Stonewall Jackson Birthday Lemon Toss
Happy “200th Birthday of Stonewall Jackson” to you!
(The Stonewall Jackson “lemon myth,” by the way, gets its origin from Richard Taylor: “Where Jackson got his lemons ‘no fellow could find out,’ but he was rarely without one,” Taylor wrote in his memoir. Henry Kyd Douglas also mentioned a lemon siting, but otherwise, that’s about it, but the legend has nonetheless grown to become one of the central pillars of the Stonewall myth. See: Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War (New York: Appleton & Co., 1879), 50.)
And for the hardcore, on Jackson’s birthday, here’s an image of Jackson’s birthplace in Clarksburg, West Virginia, courtesy of the Library of Congress:
For more on the image, see this birthday post from several years ago.
I am a long time Stonewall Jackson fan. He was a very gifted man in many ways and did not have an easy life… but a life full of loss.
He was also a great General as i have heard some of his battle tactics are still talked about today at West Point and Rommell used many of his ideas in WWII ( which i am thankful that his interpretation of them did not work)
Thank you so much for posting this picture of Jackson’s birthplace. I’m surprised no effort was made to maintain it as a historic site or at least keep it intact, as he was, and still is, such a hero in the South.
Or as Douglas once quoted Jackson as saying: “when life gives you lemons, suck them dry.”
James I Robertson, Jr. said he just liked fruit.
The next myth to get rid of is the A.S. Johnston “fight them if there were a million” silliness.
Happy birthday!
Jackson’s preference for lemons was recorded so many times by so many different people that it is now accepted fact, not myth.
Unfortunately, that goes for most CW writing.