Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 17, 1991                   TAG: 9102200031
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: C-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by GEORGE KEGLEY
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

RECALLING THE EVENTFUL LIFE OF `STONEWALL JIM'

Gen. James A. Walker was the colorful commander of the Stonewall Brigade on Civil War battlefields, a Southwest Virginia lawyer, a Democratic delegate and lieutenant governor and a controversial Republican congressman from the 9th District. His biography was written with admiration by his daughter, Willie Walker Caldwell, an author and woman's club president who lived in Roanoke.

Her book, written in the 1930s when she was near 80, is accompanied by an introduction by M. Caldwell Butler, her grandson and Walker's great-grandson. A Roanoke lawyer, he was a member of Congress for 10 years.

Walker, a man who sometimes enjoyed a mint julep before breakfast, lived life to the fullest, Butler said. The general had "a sharp tongue and a short fuse (traits which, fortunately, have been bred out of succeeding generations)," the great-grandson added.

The title came from an account in "The Stonewall Brigade," a book by Virginia Tech Civil War historian James I. Robertson. When Walker was chosen to take command of the brigade after Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's death at Chancellorsville, his men called him "Stonewall Jim," according to Robertson.

His daughter said Walker could recall fighting in 56 "bloody encounters" during the war. Butler refers to his ancestor as "a Confederate officer of the story-book tradition: bold, reckless, romantic, idealistic, emotional, at times foolhard."

Walker, an Augusta County native who later lived in Newbern and Wytheville, had a busy life. He was expelled from VMI after he challenged Jackson, his math professor, to a duel just weeks before his scheduled graduation.

When he went to Richmond as lieutenant governor, he sided with the Funders in the quarrel with the Readjusters over payment of the state's $45 million debt. He later turned from the Democratic party and became a Republican, winning two terms in Congress. His bid for re-election led to a gunfight in a Bristol courtroom and he never fully recovered from a wound suffered there.

Walker was a successful lawyer, representing such mineral firms as Pulaski Iron, Ivanhoe Furnace and Loddell Carwheel companies. He was a director of the Virginia and Tennessee and its successor, the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio Railroad, during the boom years of the late 19th century.