Jackson would have done no more. But I cannot help thinking Stonewall Jackson would have tried.
No one understands a man better than his wife. Mrs. Johnston adored her husband. He was her knight, her chevalier, her hero, as he deserved to be. But when he scolded a girl who was attacked by a turkey-gobbler and neither ran nor resisted, saying, "If she will not fight, sir, is not the best thing for her to do to run away, sir?" Mrs. Johnston commented, "with a burst of her hearty laughter, 'That used to be your plan always, I know, sir.'"10 No doubt the lady was mocking purely. No doubt she would have raged, if any one else had said it. Yet—no one understands a man better than his wife—when she understands him at all.
In short, too much of Johnston's career consists of the things he would have done, if circumstances had only been different.
And here it is urged, and justly urged, that fortune was against him. All his life he seems to have been the victim of ill luck. Lee was wounded, I think, only once. Johnston was getting wounded perpetually. He himself told Fremantle that he had been wounded ten times.11 General Scott said of him before the war that he "had an unfortunate knack of getting himself shot in every engagement."12 A shell struck him down at Fair Oaks, just as it seemed that he might have beaten McClellan and saved Richmond.
Nor was it wounds only. Johnston had a vigorous
