Stonewall Jackson Injured by Friendly Fire

Born in 1824 at Clarksburg, Virginia (now in West Virginia), Thomas Jackson was one of the heroes of the American Civil War. His father and mother died when he was a boy and he had a lonely childhood, brought up by an uncle. Introverted, shy and socially awkward, he had weak eyesight, poor hearing and huge, clumsy feet. In 1842 he went to the US Military Academy at West Point, where he did well, though he made few friends. Fighting in Mexico as a junior officer, he came to the attention of General Robert E. Lee, the future Confederate commander-in-chief.

From 1851 Jackson taught at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, but teaching was not his forte. When the War Between the States began in 1861 he was given the rank of colonel and put in command of a brigade of Virginian infantry. He earned his nickname at the First Battle of Bull Run in July, when Jackson and his men held the line against such overwhelming odds that a Confederate general called Bee said: ‘There stands Jackson like a stone wall.’ It is the only thing for which poor Bee is remembered.

Jackson was promoted to major-general later in the year and in 1862 Lee put him in command of the Confederate Second Corps as a lieutenant-general. He scored successes in most of his battles and was admired by his men. A ferociously aggressive commander, he was a strict disciplinarian (though he did not always obey other people’s orders) and a devout Presbyterian, who attributed his victories to the Almighty. Above all he was a master of surprise, who understood that mystifying his opponents would have a devastating effect on their morale. His moves regularly caught the enemy unprepared and often his own people as well, as he tended to keep his intentions secret from his officers until the last moment.

In April 1863, with General ‘Fighting Joe’ Hooker beginning a new offensive in Virginia with a Union army about twice Lee’s strength, it was decided that Jackson would move stealthily round the right flank of the Union army while the rest of the Confederate force held the Union troops at bay. It was a bold stratagem, fraught with danger, but Jackson set off early in the morning. It took until the afternoon for his 28,000 men to move through a thickly forested area called the Wilderness. The troops on the Union army’s western flank had no notion of what was happening and were astounded when fleeing deer, rabbits and squirrels suddenly burst out of the woods at them, followed by thousands of Confederate soldiers firing muskets, brandishing bayonets and screaming their rebel yell (a horrible terrifying sound that has been likened to the wail of a banshee). One of the Union commanders said that the attack was like ‘the fury of the wildest hailstorm’ and that the panic-stricken men fled ‘in a mad current’. The Union soldiers were hurled two miles or so back in total disorder to a crossroads called Chancellorsville.

Jackson rode forward with a group of staff officers to organise further pursuit, but in the gathering dark some of his own men mistook them for the enemy and opened fire on them. Jackson was struck by two bullets in his left arm and one in his right hand. Bleeding profusely, he was carried on litters to a field hospital, where his left arm was amputated close to the shoulder and the bullet extracted from his right hand. He was then moved to a house some 25 miles away and might have recovered, but he contracted pneumonia and possibly pleurisy and died on May 10th. It seems that Lee never made the comment attributed to him, that though Jackson had lost his left arm, his death had cost Lee himself his right arm. Even so, he might well have agreed with it.

Jackson was 39 when he died, leaving a widow and two small child-ren. After an impressive military ceremony in Richmond he was buried in Lexington in what is now the Stonewall Jackson Cemetery. His reported last words on his deathbed, ‘Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees’, have been famous ever since and Ernest Hemingway used them for the title of his 1950 novel Across the River and Into the Trees, about death and facing it. A distinguished American general of modern times, Wesley K. Clark, thinks that if Jackson had lived to lead troops at Gettysburg in 1863 the Confederacy might still be enjoying independence today.