Richard Tillinghast replies:

Stewart White is correct in saying that the 1st Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment fought under Stonewall Jackson in western Virginia in 1861, not 1862. My mistake. It was on this campaign that Sam Watkins based his vivid descriptions of Jackson in the classic Civil War memoir Company Aytch.

As for the nickname “Old Blue Light”: Now that the fine points of nineteenth-century American theological controversy have faded from collective memory, modern historians have generally been unaware that the term might originally have referred to Jackson’s rigorous Presbyterian piety. Shelby Foote, the dean of Civil War historians, wrote in 1958 that soldiers under Jackson’s command “had seen his pale blue eyes take on a wild unearthly glitter in the gunsmoke; Old Blue Light, they called him.” S. C. Gwynne writes, in the book under review, of Jackson’s “light eyes blazing with the glow of battle—the men were beginning to call him ‘Old Blue Light.’ ” Mr. White’s letter has led me to Kenneth E. Hall’s 2005 book, Stonewall Jackson and Religious Faith in Military Command, which I had been unaware of. Mr. Hall attributes the nickname to Jackson’s hard-shelled Presbyterianism, and I am inclined to believe he must be correct. Certainly this is the suggestion made by the 1862 ballad, “Stonewall Jackson’s Way,” other lines of which I quoted in my review:

We see him now, the old slouched hat

Cocked o’er his eye askew,

The shrewd, dry smile, the