Searching for Stonewall Jackson

A Quest for Legacy in a Divided America

By: Ben Cleary

Narrated by: Ben Cleary

Length: 12 hrs

Publisher's summary

Historian Ben Cleary takes listeners beyond the legend of Stonewall Jackson and directly onto the Civil War battlefields on which he fought, and where a country once again finds itself at a crossroads.

Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson was the embodiment of Southern contradictions. He was a slave owner who fought and died, at least in part, to perpetuate slavery, yet he founded an African-American Sunday School and personally taught classes for almost a decade. For all his sternness and rigidity, Jackson was a deeply thoughtful and incredibly intelligent man. But his reputation and mythic status, then and now, was due to more than combat success. In a deeply religious age, he was revered for a piety that was far beyond the norm. How did one man meld his religion with the institution of slavery? How did he reconcile it with the business of killing, at which he so excelled?

In Searching for Stonewall Jackson, historian Ben Cleary examines not only Jackson's life, but his own, contemplating what it means to be a white Southerner in the 21st century. Now, as statues commemorating the Civil War are toppled and Confederate flags come down, Cleary walks the famous battlefields, following in the footsteps of his subject as he questions the legacy of Stonewall Jackson and the South's Lost Cause at a time when the contentions of politics, civil rights, and social justice are at a fever pitch.

Combining nuanced, authoritative research with deeply personal stories of life in the modern American South, Searching for Stonewall Jackson is a thrilling, vivid portrait of a soldier, a war, and a country still contending with its past.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 Ben Cleary (P)2019 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

"Cleary provides a thoughtful, accessible look into both Jackson and the continued relevance of the Civil War." (Publishers Weekly)

"Cleary...is both sensitive and sensible, and readers along the way will learn both of Jackson's gallantry and the essential wrongness of the enterprise for which he died. An honest, searching book sure to tread on the toes of supremacists and iconoclasts alike." (Kirkus)

"Ben Cleary's decades-long fascination with the Civil War was stoked in part by his awareness that Stonewall Jackson and his soldiers had marched past the site of Cleary's Virginia home in 1862. Intrigued by Jackson's military genius and baffling personality, he set forth on a quest to understand both and to probe the meaning of the war by following in Jackson's footsteps. Civil War experts and neophytes alike will find the results of his quest to be a rewarding reading experience." (James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times best-selling author of Battle Cry of Freedom)

Excellent Memoir and travelogue

Don’t be turned off by the negative reviews of this book. It is just fine. It is not a formal biography of Jackson, if you are looking for that look elsewhere. This is a ‘journey’ taken by a man that I can well identify with. In many’s it reminds me of two other books “Confederates in the Attic” and “My American Revolution”. The authors reading is perfect too.

A man i can identify with

TJ Jackson is a man i have long admired. Both for his military prowess, and his incredibly deep complexity. In today's social and political climate, i too struggle with how can a man who saw through the "political correctness", of his time, to see that the "black man" was a human being, made in the image of God, just like the "white man", and yet still choose to fight for the "nation" that was continuing to enslave a fellow human being.

Mr. Ben Cleary has kindly helped me learn a little bit more. Not enough. Never enough (for me). Humans are far too complicated to be fully known. Especially when our own perceptions are tainted by our own lenses of our culture, faith, understsndings, etc., so i am grateful for the work he put into this book, and for sharing it.