Interview with Christian Keller, author of The Great Partnership: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the Fate of the Confederacy

This is an interview with Christian Keller about his recent book The Great Partnership. To read a review of the book click here.

What sparked your interest in this topic and inspired you to write this book?

Growing up in south-central Pennsylvania as the offspring of two old families that traced their lineages back before the Revolution, the history of the United States literally ran in my blood, and, as I tell my students today, it almost oozes from the very ground around here.  Carlisle was occupied by elements of General Richard Ewell’s corps, the Confederate flag raised over the Barracks, and then J.E.B. Stuart bombarded the town a few days later on his way to Gettysburg.  Some of my ancestors hid their horses from marauding rebel foraging parties and passed down stories about when the Southerners “came through.” Civil War history thus wasn’t just something I read about in books; it was truly a living, visible part of my young life.  I remember my first visit to Chancellorsville sparking the question about what might have occurred later if Stonewall Jackson had survived, and for me that speculation centered on how my own ancestors would’ve fared under his wrath.  Later in graduate school, while on a staff ride to Gettysburg, I asked the question of a certain professor (who will go nameless), hoping for some sort of complex answer, but instead was told that if Old Jack had been at the battle he would’ve been rather smelly (as in a putrid corpse).  I found that sarcastic reply deeply unsettling and disingenuous and decided then and there that I would write a book someday exploring Jackson’s significance to Lee and the aftershocks of his death.  Without a shred of evidence to prove it, I believed back then that the two men must have shared a stronger connection than collegial professionalism.

The relationship between Jackson and Lee has been discussed before. How does your book and argument stand out from previous interpretations of these two men?

This is an important question and strikes at the heart of the book.  Previous scholars who examined the Lee-Jackson collaboration, such as Joe Glatthaar, Gary Gallagher, Jack Davis, Bud Robertson, and Emory Thomas have all concentrated on the professional relationship between the two generals, which makes sense considering the thrusts of their various books and articles.  Even Douglas Southall Freeman, who covered an immense amount of scholarly ground in his classic biography of Lee and later in Lee’s Lieutenants, dwelt almost exclusively on the Confederate chieftains’ operational and tactical interactions.  As mentioned above, I suspected early on in my historical career that that was only part of the story, and rereading Freeman and some of the other earlier biographers I noticed a trend in how they covered Lee’s reactions to Jackson’s death.  Having lost a large portion of my family at a young age, and as a Christian, I started to identify statements in the primary sources these writers referenced, such as Lee’s personal letters, that rang true to me and my own life experiences.  That made me ask: why was Lee so devastated by Stonewall’s death?  It had to be more than simple professional lamentation.  From that inference, I delved into what other eyewitnesses to the relationship said about it at the time.  Combined with my background in professional military education, which has taught me what strategic-level thinking really is, I arrived at my four theses: (1) Lee and Jackson enjoyed a close personal friendship underpinned by religious faith.  No previous author has ventured this argument. (2) Old Jack came to serve not only as Lee’s principal operator (his “right arm”), a fact well-substantiated in extant literature, but also as his strategic advisor, a reality that has gone astonishingly undocumented. (3) Stonewall was himself a strategic-level thinker, not unlike Lee, and formulated war-winning ideas he shared with the commanding general, some of which were acted upon.  A small handful of previous authors have commented on Jackson’s thoughts but have not grasped what they theoretically or realistically represented. (4) Jackson’s death was a true strategic-level contingency point in the Civil War, recognized as such in 1863 by military leaders, politicians, common soldiers, and civilians all throughout the South and even in England and the Union. Second and third-order military effects from his loss created real problems for Lee and his command team just prior to the pivotal Pennsylvania Campaign. This point has been avoided like the plague by modern historians, fearful of being labeled “neo-Confederates,” and thus they barely looked at the period primary sources.  Newspapers across the Confederacy, Lee’s own writings, and those of countless other rebels in 1863-1865 make it abundantly clear how tragically Old Jack’s loss was received and what people thought about it then, as opposed to years later.

The Lee-Jackson relationship is deeply ingrained in the Lost Cause. How did you approach the topic to separate the history from the later interpretation of the war? Was that a challenge, especially with the postwar sources?

The key to navigating through the vast amount of literature written during the heyday of the Lost Cause (c. 1870-1910), regardless of one’s topic, is to root the research first and foremost in period primary sources.  I worked very hard to do that throughout the book and started with Lee’s and Jackson’s wartime letters.  Next, I spent a lot of time in archives and online, looking at letters written during the war by those who knew them, official dispatches with Richmond preserved in The Official Records, etc.  Once you know what was said and believed during the war based on eyewitness accounts, it’s OK to turn to postwar sources, because ostensibly at that point the rhetoric and falsehoods of Lost Cause-inspired authors can be judged with a more critical eye.  I was honestly surprised how closely the early postwar secondary sources (i.e., 1865-1870) and even many of the late postwar letters written by men like Hotchkiss and McGuire in the 1890s correlated pretty well to what was said during the war years. I came away with the impression that some of the source material we modern historians have jumped to label as tainted with the Lost Cause isn’t all that erroneous.  Of course, a fair percentage of it certainly is, and so in cases in which the only source for something important emanated from a likely Lost Cause writer, I had to make a judgment call.  As I state in the introduction, I checked and rechecked these sources in search of anything that might deem them questionable.  Anyone who has conducted serious research on the Confederate high command has run into this same challenge.

I was interested in your take on Longstreet. He is usually seen as an equal to Jackson, but there are points where you portray him as lower in Lee’s esteem or even working against Lee’s plans for the war. What was the hierarchy of Lee’s subordinates, and did Longstreet’s position change after Jackson’s death and Gettysburg?

This is another fantastic question, and frankly I’ve received a few reviews on popular websites complaining I was “too hard on Longstreet.”  Since Appomattox, there have always been Jackson acolytes and Longstreet lovers, and unfortunately the Lost Cause clouded the history on how Lee truly regarded his chief lieutenants.  Longstreet didn’t do himself any favors by his behavior and writings after the war that were critical of Lee and Jackson, and the outraged Lee-Jackson defenders made an abject mess of how the Army of Northern Virginia leadership actually functioned during 1862-1863.  Freeman got it right when he claimed, essentially, that a “triumvirate” of seasoned, gifted subordinates composed of Jackson, Longstreet, and Stuart served Lee well and were equally indispensable for Confederate success in the Eastern Theater during that time frame.  Jeffry Wert has also said this in multiple books. The only variance with this interpretation that my research uncovered was that as Jackson recovered in Lee’s estimation from his disastrous showing during the Seven Days with strong performances in the Second Manassas and Sharpsburg Campaigns, Longstreet’s steady but less-spectacular exploits began to pale in comparison.  Lee seemed to have overlooked Stonewall’s mistake in deployment at Fredericksburg and when he sent Old Pete to southeastern Virginia to watch Union activity at Suffolk and gather supplies, the commanding general’s language in official dispatches to him became noticeably less lenient, more frustrated, and even condescending.  I looked in vain for similar statements from Lee about Jackson during that time and even earlier.  That, and eyewitness accounts describing the closeness of the two generals during the winter of ’62-’63 made it clear in my mind that Jackson had superseded Longstreet as Lee’s primary subaltern by the advent of the Chancellorsville Campaign.  I think their connection as Christians had something to do with that, as did the simple fact that Old Pete was not present during most of that winter encampment.  As I write in my final chapter, after Stonewall’s demise, Longstreet naturally reassumed his position as Lee’s primary subordinate, something the commanding general was doubtless grateful for.  But I do believe that Longstreet was inappropriate by scheming with Secretary of War Seddon on national strategic and theater-strategic options before he reported back to Lee at Fredericksburg in May 1863, and in likely knowledge of the plan Lee and Jackson had created during the winter that intended to take the war into Pennsylvania.  What Old Pete proposed to Seddon was quite different, demonstrating insubordination to--and presumption of--Lee’s intent.  All of this analysis came straight out of The Official Records, complemented with Longstreet’s own memoir.

The idea that Jackson’s death was a turning point towards Confederate defeat at Gettysburg and in the war as a whole is often brushed off as part of the Lost Cause narrative, but you demonstrate in your book that southerners at the time believed that this was the case. Do you think that Jackson’s death was a turning point towards the South losing the war? If so, how would you counter the argument that the war continued on for almost two more years.

Unquestionably, Old Jack’s death was a turning point in the war for the Confederacy.  The subtitle to the book clarifies my stand on this issue, as does the entire fifth chapter about Confederate reactions to Stonewall’s loss.  But I want to make it crystal clear that his demise was only one of many major contingency points (that’s military speak for “turning point”) during the conflict in which a changed outcome would have probably had war-altering effects.  I’ve long agreed with Jim McPherson that there were three strategic-level contingency periods during the war, during which any number of operational and even tactical events could have either ended the war in Union victory faster, proffered good chances for Confederate independence, or both.  The summer and early fall of 1862; the summer of 1863; and the summer and fall of 1864 all brimmed with possibilities.  Of course, there were a lot of individual contingency points during those time periods, and Jackson’s death was one of many (I examine a few others that occurred after he joined Lee on the Peninsula).  I’m convinced by the primary source evidence, however, that Old Jack’s removal from the stage was one of the big ones for the Confederacy, if not the big one, mainly because of its timing just before the advent of the fateful Pennsylvania Campaign upon which so much hinged.  The people of the seceded South, and Lee himself, implicitly understood Jackson was irreplaceable and that the efficacy of the army’s command team was badly damaged.  Yet there was little time to mourn, especially for the commanding general.  He had to reorganize his army as a result of Stonewall’s loss, and that reorganization alone created a cascade of secondary and tertiary effects that set up conditions for serious problems—but did not guarantee defeat—in the ensuring operation.  Then the Army of Northern Virginia was compelled to move quickly after Ewell and Hill were elevated to corps command (each had about a week to become acclimated to their new magnitude of responsibility before the movement north commenced), and Stuart and Lee both had probably not yet personally recovered from the death of their friend.  Most importantly, I argue, Lee had little time to change his preferred intent-based command style that had worked so well with Jackson to one more attuned to the punctilious, specific orders Old Jack had himself issued to his former subordinates, Ewell and Hill.  That reality may well have been the most far-reaching effect of Stonewall’s demise.  That Lee, his army, and the Confederacy writ large continued fighting after his death is a testament to their devotion to the goal of independence, a belief the war could still be won (especially before Lincoln’s re-election), some Federal missteps that helped prolong the war, and stubborn fighting by the rebel rank and file across all three theaters.  But as Walter Taylor put it in 1864 before the advent of the Overland Campaign, the absence of Jackson meant Lee’s army was not quite capable of the same feats it had accomplished previously, and everyone knew it (except, for a time, the Army of the Potomac and its leaders!).

As you immersed yourself in this research, what was the thing that surprised you the most or that you were the most excited to discover?

I was most surprised by two revelations.  First, I was shocked how strategically progressive Stonewall’s thoughts about winning the war were.  I have students today at the War College who couldn’t articulate the fundamentals of strategic theory as well as Jackson did in 1862.  He understood the essentiality of means, or resources, for waging war, and developed plans for destroying critical Union resource nodes, such as coal, that would have brought the Federal war effort to a screeching halt.  He also comprehended the idea of breaking northern civilian will through a hard war, foreseeing the actual theater strategies Grant and Sherman embarked upon later against the South.  These ideas, which mirror those promulgated by classic strategic theorists like Carl von Clausewitz, he shared with Lee, and it’s likely both the Maryland and Pennsylvania Campaigns were at least partially the result of their combined strategic thoughts.  Second, I was startled at the depth of Christian faith of the generals, and how their unswerving trust in Divine Providence girded them through tough times (such as Jackson’s death for Lee) and guided much of their thinking about their army, the war, and the Confederate cause.  I knew both men were devoted Christians, but not until I pored over their letters and examined their specific language did I see how overriding their faith was for both of them.  They were also far more aligned in their religious convictions than previous scholars have documented.

If there are any other comments or things you want to say to our readers about your work, feel free to include that as well.

Please read the introduction carefully. It outlines the major theses clearly and introduces readers to the baseline theory that underpins the entire book, such as the differences between strategy, operations, and tactics; the levels of strategy; and my research methodology. It also underscores the significance of the endnotes, where I placed most of the historiographical debates and commentary about sources. The appendix offers an encapsulation of the major “so what” take-aways of the book for modern leaders, so those interested in a nutshell version focusing on those nuggets might wish to read that first.

About the Author

Since 2011, Dr. Christian B. Keller has been Professor of History in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the United States Army War College, Carlisle, PA, where he teaches courses for senior leaders on the theory of war and strategy, national security policy and strategy, and the American Civil War. In 2017 he was named the General Dwight D. Eisenhower Chair of National Security.

Previously, he served as Professor of Military History for five and a half years at the Army Command and General Staff College, Ft. Belvoir, VA, and has also taught at numerous civilian institutions, including Shippensburg University, Gettysburg College, Dickinson College, and Washington and Lee University. In 2001-2002, after completing his Ph.D, Dr. Keller was a Fulbright Professor of American History at the University of Jena, Germany.

Along with many scholarly articles focusing on strategic, operational, and ethnic topics in the Civil War, he is author of Chancellorsville and the Germans: Nativism, Ethnicity, and Civil War Memory (Fordham, 2007); co-author of Damn Dutch: Pennsylvania Germans at Gettysburg (Stackpole/Rowman-Littlefield, 2004); and co-author of Pennsylvania: A Military History (Westholme, 2016). His new book, The Great Partnership: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the Fate of the Confederacy was released by Pegasus Books in July 2019.

Dr. Keller’s next project, an edited collection of essays on Confederate strategy written solely by colleagues and former students at the War College, is entitled Southern Strategies: Why the Confederacy Failed, and will be in press shortly.

A native of Carlisle, Dr. Keller lives with his wife, Kelley, in an antebellum house that witnessed the occupation of Carlisle Barracks by Confederate troops at the end of June 1863.