“We must examine you, General.”
Jackson nodded several times. McGuire absently studied his watch, noting that it was two o’clock. Sunday morning.
“We will give you chloroform so that you will have no pain. These gentlemen will help me. We might find bones badly broken, General. So that the only course might be amputation.”
The General watched McGuire’s face closely.
“If that is our conclusion, do you want us to go on with the operation?”
The weak voice was firm and a bit impatient. “Certainly, McGuire. Do for me whatever you think best.”
The doctors stirred. One of them spread a salve over the General’s face to protect the skin, and Dr. Coleman folded a cloth cone. Soon there was the heavy, unpleasant odor of the anesthetic in the place. The General breathed deeply under the cloth, several times, so that it could be heard throughout the crowded tent.
“Breathe more deeply. Deeply.”
“What an infinite blessing,” Jackson said. His voice strayed on, lost. “Blessing. Blessing … Bless …” His words became garbled, and the listening men could not understand them. He appeared, at last, to have lost consciousness.
McGuire took up the battered right hand. Smith held the light as the doctors probed. On the back of the hand, under the dark flesh, was a round ball which had entered the palm. Two small bones were broken. McGuire lanced the skin and removed the bullet. He rolled it in his palm. “A smooth-bore Springfield,” he said. “Our troops.” He glanced around at the others. It was becoming clear that his own men had indeed wounded him. The Federals had long since abandoned the old muskets.
The doctors turned now to the injured shoulder, where, about three inches below the shoulder, a bullet had torn the muscle, fractured the bone and passed through the arm. It was an ugly, irregular wound. Lower, in the forearm, a second wound; the entry near the elbow, passing through the arm, emerging on the inside above the wrist. McGuire saw the decision on the faces of the others: This arm could not be saved. Gangrene was certain if they attempted to save it by treating the wounds and setting the bones. The shaken heads made a conference unnecessary. It was not a difficult decision and the operation was simple. Each of them had performed hundreds such in his time.
McGuire cut around the damaged arm and sawed through the bone; Dr. Walls tied off the arteries, working swiftly behind him, so that there was little loss of blood. Dr. Black bore on the chest with his stethoscope meanwhile, hearing the firm pounding of the heart. McGuire dressed the wound and turned his attention to Jackson’s scratched face, where the cuts were superficial, requiring no more than clear plaster.
Jackson did not stir for half an hour, beyond a spasmodic turn of the head. He passed through the operation in excellent condition. McGuire ordered him to be given coffee, which he took with ease, and he fell into light slumber. An hour passed.
At about three thirty, an argument arose outside. Sandie Pendleton had come with a message for the General. The doctors told him it was impossible; Jackson was not to be disturbed until morning. Pendleton insisted. The army was in danger, he said. The troops were in disorder; General Hill was unable to take the field, and General Stuart had sent him to take orders from Jackson. The interview was imperative if the army was to be made safe in the coming hours. The doctors relented.
McGuire entered the tent with Pendleton but was not needed as spokesman. Jackson instantly recognized the visitor. “Well, Major. I’m glad to see you. I thought you were killed.”
Pendleton spoke of Hill’s wounding, and of Stuart’s coming to the front to take command. Stuart, he said, was in ignorance of the situation on the front and had sent to Jackson for instructions.
The General was immediately interested. He asked a few pointed questions, about the terrain and location of the brigades, and the news of the enemy. When Pendleton answered, a look of quick vigorous intelligence passed over Jackson’s face, but the effort was too much. He exhaled slowly and with blank features said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know. I can’t tell. Say to General Stuart he must do what he thinks best.”
This seemed somehow to have waked the General, who turned, grinning, to Smith. “Did I have anything to say under the chloroform? Anything wicked?”
Smith shook his head and before he could reply, Jackson spoke with a rush. “I have always thought it was wrong to give chloroform when there is a possibility of death at hand. But it was the most delightful sensation, Smith. I was conscious enough to know what was going on. I thought I once heard music—I suppose it was the saw.”
Jackson soon fell asleep, and with Smith at his side, rested undisturbed through the night.
At the front, during these hours, blind slaughter went on without reason or direction. A Union cavalryman looked from heights above the Rapidan at a sight he could never forget, of which he would write:
“A scene like a picture of hell lies below us. As far as the horizon are innumerable fires from burning woods … cannon belching in monotonous roar; and the harsh quick rattling of infantry firing.… It is the Army Of The Potomac … engaged at night in a burning forest. At our feet artillery and cavalry are mixed, jammed, officers swearing, men straggling, horses expiring.”
What the cavalryman saw was the terrible, bloody and inconclusive attack of the fifteen thousand of Sickles’s corps trying to get back within Union lines. The files were threshing, now against Rebels, now against Union lines. When the corps clashed with its own companions in arms, the casualties were as great as when it met the Rebels, and no one seemed able to halt the senseless affair until at last, God knew how, the men of Sickles’s rushed back into their own lines and settled down, leaving uncounted casualties in the tangle behind. The rifle fire died out in the Wilderness, and soon the quiet reached even the clearing at Chancellorsville, where for so long there had been a scene of tearing men and horses, couriers driving in to Hooker’s headquarters, officers attempting to rally survivors, hospital parties passing with litters, brass bands blowing madly in an effort to revive morale. The drifting smoke all but blotted out the moon.
Things had quieted when the moon sank from sight and the armies lay down for a brief sleep before the next bath of blood.
Lee had known little of Jackson’s movements since his dispatch of three o’clock in the afternoon, though fully aware of the damage the assault had done to the Union flank. The commander had spent some anxious hours in the final phase of Jackson’s approach to the exposed Eleventh Corps of the enemy—for shortly before, Lee had word of a disaster from his rear. There had been a misunderstanding of verbal orders, and General Early had pulled out from Fredericksburg, leaving that town to the enemy and opening the rear of the army to attack. Lee had then flung his thin lines against Hooker, even as Jackson hit the flank, and all had pressed the enemy hard. It had been a brisk, costly dusk battle, and in some quarters it flamed long after dark, particularly about the Fairview Cemetery, where the ranked Federal guns, loaded with everything from canister to trace chains, had cut great gaps in the gray columns. The battle in the dark blazed on, with neither side able to halt it, until about twelve o’clock, when it fizzled out to the southward.
Lee went to sleep in a pine copse beneath an oilcloth cover and a blanket. He had been asleep for little more than two hours when the voice of his aide, Walter Taylor, aroused him.
“Who is there?”
“It’s Captain Wilbourn,” Taylor said.
Lee invited Wilbourn to sit beside him. “Tell me about the fight last night, Captain.”
Wilbourn, bone-weary and heavy-lidded, tried to tell Lee of the entire assault, from the moment they found the Federal flank naked, its troops unsuspecting, until the advance had halted, more than a mile beyond Wilderness Church, the enemy crushed.
He then told the story of Jackson’s wounding as he scouted the enemy. Lee groaned, shaking his head, and though Wilbourn described Jackson’s hurts as flesh wounds, Lee seemed deeply moved. “Ah, Captain, any victory is dearly bought th
at takes General Jackson from us, even for a short time.”
Wilbourn spoke of the instant when Jackson was shot and his pain. Lee rose suddenly. “Ah,” he said. “Don’t talk about it. Thank God it is no worse.” He stood without speaking, and Wilbourn, assuming that he had been dismissed, moved to go. “I want to talk more with you,” Lee said.
Under his questions, Wilbourn told him that General Stuart was now in command, Hill having been wounded, and General Rodes having bowed to Stuart’s seniority. “They want you to come there yourself, General,” Wilbourn said.
Lee smiled and asked where Stuart and Jackson were, so that he could write dispatches to them. Wilbourn gave the positions, and as an afterthought, “General Jackson planned to take the United States Ford road, I think, and cut them off from the river.”
Lee’s reaction was instantaneous. “We must press those people today,” he said. He went about the business of directing his army, writing dispatches, calling in his couriers, in the midst of it pulling on his boots, and ordering breakfast for Wilbourn. The army made ready to fight once more.
On the flank where Jackson’s loss had brought things to a standstill, the fate of the lean columns in the coming day was uncertain indeed. The enemy had not yet come to realize it, but they lay with the golden opportunity of the war in their hands, astride the separate wings of the Confederate army.
For his part, Stuart may not have realized the full extent of the danger. In any event, without quailing in the face of the unknown, he planned attack. A man who had never commanded infantrymen in action, assisted by general officers who themselves had never led so much as a division into battle, was to challenge the overwhelming weight of the Federals. His very hope of stinging the enemy and probing for advantage seemed dim when he discovered that Crutchfield, the artilleryman, was among Jackson’s wounded officers. But for one man, Jackson’s staff was missing. The cavalry chief answered the situation himself by riding up and down the front lines in the blackness, calling for silence among his men, in preparation to go forward with the dawn.
24
THE DEPARTURE
The battle could not be followed from the field hospital, but its voice came in strongly—musketry and cannon fire, too. It was a clear, sunny Sunday morning, cool at first, until the dew disappeared. A fragrance of blooming fruit trees hung in the air. The General had spent a restful night, and took a meager breakfast, smiling. “I’m going to get well,” he said. The doctors smiled too, even when beyond his sight.
No one told the General of the little burial service in a near-by family graveyard, when his shattered arm was interred.
Jackson sent Joe Morrison to Richmond cross-country. He was to find Mrs. Jackson, tell her all details of the wounds, and bring her back, along with baby Julia.
Jackson then busied himself, under McGuire’s careful eye. He gave Smith a dispatch to be sent to General Lee, dictating only a few lines about his wound, the victorious attack, and his passage of command of the corps.
He seemed to work from a great reservoir of strength and determination.
Suddenly he waved his one big pale hand at the men filling the tent. “Too many of us,” he said. “You have me out of trouble, now. They need you there in the lines.” He sent away all of the staff, excepting Smith.
Two visitors came—the Reverend Lacy was first. He entered mournfully. “Oh, General, what a calamity!”
“I’m wounded,” Jackson said, “but not depressed. I believe it was according to God’s will. I can wait until He makes His object known to me.”
He talked with the minister in a low voice. He told Lacy he had thought he was on the point of death when he fell from the litter after being wounded. There was a good deal of spiritual talk, evidently comforting to Jackson. The staff did not listen closely.
Kyd Douglas came and Smith took his news, passing it on to the General. Jackson was moved at word of the death of General Paxton, shot down while leading a charge, and when he heard of the gallantry of the Stonewall Brigade under fire, he said, “It was just like them! A noble body of men!”
Jackson by now began to writhe slightly. There was pain on his face. McGuire came and examined the side of which the General complained. He found nothing, though he spent several minutes in a careful exploration. McGuire determined that the lungs were clear and had an ointment applied to the side. The pain had disappeared in the early evening, and Jackson seemed to revive. He asked detailed questions about the progress of the battle and about the wounded in near-by tents. When the bravery of one of his officers was described, he would give his head its characteristic shake from side to side, muttering, “Good, good.” He praised the old brigade once more. “Some day men will be proud to tell their children they fought in the Stonewall Brigade. The name belongs to the men, not to me.”
A note came in from General Lee. Smith, on request, read it to the General:
General,—I have just received your note telling me that you were wounded. I cannot express my regret at this occurrence. Could I have directed events, I should have chosen for the good of the country to be disabled in your stead.
I congratulate you upon the victory, which is due to your skill and energy.
Very respectfully, your obedient servant,
R. E. Lee, General.
Jackson wore an embarrassed look and, turning away, he said shyly, “General Lee is very kind. But he should give the praise to God.”
McGuire, as he looked in at his patient for the last time during the evening, thought that things were going well indeed. He and Smith agreed that the General was on his way to recovery.
Jackson passed a painless, peaceful night. In the morning McGuire had a message from Lee. Jackson was to be moved if possible. The Federals were threatening to cross the Rapidan at Ely’s Ford and might drive in the direction of the field hospital. The guard of infantry placed there might not hold back the enemy.
McGuire explained this to Jackson. “Don’t move me if it will do harm,” Old Jack said. “I would like my wife to stay in that house down the way, when she comes. If the enemy does come, I will not fear them. I have always been kind to their wounded, and I’m sure they would be kind to me.”
A second note from Lee arrived in the evening, insisting that Jackson be moved to safety. McGuire prepared to take the General to Guiney’s Station the next morning. There was some discussion as to whether McGuire should accompany the General. Lee had ordered him to go along, but Jackson at first demurred, insisting that he would not add to the common complaint that the general officers had always monopolized the services of leading doctors, leaving the men to suffer. When McGuire cited Lee’s order, Jackson succumbed. “General Lee has always been kind to me, and I thank him.”
Just after daylight, on Tuesday, Jackson was placed in an ambulance and began his day-long ride to more comfortable quarters on the Chandler farm, where he had once been invited to make his headquarters by the Chandler family. With Lacy and Smith as attendants, Jim riding at the rear, Crutchfield as his fellow patient, and McGuire to direct the party, Jackson’s ambulance rolled off. Ahead of it went Jed Hotchkiss of the staff and some of his engineer troops, who sweated through the day, grubbing up roots, logs and stones, filling in ruts and sinkholes. They also ordered wagons out of the way, but until they explained to the drivers that Stonewall Jackson was on his way to the rear, they got nothing but profane defiance. The name seemed to be magic, and by magic it spread. Numbers of people waited at the roadside on the chance of seeing the General pass.
It was not long before the wagon began to overtake the walking wounded, heading back from the battle to the line of the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad, and these men, discovering Jackson’s identity, raised cheers around the wagon. The party now began to pass hundreds of people, among them many who wept; the men generally stood with hats in hands, the women with heads bowed, as if at a funeral. A considerable crowd halted the ambulance at Spotsylvania Court House, with people pressing close enou
gh to see the General.
Down the road the people waited with gifts, the meager delicacies their farms could boast. Officers took their pails of milk, and cakes, pies, honey, dried fruit, bags of fried chicken and biscuit, until there was no more room. Looking back, the officers could see people going to their knees in the brush, praying for the General before he was out of sight. It was a strange spectacle that cast a gloom over the young men with Jackson.
Inside the ambulance there was idle chatter, almost cheery. McGuire had not seen Jackson so talkative; and several times he put a suspicious palm on the General’s forehead to be certain that his temperature was not on the rise. Jackson explained in some detail his battle plan—that he had intended to cut the Federals from the United States Ford by sliding his files past them to the north, and then, by taking positions between them and the river, force them to attack. He defended that tactic with a smile. “My men sometimes fail to drive the Yankees from a position, but they always fail to drive us.”
Someone asked if Hooker’s plan of battle seemed sound to the General, and Jackson replied without pause, as if he had already pondered the problem. “It was, in the main, a good conception, sir. An excellent plan. But he shouldn’t have sent away his cavalry. That was his great blunder. That enabled me to turn him, without his being aware of it, and to take him by his rear. If he had kept his cavalry with him, his plan would have been a very good one.”
He spoke of several of his officers, praising General Rodes rather extravagantly, saying that he had performed flawlessly on Saturday afternoon during the pell-mell assault, and that he hoped Rodes would be promoted soon. He said with some heat that officers should be promoted on the field for valor, as a spur to the entire army.
He spoke emotionally of the death of Paxton, and of Boswell, who died in the volley before Jackson was wounded.
He was cheerful and bright most of the way, but in the afternoon the jolting seemed to tell on him, and when the heat was at its worst he suffered an attack of nausea; the ambulance was halted for a time, and the doors were opened, A few people stared from a distance, and the hot scent of the briar-covered road banks and flowering shrubs came in. The General had suggested his old favorite remedy—cold towels on an uncertain stomach; and a soldier ran to a house near by, waited while the well windlass screeched, and returned with a bucket of icy water. The treatment appeared to comfort Jackson. “Ah, that does it,” he said. “That’s true relief.”
They Called Him Stonewall Page 46