Trotwood's Monthly, Vol. II, No. 2, May, 1906

Transcriber’s Note: New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

Copyright 1906 by Trotwood Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Entered as second class matter Sept. 8, 1905, at the Postoffice at Nashville, Tenn., under the Act of Congress of March 3, 1879.

By John Trotwood Moore
The verdict of another century is sure to crystallize in the now growing belief that the two greatest military geniuses of the first century of the Republic were both named Jackson—Andrew and Stonewall.
The battles of all other commanders—the slow, ponderous, red-tape, unimaginative stands and retreats of Washington; the stubborn, mathematical defenses of the perfectly poised Lee; the ponderous hammerings of the stoical, machine-made Grant—all these were generals after a rule and a school. But the two Jacksons were a law unto themselves. They were comets among fixed stars, meteors in a still heaven. After the frightful holocausts of the Civil War, everything before it looks small.
But there are tragedies, even in an ant hill, and the life of the Republic came nearer going out in the wilderness of 1815 than at Bull Run, Shiloh or Gettysburg, fifty years later.
As the fighting savior of his country, posterity is ultimately bound to rank Jackson ahead of Washington; for Jackson finished the War of Independence, begun in 1776, on the eighth day of January, 1815.
And he finished it forever.
England never considered the matter closed at Yorktown, and when she marched through the North, burning Washington in wantonness and derision, knocking her generals about as so many dummies and their soldiers as so many tenpins, she was thinking of King’s Mountain and Yorktown.
Before Jackson’s day nothing was possible for the young Republic. She was gagged and bound, lying between England’s devil, on the north and west, and Spain’s deep, blue sea, on the south.