When he died in 1898, Presbyterian theologian Robert Lewis Dabney seemed to have been left behind by a New South that increasingly embraced economic progress, theological liberalism, and sectional conciliation. His authorized biographer, Thomas C. Johnson, presented Dabney as "a man who was at war with much of his age" in describing his battles with "evolution ... jacobinism ... [and] mobocracy." The Rev. Benjamin Palmer declared that Dabney held to his belief that scripture sanctioned slavery "to the day of his death." (1) Some contemporaries were proud of the intellectual legacy of a man whom eminent Presbyterian thinker Charles Hodge once called the "greatest living teacher of theology." According to one eulogist, Dabney had created not only a "splendid literature," but would live through the large company of ministers he had trained in almost four decades teaching theology at Hampden-Sydney College. (2) To Palmer, Dabney's death marked the end of the Old South, as "those who stood by his side, fighting for the truth of God in his generation are standing at the edge of their own graves opening at their feet." (3) The image of Dabney as an archconservative warrior for the Lost Cause has been described by many historians, and was perhaps best captured by Gaines Foster, who has argued that Dabney retained an "almost feudal faith in a hierarchical society" long after the Civil War. (4)

Dabney's prominence as a spokesman of the Lost Cause movement derived from two sources: his undisputed intellectual prowess and his place as an associate of Stonewall Jackson. The two men's wives were first cousins, and Dabney briefly served as Jackson's chief-of-staff in the Shenandoah Valley campaign and Seven Days Battles outside Richmond. After Jackson's death, the general's widow commissioned the theologian to write Jackson's authorized biography. (5) Written as the Confederacy collapsed, Dabney's Life and Campaigns of Lt. General T. J. (Stonewall) Jackson quickly took its place as a preeminent book on the subject after its publication in 1866. For a generation, Americans viewed it as the authoritative work on the general.

Dabney's work shaped the agendas of pioneering military historians, and continues to influence professional scholarship on the enigmatic Jackson. William Allan, a veteran of Jackson's Shenandoah Valley campaign and author of a thoroughly researched history of Jackson's operations there, which remains in print, described himself as "indebted ... especially to the earliest and very valuable biography by his former chief of staff, Dr. Dabney." (6) Sarah N. Randolph, a Lost Cause activist and granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson, acknowledged in her widely read 1874 Jackson biography the "great assistance" she received from Dabney's book. In some instances, she followed it so closely that "but for the frank acknowledgement" she would be "almost ... liable to the charge of plagiarism." When the general's widow published her 1895 Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson, at times she did little more than "paraphrase" Dabney's earlier book. British staff officer G. V. R. Henderson, whose classic 1898 book was the first Jackson biography written with access...