By Stephen Smoot
The discipline of history, in terms of its professional practice, has hit a nadir not seen since its professionalization about 150 years ago. Professional and academic history, until very recently, made objectivity the primary goal, with appropriate use of context its ever present sidekick. Reducing bias and emotional inputs lay at the heart of creating solid and respectable works of history.
Only work produced in such a way could contain respectable and useful interpretations that also conflicted with each other. In history, the only consensus that ever exists is that based tightly to undisputed facts, for example the Holocaust. Thousands of miles of United States War Department films and an even longer paper trail of German documents prove that it happened, no interpretation necessary as to what happened in the face of overwhelming proof.
Interpretations must have a basis in fact, not on how they might “make someone feel.”
Consider the example of a man born 200 years ago last month “who suffered the trials and limitations of an impoverished orphanhood,” who in his youth “acquired inalienable concepts of duty and responsibility” in an environment of privation, raised in a rural area far from the seats of power.
This man’s sense of duty before the Civil War made him a hero for most after it. Reverend Lylburn Downing and his wife Ellen for example, both born to slavery in Virginia, honored him as one of the few white men who risked his personal freedom and social position to help when he got his own church in 1870.
Reverend Downing had a stained glass wall created in this man’s honor for his church because the figure had dared to give slaves an opportunity to learn when most of the rest of society saw the lack of education as a way to perpetuate their bondage.
Almost 90 years later a fire damaged the window of the still overwhelmingly black church. They raised money to restore the window, although one could forgive them back in those violent days if they felt that continuing to honor a white man’s legacy was no longer a priority for the church.
Especially since the man in question cast his lot with the Confederate States of America.
This legacy came under fire in an American Civil War Museum forum in 2017. Some questioned “if a future Confederate . . . had been so concerned about the Christian welfare of enslaved people . . . how could his Confederate cause be seen as committed to the brutal enslavement of black people?”
A legitimate historical question requires a professional answer. A historian would start from at least two hypotheses to test through examining historical sources. One path might start with testing the idea that the individual was, in fact, a hypocrite. A historian would then search the historical records to build the case for proving that the figure was, in fact, not a practitioner of what he preached.
The evidence overwhelmingly points to the notion that this particular individual might have been psychologically incapable of hypocrisy, due to a distinct possibility that he could have suffered from what was once called Asperger’s Syndrome.
If a historian failed to prove hypocrisy, the next logical step lies in examining the ideal behind the question itself. Was the Confederate cause centered entirely around “the brutal enslavement of black people?”
Again, the job of the historian lies in a careful examination of primary sources, not the opinions of pundits or the possible negative responses to the inquiry.
The motto of the late, great Charleston Daily Mail (murdered in its sleep by its sister paper) was “Without or with offense to friends or foes, I sketch the world exactly as it goes.” No finer maxim could be accepted by real historians, but only if it inspires them to look beyond conventional wisdom and personal prejudice.
Many would agree today with the speaker at that museum function who went on to downplay the fact that this man who had escaped grinding poverty would risk his employment and personal freedom to help slaves, but that is not good history. Resolving an apparent contradiction does not mean ignoring the issues that normally drive people to do what they do.
Here, context is key to any interpretation.
It means explaining why a man, who in this case was a college professor, perhaps even a campus radical, could at the same time place his personal lot with the ideal of educating slaves, but also emerge as one of the finest military leaders of his type in modern history – who chose to serve in the service of the Commonwealth of Virginia when it placed its forces in the cause of the Confederate States.
Because just as he did in war, he stood like a stone wall. He did so for a lonely cause that was not easy for him personally – a cause that required substantial personal courage – almost the opposite of most 21st century academics who condemn figures of history for only surface reasons.
No, because Thomas J. Jackson, born in Clarksburg, West Virginia, was a complex man who lived in complex times. He is proof that the scientific notion of “Occam’s Razor” is never applicable when navigating the muddy and turbulent waters of studying humanity, especially during stormy periods of history.
And “now,” as a great journalist once dramatically said as his famous tagline “you know the rest of the story.”
