Reply #61: Stonewall Jackson was a great military strategist and not a racist

[XOKCowboy]

Here is his Wikipedia bio.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_Jackson#Early_childhood

Jackson was seven years old when his mother died. He and his sister Laura Ann were sent to live with their paternal uncle, Cummins Jackson, who owned a grist mill in Jackson's Mill (near present-day Weston in Lewis County in central West Virginia). Cummins Jackson was strict with Thomas, who looked up to Cummins as a schoolteacher. His older brother, Warren, went to live with other relatives on his mother's side of the family, but he later died of tuberculosis in 1841 at the age of 20.

Jackson helped around his uncle's farm, tending sheep with the assistance of a sheepdog, driving teams of oxen and helping harvest wheat and corn. Formal education was not easily obtained, but he attended school when and where he could. Much of Jackson's education was self-taught. He once made a deal with one of his uncle's slaves to provide him with pine knots in exchange for reading lessons; Thomas would stay up at night reading borrowed books by the light of those burning pine knots. Virginia law forbade teaching a slave, free black or mulatto to read or write, as enacted following Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion in Southampton County in 1831. Nevertheless, Jackson secretly taught the slave to read, as he had promised. Once literate, the young slave fled to Canada via the underground railroad. In his later years at Jackson's Mill, Thomas was a schoolteacher.

He grew up to go to West Point and Military historians consider Jackson to be one of the most gifted tactical commanders in United States history.

Now in light of that and the fact that it's a military school in the south, I really don't think it's a racist gesture. More of a respectful gesture to a military hero. He just fought for the wrong side.