"Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.”
Guiney Station, Virginia | May 10th, 1863
To walk through the door of Guiney Station is to be transformed, as if transplanted by a time machine of sorts. The door through which you have entered is one hundred and sixty years old, and the stories it could reveal would be endless. The room itself, the bed, the blanket Jackson clutched at death, and the ticking clock on the mantle, all present when Jackson died, combine to create an sensation that is similar to walking in misty fields, searching, looking for the familiar and yet being tugged into an awareness of history that is rarely found on this planet. This is the place where General Jackson died, where his soul was ushered into eternity, thus changing the history of the United States of America.
NOTE: I have shared my feelings in past writings about this man who still casts such a shadow over the Civil War and the Confederacy. If you are interested, you can read that HERE.
Such a poetic farewell from Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson probably astonished those who surrounded his deathbed that quiet sunny Sabbath in rural Virginia, twenty-seven miles from the bloody battlefield of Chancellorsville. More true to form had been his hallucinatory ravings the previous several hours, mostly commands, terse and to the point, that brooked no contradiction—“Push up the columns! Pendleton, you take charge of that. Where’s Pendleton? Tell him to push up the column!” Only his wife knew the gentler side of his personality, rooted as it was in loneliness and insecurity. To everyone else on the wider stage of Civil War topography—what was becoming, in point of fact, the bloodiest war ever fought on earth—“Old Jack” presented a picture of total mayhem, the hunter who, if he had his way, would never grant quarter to an enemy. “Draw your sword and throw away your scabbard,” was his battlefield credo. “Give them the bayonet! Kill them, sir! Kill every man!”
Even in the quiet living rooms of Richmond, the Confederacy’s capital, talk had it that Jackson was a different breed of soldier. “This Stonewall,” said a Mrs. McCord over tea, “they say he does not care how many die. He fights to win, God bless him, and he wins. His business is war. If Yankees do not want to be killed, they can stay at home. Let us drop all talk of the merciful Christ just now.” The diary of Mary Chestnut summed it up in a single word: Jackson was “fanatic.” All that the Bible taught about turning the other cheek, loving your neighbor, Christian charity—all of it—made war a mockery and “eliminates the great captain,” without which in 1863 the Confederate cause could not survive, and many southerners realized it.This “was the first time it dawned on me that God would let us be defeated,” a young girl from Virginia wrote when she heard Jackson had died. Robert E. Lee was so stunned he refused to talk about it, and Jeff Davis said, “I am staggering, I cannot think.” After war’s end people wondered, if Jackson had lived, would Gettysburg have been lost?
This immense reputation grew from only two to three years of Jackson’s life, a span taken up almost entirely with battles, maneuverings, and more battles. In one nine-month period he was engaged in some fourteen major fights, in many of which he and he alone was the deciding factor. His emergence as the premier field officer on either side of the conflict caught everyone by surprise. The Confederacy, said a newspaperman at the start of hostilities, “must be sadly deficient in military men, if this is the best she can do.” Said another observer, “There must be some mistake about him. If he was an able man, he showed it less than any of us had ever seen.” Nothing in his past predicted what he had become by May of 1863.
Robert E. Lee, and in fact many of the field commanders wearing rebel gray, were Virginian or “Old Dominion” aristocrats, chivalrous in the extreme and high Episcopalian in their religious orientation. Jackson was none of it. He was a raw boy from the Piedmont who grew up in poor, hardscrabble circumstances. Everything that came his way in early life was mostly engendered by himself, and purposely so. Jackson was consciously a self- made man, ambitious to do well and to succeed, but shy and well aware of the advantages he lacked. Many of his accomplishments came through sheer force of will, and were generally devoid of social grace.
Perseverance saw him through West Point; an average student, he managed to translate a capacity for drudge work and brute recitation of text into sufficient grades for a diploma, an experience that solidified in his character an almost single-minded devotion to military etiquette, rules, and minutiae. During the Mexican conflict he worried that enemy fire “would not be hot enough for me to distinguish myself.” He was a man without a moderating bone in his body. Jackson avoided whiskey, as he enjoyed telling people, because he liked the taste too much.
On July 21, 1861 at the First Battle of Bull Run, he earned the most famous nickname in American military history. “There is Jackson standing like a stone wall,” cried General Barnard Bee rallying his men. “Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer!” Bee’s prophecy came true on both counts: he was killed that day, but the South also achieved a stunning victory, one of many to follow, several engineered by Jackson. Sent to the Shenandoah Valley, strategically vital to both sides, he managed with barely a third the troops his adversaries could field, to outmarch, outwit, and outfight anything the Federals threw at him in a campaign of three month’s duration. Only Jackson seemed unsurprised by these stunning results. Strongly imbued with the religious doctrines of predestination, he saw all events in his life as manifestations of God’s will. Defeats were his fault, God wanted to chastise him; victories had nothing to do with him, they were God’s alone.
As the war progressed, with his fame rising every day, Jackson more and more saw in this struggle the elements of a sacred crusade. Yankees were sinners, to fight them was the equivalent of religious duty. To fail in any respect was a sign of spiritual decay. In many ways this explains Jackson’s often cavalier treatment of his own men. They were God’s tools, they had to be willing to endure hardship, hunger, impossible marches, and immediate death if so ordered. A man who fell by the wayside had failed God and was unworthy of compassion. If he died, so be it, it was his duty to die. “He did not value human life where he had an object to accomplish,” a fellow general remarked. “He could order men to their death as a matter of course. He used up his command so rapidly.” Did Jackson’s men love him? That was so much “fudge,” according to the same officer. “They feared him and obeyed him to the death. I doubt if he had their love.” This reflects the fact that Jackson was more of an Old Testament figure, not one from the more congenial gospels of Jesus Christ.
“Old Jack is a character,” said a contemporary, “either a genius or just a little crazy.” On the battlefield, he was both. Stonewall kept his own council, to the puzzlement and fury of his subordinates. “Mystery, mystery, Major, is the secret of success,” he once said. “We must bewilder them and keep them bewildered. Our fighting must be sharp, impetuous, continuous.” His wife remembered Jackson saying that only one style of war was acceptable against the Federals: “blind, furious, mad.” Stonewall gained the reputation for showing up, in force, where least you expected or wanted him, and he had no hesitation whatever in attacking. He never doubted himself, he was always pushing and always certain. This made Jackson the ideal lieutenant – indeed, almost the physical extension – of Robert E. Lee, himself a commander of extraordinary daring.
By June of 1862, Lee and Jackson had begun their famous collaboration. The Army of Northern Virginia, with Lee in command and Jackson eventually heading up one of the two corps, frustrated General McDowell on the Peninsula; routed a hapless General Pope at Second Bull Run; captured Harper’s Ferry in western Virginia; badly bloodied McDowell (again) at Antietam; and annihilated over 12,000 regulars under General Ambrose Burnside on the murderous heights above Fredericksburg. Jackson’s fame, ballooned by an adoring southern press, was now at its height. President Lincoln, who could only wish that Jackson wore blue, now turned to yet another general, “Fighting Joe” Hooker from Massachusetts, to steady the Federal ship. At Chancellorsville in the late spring of 1863, Fighting Joe promised to “bag Lee.” Instead, after three days of brutal fighting, immortalized by Stephen Crane in The Red Badge of Courage, he admitted to George Meade “that he had had enough of it, and almost wished he had never been born.” The primary agent of this profound mood swing was Stonewall.
However at this point in the war Jackson was a physically exhausted man. He become famous for falling asleep at the most inopportune times, particularly during church sermons, which he loved attending. One story had him sleeping at a dinner table with a muffin in his mouth. Always careless of attire and often incongruously uniformed, he made an ungainly figure as he rode about on an undersized, common little horse named Little Sorrel. In the heat of battle he rarely lost composure, however, and rarely uttered praise. “He gave his orders rapidly and distinctly and rode away,” said an officer. ‘Look there. See that place? Take it.’ When you failed you were apt to be put under arrest. When you reported the place taken, he only said ‘Good.’” Often, at the moment of victory, he could be seen pointing to heaven, head bowed. What never failed him was his appreciation of opportunities.
Robert E. Lee faced a huge dilemma in April of 1863. Hooker had stolen a march on the Army of Northern Virginia, and unbeknownst to Lee had managed to cross 134,000 men over the Rappahonnock River and onto the Confederate rear. Lee immediately divided his force of 62,000 troops, leaving a covering screen on his front line while redirecting the rest towards Hooker. At the first encounter with Lee at a tiny crossroads in the middle of nowhere called Chancellorsville, Hooker assumed a defensive position inviting Lee to attack. This was the first of many Federal mistakes.
Lee was a courtly man, unfailingly polite and diplomatic, in many ways a throwback to more genteel times. He was also, militarily speaking, extraordinarily aggressive and determined. He took the measure of Hooker, as he had every other Union commander he would face, and realized he was a house of cards. This is not to say he doubted Fighting Joe’s courage, no one did, but the burdens of commanding a modern army were different than leading a brigade or a division into battle. The ramifications were larger and the potential for failure that much more psychologically extreme. When Hooker abandoned the significant advantages he had originally gained by digging in and waiting for the enemy, Lee sensed weakness in the character of his adversary, almost a moral flaw. Like any born killer, he smelled blood. Despite the huge discrepancy in numbers, in both men and artillery, he anxiously pressed Jackson with the question of the day: “How do we get at those people?”
The answer came quickly enough from scouts. Hooker’s right flank was “in the air,” unanchored by any geographical feature of the landscape or even by trenchworks. This was an astounding discovery. “General Jackson,” Lee asked, “what do you propose to do?” Tracing a rough map, Jackson replied, “Go around here,” meaning a march beyond, and ultimately behind, Hooker’s flank. The discussion ended with Lee’s command, an informal “Well, go on.” Lee therefore divided his army a second time, and thus began what Jackson called “the most successful movement of my life.”
Setting out at 7:30 the next morning, Jackson began a twelve-mile mile trek through the Wilderness, a scrawny morass of second-growth pine and underbrush with few serviceable roads or paths, which both hindered and facilitated the maneuver. True, the march was circuitous and unwieldy, with so many men crammed silently on a single, narrow route; but the design was also camouflaged by the same weedy terrain. At one point in the early afternoon a scout brought Jackson to a small knoll and its incredible view: 700 yards away he saw 11,000 men of the Union XI Corps, all lounging around in a large clearing with arms stacked, listening to regimental bands and waiting for dinner. Stonewall took in the scene for five long minutes, saying nothing. For a soldier, this was paradise.
With only two hours to go before sunset, Jackson, his brigades organized in a line some mile and a half long, ordered the men to advance through scrub woods on the unsuspecting Federals. Many junior officers of the XI Corps had sent back messages to headquarters warning of “a queer jumble of sounds” coming from the undergrowth, while others had seen snatches of gray crossing intersections in the woods. “Humbug generals” in the rear laughed at these reports, and questioned the courage of those who sent them. Three hours earlier, in fact, Hooker believed Lee was in retreat! And besides, as General Howard of the XI had memorably predicted, no army could advance through wilderness. So it was with some puzzlement that Federals heard a sudden tidal wave of rustling come out from the scrub land at 5:45 p.m., followed then by all the creatures of the forest who had produced it: quail, partridge, rabbits, foxes, deer, even a bear. Right behind them were 21,000 Confederate soldiers who “gave them a volley that will last until peace is made.”
Within minutes, at least half the XI Corps, many new to combat and its mayhem, had dissolved into a panic-stricken rabble, “fleeing for our lives, which we did with a right good grace,” officers and men alike. We “stuck to our major,” one survivor confessed, “as he made about as good a time as any of us through the woods.” Hooker, somewhere to the rear, could not believe his eyes as he saw thousands of his fine men dash past him on a mad flight for safety. Only stalwart groups of Federal diehards who refused to flee brought some order to his flank as the sun, finally and mercifully, set.
To a man of Jackson’s temperament, however, the coming moonlit night only suggested more options for the advance, not an excuse to stop fighting and take a rest. He knew the crushing blow just delivered could be magnified if he kept up the pressure; he sensed the chance not just to bloody Hooker, but to annihilate him. Around nine o’clock he decided to reconnoiter ahead of his own men, to find a way to press home the advantage. In the dark, amidst the confused mangle of twisted trees and brush, his party blundered across the face of Confederate lines. One or two shots rang out. “Cease firing!” screamed a member of Jackson’s command, “You are firing on your own men.”
“Who gave that order?” yelled a major of the 7th North Carolina. “It’s a lie! Pour it to them, boys,” whereupon they opened up. In seconds ten men of the nineteen with Jackson were cut down, along with twelve horses. Jackson was hit simultaneously three times, and Little Sorrel bolted through the undergrowth, where a branch hit the general squarely in the face. Somehow he retained his seat. Staff members found him dazed, in pain, but thankfully alive. “My arm is broken,” he announced, and “a slight wound in the right hand.” He was carried from his horse, which then ran off towards the enemy.
Jackson, in fact, had been shot twice in the left arm and, as he correctly surmised, once in the right hand. Federals were all over the area, and cannon were spraying the trail with canister. A makeshift stretcher was thrown together, but twice in the darkness men stumbled and fell, tossing Jackson to the ground on his mangled shoulder, apparently rupturing an artery. Jackson was now in serious danger of bleeding to death, though he was alert enough to issue a last order: “General Pender. You must hold your ground, sir!” When finally conveyed to a field station, surgeons amputated the arm.
At first, prospects for his survival and, indeed, recovery were promising. Lee was certain he would resume his command, admitting that he had never in his life prayed so earnestly to God for any single bounty. A long, grueling ambulance ride to the rear—a twenty-seven mile journey that took fourteen hours – brought Jackson to Guiney Station, a railroad junction on the line to Richmond. There he was placed in a rope-slung bed set up for him in a plantation’s business office, administered to by several doctors and ministers. His wife and infant daughter arrived three days later. Despite all the promising diagnoses, however, Anna Jackson’s heart sank when she saw her husband. “He looked like a dying man.”
Yet, Stonewall lingered for another three days. He was, at first, lucid and grateful to God for his wounds, part of the divine plan to be sure. He received General Lee’s congratulations, and the famous remark that although Jackson had lost his left arm, Lee had lost his right. But the General refused to visit Jackson. He was completing the rout of Hooker’s army and besides, hospitals and dreary, depressing aftereffects of this most deadly profession were circumstances that he avoided whenever possible. On May 7, signs of pneumonia became manifest, and gloom set in among the doctors. By the 9th, it was clear that Jackson would die. Anna asked him if he was ready to meet the God he had so earnestly worshipped. “My wish is fulfilled. I have always desired to die on Sunday.” At 3:15 on the afternoon of May 10, he “crossed the river.”
For General Lee, Jackson’s death was devastating. He never again split his army as he had at Chancellorsville (not once, but twice); he never again dared a flanking march as monumental as that of May 2nd; and he was never to trust a man as he had Stonewall. Pickett’s charge at the Battle of Gettysburg – a desperate, sledgehammer stroke without subtlety or nuance – represented the type of warfare that Jackson’s absence now made a grim necessity for Lee. It was a tactic that favored a more populous North, and eventually would doom the Confederacy, altering forever the trajectory of the United States of America.
