RATING:
Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Eccentric, driven by what some would deem a profound religious faith and others might call fanatic zeal, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson was a tactical genius. As a subordinate commander (except during the Valley Campaign), he was never responsible for big-picture strategy, but he was the greatest field commander on either side, and his combat practices had a great impact on tactics, while his tactics had a highly significant effect on strategy.
Jackson drilled his soldiers relentlessly, preparing them for the extraordinary demands he made on their endurance. His approach to combat, which was to leverage small numbers against much superior forces, required ceaseless maneuvering, often through long forced marches at great speed. Early on, he arrived at a formula for victory—deceive and surprise the enemy, defeat larger forces in detail, follow up victory with ruthless, annihilating pursuit—and, to a remarkable degree, he consistently followed through on it. His performance at the First Battle of Bull Run, the Valley Campaign, the Second Battle of Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville showed him to be a war-winning general, while his disappointing performance in the Seven Days Battles was an aberration that was almost certainly the product of personal fatigue as well as the exhaustion of his command. His death, as a result of a friendly-fire incident, at Chancellorsville very nearly amounted to a decapitating blow from which the Confederate military could never and would never recover.
Principal Battles
PRE–CIVIL WAR
U.S.-Mexican War, 1846–1848
CIVIL WAR
When the Battle of Gettysburg was lost, Robert E. Lee offered comfort to General Cadmus Wilcox, whose brigade had been decimated in Pickett’s Charge. “Never mind, general,” he said, “all this has been my fault—it is I who lost this fight. . . .” And Lee thereafter never sought to shift the burden of failure onto anyone else’s shoulders—with one possible exception. Years later, he reportedly observed, “If I had had Jackson at Gettysburg, I should have won the battle, and a complete victory there would have resulted in the establishment of Southern independence.”
Although some question the authenticity of the remark about Jackson, Lee nevertheless saw him as what George Washington biographer James Thomas Flexner later famously called his subject: the indispensable man. Intuitively, all the Confederate South seems to have felt this as well. After Jackson succumbed to pneumonia following a friendly-fire wounding at the Battle of Chancellorsville, he was accorded a funeral of the kind normally reserved for monarchs and presidents. He lay in state at the Executive Mansion in Richmond, then was moved by an escort of general officers to the Confederate House of Representatives, where his remains were viewed by more than twenty thousand awestruck and grief-stricken mourners. “The affections of every household in the nation were twined about this great and unselfish warrior,” a Richmond paper observed. His death deeply marred the Confederate triumph at Chancellorsville. A tragic coda to that victory, it seemed to many the end of all hope for the Southern cause.
The circumstances of his birth, humble and remote, much like those of Abraham Lincoln, were hardly calculated to produce a cultural icon and military celebrity in whom an entire people so deeply invested their aspirations. Thomas Jonathan Jackson could trace his ancestry to a pair of felons, great-grandparents John Jackson and Elizabeth Cummins, who had both been sentenced to periods of indentured servitude and transported from England to America after separate convictions for larceny. The two met aboard the ship that took them to Annapolis, Maryland. They would eventually establish themselves in western Virginia and fight as Patriots in the American Revolution, producing a large family that would remain in the region. Son Edward Jackson sired Jonathan Jackson, who married Julia Beckwith Neale. Their third son was Thomas.
He was born in Clarksburg, Virginia—now West Virginia—on January 21, 1824. His father was a lawyer, but struggling and poor, his mother a schoolteacher, pale, frail, and sickly. Two years after Thomas came into the world, his father died of typhoid, days after that disease had taken his six-year-old sister Elizabeth. A day after her husband died, Thomas’s mother gave birth to another girl, named Laura Ann. A widow at twenty-eight, Julia proudly turned away all offers of charity and instead sold off the family’s meager possessions to pay the debts Jonathan had left her. She moved herself and her three surviving children into a rented one-room house and did her best to feed her family by teaching school and taking in sewing. She found a new husband in 1830, attorney Blake Woodson, fifteen years her senior. A widower with eight children of his own, he brought a modicum of improvement in the family’s finances, though not much. In 1831, after giving birth to Woodson’s child, Julia died. By this time, however, her three children from her first marriage had been parceled out to relatives. Thomas and Laura Ann lived with their uncle, Cummins Jackson, owner of a gristmill at Jackson’s Mill in what is today West Virginia.
For the four years he and his sister lived with their uncle, Thomas thrived in the affection and cheerful warmth Cummins provided, but in 1834 he and his sister were separated, Laura Ann going to live with her mother’s family, and Thomas with his father’s sister and her husband, one Isaac Brake, who treated him like an unwelcome stranger. Thomas ran away in 1836, walking the eighteen miles through tangled woods back to Jackson’s Mill and the welcoming arms of his Uncle Cummins, with whom he lived for the next seven years. During this time, he labored on the family’s farm and cobbled together a rudimentary education, some of it at school, most of it at home on his own. Again like Lincoln, Jackson read borrowed books by firelight—though (it was said) he produced his fire by burning pine knots, which his uncle’s slaves brought him in exchange for his teaching them to read (in violation of Virginia law).
As a teenager, Thomas Jackson used what little education he had to teach school; he also found employment as a town constable and what has been described as an engineering assistant. He earned sufficient local renown in these professions to move others to encourage his taking a competitive examination for admission to West Point in 1842. He failed, but just barely, and when the candidate who had edged him quickly dropped out of the Class of 1846, Jackson was invited to take his place.
He struggled mightily to stay afloat in the bottom third of his class during his first year, and while he displayed no particular aptitude for learning, he possessed a spectacular capacity for hard work. He made it his practice in the fall and winter to pile the grate in his room with coal just before lights out, and, lying on the floor before the grate, he read by the glow of the coals late into the night. Through dint of such dogged application, he clawed his way up academically, ultimately graduating seventeenth out of fifty-nine cadets in what some military historians have called the greatest class in the academy’s history. His effort was an object of wonder and admiration among his peers, who remarked that, if he had remained just one more year, he would have graduated number one.
What Cadet Jackson demonstrated above all at West Point was his unconquerable will. But he also eagerly absorbed all lessons offered in the military art, particularly those of Professor Dennis Hart Mahan (1802–1871), the academy’s leading tactical and strategic theorist. Mahan was a keen student of the campaigns of Napoleon, and he taught his cadets that the common thread uniting these remarkable campaigns was speed of maneuver and boldness of attack—tempered with judgment born of reason. Jackson adopted this cluster of concepts as a veritable tactical mantra, which he would apply in virtually every battle he fought in the Civil War.
The Class of 1846 had what its members all deemed the great good fortune to graduate directly into the war with Mexico. Jackson’s standing was good enough to warrant a second lieutenant’s commission in the 1st U.S. Artillery Regiment, which was quickly packed off to combat under Major General Winfield Scott.
Jackson served with Scott at the Siege of Veracruz and the advance to Mexico City, distinguishing himself particularly at the Battles of Contreras (August 19–20, 1847) and Churubusco (August 20, 1847). At the Battle of Chapultepec (September 12–13, 1847), the culminating struggle for the conquest of Mexico City, Jackson commanded a highly exposed artillery position, refusing an order to withdraw in the face of superior enemy numbers and instead directing fire against the attackers, whom he decimated. When his commanding officer demanded that he justify his insubordination, Jackson explained his judgment that it would have been more hazardous to withdraw than it was to continue firing. In the end, the officer agreed with him, and the episode became one of the legends of the war. By war’s end, Jackson earned three brevet promotions (up to brevet major) in addition to promotion to the regular army rank of first lieutenant. None other than Winfield Scott himself held a banquet in Mexico City with First Lieutenant Jackson the guest of honor.
Jackson as a young U.S. Army officer.
VIRGINIA MILITARY INSTITUTE
Jackson remained in Mexico with occupation forces and used his ample spare time to study religion (in which he was becoming increasingly and ever more deeply interested), to teach himself Spanish, and to read history. While living in this Catholic country, he found himself strongly drawn to Catholicism and stunned his fellow officers by taking up residence for some weeks in a monastery, where he had the opportunity to converse on religious matters with the archbishop of Mexico. In the end, however, he turned from Catholicism to the Episcopal Church, in which he was subsequently baptized. By the 1850s, he would leave that church for the more austerely demanding tenets of Presbyterianism.
Jackson returned to the United States late in 1848 and was stationed with the garrison at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, moving in 1850 to Fort Meade, near Tampa, Florida. Both assignments were dull. He filled his time with religious study and, according to many who served with him, a morbidly growing preoccupation with the state of his health. He ascribed the chronic indigestion from which he suffered to some mysterious disorder that was insidiously gnawing at his vitals. To combat it, he adopted an austere diet void of seasoning and consisting mostly of vegetables and fruit. He also began a rigorous regimen of general-knowledge reading, committing himself to digesting fifty pages a day every day, in English, Spanish, and other languages.
With all of this, Jackson somehow also found time to investigate a rumor of sexual impropriety alleged to have been committed by the commanding officer of Fort Meade, Brevet Major William H. French. When French demanded that he drop the impertinent investigation, Jackson refused, whereupon French had him arrested for insubordination. In due time, French’s arrest order was reversed without court-martial, but, eager to put distance between French and himself, Jackson accepted in March 1851 an invitation from the superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington, Virginia, to become the school’s professor of natural and experimental philosophy (that is, physics) and instructor of artillery.
Jackson proved woefully inept in the classroom. He knew nothing about physics coming into the position, and he struggled to keep a day or two ahead of his students. At that, his physics classes were conducted as rote lectures, essentially verbatim regurgitations of what Jackson had read in the textbook the night before. Excruciatingly bored, his students were unruly, and Professor Jackson seemed wholly incapable of instilling any discipline in them. As an artillery instructor, he was, however, considerably more successful. Combining what he had learned from Mahan with his own battlefield experience, he taught his cadets that mobility tempered by discipline was key to victory and that a successful commander is one capable of probing an enemy’s intentions and his strength without revealing his own. Doctrinally, Jackson preached the gospel of a combined arms approach to combat, using the deadly efficiency of artillery to prepare the way for infantry assault.
Popular with neither his physics nor his artillery students was Jackson’s insistent religious proselytizing, which became so egregious that in 1856 an alumni group petitioned for his dismissal. The petition was ignored.
Professor Jackson managed to find a kindred spirit in Elinor “Ellie” Junkin, the daughter of the president of Washington College, the other institution of higher learning in Lexington. He married her in 1853; on October 22, 1854, she gave birth to a stillborn son, began hemorrhaging uncontrollably, and died. Prostrated by grief, Jackson turned yet more deeply to his faith, becoming a Presbyterian deacon and founding a Sunday school for slaves. He took time out for a European tour, then was remarried in 1857, this time to Mary Anna Morrison, the daughter of the first president of Davidson College.
The quiet routine of academia was shattered in December 1859, when Jackson was assigned to command twenty-one VMI cadets manning a pair of howitzers as part of the military contingent assigned to provide security at the hanging of John Brown following his trial and conviction for the raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry.
The Brown hanging must have reminded Jackson, if he needed any such reminder, that the nation was in deep crisis. Although he believed that states possessed the inherent right of secession, Jackson was opposed to fighting over it, and he organized a citizens committee in Lexington to discuss alternatives to war. He also convened a public prayer meeting to beseech the Lord for peace. He said that his combat experience in Mexico had taught him that war was “the sum of all evils.” Nevertheless, he felt about Virginia much the same way as Lee did. It was his “country,” and he would defend it. But he added a dimension that went beyond Lee. Virginians, he believed, were more godly than Northerners, and in this fight, God would surely be on the side of the righteous.
When the war commenced in April with the fall of Fort Sumter, Jackson resigned his U.S. Army commission and offered his services to his state. Appointed a colonel of Virginia troops, his first assignment was the training of recruits, but on April 27, 1861, Governor John Letcher ordered him to assume command at Harpers Ferry—the federal arsenal had been commandeered by the state—and to assemble a brigade for the defense of this strategically crucial town at the border of the North.
Waiting for him at Harpers Ferry was a ragtag contingent of 2,500 militiamen and volunteers, earnest but untrained. Jackson drilled them mercilessly, as much as seven hours a day, even as he set about recruiting more soldiers, until he had built up a brigade of 4,500 comprising the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 27th, and 33rd Virginia Infantry regiments, all from the Shenandoah Valley.
On May 23, 1861, Joseph E. Johnston arrived to assume overall command at Harpers Ferry and assigned Jackson to command the brigade he had created, now designated as the First Brigade. On June 17, political allies in Richmond ensured Jackson’s promotion to brigadier general. In the meantime, Johnston, who now commanded some ten thousand men in and around Harpers Ferry, made the strategic decision to relinquish the town to assume what he deemed a more readily defensible position that would not tie his troops down to any one place. The move was made in time for Jackson to play a crucial role in the First Battle of Bull Run.
P. G. T. Beauregard’s forces, in place at Manassas Junction on the morning of July 21, 1861, were giving way under a heavy Union assault and had fallen back upon a position known as Henry House Hill. Just as the brigade commanded by Brigadier General Barnard Elliott Bee Jr. was about to crumble, Jackson appeared with his 1st Brigade. The story goes that he rode back and forth under heavy fire, marshaling and rallying his men to stand against the Union onslaught while periodically raising his left hand to heaven, as if to exhort the Lord himself to battle.
Bee, desperately trying to stem the panic in his disintegrating line, called out to his men: “There is Jackson standing like a stone wall. Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer. Rally behind the Virginians!”
Stereopticon view of “Stonewall Jackson’s Entrenched Lines” at the First Battle of Bull Run.
NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY DIGITAL LIBRARY
And so—the story goes—they did. With this, the tide of battle began to turn. By the end of the day, it was the Union army under Irvin McDowell that melted away in headlong retreat, Jackson’s 1st Brigade became known thereafter as the “Stonewall Brigade,” and Jackson himself as “Stonewall.” It would be the most famous sobriquet to emerge from the war, and nothing will change that, although some historians have cited witnesses who claimed that General Bee had actually expressed himself more mundanely, to the effect of “Yonder stands Jackson like a stone wall; let’s go to his assistance.” Still others reported that Bee did not intend the “stone wall” comparison as a rallying cry, but as a complaint. He wanted Jackson to get moving instead of just standing “like a damned stone wall.” The truth of Bee’s intended meaning will never be known, since he died in combat before the day ended.
Although the arrival of Jackson and the Stonewall Brigade saved the day for the Confederates, it was the shift from a defensive posture to an offensive one late in the afternoon that brought victory. At this point, Jackson called to his men to “yell like furies” as they charged, and, for the first time on any battlefield, friend and foe alike heard the “rebel yell.” It has been described as a high-pitched keening that seemed to come from the same otherworldly place as another attribute of Jackson: the eerie light of his deep blue eyes. For while the world would come to know him as Stonewall, his men knew him even better as “Old Blue Light.”
The effect of the rebel yell was both electric and primal. The Federal lines broke, and panic-stricken soldiers fled. Union losses at Bull Run would tally up at 2,896 killed, wounded, captured, or missing, while total Confederate losses were 1,982. But Stonewall Jackson was hardly satisfied with this result. President Jefferson Davis, who was on scene to micromanage the battle—something he would often do, much to the consternation of his generals—agreed with P. G. T. Beauregard and Joseph Johnston that McDowell’s men should be allowed to flee back to Washington. The day belonged to the Confederacy, and, for them, this was enough. Jackson, however, pleaded with Davis: “We have whipped them! They ran like sheep! Give me 5,000 fresh men, and I will be in Washington City tomorrow morning.” Although Davis, a habitual blamer, criticized both Beauregard and Johnston for failing to pursue McDowell, he neither ordered nor urged them to do so. As a result, who can say what opportunity the Confederacy lost in the midst of victory?
Instead of seizing the offensive initiative as Jackson urged, the leaders of the Confederate army, after Bull Run, deployed their forces defensively across a broad swath of Virginia to await the anticipated Union assault. Promoted to major general on October 7, 1861, Jackson was assigned command of the so-called Valley District, headquartered in Winchester. His mission was to defend the Shenandoah Valley, the lush garden and breadbasket of the South and, equally important, a prime avenue of attack against Washington and Baltimore. In the spring of 1862, when the Union’s “Young Napoleon,” Major General George B. McClellan, led the Army of the Potomac in its roundabout advance on Richmond in his Peninsula Campaign, Jackson was tasked with operating in the Shenandoah Valley to oppose and defeat two Union divisions under Major General Nathaniel P. Banks, which were assigned to keep Jackson from reinforcing Richmond. At the same time, Jackson was also supposed to act against McDowell’s large corps, which was positioned to strike at Richmond from the north and to reinforce the rest of McClellan’s army as needed.
Jackson’s first stroke came at the Battle of Kernstown on March 23, 1862. Relying on poor reconnaissance, Jackson believed he was going up against a small detachment only to discover that he was substantially outnumbered. The result of this error was a tactical defeat for Jackson, yet also a significant strategic triumph. Although overmatched—the Union commander, Nathan Kimball, had about 8,500 men, while Jackson led just 3,800—Jackson continued to fight so aggressively that Abraham Lincoln himself, eager to protect Washington, ordered Banks’s troops to remain in the Shenandoah Valley and McDowell’s corps to hold a position near Fredericksburg. This meant that a total of some fifty thousand Union soldiers were unavailable to McClellan’s main invasion force. In sum, Jackson had used 3,800 men to tie down fifty thousand. It was a spectacular instance of strategic leverage, which exemplified Jackson’s combat doctrine—always to “mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy.”
But deception was not the sum total of Jackson’s tactical philosophy. He also believed that winning a battle was never a sufficient objective. When an enemy was overcome, he held, the next step was pursuit. “If hotly pursued,” Jackson wrote, a retreating force “becomes panic-stricken and can then be destroyed by half their number.” Jackson stood his assigned Valley mission on its head. Instead of defending the Shenandoah Valley, he resolved to use it as a vast field for offensive action. When possible, he would pursue. He would also maneuver in such ways as to attack whenever the opportunity presented itself. The great thing, however, was timing. The attacks had to come before the enemy could concentrate and consolidate his forces. If he could hit isolated elements hard, Jackson believed that he could defeat the enemy in detail, even if its combined forces far outnumbered his.
Jackson acquired two divisions, one under Major General Richard S. Ewell and another commanded by Major General Edward “Allegheny” Johnson, which gave him an army of seventeen thousand to go up against combined Union forces of some sixty-two thousand. Adhering to his doctrine of maneuver and attack, Jackson was able to render these odds meaningless.
After Kernstown, he managed to deceive Banks into believing that he had abandoned the Valley, which prompted the withdrawal of all but a single Union division from the region. This presented Jackson with an opportunity to attack some six thousand Union troops under Brigadier Generals Robert H. Milroy and Robert C. Schenck at the Battle of McDowell on May 8, 1862. Victory here was followed by the Battles of Front Royal (May 23) and Winchester (May 25), in which Jackson was able to bring superior numbers against isolated Union forces and defeat them in detail. At Winchester, he outnumbered Nathaniel P. Banks 16,000 to 6,500 and took a devastating toll, inflicting more than two thousand Union casualties, killed, wounded, captured, or missing, for a loss to his forces of no more than four hundred men. With this, Banks was driven from the Valley.
The Battle of Winchester convinced President Lincoln that defeating Stonewall Jackson had to take top priority. Generals McDowell and John C. Frémont were sent to converge at Strasburg to interdict Jackson’s escape route up the Shenandoah Valley. Even when pursued, however, Jackson continued to outmaneuver the Union forces. He drove his men mercilessly in forced marches that frustrated Union efforts to consolidate its attacks successfully. At Cross Keys on June 8, Jackson defeated Frémont, and at Port Republic the next day he soundly beat 3,500 men under Erastus B. Tyler.
Union commanders were simply dazzled. Jackson moved so fast—646 miles in forty-eight days, winning five important battles during this span—that his small army was dubbed the “foot cavalry.” In all, the Valley Campaign was a military masterpiece, certainly the greatest tactical and strategic achievement of the Confederacy. All told, it deprived the Union offensive of some sixty thousand soldiers, it lifted Southern morale while dashing that of the North, it continued to hold the all-important Confederate breadbasket, and it kept alive the threat to Washington. Most immediately, the defeat of the Union in the Valley freed up Jackson and his men to reinforce Robert E. Lee against George McClellan in the Seven Days Battles.
Jackson in an undated engraving. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Jackson emerged from the Valley Campaign as a full-fledged military celebrity, a star among Confederate generals. His entrance into the Peninsula Campaign should have been suitably spectacular. Using a railway tunnel through the Blue Ridge, then hopping the Virginia Central Railroad, he materialized at Mechanicsville on June 26, 1862, for the second of the Seven Days battles (the Battle of Mechanicsville is also known as Beaver Dam Creek). Yet instead of capitalizing on the surprise he had achieved, Jackson inexplicably bivouacked for the night, even as the sounds of battle were clearly audible to everyone. At Gaines’s Mill (June 27) and Savage’s Station (June 29), he was again late, and at White Oak Swamp (June 30) he stumbled badly by wasting many hours in rebuilding a bridge across White Oak Swamp Creek instead of simply fording the stream. His contribution at the Battle of Malvern Hill (July 1) was unexceptional and costly.
Having created about himself an aura of invincibility during the Valley Campaign, Jackson’s subpar performance at the Seven Days came as a shock and a disappointment. Some military historians, taking their cue from James Longstreet’s assessment, believe that his genius was incompatible with subordinate command and could be given full rein only when he operated independently. Perhaps. The more probable explanation, however, is simple exhaustion. Nearly two months of forced marches alternating with pitched battle had drained him and his men.
Whatever the cause or causes of Jackson’s failure in the Seven Days, he more than redeemed himself at the Second Battle of Bull Run when Lee put him in command of the left wing of the army as Longstreet commanded the right wing.
Exhibiting his flair for rapid movement, Jackson swept his wing into position at the rear of Major General John Pope’s Army of Virginia. Here, at Manassas Junction, he captured and destroyed the main supply depot of the Union army. This done, he withdrew to a defensive position that lured Pope into repeated assaults, convincing him that he had Jackson on the ropes. In fact, Jackson was holding Pope for Longstreet’s right wing to make a smashing impact on the Army of Virginia’s left with more than twenty-five thousand men. The magnitude of Pope’s defeat dwarfed the result of the First Battle of Bull Run.
When Lee decided to follow up the victory at Second Bull Run with an invasion of Maryland, he split his army (over the protests of Jackson and Longstreet), assigning Jackson to capture Harpers Ferry so that his rear would not be threatened when he attacked Sharpsburg (at Antietam Creek) in Maryland. Jackson quickly overwhelmed the Union forces holding Harpers Ferry—some eleven thousand men—then rushed to join Lee and Longstreet at Sharpsburg.
Had McClellan been more aggressive, the Battle of Antietam, on September 17, would have been catastrophic for the Army of Northern Virginia. Fighting a desperate defense, Jackson’s corps absorbed the full force of the Union assaults on the northern end of the line, but it managed to hold and to withdraw, with heavy losses but in good order, along with the rest of Lee’s army, back across the Potomac and into Virginia.
Jackson received promotion to lieutenant general, and his command was redesignated as II Corps. He commanded the right wing of the Army of Northern Virginia at Fredericksburg, holding off Ambrose Burnside’s strongest assault here and thereby contributing to a costly but major Confederate victory.
The Union defeat at Fredericksburg cost Burnside command of the Army of the Potomac, and his replacement, Joseph Hooker, decided on a new assault. Lee resolved to counter this threat by depriving Hooker of the initiative instead of obliging him by playing the expected defensive role. Once again, Lee boldly violated basic tactical doctrine by dividing his already outnumbered army in the face of the enemy, sending Jackson and II Corps to make a flanking attack on Hooker’s right.
Risky as the maneuver was, Lee knew his man. He was employing Jackson to do precisely what he did best. Jackson led his infantry in a wide movement south and west of Hooker’s line, all the time using Major General Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry to approach Hooker more closely, so that he could precisely ascertain the position of the Union right flank and rear. Seeing the vulnerability of the Union right, Jackson pounced, forming up his divisions into a line of battle and stealthily advancing into position for attack. All of II Corps was within a few hundred feet of the unsuspecting Union forces when, suddenly, the unearthly rebel yell was raised, and the Confederates unleashed a fierce assault that captured many (some without a shot having been exchanged) and routed the rest. True to his battle doctrine, Jackson called to his troops to “Press on! Press on!” against Hooker’s XI Corps, driving it into the very center of the Federal line until the failing light of dusk called a halt.
If anything marred Jackson’s devastating assault it was that he had begun too late to finish it in a single day—at least finish it to his satisfaction, which meant pursuing the enemy to annihilation. Thus, on the night of May 2, he and his staff rode quietly through the Wilderness, scouting for avenues for a possible night assault. A nervous picket of a North Carolina regiment, never suspecting that the commanding general would be riding about at night, heard noises and called out the Who goes there? Without waiting for a response, he opened fire. His commanding officer, suspecting a “damned Yankee trick,” ordered a full volley, even after Jackson’s party had answered the picket.
Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson was shot in the right hand, left wrist and hand, and left arm. The wounds were bad, but they could have been much worse. No head wound. No gut shot. Nothing vital had been hit. (Several of his staff had been killed outright in the fusillade of friendly fire.) In the darkness, however, Jackson’s evacuation took time, and his wounds were not treated for some hours. When brigade surgeon Dr. Hunter McGuire finally saw him, he told Jackson that his left arm required amputation lest blood poisoning set in.
Stonewall Jackson in 1862. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
“Do for me whatever you think is right,” Jackson calmly replied.
Under the circumstances, in the field and during a primitive medical era, the amputation was indeed the correct course of action, and Jackson improved over the next few days. But then pneumonia set in—the result of infection, blood loss, and perhaps the effects of chloroform anesthesia—and the general gradually slipped away. “His mind . . . began to . . . wander,” McGuire later wrote, “and he frequently talked as if in command upon the field. . . . ”
About half-past one he was told that he had but two hours to live, and he answered . . . feebly but firmly, “Very good; it is all right.”
A few moments before he died he cried out in his delirium, “Order A. P. Hill to prepare for action! Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks—” then stopped, leaving the sentence unfinished.
Presently a smile . . . spread itself over his pale face, and he said quietly, and with an expression as if of relief, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”
The very day of Jackson’s death, on May 10, 1863, Jefferson Davis addressed his fellow countrymen: “Our loss was much less killed and wounded than that of the enemy, but of the number was one, a host in himself, Lieutenant General Jackson . . . war has seldom shown his equal.” More humbly, speaking to his camp cook, Robert E. Lee quietly moaned, “William, I have lost my right arm.”