Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 34.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

During the period which intervened between the death of General Jackson and that of General Lee, only the partial admirers of Jackson were heard from, for so long as General Lee was reluctant to speak, those who had been nearest to him and were best informed as to what could be said in contravention of some of the claim set up by biographers of General Jackson, were necessarily constrained to silence; and even after General Lee's death there was still some reluctance on the part of General Lee's staff to say anything that might seem to detract from the fame of General Jackson.

The first public allusion to the fact that the famous ‘stroke of generalship,’ which won the Battle of Chancellorsville, was ‘directed by Lee and executed by Jackson,’ seems to have been made by Major John W. Daniel, in his address at the Fifth Annual Re-union of the Army of Northern Virginia, in October 1875, nine years after the publication of the ‘Life and Campaigns of Lieutenant-General Thomas J. Jackson,’ in which Dr. R. L. Dabney stated that at a conference between Lee and Jackson on the night of May 1st, 1863, General Jackson ‘proposed to throw his command entirely into Hooker's rear.’ But it was not until the Ninth Annual Re-union of the Association, in October, 1879, that General Fitzhugh Lee, in his address on Chancellorsville, endeavored to settle the question as to who originated the movement of Jackson's corps to the rear of Hooker, and gave Col. Charles Marshall's account of the matter.

Subsequently, in 1886, General A. L. Long, in his ‘Memoirs of R. E. Lee,’ gave his own recollections of how Jackson's movement originated, and corroborated them by a letter from General Lee to Dr. A. T. Bledsoe, written in October, 1867, and an extract from a personal letter from me.

In 1867 an account was published of the Battle of Chancellorsville by Messrs. Allan and Hotchkiss, the former of whom was the Chief of Ordnance of the Second Corps, and the latter also attached to General Jackson's staff, from which I extract the following, which differs materially from Dr. Dabney's account of the conference between Lee and Jackson and other occurrences which preceded the flank movement around Hooker, but