by John Waugh
Smith’s heart, like Morrison’s, sank. He spurred his horse into a gallop, soon passed the Confederate line of battle, and some three or four rods beyond found Little Sorrel beside a pine sapling. A rod beyond that he saw men bending over a wounded officer. He reined up and dismounted.
Sandie Pendleton was also riding back through the night toward the battle line when he learned Jackson had been hit. He spun his horse around immediately and spurred furiously to the rear. He must find Dr. McGuire.35
The men in the thicket, now joined by Smith, worked quickly over Jackson. They bound his wounds, tried to staunch the flow of blood, and wrapped his arm in a sling. An assistant surgeon of Dorsey Pender’s brigade, Dr. Richard R. Barr, arrived in company with Benjamin Leigh. But he saw there was very little he could do that hadn’t already been done. It was urgent now that they get Jackson out of there, back within Confederate lines.
Hill stood. He was in command of the corps now, and must see to business. As he prepared to leave, he spoke briefly once more with Jackson. He told him he would keep word of his wounding from the troops. Jackson thanked him. Hill ordered Leigh, who was now standing beside them with a stretcher, to stay and help move the wounded general to the rear. He then mounted and rode away.
To the stricken classmate whom he had never liked, Hill had given all the help and love he could. The deadly volley had shattered more than men’s bodies; it had shattered the bitter differences between the two classmates—at least for a time. Now it was left to the four young staff officers, Morrison, Smith, Wilbourn, and Leigh.
“Let us take the General up in our arms and carry him off,” Morrison suggested.
“No,” Jackson objected, still in command, “if you can help me up I can walk.”36
As they lifted him to his feet, the Union batteries on the road in front opened up. Slumped against Leigh’s shoulder, Jackson began to drag himself down the plank road toward the Confederate lines.
The young campaign, but four days old, had been a series of close calls so far for Henry Kyd Douglas. He had not been with Jackson, as he so often was, when the volley struck. But two days earlier as he sat on his horse reading a letter from a young lady, a piece of shell had sliced through his horse’s bridle and halter and snatched the letter rudely from his hands. Now he was riding with Hill, who had just left the wounded Jackson. From out of the night a smattering of shell rocketed between them, and a piece cut through Douglas’s boot, severing his stirrup leather and dropping the stirrup to the ground. Federal fire was gradually sheering away all of his possessions. The next day a ball would enter his new cap just above the visor and cut off a lock of his abundant black hair on its way out the other side. Douglas was finding the war an enigma—life threatening on one hand, but on the other he seemed to be leading a charmed life.37
Hill was worse off. A fragment from that smattering of shell fire that had carried away Douglas’s stirrup had also cut painfully into the calf of Hill’s leg. The Second Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia had just lost its second commander in the space of half an hour.
Making his own way back toward the front, Captain Murray Taylor found Hill riding with his foot out of the stirrup and his horse being led by the artillery officer, Major William Pegram. Hill quickly explained to Taylor that since there was now no major general left in the corps to take command, he had sent for Stuart, the nearest one he knew of. Hill ordered Taylor to find Lee and report what had happened—both he and Jackson wounded, and Stuart now in command of the corps.38
Jackson meanwhile was being Jackson, taking his wound as he would any other duty, doggedly and without complaint. His young staff aides had yet to hear him groan. But he was bleeding all over the new coat Leigh’s wife had recently stitched and given to her husband. Leigh suggested that they place the general on the litter. A combination of men and the officers lay Jackson gently on it, lifted him to their shoulders, and hurried on.39
Now the fire raking the road was coming uncomfortably close, and one of the litter-bearers was hit in both arms. As the litter fell to the ground, Leigh leaped forward and caught it. As it was gingerly lowered the rest of the way, a hurricane of fire swept the road. Having endured all they could, several of the men fled into the woods, leaving Jackson alone on the pike with his staff officers.
It seemed as if nothing could survive the storm of shot now sweeping over them. Leigh, Smith, and Morrison lay down with Jackson in the middle of the road to shield his body with theirs.
All about them shot and shell tore at the road, hissing and raising sparkling flashes from the flinty gravel. Jackson started violently and attempted to get up.
Smith threw an arm over him and held him down. “Sir, you must lie still; it will cost you your life if you rise.”40
Jackson lay quiet. In truth none of them expected to escape alive no matter what they did. But after a few moments the federal fire moved on. They sprang to their feet and helped Jackson to his and continued to hobble down the road, proceeding along the margin of the traffic. The plank road was again filling with soldiers, Hill’s men moving up.
As the troops passed the little party, many of them looked curiously through the shield of horses Wilbourn was pulling along to hide Jackson from view.
The questions began to come. “Who is that—who have you there?”
The answers were lame and unconvincing. “Oh, it’s only a friend of ours who is wounded.”
The enquiries became more frequent and insistent—the soldiers weren’t fooled; they sensed that there must be more there than met the eye.
“Just say it is a Confederate officer,” Jackson murmured.
Some of the soldiers began going around the horses, straining to see. One of them caught a glimpse of the bareheaded general in the moonlight.
“Great God,” he said, “that is General Jackson!”
There was another evasive reply. The soldier looked from them to Jackson in bewilderment, and passed on down the road without another word. He was surely unconvinced.41
By then they had reached the Confederate line of battle, and Dorsey Pender, one of Hill’s brigadiers, reined up before them. He was curious too.
Who was wounded? he asked.
“A Confederate officer,” said Smith.
Pender wasn’t deceived. Recognizing Jackson, he sprang from his horse.
“Oh, General,” he said hurriedly, “I hope you are not seriously wounded.” Then he said: “I will have to retire my troops to re-form them, they are so much broken by this fire.”
The scene was fearful, alive with shrieking shells and whistling bullets. It seemed to justify what Pender was telling him. Horses without riders and mad with fright galloped mindlessly. Men were leaving the ranks and bolting for the rear. The groans of the wounded and dying were intermingled with wild shouts.
Now nearly faint from loss of blood, Jackson shook off Morrison and Smith and turned to Pender.
“You must hold your ground, General Pender,” he said feebly, but distinctly, loud enough to be heard over the chaos, “you must hold your ground, sir!”42
Exhausted and in intense pain, Jackson then asked to be permitted to lie down for a few moments. Leigh frantically tried to recruit litter bearers, but with little luck. So he violated Jackson’s orders and told them who it was for. Immediately he had more hands than he needed.
With Jackson again on a litter, the party headed out through the brush, still under a rain of fire. They had gone about half a mile toward the rear when one of the litter bearers caught his foot in a grapevine and fell. Jackson tumbled heavily to the ground, and for the first time they heard him groan.
Smith sprang to his side. “General, are you much hurt?”
Jackson quickly composed himself. “Never mind me, Captain, never mind me.”43
To avoid that happening again they returned to the road, and continued to move as quickly as they could toward the rear. For what seemed an interminable time, they remained under the federal fire, with shells bursti
ng about them. It seemed to Benjamin Leigh like showers of falling stars.44
By then it had become generally known in this “pandemonium of death and confusion” that Jackson was wounded—despite all the effort to keep it hidden. Douglas saw that “a gloom that was worse than night and disaster seemed to settle upon the army.”45
Many rebel soldiers that night would sleep on their muskets and question the value of a victory that had cost them Stonewall Jackson.
Death of the
Enthusiastic
Fanatic
Dr. Hunter McGuire did not know that Jackson had been wounded until Sandie Pendleton found him and told him so. The doctor was in the rear organizing relief for wounded Confederate soldiers.
McGuire was another of those bright young men Jackson seemed to attract to his staff. But there was a limit to youth. When McGuire reported to Jackson at Harpers Ferry in the spring of 1861 as the newly-assigned medical director of the Army of the Shenandoah, he looked younger than a doctor ought to look. Jackson stared at him for a long time, and presently said: “You can go back to your quarters and wait there until you hear from me.”
McGuire was puzzled, but he did as he was told and didn’t hear from Jackson for a week. When he did, it was only indirectly, a simple announcement at dress parade that McGuire was the army’s new medical director. Some months later McGuire, who often roomed with the general, asked him why there had been the long wait without a word that first week. Jackson told him he looked so young that he had sent to Richmond to see if there wasn’t some mistake.1
Now, two years later at Chancellorsville, if Sandie Pendleton was right, they might be dealing with one of the most tragic mistakes of the war. If Jackson was mortally wounded, by the hand of his own troops, it would be catastrophic. McGuire and Pendleton hurried together toward the Confederate front lines.
The first member of the Jackson party they met was Wilbourn, who had come looking for them. At that point McGuire received his first patient at the scene, and it wasn’t Jackson; it was Pendleton. As Wilbourn was telling them what had happened, Pendleton dismounted. When his feet hit the ground, he fainted, weak from exhaustion. McGuire quickly administered a pull on a flask of whiskey, and when Pendleton was revived sufficiently, they rode on together to the Melzi Chancellor house, about two miles behind the Confederate front, to look for the main patient of the evening.2
There McGuire found Jackson, brought that far through the fire and the night by his four young staff officers. The doctor knelt beside the litter.3
“I hope you are not badly hurt, General,” he said.
Jackson answered calmly, but feebly. “I am badly injured, Doctor; I fear I am dying.”
After a pause, he added, “I am glad you have come. I think the wound in my shoulder is still bleeding.”
McGuire saw that Jackson’s clothes were saturated with blood, and that the wound was still hemorrhaging. He compressed the artery with his finger as lights were dragged from an ambulance. The handkerchief that had been wrapped around the wound had slipped; McGuire readjusted it.
Jackson’s hands were cold, his skin was clammy, his face was pale, and his lips were compressed and bloodless. McGuire could see the impression of his teeth through the thin tightly drawn lips, but all else seemed under the stern control of that relentless iron will. There was no disposition to restlessness that McGuire so often saw attending a great loss of blood. The doctor administered more whiskey and morphine and Jackson was then lifted into the waiting ambulance, to be carried to the field infirmary at Wilderness Tavern. Torches were fired to light the way, and Leigh in his blood-soaked coat rode out ahead on a horse borrowed from one of Jackson’s couriers.
Inside the ambulance, Jackson found he was not the only patient. Colonel Stapleton Crutchfield, his chief of artillery, was already there, wounded in the leg and suffering great pain. McGuire sat in the front of the ambulance with his finger resting on Jackson’s artery above the wound, ready to arrest further bleeding.
Jackson placed his right hand on McGuire’s head and pulled him closer.
“Is Crutchfield dangerously injured?” he asked.
“No, only painfully hurt,” McGuire answered.
“I am glad it is no worse,” Jackson said. The general was fond of his bookish chief of artillery; they had been on the faculty together at VMI.
A few moments later, Crutchfield pulled McGuire down and asked the same question about Jackson. McGuire told him the general appeared to be very seriously wounded.
Crutchfield groaned and cried out. “Oh, my God!”
When Jackson heard that, he ordered the ambulance halted and requested that McGuire do something to ease Crutchfield’s suffering. It wasn’t that simple, for Jackson’s wound was now Crutchfield’s greatest pain.4
In this halting and solicitous manner they finally reached the field infirmary and Jackson was put immediately in a bed, covered with blankets, and given another drink of whiskey and water. Jackson hadn’t drunk this much liquor since that night at Brown’s Hotel when he had danced the barefoot two-step with Dominie Wilson.
Two and a half hours passed before there was sufficient reaction to this to warrant McGuire making a detailed examination of Jackson’s wounds. He did not like what he had already seen.
At 2:00 in the morning—it was now Sunday—and with three other surgeons present, McGuire told Jackson he would chloroform him now and examine his wounds. He advised him that amputation of the arm would probably be necessary. If so, should it be done at once?
“Yes, certainly,” Jackson replied. “Doctor McGuire, do for me whatever you think best.”
As the chloroform began to take hold, Jackson exclaimed, “What an infinite blessing,” and continued to repeat the word, “blessing,” until he lost sensibility.
With one doctor administering the blessed chloroform, another securing the arteries, another monitoring the pulse, and James Power Smith holding the lights, McGuire first extracted the round ball that had lodged under the skin on the back of Jackson’s right hand. It was from a smooth-bore Springfield musket, the kind of weapon Confederate soldiers carried. The ball had entered the palm at about the middle of the hand and had fractured two of the bones. Very rapidly and with but slight loss of blood, McGuire amputated the left arm about two inches below the shoulder—by an ordinary circular operation. He dressed the lacerations on the general’s face with isinglass plaster.
As soon as Jackson recovered consciousness, at about 3:00 in the morning, he called for Joseph Morrison.
“I want you to go to Richmond,” he told his young brother-in-law, “and bring Anna up to stay with me.”
Morrison found a horse and left immediately for Guiney’s Station.5
At about 3:30, Sandie Pendleton arrived and asked to see the general. He told McGuire that Hill had been wounded and that the troops were in disorder. Stuart was now in command and had sent him to consult Jackson.
At first McGuire was reluctant to disturb his patient, but when Pendleton, now Jackson’s chief of staff, argued that the success of the cause might depend on it, he relented.
“Well, major,” Jackson greeted his young adjutant, “I am glad to see you. I thought you were killed.”
Pendleton delivered Stuart’s message, asking what Jackson thought ought to be done now. Jackson asked several questions in his quick, rapid way, and when they were answered, he fell silent for a moment, struggling to concentrate. For an instant his nostrils dilated and his eyes flashed their old fire. But it was only for a passing moment.
His face relaxed again. “I don’t know, I can’t tell,” he said feebly. “Say to General Stuart he must do what he thinks best.”6
When the ambulance left Melzi Chancellor’s house for the field infirmary at Wilderness Tavern, Sandie Pendleton knew it was time Robert E. Lee was told what was happening. After consulting with General Rodes, he ordered Wilbourn, who had already had a long night, to ride to the general as quickly as possible. He was to explain their
position, tell Lee that Jackson and Hill were wounded, and that Stuart was now in command of the corps.
Wilbourn galloped away at once, accompanied by that other survivor of the volley and the night, his signalman, W. T. Wynn. They reached Lee’s headquarters before daybreak and announced themselves to Colonel Walter H. Taylor, Lee’s chief of staff. Lee raised himself on one elbow as Wilbourn entered his improvised shelter, and invited the exhausted captain to sit beside him. Wilbourn recounted the battle and described the victory, and then related what had happened to Jackson.
Lee was visibly shaken. “Ah!” he said, “any victory is dearly bought which deprives us of the services of Jackson, even for a short time.”
When Wilbourn told the general that it appeared Jackson had been shot by his own troops, Lee groaned. It seemed to Wilbourn that the general was about to burst into tears.
After a short silence, Lee said, “Ah! Captain, don’t let us say anything more about it, it is too painful to talk about.”
He seemed then to give way to grief. Wilbourn was not feeling so well himself. He was having the unhappiest night of his life as it was, and now the sight of this great man so much moved and looking as if he could weep, was more than the young captain could stand. He rose and left the shelter.7
Before the night was over Lee was to hear the bittersweet story of the victory at Chancellorsville and what it had cost him from two other messengers: Captain Taylor sent by Hill, and Jedediah Hotchkiss. It was too sad a story for one telling, let alone three.
Jackson slept through what was left of the night with Smith at his bedside. When he awoke, he was doing well; he was free of pain and it was Sunday morning. He believed he might live after all.
When Tucker Lacy, Jackson’s corps chaplain, entered and saw the stump of an arm, he exclaimed, “Oh, General! what a calamity!”
That, however, wasn’t the way Jackson was seeing it. Providence had once again been kind. “You see me severely wounded,” Jackson replied, “but not depressed; not unhappy.”
