Symposium Spotlight: Chris Mackowski

For this year’s Sunday morning battlefield, Chris Mackowski will be leading us across the very ground where one of the biggest turning points in the Confederate war effort happened, Chancellorsville. In this week’s symposium spotlight, Chris previews his battlefield tour focusing on the death of Stonewall Jackson. Don’t forget you can still purchase your tickets for this year’s Symposium, Aug. 3-5, 2018 here. They include Friday night’s reception, speakers, keynote address, and historians’ roundtable; Saturday’s line-up of talks; coffee service and lunch on Saturday; and Sunday’s tour of Stonewall Jackson’s final days. 

“No doubt the history of America would have to be rewritten had ‘Stonewall’ Jackson lived,” said David Lloyd George, the former British Prime Minister who knew a thing or two about the fortunes of war. George had helped see Britain through the agony of World War I. On a trip to the United States in 1923, he visited the building where Jackson had died in 1863. “That old house witnessed the downfall of the Southern Confederacy,” George observed.

Indeed, one of the most popular “What If” questions Civil War buffs ask today concerns Jackson’s mortal wounding at Chancellorsville, and how the war might’ve played out differently had he lived.

Was Stonewall Jackson’s death a turning point of the American Civil War? Join historian Chris Mackowski for a Sunday morning tour that focuses on Jackson’s wounding at Chancellorsville and his last days at Guinea Station. Walk the ground to better understand the circumstances on that fateful May 2nd night, join in a discussion that explores the aftermath of his wounding, and stand in the room where Jackson crossed over the river to “rest under the shade of the trees.”

Chris Mackowski is editor-in-chief of Emerging Civil War. With Kristopher D. White, he is co-author of The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson: The Mortal Wounding of the Confederacy’s Greatest Icon. He has also written on Jackson and his wounding for Civil War Times, America’s Civil War, and other publications. Chris has worked as a historian at both the Chancellorsville battlefield and the Jackson Shrine, and he is historian-in-residence at Stevenson Ridge. He is a writing professor in the Jandoli School of Communication at St. Bonaventure University. You can find his full bio here.