Thomas Jonathan 'Stonewall' Jackson

Thomas Jonathan Jackson (1824–1863) was Robert E. Lee's most gifted corps commander in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War. A graduate of West Point who served with gallantry in the Mexican-American War, Jackson was an eccentric, devoutly Presbyterian physics instructor at the Virginia Military Institute before the war.

Jackson earned his immortal nickname at the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861, when General Barnard Bee rallied his troops shouting: 'There is Jackson standing like a stone wall!' In the spring of 1862, Jackson executed the Shenandoah Valley Campaign, marching his 'foot cavalry' 650 miles in 48 days with 17,000 men to defeat three separate Union armies totaling 52,000 men in five battles. On May 2, 1863, at Chancellorsville, Jackson executed a crushing 12-mile flank march through the Wilderness; reconnoitering that night, he was mistakenly shot by his own pickets, losing his left arm and dying of pneumonia eight days later.