officer the sun ever shown i mean it was true and the lee jackson partnership was made in heaven i mean they were you could make a buddy movie but they were opposite personalities but they were extraordinarily effective in battle uh and and it was in fact a form of high command teamwork absolutely unseen in the war to that point now in individual battles the first campaign that the two fought together was the seven days which was just a absolute miserable sloppy piece of work from everybody's point of view lee didn't know how to move armies yet jackson performed badly a couple of times but the effect of seven days of course was that lee became hugely famous by driving george mclellan and his entire hundred twenty thousand man army into the james river where they cowered behind the behind their gunboats but once once the team starts going which you which you see at at second manassas it's really just absolutely extraordinary what they're able to do together they think alike and one of the things i i say in my book is that when jackson first started operating the shenando valley the place where his valley campaign would be where he first became so famous what happened was uh he was nominally reporting to a general named joseph johnson but in fact johnson was way preoccupied with the defense of richmond as increasingly jefferson davis was and so davis basically said to his military sidekick at that point robert e lee he said hey look we're too busy with the defense of richmond why don't you look after the valley and which and started this extraordinary correspondence between the two men at that point lee was seen as not really not necessarily who you wanted in field command he hadn't performed that well in the war he was thought to be a little fussy um he wasn't what anybody later found out that he was um but in his correspondence with jackson jackson is really the first one to see this profoundly aggressive riverboat gambler risk taken guy and and one of the reasons jackson was able to do the valley is he had this little voice this little little man standing on his shoulder robert e lee saying you know using terms like if you can drive the enemy drive the enemy move the enemy and so in purely military terms the two of them discovered each other these very aggressive guys in an early in the war where aggressiveness wasn't yet perceived as a as a value everybody wanted and in fact people thought jackson was a bit of an attack dog he should be reigned in now last question although in 2014 we're in the midst of the civil war sesquicentennial today we're living in a strange politically correct world such that as we speak there are actually political activists in places like charlottesville virginia who are trying to have removed from public places all statues and monuments related to the confederacy so as your book vividly depicts the amazing wartime accomplishments of stonewall jackson and his dauntless courage and his consummate general ship demonstrated by his string of military successes from 1861 until his death in 1863 i wonder what coverage of his life if any is being taught to america school children these days i don't know not very much it's interesting it's interesting there's a stonewall jackson elementary school in dallas that i think's in 32 but uh you know it's it's the civil war one of the things that you learn as a yankee i'm as connecticut yankee as you get i you know we were just brought up to the civil war was really simple if you grew up in connecticut trust me it was it wasn't hard to figure out why it was being fought and and who won and we weren't really we didn't pay much attention to it frankly and we being you know yankees um connecticut yankees but the civil wars are really it's a it's an extremely sort of complicated thing and to slavery was the larger reason why it was fought and in fact it was a it was the america's inability to know what to do with its new territories this gigantic amount of new territories that dwarf the original colonies that it acquired and then in the uh since the louisiana purchase and it was what are we going to do with it that's what the civil war was really about so it was about what will the nation in the future be about slavery not about slavery um but when you come to in my book i i talk a lot about slavery and jackson's uh you know relationship to it and one of the things you learn is that it's never as simple as you thought it was going to be jackson came from the western part of virginia which was where his uncle commons had had 12 slaves but slaves were uncommon there not only that but western virginia deseceded from the from the confederacy as soon as virginia seceded and so he was from a part of the country that actually went for the north uh he himself had six slaves uh three of which he were reclamation projects people had asked him to one of them wanted his freedom another three of them came through his wife he was as far as we know a benevolent owner although he did not have any views that said that slaves were not property he and his wife believed that they were on the other hand he started and ran a very successful sunday school for slaves in lexington that had a hundred students at one point um he did this in violation of virginia law the virginia law which was based on the nap turner rebellion of the 1830s said that you know if you if you taught slaves to read in this case the bible or taught them to be literate they would rise up and kill you and so jackson did this uh in contravention of virginia law and he was in fact accosted in the street a number of occasions that i described in the book by people who said you can't do this jackson's interest was saving souls but he ran a good school people liked it and to this day there's a uh this is part of the complexity of the south there is a stained glass window in a black church in virginia put there by one of jackson's old students um anyway and then then we get into the war itself slavery when jackson's in his valley campaign was the first time that slaves crossed lines in large numbers i think it was it was one of the first times anyway crossing to nithaniel bank's army and the union army believe that jackson would would kill them and and uh you had you know there was just there was there was many different levels of this i guess and and that well i mean every you know obviously one condemns slavery but the confederacy was a large and the south as a whole was a very large and complex entity um and that you can't just rule it off with uh i'm sorry just rule rule it out or dismiss it if you will um uh as a single issue cause well i think all of us are tremendously indebted to you for bringing stonewall jackson alive uh at a time when when we're living in this very unusual world with this uh attitude toward the the south and the confederacy and trying to demonize uh so much of it so thank you for this wonderful book let's show our appreciation to s c glenn thank you