by Tony Horwitz
Just outside the visitors’ center stood a monument marking the site of Jackson’s wounding, at the climax of his triumph on May 2. After a day-long march around Hooker’s huge force, Jackson’s men crashed out of the woods shortly before sunset and demolished the Union flank. At nightfall, as the Union fell back in disarray, Jackson galloped ahead of his lines to reconnoiter the enemy and judge whether to press the attack by moonlight. He was riding back through the dark woods when North Carolina pickets mistook his entourage for Union cavalry. “Pour it to them, boys!” an officer shouted. The volley struck Jackson three times in the hand and arm and killed four of his fellow riders. Jackson, ever the dour drillmaster, allegedly declared to an aide, “Wild fire, that.”
A few yards from the monument lay a large quartz boulder dragged to the site by oxen soon after the War. The lump of stone, known simply as “the Jackson rock,” was somehow more eloquent than the fine Victorian statuary that usually adorned such spots. A teenager stood reverentially studying the stone. He had spiked hair, earrings in every orifice, black combat boots, cutoff camouflage shorts and a T-shirt that read: “Sex Pistols. Pretty Vacant.” He looked up and nodded at Rob, and said, Punk to Grunge: “Nice threads. Where can I get some of those?” Rob gave the teenager his address and promised to send a copy of the hardcore “vendors’ list” he’d mailed me when I first expressed interest in reenacting. As the teenager wandered off, Rob said he often recruited people this way. “The uniform’s like a worm, it’s bait on your hook. Once they nibble at it, all you’ve got to do is reel them in.”
From the site of Jackson’s wounding, we worked our way backwards in time to the pine grove where Jackson met Lee on the night before Stonewall’s final march. The two generals sat on hardtack boxes beside a campfire, plotting their bold scheme to split the Southern army and send Jackson around the Union flank. Their parting the next morning, known as the “Last Meeting,” was the most sanctified of all the Lost Cause’s hallowed moments, reproduced in countless prints and paintings that once adorned the homes of many Southern whites.
“We’ll do all the art and mythology stuff tomorrow in Richmond,” Rob said. Today’s lesson was anatomy. So we drove on, stalking Stonewall’s arm. Probably no limb in history was so heavily signposted. We passed an historical marker by the road titled “Wounding of Jackson” and another labeled “Jackson’s Amputation.” After Jackson’s wounding, litter-bearers carried him off the field under heavy fire, twice spilling the general on the ground. Then came chloroform and the surgeon’s scalpel; a tiny stump was all that could be saved of Jackson’s left arm. Stonewall, characteristically, took the loss in stride. Awakening from his drugged sleep, he declared that the doctor’s bone-saw had sounded “the most delightful music.”
The next day, Jackson was loaded on an ambulance and taken to a farm well behind the lines. An aide, meanwhile, bundled up the severed arm and carried it to his own brother’s house for burial in the family graveyard. We parked on the quiet country lane leading to the spot. Rob dug two Ambulance Corps armbands from his haversack—“to get us in the right spirit”—and we slipped them on before walking solemnly toward the burial ground, which lay at the center of a just-tilled cornfield, ringed by a small iron fence and a perimeter of gopher holes.
The graveyard was unremarkable, except for one lumpy stone with an inscription that read: “Arm of Stonewall Jackson May 3 1863.” No birth or death dates, no list of accomplishments. Just date of severance. It got stranger than that. A nearby marker stated: “During a mock battle attended by President Warren Harding in 1921, Marine Corps General Smedley D. Butler exhumed the arm and reburied it in a metal box.” Butler, I later learned, had heard from a local man that Jackson’s arm lay buried there, and arrogantly declared, “Bosh! I will take a squad of marines and dig up that spot to prove you wrong!” He found the arm bone in a box several feet beneath the surface and repented by reburying it and erecting a bronze plaque, which had since disappeared.
It was midafternoon, we were dazed and spent, and the graveyard seemed as good a place as any to rest for a while. Rob lay with his eyes closed while I read aloud from the books we’d picked up at the visitors’ center. Amidst hagiographic retellings of Stonewall’s triumphs I caught glimpses of Jackson’s famed idiosyncrasy. This was a man who was fearless in battle, but so hypochondriacal that he believed eating a single grain of black pepper was enough for him to “lose all strength in my right leg.” He was a stern Presbyterian who frowned on public dancing, yet loved doing the polka with his wife in their parlor. A Virginian who owned six slaves, he broke state law by teaching blacks at Sunday school. He was also a merciless taskmaster who pushed his men ceaselessly and shot deserters without remorse, yet succumbed himself to battle fatigue during the Seven Days campaign and napped catatonically through much of the fray.
“He wasn’t stable. That’s attractive to me,” Rob said. “Plus the fact that he always won. I may be a loser but at least I was born on the same day as a winner.”
The identification went deeper than that. Jackson and the “foot cavalry” he led were mostly men of humble background from the Shenandoah Valley. Jackson grew up in the hill country of what was now West Virginia and spent his youth Huck Finn-ishly; orphaned at seven, he later rode a raft down the Ohio to the Mississippi, selling firewood to passing steamers.
Rob’s own family came from the same sort of modest, upcountry Southern stock. His father was born in a log house in hardscrabble hill country near Rock Creek, Alabama. A mule-trader’s son, he quit school after the eighth grade and at sixteen caught a ride to Cleveland, where he arrived with $15 in his pocket. While boarding with a Southern family, he met Rob’s mother, whose clan came from Tennessee. Nine days after they married, Rob’s father shipped out to fight the Japanese and returned thirty months later, shell-shocked, one of only seven men in his unit of fifty-seven to survive.
Rob’s father had recently retired from selling used cars and moved with his wife to the log homestead in Alabama that his forebears had lived in for generations. “Even though I was raised in the North I feel strong ties to the South, or at least the poor part of it my family came from,” Rob said. He’d been gratified to discover at the Archives that his ancestors were common farmers who owned no slaves. Such yeoman often resented the plantation gentry, who could be exempted from military service if they owned twenty or more slaves, a loophole that prompted the famous Southern gripe: “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”
Rob clearly cast his lot with the latter. “I like to think of myself as the average grunt,” he said, peeling off his filthy socks and draping them over a gravestone to air.
We snoozed beside Stonewall’s arm until the cool of the day, then trudged back to the car. The land all around us was actually twice-fought ground. Almost a year to the day after Stonewall’s wounding, the North fought Lee’s army again in the dense thicket just west of Chancellorsville, known as the Wilderness. In some spots, soldiers stumbled on bones of men left unburied from fighting the year before.
The Wilderness wasn’t so wild anymore; apart from a few roadside exhibits, stray cannons, and trails winding into the woods, much of the battlefield had been lost to development. We followed one line of trenches until it ended abruptly at a vast, brick-walled compound with a sign that said: “Fawn Lake, An NTS Club Community.”
Curious, we followed a shaded entrance road into the community, which was bordered by signs warning “security patrols in effect.” Then came a guard booth. The sentry said only residents were allowed beyond this point, but he let us drive just far enough to glimpse the golf course, artificial lake and wooded homesites that lay beyond. The development was laid out along streets and cul-de-sacs named for Longstreet, Jackson, Burnside, Appomattox—the only hint that minié balls, rather than golf balls, had once sliced through the air all around here.
As we wound back out of the development, Rob pointed to rifle pits still dimly visible in the road’s median strip. “I shoul
d go bloat in one of those trenches,” he fumed. “I’d like these rich fucks to have to look at me every time they tee off.”
I had never seen Rob so angry. He’d told me before we set off that every Gasm finds its own theme; the dispiriting leitmotif of ours, at least so far, was the devastation of Virginia’s historic landscape. The Wilderness a golfers’ rough; Stonewall’s flank march a Fas Mart; Jackson and Lee and Longstreet now names of shopping malls and streets built on the ground over which they’d once fought.
Rob and his fellow hardcores often staged marches to raise money for the preservation of battlefields and the landscape surrounding them. But sometimes Rob thought more radical action was required. “I fantasize a lot about my buddy who has a twelve-pound Napoleon firing some solid shot at this shit,” he said, as we drove past a housing development called Lee-Jackson Estates.
We pushed on, past historic markers and realtors’ signs, until we reached Spotsylvania Courthouse, where Grant battled Lee a few days after the Wilderness. By May 1864, both armies had learned the grim lesson of Bloody Lane; here, the trenches twisted and turned so the defenders could “enfilade” attackers, or fire on them from several sides. The rebels also axed trees from in front of their breastworks to create a clear kill zone. Then they sharpened the felled trees and deployed them as pikelike obstacles called abatis, bristling in front of their trenches. Spotsylvania was a long way from Shiloh, where generals regarded trench digging as unmanly and demoralizing, and a short way from the Western Front in World War I.
It was also here, at a salient called Bloody Angle, that some of the most intimate and fevered killing of the entire War occurred. At dawn on May 12, Grant threw 20,000 men at the rebel line; for eighteen hours, often in heavy rain, the two sides engaged in a rare instance of prolonged hand-to-hand combat as they hacked, bludgeoned, bayonetted and blasted away at point-blank range. The attack achieved little, except some 14,000 casualties. Corpses packed the muddy trenches so densely that burial parties simply collapsed the breastworks to cover the dead.
For half an hour I listened to Rob read aloud from accounts of the carnage: “The writhing of the wounded and dying who lay beneath the dead bodies moved the whole mass.… Troops were killed by thrusts and stabs through chinks in the log barricade, while others were harpooned by bayonetted rifles flung javelin-style across it… I never expect to be fully believed when I tell what I saw of the horrors of Spotsylvania.” The horrors of it all were starting to numb me. Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, and the Wilderness ranked three, four, and six in the list of bloodiest Civil War battles; Fredericksburg rounded out the top ten. All told, the ten-mile-square territory we’d traversed that afternoon claimed 100,000 casualties. The writer Bob Schacochis called Civil War Virginia “the abattoir of the South.” At Bloody Angle, I felt as though we lay near the center of that slaughterhouse.
Butchery on the scale that occurred around Spotsylvania was hard to grasp, even for those who committed it. Curiously, many of the soldiers’ accounts described a single oak tree, almost two feet in diameter, felled in the hail of small-arms fire. After the battle, the bullet-riddled stump was featured at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and later installed at the Smithsonian. “The death of this single tree,” one historian observed, “was a way of measuring the scale of combat that surpassed understanding.”
The death of a single man was also easier to grasp than the massacre of thousands, particularly if that man happened to be Stonewall Jackson. Even the nonpartisan Park Service literature referred to his death site by the name Southerners gave it: the “Jackson Shrine.” As shrines went, it was modest: a small frame cottage at a sleepy rail spur called Guinea Station, where doctors sent Jackson to recover after the amputation of his arm. During the twenty-seven-mile ambulance ride, civilians lined the route, offering the wounded general fried chicken, biscuits and buttermilk.
We waited until full dark, then crept along a half-mile gravel road leading from the old railroad station to the Shrine. Except for a caretaker’s house and a few dogs howling in the dark, there wasn’t much to worry about. It was a fine, starry night and the A-frame cottage stood clearly silhouetted in a small clearing not far from the railroad tracks. Unfurling our bedrolls on the building’s front porch, we took turns reading aloud about Jackson’s final days.
At first, Jackson seemed headed for a brisk recovery. But after a few days, nausea and fever set in. Doctors diagnosed this as pneumonia, though modern physicians suspected that Jackson’s falls from his stretcher at Chancellorsville may have caused internal bleeding as well. Doctors treated the pneumonia with crude measures common in that day, such as bleeding Jackson and cupping his chest with hot glass to raise a blister and draw out ill humors. But on the morning of May 10th the general’s doctor informed Jackson’s wife that her husband would not last the day. When she told her husband, Jackson asked the doctor for confirmation, then announced: “My wish is fulfilled. I have always desired to die on Sunday.”
The scene recalled an interview with Shelby Foote I’d read, in which he talked about the deathbed rituals of the mid-nineteenth century. “When you are dying, the doctor says you’re dying,” Foote said. “You assemble your family around you and sing hymns and you are brave and stalwart and tell the little woman that she has been good to you and not to cry. And you tell the children to be good and mind their mother, Daddy’s fixing to go away. That was called making a good death, and it was very important.”
Jackson’s death wasn’t just good, it was sublime. After consoling his distraught wife and cuddling his newborn daughter, he declined the doctor’s offer of brandy, declaring, “I want to preserve my mind, if possible, to the end.” Then, as Foote told it in his narrative of the War, Jackson slipped into a deathbed delirium, “alternately praying and giving commands, all of which had to do with the offensive. Shortly after 3 o’clock, a few minutes before he died, he called out: ‘Order A. P. Hill to prepare for action! Pass the infantry to the front. Tell Major Hawks—’ He left the sentence unfinished, seeming thus to have put the war behind him: for he smiled as he spoke his last words, in a tone of calm relief. ‘Let us cross over the river,’ he said, ‘and rest under the shade of the trees.’”
Bizarrely, legend held that Robert E. Lee also ordered A. P. Hill into battle from his deathbed. “Tell Hill he must come up,” Lee said, before making his own good death by uttering, “Strike the tent.” A. P. Hill was a hot-tempered, gonorrhea-wracked commander who wore a red shirt into battle and feuded with his superiors. Judging from Lee’s and Jackson’s last words, Hill obviously got under their skins. I wondered whether Hill reciprocated by mentioning either commander on his own deathbed.
“Don’t know, but I doubt it,” Rob mumbled sleepily. “Hill got waxed at Petersburg, near where Pickett was getting loaded at a fish fry while losing the Battle of Five Forks.”
“Hunh?”
“We’ll see it all later in the Gasm,” Rob said, drifting off to sleep.
I lay awake for a while. Night erased all sign of the twentieth century, as it had at Antietam, and lying there on the wood-slat porch, a few feet from where Jackson died, I felt the mournfulness of our campsite. Eight weeks after Jackson’s death, Lee’s army self-destructed at Gettysburg. Southerners and Civil War buffs had speculated ever since that Gettysburg—and, consequently, the whole course of the War—might have gone differently had Jackson been there. “That old house,” the English prime minister David Lloyd George observed on visiting the Jackson shrine in 1923, “witnessed the downfall of the Southern Confederacy.”
Guinea Station also possessed a spare dignity that suited the man it enshrined. The cottage bore little resemblance to the grand manses of the plantation South, just as Jackson had little in common with patricians such as Lee, who hailed from one of Virginia’s leading families, married into another, and spent his adult life shuttling between vast estates. Jackson, by contrast, married a minister’s daughter and when she died in childbirth he married another,
honeymooning each time at Niagara Falls. He settled in a modest town house near the Virginia Military Institute, where he taught until the War broke out. His professor’s salary didn’t allow for much extravagance, even if his Presbyterian temperament had permitted it.
My musings were interrupted by Rob, who rolled over and mumbled, “Forgot something.” Then he pulled out his notebook and scribbled: “Gasm, Day Two.”
5:30 wake up, Bloody Lane
6:00 breakfast at diner, look at bloaters
7-9:30 antietam: cornfield, dunker church, museum
12-1 fredericksburg (drive-by)
2-5 chancellorsville, wilderness, Stonewall’s arm
6-8 Spotsylvania
10-1 jackson shrine. cosmic. read about death
We were only to May 1863, the midpoint of the War. “Get some rest,” Rob said, pulling a blanket over his head. “Tomorrow we’ve got to do Jeb Stuart’s death, plus Richmond and the rest of ’64.”
TOMORROW ARRIVED a few hours later when a freight train roared past, just fifty or so yards from our campsite. In the dim predawn light I peered through the windows of the cottage, which revealed itself now as a handsome weatherboard structure with a shingle roof, wide pine floors, white walls and a stark Shaker beauty. In one room stood the bed in which Jackson died, a four-poster with ropes beneath the mattress and a jack to tighten the hemp before bed (hence the phrase “sleep fight”). A clock sat on the mantel, the same one that had ticked away the last minutes of Stonewall’s life. It was set to 3:15, the exact time of Jackson’s death.
A year and a day after Stonewall’s death, Lee’s army lost its most renowned cavalryman. The site of Jeb Stuart’s mortal wounding, Yellow Tavern, sounded appropriately romantic: the sort of rustic saloon where Stuart might have danced in his spurs on the night before battle. Though a teetotaler and devout Christian, like Stonewall, Stuart cultivated the image of a wanton Cavalier, with his extravagantly coiffed beard, silken yellow sash, crimson-lined cape and ostrich plume poking up from his slouch hat. Stuart spoke of his daring rides around the Union army as if they were fox chases; after one narrow escape, he declared he’d rather “die game” than accept surrender.