

He wore a civilian black rubber raincoat and gauntlets as he waited for the last of his 21,000 soldiers to spread through the woods into an attack formation a mile and half long.

There were only a few hours of daylight left, and his men had been marching all day. But the officer had carefully maneuvered his 45 regiments into position to launch one of the greatest assaults of the Civil War.

As the minutes ticked by, he asked a subordinate: "Are you ready?" Yes, came the reply.

"You can go forward, then."

Here, two miles from a crossroads mansion called Chancellorsville, which would give this battle its name, Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and the Confederate States of America stood at the pinnacle of triumph.


The battle would elevate the already-famous Jackson to mythical status and place him among the ranks of history's best military leaders.

His death eight days later would cripple the Confederacy, and like Abraham Lincoln's, would provide one of the most wrenching scenes of the Civil War.

And his funeral would become the largest public gathering in the South during the conflict. "With impious hearts we inveighed against the will of God in the destruction of our idol," Richmond memoirist Sally Putnam wrote.



The Battle of Chancellorsville elevated the already-famous Gen. Thomas &quot;Stonewall&quot; Jackson to mythical status.
The Battle of Chancellorsville elevated the already-famous Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson to mythical status. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)




In a harrowing scene, Jackson was caught on a plunging horse in no-man's land as the Confederate and Union soldiers, now both alarmed, fired on each other with muskets and cannon. He was helped to safety, but only after stretcher bearers dropped him.



Although it was not evident at the time, some historians believe Jackson's death began the ruin of the Confederacy. The Southern disaster at Gettysburg two months later only confirmed the start of the eclipse.

"The road to Appomattox [where the war ended] began on [that] Saturday night" at Chancellorsville, James I. Robertson Jr., Jackson's best biographer, has said. "With his death, the southern confederacy began to die as well."

"It was just a tragedy for the South," Robertson said in an interview, "the greatest personal loss that the South suffered in that war . . . a horrible blow."

Civil War scholar Robert Krick said: "It's hard to imagine the war going the way it did with Jackson present."


Although his body is buried in Lexington, Va., his Jackson&#8217;s left arm, which was amputated during surgery, is buried in Wilderness, Va.
Although his body is buried in Lexington, Va., his Jackson's left arm, which was amputated during surgery, is buried in Wilderness, Va. (The Washington Post/Margaret Thomas)

To this day, signs on Interstate 95 identify the little house where he died as his "shrine." There are also schools that bear his name, as well as a hotel, a hospital, a decommissioned submarine, numerous thoroughfares, a lake and several towns across the country. The Virginia Senate recognizes him every year on his birthday.

But all that lay ahead on May 2, 1863.



"Press on!" he cried. "Press on!"

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It was Dec. 16, and Jackson and his command were fresh from the slaughter at Fredericksburg, a brutal battle that had ended three days before with the Confederates' thorough defeat of the Union army, about 11 miles upriver.


Jackson had resisted taking refuge in the house, preferring to stay with his men. But he relented finally in the cold, saying, "Let's go to the Moss Neck house."

The stately home — which still stands — was elegant, low-slung and comfortable, and it was part of the Corbins' 1,600-acre plantation, from which most of the slaves had fled.

At the time, the house was occupied by, among others, the absent owner's wife, Roberta, their only child, a 5-year-old daughter named Jane, and Roberta's charming sister-in-law, Kate Corbin.


They were intoxicating times, in which he had risen from an eccentric professor at the Virginia Military Institute to the war's most celebrated general.

He had earned the nickname "Stonewall" for the steadiness of his men at the first Battle of Bull Run in 1861. He had run several Union armies ragged in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862.


At Chancellorsville, he had proposed to his commander, Gen. Robert Lee, that they split their outnumbered army. While Lee held the Yankees' attention, Jackson would march his men quietly across the Union Army's front, and then pounce on its right flank.


It was one of the greatest coups of the war.

Handsome and clean-shaven as a young man, Jackson appears in an 1863 photograph as a bearded patriarch with a receding hairline. The soldiers called him "Old Jack," though he was only 38.




His confidants were seldom his top lieutenants. Instead, he gathered around him an unusual military "family."




Jackson's top aide, Maj. Alexander Swift "Sandie" Pendleton, 22, bunked in with the physician, Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire, 27.



She was "a sweet child . . . [with] a happy face and fair, flaxen curls," Jackson subordinate Capt. James Power Smith, the former divinity student, recalled. "She was . . . as happy and sunny a child as I ever saw. . . . She was the general's delight."

Her mother, "Bertie," remembered many years later how Jackson would summon the girl to his office and she would play for hours, cutting out paper dolls.


The child wore it like a crown, and her mother kept it as a memorial "with precious associations" for years.

The season came and went "like a dream," Kate Corbin wrote a friend. There were dinners, music and good company. And she and Sandie Pendleton eventually became engaged.

He had a "splendid, almost boyish, exuberance of spirits," she wrote a friend, according to his biographer, W.G. Bean, and "is a sincere, professing Christian."

A year later the war would claim him, too.

The advent of spring brought the coming of battle season.



"Never have I witnessed such a scene," he wrote a sister. "It was truly appalling to witness the heartbroken anguish." The child's mother "seized me and began afresh her wild lamentations. . . . Death on the battlefield is not half so fearful as this."

Fifty years later, as an old woman, the mother wrote of her daughter's death as a portent for Jackson's: "She seemed but the avant courier of the brilliant star so soon to set."

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Jackson and another wounded officer lay on mattresses inside the wagon, according to biographer Robertson's account. McGuire sat beside the wagon driver. Jedediah Hotchkiss, the mapmaker, led the way. And Smith and Rev. Lacy rode inside with the general.





Early Thursday, Lacy and Jackson's servant, Jim Lewis, were awakened by Jackson's groans. The general was nauseated and feverish and had a severe pain in his left side.

Lacy and Lewis wanted to summon the exhausted McGuire, who was sleeping in the next room. But Jackson wouldn't let them. He called for a wet towel to be placed on his side. It did no good, and finally, around dawn he allowed McGuire to be awakened.

The doctor examined Jackson and realized that he had pneumonia.





"Thank God, they are very kind," Jackson said, adding "it is the Lord's day. . . . I have always wanted to die on a Sunday." Pendleton, who would later say he'd have given his life for Jackson, left the cottage and broke down on the porch.

By noon a silent crowd had gathered outside. Inside, Jackson was slipping away. "His mind began to fail and wander," McGuire remembered. He began to shout orders as if in the heat of battle: "Pass the infantry to front rapidly!"

Then he quieted down, and as he died, said, "Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees."