ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, August 8, 1996 TAG: 9608080002
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JENNIFER MILLER STAFF WRITER
Gary Walker can tell you a story about Confederate Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson that you probably won't find in a history book:
In 1858, when Jackson taught mathematics at Virginia Military Institute, he had a run-in with Cadet James Alexander Walker, one of Gary Walker's ancestors, from the more gentrified branch of the family.
Jackson had assigned a geometrical problem - the one in which a tree and its shadow make up two sides of a triangle and you solve for the length of the hypotenuse - and James had solved the problem correctly.
But Jackson made a mistake when he read the solution to his class. James corrected his professor, who earned a second nickname from the cadets - Thomas "Fool" Jackson. The professor got angry, and the student got angrier - he challenged Jackson to a duel.
"Fortunately for the South, the duel never took place," laughed Gary Walker, who rattles off stories like this as if it's second nature.
Writing down those tales is a different story. Walker, whose fifth book, "Slavery and the Coming War," will be released in September, keeps putting down his pen to look up Jackson's name in the dictionary.
Walker is dyslexic. And although he has written four books about the Civil War and two books detailing his family's genealogy, he still gets stumped by some of the most familiar words in the English language.
```When' and 'went' get turned around in my mind, and 'from' and 'form,''' Walker said. Some names - like that of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee - stick with him now. "After going to the dictionary to see how to spell a word four times, you start to remember."
Walker said he doesn't mind double-checking spellings because he thrives on teaching people about "the War between the States."
"Psychologists would say that I am fighting a battle I lost as a child," Walker says of his dyslexia. "They would say that I am overcompensating by writing books that interest people." But as he sees it, "the Lord doesn't give anyone everything. You do good with what you have been given."
Walker looks to his wife, Sue, and his IBM-compatible computer to catch spelling errors.
It's something Sue Walker has been doing for 28 years. She does all of her husband's proofreading and editing before he sends his manuscript to Bookcrafters, a publishing company in Fredericksburg.
And if she misses something, Walker can put a disclaimer on the bottom of the page: "Please excuse any word errors, I have dyslexia."
Walker's reading and writing skills have come a long way since he outlined his family history in a book he printed himself, "Walker, Ben to Carl," in 1981.
"Writing books has improved my literary skills immensely, even though every once in a while I have a tendency to return to my grade-school kid habits again and get caught up on a word."
Teachers detected Walker's learning disability while he was in the second grade. The principal of Spiller Elementary School in Wytheville told Walker's mother that her son was mentally retarded. In seventh grade, when students were supposed to choose a field to study in high school, teachers told Walker not to enroll in precollege courses.
"They said I certainly wasn't going to make it through high school and college."
Stubborn and "bit by the war bug," Walker made a compromise with his principal. He enrolled both in precollege classes and remedial reading classes. He graduated from George Wythe High School in 1964.
Later, at Virginia Tech, Walker was barred from majoring in history because liberal arts students had to take three foreign languages.
"I was certain that I wouldn't pass a foreign language," Walker said. Mastering English was tricky enough.
He graduated in 1968 with a bachelor of science degree in business administration. He didn't suspect it would help him almost 30 years later: His new book examines slavery from an economic standpoint.
Walker's thesis, after two years of studying more than 75 sources, including writings of Booker T. Washington and Abraham Lincoln, is that most masters provided their slaves with food, clothing and shelter because it was economically advantageous for them to do so.
"If you treat your labor good, you get good results from your labor," Walker said. "You then have less problems and more production."
Walker believes that other authors wrote about slavery with the assumption that freedom was precious to slaves. But Walker says - and he knows he'll have critics - he found no evidence of massive slave resistance in the South during the 1860s.
"To be free [for slaves] meant going down tremendously in the quality of their life," Walker argues. Without their masters, slaves lost services they couldn't afford themselves, such as free medical care during pregnancy and death benefits, he said.
But Washington and Lee University history professor Ted Delaney said it is "absolutely silly" to think that slaves didn't want their freedom.
"There are a great many problems'' with Walker's contention, he said. "The facts that fly in the face of this theory are the slaves that fled to the Union army from the plantations ... or people actively seeking to buy their freedom. And the Underground Railroad, what was that all about?"
However, Civil War scholar Edward C. Smith, a history professor at American University in Washington, D.C., agrees with some of Walker's points.
"One of things that gets lost in this debate is that slavery was a business," Smith said. "The image that every plantation was a concentration camp and every master was a Nazi is untrue. It was unprofitable for a master to senselessly abuse" a slave.
"There were a fair number of slaves, especially those with no marketable skills, who feared leaving the plantation," Smith said. "It was kind of their security blanket."
Walker said he knows he's dealing with a sensitive topic, and adds that he's not defending the institution of slavery - he's looking at it in a different light.
"I am almost positively sure that I will have critics," Walker said. "We'll just have to ride and see how things go."
LENGTH: Long : 111 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON/Staff. 1. Gary Walker's fifth book,by CNB"Slavery and the Coming War," will be released in September. 2. Gary
Walker says he is prepared for criticism of his forthcoming book.
color.