This Day in Civil War History (Stonewall Jackson Dies)

May 10, 1863—Eight days after being wounded at twilight at the Battle of Chancellorsville and having an arm amputated in an effort to save his life, Confederate General Stonewall Jackson died in mid-afternoon, attended by his friend, surgeon Hunter McGuire. 

In his last few hours, his mind began to wander, until he finally smiled and said, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”

After lying in state in Richmond, Jackson’s casket was brought by canal back to Lexington, Va., the college town where he had lived and taught for nearly a decade before joining the rebel cause.

There, the professor once nicknamed “Tom Fool” for his eccentricities was laid out overnight in his old Virginia Military Institute (VMI) lecture room, which had not been used from the day he rode off to war.

As they laid to rest the fallen soldier in Oak Grove Cemetery, Lexington recalled how Jackson had marched his army 25 miles, across river or mountain, falling on the enemy’s flanks before nightfall, in the Shenandoah campaign the prior year; how in the same campaign he beat four different Union leaders, all with forces that outnumbered his; how his sleepy eyes filled with intensity just before an attack, earning him the nickname “Old Blue Light”; and how, awakened in the midst of a war council with Lee and his lieutenants and asked what to do about the besieging Union Army, answered: “Why, drive them into the river, of course.” 

People argued, then and later, about who nicknamed him “Stonewall” at the first Battle of Manassas, but all remarked on the irony that this most offensive-minded general became famous because of a defensive stand there.

I dealt briefly with Jackson in my post on the Battle of Chancellorsville, but I thought it would be good to revisit him today, only this time focusing on his life—and especially the personality that sometimes gets lost in his extraordinary military exploits.

Lexington, Va.: “Stonewall Country”

The best fix on this personality, I think, is to visit Lexington, as I did nearly a decade ago—or, as I came to think of it after seeing a local sign on Main Street, “Stonewall Country.” 

After a few seconds, I realized that the sign referred to a residential realty firm, but in a symbolic sense this region belongs heart and soul to Thomas Jonathan Jackson.

Lexington gave its sympathies to the two greatest Confederate heroes, both of whom made their marks at local colleges and are buried within less than a mile of each other here: Robert E. Lee, who after the war headed Washington University (later renamed Washington and Lee University in his honor) and Stonewall Jackson.

More than any other town, Lexington can claim Jackson legitimately as its own. In a real sense, it was the setting of his formative years.

So frustrated with the peacetime U.S. army that he quit, Jackson came here at loose ends in 1851, hoping for a new career as a military instructor. 

He was a spiritual seeker with no solid core of faith; a bachelor without a wife, children, or even parents since the age of seven; an ordinary young man with few strong political convictions.

By the time he rode off from Lexington in 1861, Jackson had absorbed centuries of military tactics and taught them to unformed cadets; developed an almost mystical attachment to the Presbyterian Church; lost a wife and child, only to start another family; and cast his lot with a new young republic, upholding slavery and ready to overthrow the Union he had sworn to defend as a cadet years earlier.

Accompanying this post is a photo that I took off the Web of Jackson statue by Moses Ezekiel (VMI 1866, a corporal who guarded his corpse before its burial), which stands sentinel before Jackson Arch. 

It captures the general at Chancellorsville—a quietly confident master of war about to announce words that still echo proudly down the generations in the school where he taught: “The Institute will be heard from today." 

It was a far cry from the campus instructor who drove his restless young students to distraction (and frequent laughter) with his emphasis on memorization and recitation, his inflexible stare, his monotone, and his clumsiness in wielding scientific instruments.

VMI has a number of items related to Jackson in its museum inside Jackson Memorial Hall, but I thought, for space reasons, that I’d concentrate on the house where he lived not far from the campus.

Before the Legend, an Eccentric Bourgeois

VMI may illustrate Jackson’s tendencies as a military man and educator, but the Stonewall Jackson House shows his tendencies as an aspiring bourgeois. The Stonewall Jackson Foundation has restored the home on 8 East Washington Street back to how it looked in the general’s time: a modest but comfortable Victorian American home, the only home he ever owned.

Thomas and Mary Anna Jackson (daughter of a college president, just like his first wife, who died during childbirth) bought the brick-and-stone structure for $3,000. Ranging from $1,200 to $1,350 a year in his time at VMI, his salary could be stretched, if they economized, enough to accommodate Jackson’s middle-class aspirations.

Jackson started with outside business interests—a one-third interest in a local tannery, as well as a 20-acre farm on the outskirts of town. In his backyard, after his artillery class had ended for the afternoon, Jackson tended to his vegetable garden. 

Today, the garden is filled with a profusion of plants: potatoes, early scarlet horn carrots, salsify, and silesia lettuce (the only vegetable variety specifically mentioned in Jackson’s surviving letters).

Part of the reason for Jackson’s interest in agriculture related to his bouts of poor health. Jackson scholars and enthusiasts still debate where his actual ailments left off and where his hypochondria began. 

Nevertheless, it is true, as his sister-in-law Margaret Junkin Preston noted, that he “studied his physical nature with a physician’s scrutiny,” and became a creature of habit as a result.

His condition, Jackson felt, might be alleviated if he sat up ramrod straight, without his spine touching the back of a chair, or if he ate a wide assortment of fruits and vegetables he grew for himself and his family.

Acquaintances would also be astonished when, in the middle of a conversation, he would raise his arm and keep it aloft for several minutes. “One of my legs is bigger than the other—and so is this arm,” he once informed a friend. “I raise my arm so the blood will run back in my body and lighten its load. It’s a cure I’ve discovered. Everything has a cure.”

The strict physical and mental regimen that Jackson developed to combat these and other ills can be seen in several objects in the house. 

Upstairs is a walking stick, made of Brussels sprouts for durability, that Jackson used every morning on a brisk three-or-four mile walk, taken in all kinds of weather. Just down the hallway are two steamer trunks—reminders of the frequent trips that Thomas and Mary Anna took to spas in the North and South.

Most important is Jackson’s study. Its centerpiece is a chair facing a wall. Here he sat in the morning, reading books in preparation for a lecture, only to review the work again in the evening. 

Only this time, because he believed artificial light damaged his eyes, he memorized the lessons without a book for an hour, facing the wall with eyes closed, leaving strict instructions with his wife not to disturb him during this time.

Jackson’s students correctly surmised that he was highly eccentric. But his house hinted at how he overcame this – through relentless application of will. A saying copied down in his personal motto became his byword: “You may be whatever you resolve to be.”

The Jackson family’s slaves lived upstairs in their house. As with so much else about the “peculiar institution,” the professor’s relationship with African-Americans was close but contradictory.

Jackson astonished more than a few fellow Lexington whites by tipping his hat to blacks on the street. The most slaves he ever owned were six, and in his short life he bought the freedom of two of these. 

In order to teach them the Bible, he taught them how to read—a crime at this time in Virginia, which had enacted this punitive legislation after the 1831 slave revolt led by the literate preacher Nat Turner. 

Prayer sessions drew so many slaves that Jackson eventually set up a Sunday school run out of the Lexington Presbyterian Church, which he funded even while away at war.

You may find yourself anywhere else in the South—or, for that matter, elsewhere in Lexington, at VMI or the cemetery where Jackson is buried—and understand how large the general looms in the “Lost Cause” mythology of the South. 

But if you want a sense of him as the eccentric, contradictory personality behind the legend and genius of war, there’s no better place to go than the Stonewall Jackson House.

This Day in Civil War History (Battle of Chancellorsville)

May 2, 1863—In his most daring, perhaps even greatest, tactical maneuver of the Civil War, Confederate General Robert E. Lee split his force in the face of the enemy, sending Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson to fall on the right flank of Union General Joseph Hooker. Though the maneuver demoralized the formerly supremely confident Hooker and produced a Rebel victory, the Battle of Chancellorsville proved unexpectedly costly when Jackson was fatally wounded at twilight.

Hooker had received his chance at high command following the disastrous Battle of Fredericksburg six months before and the even more dismally ineffectual “Mud March” that followed it. “Fighting Joe’s” openly dismissive attitude toward Ambrose Burnside led the commander to request Washington that either he be kept or Hooker. It wasn’t much a choice—Abraham Lincoln immediately accepted Burnside’s offer to go and put Hooker in his stead.

Not, however, before the shrewd President informed his new commander of the Army of the Potomac to get over himself. It had come to his attention, the President wrote, in his droll way, “in such a way as to believe it, your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up as dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.”

Before long, the hyper-aggressive Hooker proved that he would not achieve either. The shocking thing was that at the beginning, it appeared that both lay within his grasp. He immediately set to work restoring the morale of his troops, and as spring broke began to move quickly against Lee. While General John Sedgwick’s corps would engage in a diversionary tactic against Lee, Hooker would cross the Rappahannock River and fall upon Lee’s flank. “May God have mercy on General Lee,” Hooker boasted, “for I will have none.”

The problem was that Hooker’s army became stuck in the river crossing, then became confused in the brush and trees of the Wilderness between Fredericksburg and Richmond. Unfamiliar with the dense, sodden terrain, Hooker turned, in a change for him, to the defensive.

Analyzing what happened afterward, Hooker’s disgusted subordinate, Darius N. Coach, noted that Hooker had expected Lee not to risk battle. “Finding himself mistaken he assumed the defensive, and was outgeneraled and became demoralized by the superior tactical boldness of the enemy.”

While he waited, Lee and Jackson quickly huddled. They were aided by a discovery by Jackson’s adept topographical engineer, Jed Hotchkiss, of a trace not found on maps that furnished a road behind the Federals, on which Jackson could travel and surprise Hooker. The maneuver went against virtually everything in the military book, for Lee was going to divide his army of 60,000 against the larger Union force of 130,000. But Lee had gotten inside the head of Hooker, and knew that his opponent would freeze.

Before dawn on May 2, Jackson ordered his men to march. Almost 10 hours and 15 miles later, in the warm late afternoon, they attacked the Federals with their blood-curdling Rebel yell. The Union forces began to buckle. Near twilight, hoping to urge on his troops, Jackson was riding on a pitch-black road when he was hit in a hand and arm by a Confederate picket who didn’t recognize his leader in the dark. Jackson’s left arm was amputated. The rueful Lee remarked, “He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right.”

Eight days after sustaining his wound, Jackson raised himself up from his sickbed, said “no, no, let us pass over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees,” and breathed his last.

“I know not how to replace him,” Lee mourned. “God’s will be done. I trust He will raise up someone in his place.” Unfortunately, it never really happened.

If you’d like an analogy to the inspired, almost instinctive relationship between Lee and his subordinate, think of football’s Johnny Unitas and Raymond Berry, or baseball’s Bob Gibson and Tim McCarver. Each brought out the best in the other, to the point where words almost didn’t even have to be spoken.

Lee acknowledged as much: “Such an executive officer the sun never shone on. I have but to show him my design, and I know that if it can be done it will be done. No need for me to send or watch him. Straight as the needle to the pole he advances to the execution of my purpose.” The man Lee appointed as successor to Jackson, Richard S. Ewell, was a brave officer who unfortunately lacked Jackson’s rapidity of mind and singleness of purpose—which he demonstrated at the Battle of Gettysburg two months later.

An abashed Hooker slipped back across the river, his dreams of glory vanished. The battle became part of the legend of the Confederacy, as well as those of the Lost Cause’s greatest heroes, Lee and Jackson.

The battle also inspired, in one way or another, three vivid depictions of war. Though it never explicitly identified the name of the particular battle, Stephen Crane based his Red Badge of Courage on descriptions of the battle. In a subsequent short story, “The Veteran,” a now-older Henry Fleming does mention Chancellorsville as the site of his encounter with the enemy.

Even More startling was the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story “Night at Chancellorsville.” Uncharacteristically for Fitzgerald, this piece was neither based on his own experience nor even set in his own period. Even the point of view used—a prostitute left outside her coach, along with her friends in the “world’s oldest profession,” during the battle when their quarters aer commandeered to handle the wounded—is unexpected. Yet the author was, in his way, tipping his hat to his recently deceased father, a gentle scion of the Old South who had raised his son on stories of antebellum days and the war that swept it all away.

Finally, Jackson’s famous last words furnished the title of Ernest Hemingway’s first post-WWII novel, Across the River and Into the Trees, about the aging soldier Col. Robert Cantwell. Too bad it is generally regarded as one of the Nobel laureate’s poorest efforts.