Secesh (@Secesh)

It has been said that General Jackson "fought for slavery and the Southern Confederacy with the unshaken conviction that both were to endure." This statement is true with regard to the latter, but I am very confident that he would never have fought for the sole object of perpetuating slavery. It was for her constitutional rights that the South resisted the North, and slavery was only comprehended among those rights. He found the institution a responsible and troublesome one, and I have heard him say that he would prefer to see the negroes free, but he believed that the Bible taught that slavery was sanctioned by the Creator himself, who maketh men to differ, and instituted laws for the bond and the free. He therefore accepted slavery, as it existed in the Southern States, not as a thing desirable in itself, but as allowed by Providence for ends which it was not his business to determine. At the same time, the negroes had no truer friend, no greater benefactor. Those who were servants in his own house he treated with the greatest kindness, and never was more happy or more devoted to any work than that of teaching the colored children in his Sunday-school. -- Mary Anna Jackson, Life and Letters of General Thomas J. Jackson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892) (reprinted, Harrisonburg: Sprinkle Publications, 1995) 142-143. #sec004 #stonewalljackson #slavery #abolition #confederacy #dixie #south