Mary Anna Jackson

Mary Anna Morrison – popularly known by friends and family as "Anna" – was born at Cottage Home, the family plantation near Lincolnton, North Carolina.[1][2] Her father, Robert Hall Morrison, was a Presbyterian preacher and the first president of Davidson College, and her mother, Mary Graham, was the sister of William Alexander Graham, a Senator and later Governor of North Carolina, as well as a Senator in the Confederate Congress during the Civil War. Anna received her formal education at Salem Academy (now Salem Academy and College) from 1847 to 1849.[3]

Anna was introduced to Thomas Jackson by her sister Isabella, the wife of Daniel Harvey Hill, a professor at Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, Virginia; Jackson had recently accepted a teaching position at the nearby Virginia Military Institute. In 1853, Jackson had married Elinor Junkin, the daughter of Washington College's president, Dr. George Junkin; she died in childbirth the following October. Around Christmas 1856, Jackson called on Anna in North Carolina while on furlough from VMI. They married in the front parlor of Cottage Home on July 16, 1857.[3] They purchased a brick house on East Washington Street in Lexington, where they lived from 1858 to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. Their first daughter, Mary Graham Jackson, died in infancy in 1858; their second, Julia Laura, was born in Charlotte on November 23, 1862, just before the Battle of Fredericksburg.

Anna lived with relatives in Charlotte during the war, while several members of her family - including her husband, her brother-in-law D.H. Hill, and her younger brother Joseph Graham Morrison, who served as Jackson's aide-de-camp[4] - served in the Confederate Army. She visited her husband at his headquarters house in Winchester during the winter of 1861–62, at his winter headquarters at Moss Neck Manor in the spring of 1863, and again at Guinea Station after he was wounded at the Battle of Chancellorsville. She was at Jackson's bedside when he died on May 10, 1863.

Anna Jackson appears in the novel Gods and Generals by Jeff Shaara. In the film adaptation, she is portrayed by Kali Rocha.

Mrs. Jackson is the subject of the Harnett Kane 1957 novel, The Gallant Mrs. Stonewall, based on the Jacksons' early years together.[9]

She was also portrayed in one episode of the 1988 miniseries The Murder of Mary Phagan (1988), set in 1913, where she was introduced as a special guest at a commemoration of fifty years since the Battle of Gettysburg.

• Works by or about Mary Anna Jackson at Internet Archive