The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

On Saturday Julia was brought to his bedside and he played with her, caressing her and calling her his “little comforter.”

  Smith had returned with Mrs. Hoge and Dr. Tucker, and Jackson looked about the room and said to McGuire, “I see from the number of physicians that you think my condition dangerous, but I thank God, if it is His will, that I am ready to go.”

  Now as he faded in and out of his delirium, he was back on the battlefield issuing commands:

  “Tell Major Hawkes to send forward provisions to the men.…”

  And a final word for Hill: Order “A. P. Hill to prepare for action”—doubtless ready to put his old classmate under arrest again if necessary.

  Anna asked if he would like her to read aloud from the Psalms. At first he told her no, he was suffering too much to pay proper attention. Then he relented.

  “Yes, we must never refuse that,” he said. “Get the Bible and read them.”

  In the afternoon he asked to see Chaplain Lacy. By now he was so ill and his breathing so difficult that the doctors thought all conversation would be hurtful, and tried to dissuade him. But he insisted and they yielded.

  As Saturday afternoon wore on into evening, the pain increased. He asked Anna to sing to him, and she began, with her brother joining in. Jackson wished to hear the most spiritual pieces, and she sang several of his favorites, finishing with the Fifty-first Psalm.

  She sang:

  Show pity, Lord; O Lord, forgive;

  Let a repenting rebel live;

  Are not thy mercies large and free?

  May not a sinner trust in thee?

  All night Saturday he tossed with fever, and throughout the long weary hours they took turns sitting by his bedside sponging his brow with cool water.20

  The next day was Sunday, the tenth, a beautiful clear day—the kind of day that had generally found Jackson out fighting. Dr. Morrison called Anna from the sickroom.21

  They had done everything that human skill could do to save him, he told her, but it was hopeless. Not even Dr. Tucker, the pulmonary specialist from Richmond, could hold back this killer. Jackson was going to die. His life was very rapidly ebbing away; it was probably only a question of hours now. They wanted to prepare her for the worst.

  They were words Anna knew were coming, but hoped she would never hear. When she had regained her composure she told them that Jackson must be informed. She had heard him say one time that although he was willing and ready to die at any moment that God might call him, still he would prefer a few hours’ notice. He must be told. That wish must be honored. And that duty was hers. He heard and understood her better than he did any of the others. She must tell him herself.

  Jackson was lying quietly as she approached and roused him. He recognized her immediately, but the progress of the illness had all but robbed him of speech.

  She had to repeat it several times. “Do you know the Doctors say, you must very soon be in heaven?”

  He did not at first seem to comprehend what she was saying. She repeated it, asking him if he was willing for God to do with him according to His will.

  He now looked at her calmly, intelligently. “I prefer it.” Then again: “I prefer it.”

  “Well,” she said, every word a knife-thrust to her own heart, “before this day closes, you will be with the blessed Savior in His glory.”

  Distinctly, deliberately, he answered. “I will be an infinite gainer to be translated.”

  Anna asked him if it was his wish that she should return with Julia to her father’s home in North Carolina.

  “Yes,” he said. “You have a kind, good father.” This statement triggered another thought: “But no one is kind and good as your Heavenly Father.”

  He told her he had many things to say to her, but was too weak to say them.

  She asked him where he wished to be buried.

  “Charlotte,” he said, his mind clouding again. Then, “Charlottesville.”

  Do you not wish it to be in Lexington? she asked him.

  “Yes, Lexington,” he said. “And in my own plot.”

  Jackson had bought a burial plot for himself and his family when their first child had died in infancy.

  Mrs. Hoge now entered with the baby. Jackson looked up and his face brightened.

  “Little darling! Sweet one!” he exclaimed.

  She was placed on the bed beside him and he watched her intently, with a radiant smile. She returned smile for smile, until he drifted again into unconsciousness.

  That morning Chaplain Lacy, knowing the end was near, wished to remain with Jackson. But the general insisted he too must do his duty, and preach to the soldiers as usual. When Sandie Pendleton came to his room at about midday, Jackson asked, “Who was preaching at headquarters to-day?”

  Pendleton told him that Lacy was, and that the entire army was praying for him.

  “Thank God,” Jackson said. “They are very kind.”

  A moment passed, and he said, “It is the Lord’s Day; my wish is fulfilled. I have always desired to die on Sunday.”

  At corps headquarters Lacy preached to nearly two thousand soldiers. Lee and several other generals listened as he took for his sermon one of Jackson’s favorite texts, “We know all things work together for good to them that fear God.”22

  How is he? Lee asked Lacy.

  It looks quite hopeless, the chaplain answered.

  “Surely General Jackson must recover,” Lee said. “God will not take him from us, now that we need him so much. Surely he will be spared to us, in answer to the many prayers which are offered for him.”

  Before Lacy left, Lee said to him, “When you return, I trust you will find him better.” Then he said: “When a suitable occasion offers, give him my love, and tell him that I wrestled in prayer for him last night, as I never prayed, I believe, for myself.”

  At Guiney’s Station Sandie Pendleton was so moved by what was happening inside the sickroom that he went out on the porch and wept.23 At the big house, twelve-year-old Lucy Chandler said she wished she could die in the general’s place, for then only her family would mourn, “but if General Jackson dies, everybody will be sorry.”24

  Even as Lacy preached and the men of Jackson’s “foot cavalry” prayed, Jackson was dying. His mind continued to wander and to fail. He faded in and out, issuing orders as before. He was at the mess table with his staff, then at home with his wife and child, now at prayers with his men, and again in battle. In one brief interval when his mind was in the present, McGuire offered him some brandy and water.

  He declined. “It will only delay my departure, and do no good; I want to preserve my mind, if possible, to the last.”

  He was still trying to be what he resolved to be.

  At about 3:00 in the afternoon he issued another order for A. P. Hill to come up, for Major Hawks.…

  Then he stopped, and smiled, one of those sweet smiles his West Point classmates remembered from so many years ago.

  “Let us cross over the river,” he said quietly, “and rest under the shade of the trees.”

  When Lacy arrived with Lee’s message, he was dead.

  How unspeakable and incalculable is his loss to me and that fatherless baby, Anna thought as she watched him die. All that night she struggled to stem the torrent of grief. The next day Sandie Pendleton, having suffered all night with his own sorrow, told her, “God knows I would have died for him.”25

  Anna went to see him once more in the crude casket they had improvised for him. It was covered with spring flowers and his face was wreathed in lily of the valley, the emblem of humility. Ah, thought Anna, his own predominating grace.

  The South uttered a convulsive sob. “As one man,” said Richard Taylor, “[it] wept for him.”26 There went up from every Southern heart a wail, “so long, so loud,” one mourner wrote, “that in the sad sound was heard only the heart-breaking refrain, ‘Jackson has fallen!’ ”27

  This stiff, dogged, eccentric man from the western Virginia mountains had become the palad
in of the Confederacy, the hero-idol of the South. This unlikely champion, who had demonstrated that in warfare intelligence, daring, courage, and celerity could win battles, had incredibly come to symbolize southern invincibility. Now, just as incredibly, he was dead. It seemed unreal. If Jackson could fall, perhaps they were not so invincible after all.

  “The thunderbolt was too sudden,” wrote Sallie Putnam in Richmond, “the blow too heavy.… the tower of strength upon which we had leaned had been overthrown.”28 It was, as Henry Douglas said, “the heart-break of the Southern Confederacy.”29

  Two of Jackson’s staff, Sandie Pendleton and James Smith, numbly dressed him and put him in his crude coffin, and Pendleton went to tell Robert E. Lee. Lee, “with deep grief,” told the army. Writing from the anguish in his heart, Lee praised the daring, skill, and energy “of this great and good soldier,” all now lost to them. “But while we mourn his death,” he wrote, “we feel that his spirit still lives, and will inspire the whole army with his indomitable courage and unshaken confidence in God as our hope and our strength.” He called on the grieving army to “let his name be a watchword to his corps, who have followed him to victory on so many fields. Let officers and soldiers emulate his invincible determination to do everything in the defense of our beloved country.”30

  Virginia Governor John Letcher, Jackson’s neighbor from Lexington, told the Confederate government. Within hours the news nobody wanted to believe was everywhere that the telegraph could reach. President Jefferson Davis sent the first new Confederate flag, which was intended to fly from the roof of the capitol, to Guiney’s Station as a winding sheet for the body and a gift from the mourning nation.

  From everywhere the sorrow poured out. From Charleston, where two years ago he had started this whole unpleasant business, P.T.G. Beauregard ordered a gun to be fired every half hour from sunrise to sunset throughout his command, and flags lowered to half mast. Grieving for his lost friend, Beauregard evoked “the memory of his high worth, conspicuous virtues, and momentous services,” which he predicted would “be treasured in the heart, and excite the pride of his country to all time.”31

  Nowhere was the outpouring of anguish so heartfelt as in the Shenandoah Valley, especially in Winchester, which had been the object of Jackson’s special care and solicitude. The people there viewed Jackson as peculiarly their own. When Cornelia McDonald heard that he was dead she wrote in her diary, “The shadows are darkening around us in the devoted town. Jackson is certainly dead. There is no longer room to doubt it.… No loss could be felt as his will be.” Who was there now to deliver them from the Yankees?32

  In the army, the grief was to the point of despair. Few knew his worth so well as those who, as Lee said, had “followed him to victory on so many fields.” Many of those who had followed him, and had no idea where they were going at the time, were predicting that their star of destiny would now fade. They feared that the cause would be lost without him, as there was no general who could execute a flank movement with so much secrecy and surprise.33 “The supremest flanker and rearer” the world has ever seen, admitted one Union officer.34

  When Henry Douglas went to Lee representing the Stonewall Brigade and asked permission for the men to accompany their dead general to Richmond, Lee refused. No man felt the loss keener than he, Lee told Douglas, but “those people over the river” were again showing signs of movement and he needed them just now, as Jackson had always needed them. He said that even he could not now leave his headquarters long enough to ride to the depot and “pay my dear friend the poor tribute of seeing his body placed upon the cars.”35

  On Monday, May 11, Stonewall Jackson’s body was placed on the cars, and Lee was not there to pay poor tribute, nor his brigade to march one more time with him.

  Anna rode in the train in mourning clothes, with the baby. In the party were Joseph Morrison, Pendleton, McGuire, Douglas, Smith, Major Hawks, and Major Bridgeford—the bright young officers of Jackson’s staff. There was an aide-de-camp from the governor’s office, who had charge of the body, two doctors, and several others.36

  On the outskirts of Richmond at a stop on the Fredericksburg line, the train paused to let off Anna and Julia. Meeting them with carriages was Mrs. Letcher, who carried them by an uncrowded route through the city to the governor’s mansion. The train continued slowly on bearing the body into Richmond, along tracks lined for two miles with mourners. All business was shut down in the city, and people had been waiting for hours in the intense heat for the train to come. As it pulled into the station at about 4:00 in the afternoon bells pealed throughout the city, as they had all day and would until sundown, in token of the universal grief.

  Commanding the military escort that met the train was another face Jackson would have recognized, Major General Arnold Elzey, who was to take the body of his old comrade-in-arms to the governor’s mansion. As Pendleton, McGuire, Smith, and Douglas stepped down to flank the casket, minute guns boomed and a military dirge wailed over the melancholy procession.37

  That night embalmers came to the governor’s mansion to prepare the body. A more fitting metal casket arrived, a gift from the people of Fredericksburg, and Sandie Pendleton and Henry Douglas took up a vigil beside it. President and Mrs. Davis came to stand by the coffin and to gaze for a long while at the pallid face. Varina Davis saw a tear fall from her husband’s eye and drop into the open casket. Perhaps he too sensed that something vital had gone from the Confederacy.38

  Pendleton and Douglas were surprised to see Richard Garnett arrive at the mansion. Douglas had not seen him since that dismal day more than a year before when an angry Jackson had placed him in arrest for withdrawing the Stonewall Brigade prematurely from the fight at Kernstown. The two young staff officers met the general at the door and led him into the parlor where the body lay. Garnett raised the veil that covered Jackson’s face and looked for a long while in silence. Tears began to well up in his eyes.

  He took Pendleton and Douglas, one by each arm, and led them to the window. “You know of the unfortunate breach between General Jackson and myself,” he began. “I can never forget it, nor cease to regret it. But I wish here to assure you that no one can lament his death more sincerely than I do. I believe he did me great injustice, but I believe also he acted from the purest motives. He is dead. Who can fill his place!”

  Pendleton asked Garnett if he would be one of the pallbearers in the funeral procession the next day, and he willingly consented.39

  Another who lamented his death more than most was also in Richmond to mourn. Richard Ewell—one-legged now—had come to pay his last respects. He had thought Jackson crazy in the days before the Valley campaign, and had called him “that enthusiastic fanatic.” Now he admired him, respected him, grieved for him, and knew how much the South had lost. This hard-swearing, tenderhearted man would see his old commander through this national mourning the next day and follow the casket to its final resting place in Lexington.40

  The next day, through the clear warm morning, the carriage bearing the body rolled slowly toward the capitol, the mourning plumes nodding dark and gloomy and casting long shadows over the flower-draped ensign. Following behind, led by a groom, came Little Sorrel, Jackson’s empty boots thrown across his empty saddle. In front of the hearse marched two regimental bands—one playing a dirge. Behind them marched the public guard, and several regiments of Confederate infantry with reversed arms, a battalion of artillery, and a squadron of cavalry. At the head of this military escort rode another mourner who long ago at West Point had, with his many demerits, taken Jackson’s former place at the foot of the class: George Pickett, now a Confederate major general.41

  Following the hearse drawn by four white horses toiled the cortege stretching for more than a mile, and led by the pallbearers—including Ewell, Garnett, and Longstreet. One mourner watched them pass and thought she had never seen human faces display such grief—almost despair.42

  Behind the pallbearers came Jackson’s desolate staff and
more than a hundred veterans of the old Stonewall Brigade, many of them invalid and wounded, and all knowing they would never see his like again. Next came Jefferson Davis in a carriage and behind him Confederate officialdom on foot—cabinet members and others—and behind them and lining the streets thousands of mourners, bareheaded and mute, unreconciled to this calamity.43

  Andrew Jackson Bowering, director of the Thirtieth Virginia regimental band, wasn’t reconciled to it either. He and his musicians had been at Hamilton’s Crossing when they were ordered to Richmond to play at the funeral, and nobody had told him what was expected. He knew they must play something historically appropriate. He had only one copy of the Dead March, and on the train he transcribed and arranged the dirge for twenty different instruments. That would have to do.

  When George W. Randolph, master of ceremonies for the funeral, raised his sword to start the procession, Bowering waved his baton at the boys in the band and they broke into the “Psalm of David.” Jackson would have liked that.

  As they marched along to its unhappy strains, Bowering felt emotion sweeping him away. In his time he had played final music for men standing against walls waiting for the executioner’s gun. He had played in hospitals to soothe the dying hours of shattered lives. But never had he been so overwhelmed as this. Tears rolled down the faces of his musicians, and they played as they had never played before. Bowering found that he too was weeping.44

  At about noon the unhappy procession pulled up at the western entrance to the capitol and into a throng of weeping women and children. The thunder of artillery and the mournful wail of the music rolled over the scene. The pallbearers lifted the coffin from the hearse and carried it into the hall of the House of Representatives and placed it on a temporary altar before the speaker’s chair. There the casket was draped in the Confederate flag and opened to view. Sorrowing Richmond began to file past—twenty thousand mourners by nightfall. Mary Chesnut came in the moonlight and looked at the body lying in state and wondered, “Shall I ever forget the pain and fear of it all?”45