Still, there were matters to settle in the time he had left, and Anna did her best. She asked him where he wanted to be buried and he said, “Lexington, in my own plot.” He told her he preferred that she live with her father in North Carolina. Finally she had the nurse Hetty bring his daughter, Julia, in to see him. In Anna’s words,
As soon as they entered the door, he looked up, his countenance brightened with delight, and he never smiled more sweetly as he exclaimed: “Little darling! Sweet one!” She was seated on the bed by his side, and after watching her intently, with radiant smiles, for a few moments, he closed his eyes as if in prayer.34
Jackson slept. When he awoke, at about 1:00 p.m., he received a visit from Sandie Pendleton. The two men had a very close, almost father-son relationship. Jackson asked him who was preaching at headquarters that day, the Sabbath, May 10. Pendleton, barely in control of his emotions, told him that Reverend Lacy was. Jackson had forgotten that he had asked Lacy to do that, rather than stay with him. Then Pendleton said, in a wavering voice, “The whole army is praying for you, General.” “Thank God,” Jackson replied. “They are very kind.” That included Robert E. Lee, who had attended the services and asked about Jackson. Lacy said that he was nearly hopeless. “Surely Jackson must recover,” Lee replied. “God will not take him from us now that we need him so much.” After the service, Lee approached Lacy again and said, “When a suitable occasion arises, tell him I prayed for him last night as I never prayed, I believe, for myself.” Then he turned away, overcome by emotion.35
Jackson’s mind now began to fail as the last of his strength ebbed. Sometimes he would awaken and seem to be clear in his mind. Sometimes he gave orders, as though on the battlefield again. During a moment of apparent clarity, McGuire offered him some brandy and water. He declined it, saying, “It will only delay my departure, and do no good; I want to preserve my mind, if possible, to the last.” At one thirty he was told he had a few hours to live, and he replied, again, “Very good, it is all right.”
Shortly after 3:15 p.m. he awoke in a delirium, crying, “A. P. Hill to prepare for action! Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks . . .” Then he went abruptly silent. Soon “a smile of ineffable sweetness” came across his face and he said, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” Then, without pain or struggle, McGuire wrote, “his spirit passed from the earth to the God who gave it.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
IMMORTALITY
Even before Lee’s official announcement of Jackson’s death, the news was surging through the camps of the Army of Northern Virginia. It did not seem possible that, just as the Confederacy was celebrating its greatest victory—indeed, the high-water mark of its existence—the great warrior was gone. The jolt was crueler because, until the moment of his death, the news coming from the sickroom at Guiney’s Station had been uniformly good: Jackson was recovering. He would live to fight again. “The announcement of the death of General Jackson followed frequent assurances that he was doing well,” a shaken Jefferson Davis wired Lee, “and though the loss was one which would have been deeply felt under any circumstances, the shock was increased by its suddenness.” Davis, the man who had once disliked and distrusted Jackson and had actively worked to undermine his authority at Romney, now proclaimed his passing “a great national calamity.”1
It was that, and more. In the camps “the sounds of merriment died away as if the Angel of Death himself had flapped his muffled wings over the troops,” wrote Raleigh Colston. “A silence profound, mournful, stifling and oppressive as a funeral pall succeeded to the voices of cheerfulness.”2 Jackson, whose most notable personal attribute was his silence, now inspired a wave of deep, despairing quiet throughout the army and the Southern nation.
At the Chandler house, Anna Jackson could see or feel little of this. She could only observe the soldiers who had collected in the yard, hundreds of them with their hats off, many weeping openly. On the afternoon of his death Jackson was laid out on a table in the Chandlers’ parlor. Because his uniform had been badly torn to treat his wounds, he had been dressed in an ordinary suit and dark military coat. His face was noticeably thinner than it had been in life, but it bore no trace of suffering. Anna found his appearance “more natural than I had dared hope.”3 She spent a sleepless night, with daughter Julia by her side, and later wrote of “the agony and anguish of those silent midnight hours, when the terrible reality of my loss and the desolation of widowhood forced itself upon me.”4 The next morning she came downstairs to find Jackson in an open pine coffin covered with lilies of the valley. As she gazed on his lifeless face, a distraught Sandie Pendleton came up and stood beside her and said, “God knows I would have died for him.”5
Meanwhile, the official machinery of death was grinding into gear. The previous day Lee had sent a formal note to Confederate secretary of war James Seddon: “It becomes my melancholy duty to announce to you the death of General Jackson. He expired at 3:15 p.m. today. His body will be conveyed to Richmond in the train tomorrow, under charge of Major Pendleton. . . . Please direct an escort of honor to meet it at the depot, and that suitable arrangement be made for its disposition.”6 That morning a locomotive with a single car departed Guiney’s Station for Richmond, forty-five miles distant. It contained Jackson’s body, his wife, Anna, and daughter, Julia, the nurse, Hetty, Anna’s friends Mrs. Chandler and Mrs. Hoge, and some of Jackson’s staff. To spare herself the anguish of having to face crowds, Anna disembarked outside the city, where the wife of Virginia governor John Letcher conveyed her privately to the governor’s mansion.
She was wise to have departed the train. By the time it entered the outskirts of Richmond, an immense crowd had gathered, the largest in the history of the city. The train slowed to a crawl, then proceeded ahead for two miles to the station, surrounded by thousands of bareheaded men and weeping women. Church bells tolled and minute guns split the air. Somewhere a band played a military dirge. All businesses in the city were closed. Black crape hung everywhere in the city. Even the mastheads of newspapers were draped in black.7
At the train depot Jackson’s coffin was wrapped in a flag, in keeping with military tradition. But this was no ordinary flag. The Confederate Congress had recently authorized a new national flag consisting of the familiar crossed bars of the Army of Northern Virginia’s battle flag superimposed on a pure white background. (The old “Stars and Bars”—the first Confederate national flag—was considered too easily mistaken for the Stars and Stripes in battle.) The first such flag had just been delivered, and was meant to fly from the roof of the capitol. But by Davis’s orders it now became the shroud over Jackson’s coffin. The coffin was transferred to a raven-plumed hearse drawn by two white horses, under military escort, to the governor’s mansion. Jackson was embalmed, placed in a sealed metal casket with a glass panel so that his face could be seen, and laid out in the governor’s reception room for viewing by friends, family, army officers, and official Richmond. There Anna saw her husband for the last time, and found this sealed-up version of him “disappointing and unsatisfactory.” Outside, the bells of the city’s churches tolled until sundown, while many citizens remained in the streets. “We have never before seen such an exhibition of heartfelt and general sorrow,” wrote the Richmond Dispatch.8 One of Jackson’s chief mourners was Robert E. Lee, who could not be in Richmond because he believed Hooker might attack again. “It is a terrible loss,” he told his son Custis. “I am grateful to Almighty God for having given us such a man.” When he tried to tell W. N. Pendleton how he felt, he broke down in tears.
Among the many soldiers who came to pay their respects that evening was Richard B. Garnett, brigadier general of Longstreet’s 1st Corps, who arrived at about midnight. Jackson had brought Garnett up on charges of retreating without orders at the Battle of Kernstown, and because the court-martial had never concluded, the stain on Garnett’s reputation and career had remained. Jackson’s treatment of Garnett was perhaps
his worst moment, the charges he brought his least forgivable act. Yet now the brigadier stood before Jackson’s casket with tears in his eyes. He turned to Pendleton and Douglas and said, “You know of the unfortunate breach between General Jackson and myself. I can never forget it, nor cease to regret it. But I do wish here to assure you that no one can lament his death more sincerely than I do. I believe that he did me a great injustice, but I believe also that he acted from the purest motives. He is dead. Who can fill his place?” Touched by Garnett’s words, Pendleton asked him to be one of the pallbearers the next day. Garnett eagerly accepted.9
At eleven the next morning, while field artillery detonated and a band played the haunting “dead march” from Handel’s oratorio Saul, Stonewall Jackson’s funeral procession began. Once again the streets were dense with people, many of whom had been waiting for hours. The procession was led by a large column of soldiers, with reversed arms, then a battery with six cannons, the 44th Virginia Cavalry, and the band.10 Then came the hearse with Jackson’s coffin, drawn by four white horses, and flanked by generals serving as pallbearers: Richard S. Ewell, George E. Pickett, Richard B. Garnett, George H. Steuart, John H. Winder, Montgomery D. Corse, James L. Kemper, and Rear Admiral French Forrest,11 and Jackson’s riderless horse (not Little Sorrel), with boots reversed in the stirrups and tended by his loyal servant Jim Lewis.12 Behind them followed the carriage bearing Anna, Julia, and Jefferson Davis, so disconsolate that he would apologize to a friend later that day for being so distracted: “You must forgive me,” he said. “I am still staggering from a dreadful blow. I cannot think.” Behind them were Jackson’s staff officers (McGuire, Pendleton, Smith, Douglas, Morrison, Hawks, and Bridgford), then a vast contingent of official Richmond, including the governor, cabinet officers, congressmen, and local dignitaries.13
The procession moved slowly in a large rectangle through the city streets, starting at the Governor’s Mansion and ending at the Confederate House of Representatives (the old Virginia Senate chamber) on Capitol Square. The coffin was placed on a bier in front of the Speaker’s chair. That day more than twenty thousand people filed past it. After the doors had finally closed, a Confederate veteran arrived, demanding to be admitted. With tears in his eyes, he pointed to his amputated stump of an arm and said loudly, “By this arm which I lost for my country, I demand the privilege of seeing my General once more!” Governor Letcher, who happened to be standing nearby and heard the ruckus, let the man pass.14
When it was over, and the doors had shut, and the minute guns and bells had stopped sounding, people there spoke of an even worse feeling, of despondency and loss. “Officers and soldiers gathered to do last honors to their dead comrade and chieftain seemed suddenly to realize that they were to see ‘Stonewall’ Jackson no more forever, and fully to measure the great misfortune that had come upon them,” wrote James Longstreet in his war memoir. “And as we turned away, we seemed to face a future bereft of much of its hopefulness.”15 A young woman who was visiting Richmond wrote simply, “I never saw human faces show such grief, almost despair.”16
Elsewhere in the South there were similar public outpourings of sorrow and loss. “Everyone feels as though he had sustained a personal bereavement,” wrote the Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, voicing a common feeling. “In the agony of this overwhelming sorrow we exclaim, ‘Would God I had died for thee.’ ” In Knoxville, Tennessee, the Register said that “for the first time since the war began this whole nation weeps as one man. . . . There lives not a leader whose memory shall be cherished more sacredly than that of Stonewall Jackson and not one whose loss we could have borne with less fortitude.” In Lexington, Jackson’s great friend Maggie Junkin Preston, who had kept in close touch with him during the war (though none of Jackson’s correspondence with her survives), wrote in her diary on May 12: “The grief in this community is intense; everybody is in tears. . . . How fearful the loss to the Confederacy! The people made an idol of him, and God has rebuked them. . . . Who thinks or speaks of victory? The word is scarcely ever heard. Alas! Alas! When is the end to be?”17
If Southerners were feeling a strange and unsettling emptiness that seemed to transcend the mere death of their beloved general, there was good reason. The country—North or South—had never in its short history experienced anything quite like the death of Stonewall Jackson. There had been a few big funeral processions: Benjamin Franklin drew twenty thousand in Philadelphia in 1790. About a hundred thousand came out in Washington after the death of sitting president Zachary Taylor in 1850. But neither death bore the urgency or meaning of Jackson; neither person was considered vital at the moment of his death to the survival of the country. By the time he died at eighty-four, Franklin was a sick, obese old man who had rarely been seen in public since he signed the Constitution in 1787. His great work in life was long finished. Zachary Taylor was an authentic war hero, but his passing had more effect on sectional politics than on anything vital to the fate of his country. Washington died at sixty-seven and was buried quietly and with no fanfare in 1799, as was Jefferson (eighty-three) in 1826. John Adams, who died at ninety the same year, drew four thousand to a church in Quincy, Massachusetts. William Henry Harrison, also a war hero, was the first sitting president to die in office and the first to get a state funeral. But it was a quiet, small-scale affair. None of these men died on the battlefield or during a war at the height of his fame with the very survival of his nation on the line. The closest parallel might have been George Washington’s death on the battlefield at Yorktown in 1781. Like Jackson’s death, it would have shattered the country’s emotions and encouraged its enemies. Washington, of course, died in his bed at home eighteen years later. Though history seems to have forgotten it—in part because the Confederacy exists no more and in part because Northerners never counted it as a “nation” anyway—the fact is that Jackson triggered the first great national outpouring of grief for a fallen leader in the country’s history.
In his 1865 biography of Jackson, the Reverend Robert Lewis Dabney, one of the South’s leading theologians and Jackson’s former chief of staff, reviewed the events in Richmond after his beloved general’s death and concluded: “No such homage was ever paid to an American.”18 He was speaking strictly of May 12, 1863, the day when the long procession wound through the streets of Richmond and Jackson lay in state while thousands of people streamed by his coffin. What he meant by “homage” was not just the pageantry and ceremony but the pure depth of feeling, the great and overwhelming sorrow that everyone he saw felt. Of course, the feeling was the same throughout the Confederacy, as the large crowds that greeted Jackson’s train en route to Lexington testified. Jackson’s death touched the heart of every household in the South.
It was also overshadowed in history by another, more momentous passing almost exactly two years later: that of President Abraham Lincoln. The similarities between the two are striking, starting with their symbolism. All that wild grief was not just for the two leaders. Their deaths embraced the deaths of all soldiers on battlefields far away; their bodies became the bodies of young men who would never come home; their funerals stood in for the hundreds of thousands of funerals of dead soldiers that would never take place.19 They were vessels into which the vast, pent-up heartache of the American nation, North and South, could be poured. The great effusions of anguish and sorrow were for the war itself, for the totality of its sadness and affliction. “We were not in any sense spectators,” wrote Maggie’s stepdaughter of the crowd at the Lexington funeral, but she might have been speaking for the entire South. “We were heart-broken mourners, a clan bereft of its chieftain, a country in peril.” Drew Gilpin Faust called Lincoln’s procession “the national funeral.” In Confederate terms, Jackson’s was, too.20
There were other striking similarities. Both men died at the height of their power and achievement, and also at the high-water marks of their respective countries in the Civil War. Both men were transported back home—another idea fraught with emoti
onal symbolism in a geographically dislocating war—by trains that wound through the countryside while grieving Americans clustered around and threw flowers. The scale, of course, was vastly different. The South did not have the concentrated populations the North did. New York was not the same as Lynchburg. In New York alone seventy-five thousand people followed Lincoln’s cortege. But the ideas and feelings were the same. Both men were Christian heroes who believed that God was with them and against their enemies, and to their followers and supporters they seemed to be evidence that God, in fact, was on their side.
Though the manner of Lincoln’s death was widely condemned in the South by everyone from Richard Ewell to John Singleton Mosby’s troopers and the Raleigh Standard, much of the Southern reaction to his death had to do with fear of reprisals. Most Southerners believed, with good reason, that Lincoln would have treated them more fairly and more decently than Andrew Johnson and the radical Republicans.21 Most still disliked or hated the man. But in the North there was widespread admiration for Jackson, for both his Christian piety and his warrior prowess. Harper’s Weekly described him as “an honorable and conscientious man” who had hesitated to take sides until secession forced his hand. British author and America watcher Catherine Cooper Hopley wrote that Northerners “pride themselves that he was a fellow citizen of the republic, an American, independent of northern or southern birth.”22
There were signs everywhere of the immense respect people of the North had for Jackson’s bravery and skill as a soldier. “I rejoice at Stonewall Jackson’s death as a gain to our cause,” wrote Union brigadier general Gouverneur K. Warren, soon to be a hero of the Battle of Gettysburg, “and yet in my soldier’s heart I cannot but see him as the best soldier of all this war, and grieve at his untimely end.”23 Wrote Union veteran and historian Charles Francis Adams Jr., “I am sure as Americans this [Union] army takes a pride in ‘Stonewall’ second only to that of the Virginians and Confederates. To have fought against him is next to having fought under him.”