by John Waugh
For the next three miles it was a running fight, mostly running. Jackson drove the panicked Eleventh Corps before him relentlessly. Fugitives, armed men, ambulances, and artillery became mixed together in a scrambled mass, all reeling madly to the rear, trying to escape the screaming Confederates.
“General,” a young Confederate officer cried out, “they are running too fast for us; we can’t come up with them.”
“They never run too fast for me, sir,” Jackson replied.13
In the path of the onslaught Union artillerymen struggled to dig in and stem the tide if they could. First Lieutenant J. W. Martin, commanding a battery of federal horse artillery, worked frantically to set up his guns amid a tableau of “indescribable confusion.” Carriages, wagons, horses without riders, and panic-stricken infantry stormed headlong through his battery, overturning his guns and limbers, smashing his caissons, and trampling his horse holders.14
Several forges, battery wagons, and ambulances that had been left in the plank road and were now being moved to safety smashed into the line and added to the confusion. Behind them in the wood rose the eerie rebel yell and the roar of musketry. The frightened horses in the batteries reared and plunged, and for an uncertain instant it appeared as if the batteries themselves would be swept away in the general panic. But as the torrent swept by, the artillerymen held on, and when the Confederates sprinted from the wood in front of them they let go with a volley of double-shotted canister. The surprised Confederate line shuddered, wavered, slowed, then stopped and ducked for cover. It was the first serious resistance they had encountered in three miles of ceaseless pursuit.15
A regiment of federal horse soldiers nearby was also doing its best, inadvertently, to stem the rebel tide. A brigade of Stoneman’s cavalry had been left behind under Brigadier General Alfred Pleasonton, and the troopers of the Eighth Pennsylvania found themselves at about dusk blundering into the midst of Jackson’s rampant assault.
One of the cavalry officers turned around and said, “I think this is the last of the Eighth Pennsylvania Cavalry.”
The other replied, “I think so too, but let us go down with our colors flying.”16
Their commander, Major Pennock Huey, did what any self-respecting cavalry commander would do in that situation, what anybody would do when bumbling into an ambush or other appalling adversity. He shouted, “Draw sabres! Charge!” and that is what they did. As Huey was to admit later, the charge was irregular and ineffective, and thirty troopers were killed; but it was something.17
Then darkness set in.
Stonewall Jackson hated to see the sun go down. He was at the apex of what was unquestionably his greatest victory. “Press forward!” was his urgent plea to every general, and his answer to every inquiry. “Never before,” R. L. Dabney thought, “had his pre-occupation of mind, and his insensibility to danger been so great.”18
But it was now 8:00 at night, the federal artillery was raising havoc, and the pursuit has lost its steam. Moreover there were several imponderables and a few incoveniences to be worked out. Rodes’s line, the most advanced, had stopped within a mile of Chancellorsville and was still enveloped in the bushy woods surrounding the Union entrenchments. There was no way of knowing the ground or the nature of the defenses in their front. And there was unholy disorder within the Confederate lines. In the stampede, Jackson’s two lead divisions had become hopelessly intertangled. Few soldiers knew where they were or where they were supposed to be. It had to be sorted out. Jackson moved quickly to relieve his front line, ordering up Hill’s division, which had cruised along in the wake of the pursuit and was still fresh.19
In the scramble to sort out the divisions, the soldiers kept up “a terrible noise and confusion, hallooing for this regiment and that regiment.”20
Jackson was by no means finished for the day, despite the darkness and the confusion. He was sending members of his staff in every direction—to Hill and to the other general officers—urging them on. He intended to storm the enemy’s works at Chancellorsville as soon as he could re-form his lines and before the federal army had time to recover from the jolt he had just dealt it. He intended to insert the left wing of his corps between Hooker and the river. There was a lot yet to be done.21
Having sent virtually his entire staff away on an urgent errand of some kind, Jackson sat for a moment on Little Sorrel in front of the plank road and peered ahead into the night. Then he began to ride slowly forward, planning to go as far as the skirmish line to see what he could see.
This raised a red flag in Sandie Pendleton’s worried mind. “General,” he said, “don’t you think this is the wrong place for you?”
Jackson waved the warning aside. “The danger is over,” he replied, “the enemy is routed. Go back and tell A. P. Hill to press forward.”22
He continued to ride slowly ahead. Captain Robert E. Wilbourn, his signal officer and the only staff aide still by his side, rode with him, followed by two signalmen and a handful of couriers. Not far behind in the darkness came A. P. Hill and his staff, with two of Jackson’s own aides riding with him: James K. Boswell, the engineering officer, and Joseph G. Morrison, Anna’s younger brother.
Jackson had moved some hundred yards forward and still had not encountered the Confederate skirmish line. It had to be out there somewhere; Jackson always required it in such situations.
Abruptly a volley of musketry erupted on their right and spread rapidly toward their front. Bullets whistled among them, striking several horses. This was enemy fire, the Union line assailing the barricade. That meant there was no skirmish line. Jackson spun Little Sorrel around and began to hurry back toward the Confederate position. To avoid fire now coming out of the darkness on the south side of the road, he turned quickly into the woods to the north.23
The Eighteenth North Carolina infantry regiment found itself, as it often did, at the front of things, at the very edge of a no-man’s-land. There was nothing between them and the federal battle line now but the woods and the road. But there was an ever-present danger of a Union cavalry attack. To be prepared for that likelihood, the riflemen of the regiment had gone down on one knee with their rifles primed and ready.
From out of the darkness horses suddenly appeared, looming up in their line of sight. Enemy cavalry, they thought—just as they suspected. They reacted instantly.
The first thing Jackson and his party saw was the flash of their muskets, a sheet of fire coming from low to the ground, not thirty yards away. Then they heard Hill calling at the top of his voice to cease firing.24
Three rifle balls hit Jackson. One ripped into his left arm three inches below the shoulder joint, shattering the bone and severing the artery. A second passed through the same arm lower down, on his forearm below the elbow, blowing out through his wrist. The third entered the palm of his right hand and broke two bones.25
At the instant he was hit, he was holding his reins in his left hand and his right was upraised either in the singular gesture habitual to him at times of excitement, or to protect his face from the boughs in the thicket. His left hand immediately dropped the reins and fell useless to his side. Panic-stricken and no longer under control, Little Sorrel wheeled away from the fire and bolted toward the Union lines.
The horse plunged between two trees under a branch that ran at about the height of Jackson’s head. The branch caught the general full in the face, ripping off his cap, throwing him violently back on Little Sorrel, and nearly jerking him from the saddle. Struggling to rise erect, he caught the bridle with his broken and bleeding right hand and jerked the horse painfully about. Untouched by the deadly volley, Wilbourn crowded alongside and caught Little Sorrel’s reins as Jackson swayed and nearly tumbled off.
Confusion and chaos were everywhere. Horses mad with fright ran in every direction, some riderless, others defying control. All around in the thicket lay wounded and dying men. Jackson’s entire party, except for Wilbourn and one of his signalmen, had been killed, wounded, or scattered. Hill’s
party, also caught in the volley, had been decimated. Boswell, shot through the heart, died instantly and his frightened horse galloped into enemy lines bearing his rider’s dead body.
As the volley struck, Morrison leaped from his horse, which was also streaking for the Union lines, and ran toward the source of the firing.
“Cease firing!” he shouted. “You are firing into our own men!”
Major John D. Barry, commanding the Eighteenth North Carolina, didn’t believe a word of it. “Who gave that order?” he cried. “It’s a lie! Pour it into them.”
Morrison ran into the middle of the kneeling riflemen and screamed at the major. That Morrison was telling the truth finally got through to Barry. After helping him stop the firing, Morrison turned and raced back toward the plank road. On his mind was his sister’s husband, and in his heart was a sick sinking feeling.26
Standing by Jackson’s horse, Wilbourn said to the general, “They certainly must be our troops.”
Jackson gazed painfully up the road toward his lines in apparent astonishment. He simply nodded and continued to stare. The blood poured from his arm and streamed into his gauntlets.
Wilbourn asked him if he was much injured and could he move his fingers. The captain knew that if he could, it would mean his arm was not broken. Jackson looked down at his hand and tried, but the fingers wouldn’t move. When Wilbourn attempted to straighten Jackson’s arm, a terrific pain shot though the general’s body.
“You had better take me down,” he told Wilbourn, as he leaned forward and fell into his arms.
Jackson was so much exhausted by loss of blood that he was unable to take his feet from his stirrups without help. Wilbourn’s one remaining signal officer, Lieutenant W. T. Wynn, quickly pulled them out. At that moment Wilbourn, Wynn, and Jackson were the only figures on an utterly deserted turnpike.
Out of the night, however, a mounted rider appeared abruptly in the thicket beside them and stopped, as if at a loss what to do next. He seemed to be cut off from his command, to have blundered across Jackson’s party just as they were in the act of carrying the wounded general off the pike.
Wilbourn, assuming him a Confederate, spoke urgently: “Ride up there and see what troops those were.”
The figure rode slowly away in that direction without a word. Wilbourn never saw him again.27
Together Wilbourn and Wynn carried Jackson to the side of the road and laid him under a small tree. As he supported the general’s head, Wilbourn ordered Wynn to go for a surgeon—Hunter McGuire if possible—and an ambulance.
Wilbourn then began to examine Jackson’s wounds. He removed the general’s field glasses and his haversack, which he saw contained paper and envelopes for dispatches and two religious tracts. Wilbourn removed the tracts and slipped them into his own pocket for safekeeping. Cradling Jackson’s head on his lap he began cutting away the sleeves of his India-rubber overall with his penknife, then the sleeves of the coat and the two shirts he was wearing. The mangled arm was now exposed, blood flowing from it in a stream down his wrist.
Jackson spoke. Get a skillful surgeon, he urged Wilbourn, don’t permit any but a skilled doctor to attend him. Wilbourn told Jackson he had already sent for Dr. McGuire and an ambulance.
“Very good,” Jackson said.
At about this moment Morrison arrived—and an instant later, A. P. Hill.
Hill had not in the seven months since Sharpsburg forgotten that Jackson had put him under arrest before the Maryland campaign. He had not forgiven, and he was not going to let anybody else forget. Jackson hadn’t pressed the matter, but Hill had. The battle of Antietam was not two weeks over before Hill was sending letters to Lee challenging his ex-classmate’s charges against him in full.
“I deny the truth of every allegation made,” Hill wrote Lee. And he was ready to prove it.
“These charges made by General Jackson are of a serious character, involving my reputation and standing as an officer commanding a division of this army,” Hill wrote, “and, if true, I should be deprived of the command.” If untrue then the censure should be put where it belonged—on Jackson. He requested a court of inquiry.
Jackson would just as soon have let the matter drop. His purpose for arresting Hill had been to get stricter attention to orders. That had happened, and he didn’t see any need for further action on his part. Besides, he respected Hill as a fighter. But Jackson stood second to no man for dogged stubbornness. If Hill insisted on keeping the matter alive, so be it. On the same day that he forwarded Hill’s letter and request for an inquiry to Lee, he sent along his own charges and specifications of Hill’s alleged neglect of duty.
The matter continued to simmer. Lee hated this sort of squabbling between two of his most valued lieutenants. But Hill wouldn’t let it rest. He wrote J.E.B. Stuart in November, calling Jackson that “crazy old Presbyterian fool.” “The Almighty,” he said, “will get tired of helping Jackson after a while, and then he’ll get the damndest thrashing—and the shoe pinches, for I shall get my share and probably all the blame, for the people will never blame Stonewall for any disaster.”
In January, Hill was still asking that the charges be tried. He was worried that there would soon be no witnesses left alive. Two of his most important ones had already been killed; others had left. Lee was hating the whole thing, wishing it would go away. He told Hill he didn’t think a trial by court-martial was necessary. The arrest might seem harsh to Hill, but Jackson had the right to make it as a commanding officer.
Hill said he didn’t dispute that right; it was the public rebuke by Jackson without trial that rankled him. Moreover, he told Lee that as far as he was concerned Jackson was a “slumbering volcano,” and that he intended to guard himself against any new eruptions by preserving every scrap of paper sent to him from that crazy Presbyterian’s headquarters. He repeated his demand for a trial.
That is where the matter still stood as Hill arrived at the wounded Jackson’s side at Chancellorsville.28
The volley that came so abruptly out of the night hit Hill’s party as hard as it hit Jackson’s. It was as if they had been struck by a bolt of lightning.29
Captain Murray Taylor’s horse was hit and fell heavily to the ground. Pinned beneath the dying beast, Taylor struggled to free himself. As he struggled, he heard Hill’s voice call out: Was any of his staff still alive? Taylor answered, and Hill sprang from his own horse and ran to his side. As Hill was pulling and hauling to help free Taylor, a courier hurried up and told him Jackson had been wounded.
Hill said to Taylor, “Help yourself; I must go to Gen. Jackson; don’t tell the troops.” He rose and hurried back to his horse.30
Captain Benjamin Leigh hadn’t asked for any of this—yet in a way, he had. Only that morning he had been with the Irish Battalion, his regular unit, safely in the rear. The battalion was acting as the provost guard of Jackson’s corps well behind the lines, out of the action. But Leigh hadn’t been happy with that and had asked for an assignment at the front. He was pleased when word came down that morning that he had been assigned to A. P. Hill’s staff as a volunteer aide-de-camp. Now it was night, and he was in a hellhole. But at least he was still alive, which was more than could be said of much the rest of Hill’s staff.31
As Hill rode up to Jackson, Wilbourn was still ripping clothing from the stricken general’s mangled arm. Hill swung down from his horse, motioning to Leigh as he hurried toward Jackson, ordering him to go immediately for a surgeon and an ambulance.
Hill dropped to the ground beside Jackson, telling him how sorry he was that he was hit.
Is the wound painful? he asked.
“Very painful,” Jackson admitted. He told Hill his arm was broken.32
Hill took his old classmate in his own arms, pulled off his gauntlets, which were now full of blood, and removed his saber and belt.
Jackson then seemed to rest easier. Captain R.H.T. Adams, another survivor from Hill’s staff, produced a flask of brandy, and Hill offered it to Jac
kson. Jackson hesitated, but Wilbourn urged it on him, telling him it was absolutely necessary; it would revive and sustain him until they could get him safely to the rear. Jackson relented, and drank a sip.
It seemed impossible to move him, but Hill knew they must. The enemy was no more than 150 yards away and might advance at any moment and capture them all. This fact became painfully apparent when two federal skirmishers with cocked muskets stepped from behind a cluster of bushes and stared at the small clump of men.
In an undertone Hill said, “Seize those men.”
Captain Adams shouted, “Halt! Surrender! Fire on them if they don’t surrender!”33
In the next moment the astonished federal skirmishers were prisoners of war.
Morrison stepped out into the road, suspecting that if two Union soldiers could be so close, other federal troops might also be nearby. About a hundred yards away in the moonlight he saw federal cannoneers unlimbering two pieces of artillery in the road. He hurriedly returned and told Hill.
James Power Smith, Jackson’s young aide-de-camp, had been looking for his general. During the pursuit Jackson had left Smith as a center of communication between himself and the cavalry on the flanks and the artillery moving up from the rear. As night was falling Smith started forward with his couriers through the dusky twilight. The storm of the battle had swept to the east and he rode in that direction.
He found General Robert Rodes and his staff near an old cabin in an open field about a mile west of Chancellorsville.
“General Jackson is just ahead on the road, Captain,” Rodes said. “Tell him I will be here at this cabin if I am wanted.”34
Smith had not gone another hundred yards when he heard firing ahead of him, a shot or two, then a volley on the right of the road and another on the left. Moments later he met Murray Taylor, now out from under his fallen horse, who told him that Jackson had been wounded, shot by his own troops.