06/02/2026
Raised in Stonewall's Shadow: What my high school taught me about the Lost Cause and why it was wrong
by an SJHS alum
I grew up in the Shenandoah Valley believing the name Stonewall Jackson High School was simply part of the landscape. Like the seven bends of the North Fork of the Shenandoah River. Like the ridgelines. Like the fields stretching beyond New Market. The name was there before I was born, and no one ever suggested it could be questioned.
That is how the Lost Cause works. It does not argue. It normalizes.
As a student, I walked past the image of Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson every day. Jackson astride his horse, Little Sorrel, the Confederate battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia raised overhead. The image appeared on gym floors, banners, and yearbooks. Heritage, not history was the claim. No one explained that Jackson violated his oath to the United States Constitution. No one explained that he took up arms against the nation he had sworn to serve. No one explained that he killed United States soldiers in service of a rebellion whose central purpose was the preservation of slavery.
We were taught the legend. The truth was omitted.
For a long time, I accepted these figures as honorable because I had been taught to. Jackson. Robert E. Lee. Turner Ashby. Their names were presented as inevitable, part of the Valley itself rather than deliberate choices made by institutions and communities. That acceptance was not neutrality. It was participation. The deeper I studied the record, the clearer it became that skill in war does not confer moral exemption. These men were not tragic patriots caught in history’s undertow. They were United States military leaders and strategists who knowingly disavowed their oaths, took up arms against the United States, and prosecuted a war in defense of slavery. To continue honoring them is not an act of historical literacy. It is a refusal to follow the evidence to its terminus.
While a National Honor Society student at SJHS, I placed small Confederate flags on graves at the Reformation Cemetery in New Market. No explanation. No context. Just indoctrination. Years later, I found a photograph of one of my Confederate ancestors present at the inauguration of that very moment in 1898, standing among the graves within a short walk of our family’s historical homestead along the North Fork. Even then, something felt wrong. I did not yet have the language to name it, but I know now what I was being taught: reverence without accountability, ritual without reckoning.
Stonewall Jackson did not merely execute military strategy. He advocated a black-flag war against the United States, one that permitted no quarter. That brutality is often romanticized when attached to Confederate figures, even as similar tactics employed by Ulysses S. Grant and Philip Sheridan are condemned as brutality. The difference is purpose. Grant and Sheridan fought to end an
insurrection and destroy slavery. Jackson fought to preserve both. He legally owned enslaved people through his wife under VIrginia law, financially benefited from their forced labor, never opposed slavery, and never freed those held in bo***ge. Many point to Jackson's teaching enslaved people to read as evidence of benevolence, but that instruction was religious, tightly controlled, and paternalistic, aimed at obedience and Christian submission, and it granted no freedom, rights, wages, or bodily autonomy.
That distinction matters.
Stonewall Jackson High School sits near Rude’s Hill, a frequent strategic campsite of Jackson during the 1862 Valley Campaign. It also sits near land that once functioned as what it was: an enslaved-labor farm. Near where students were taught to honor a Confederate general, iron shackles were once bolted into limestone in the basement of a former plantation. Those shackles were not symbolic. They were forged tools, used to restrain human beings kept for breeding, treated as livestock for profit. This was not incidental cruelty. It was industrialized violence, built into the architecture of the Valley itself. That reality existed within reach of classrooms where Jackson was presented as a hero. The Lost Cause survives by separating these facts. It teaches children to admire rebellion while erasing the enslaved people whose suffering stood in dark contrast to terms like “liberty” and “justice.” It turns treason into tradition and calls it culture.
My own family history exposes the lie. Some of my ancestors rode with Confederate cavalry in the Laurel Brigade, screening retreats and charging at dawn along the same roads I later drove to school. Others marched in U.S. blue to suppress the rebellion. Earlier generations fought for the United States during the Revolution. Later generations were drafted to defend the nation in worldwide conflicts, a nation their forebears had once attempted to dismantle. History is complex. Honoring Jackson is not.
Names are not neutral. A public school named for a Confederate general is not teaching history. It is endorsing a narrative. It tells students which past deserves honor and which can remain buried. This is not about erasing history. Jackson belongs in textbooks and battlefields, where his actions can be examined honestly, not elevated above scrutiny. Schools exist to educate, not to venerate insurrectionists.
I once believed the name of my high school was inevitable. I know now it was deliberate. It was a choice to perpetuate a mythology that absolves rebellion and sanitizes slavery.
Deliberate choices can be undone.
And they should be.
