Lee and Jackson: Confederate Chieftains

The symbiosis of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson made the Army of Northern Virginia virtually invincible. Only with Jackson's death at Chancellorsville did the Confederacy's long twilight begin. Casdorph ( Let the Good Times Roll ) argues that his protagonists were ``interconnected'': they had established a basis for mutual trust before the war. Yet the text shows only that Lee and Jackson were aware of each other--hardly a phenomenon given their common matrices as Virginians, soldiers and educators. More serious is the work's lack of analysis. Casdorph relies heavily on memoirs and histories written after Lee and Jackson were already legendary figures. These reconstructions follow the myth; Casdorph follows the reconstructions; and the result is a tautology. Lee and Jackson appear in these pages as ``marble men'' who perform heroically because they are heroes. And what might have been a significant study of a key Civil War command relationship becomes instead just another narrative of the ``gunpowder and magnolias'' variety. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Apr.)