May 11
On this day in 1863, Private John A. Jackson (1829-1896) of the 26th North Carolina Infantry wrote home with somber news: Confederate General Stonewall Jackson had died. A 31-year-old turpentine distiller from Carthage, Jackson had joined the “Moore Independents” on June 18, 1861. After spending several months slogging through the swampy terrain of eastern North Carolina, his regiment was ordered to Virginia on May 1, 1863, and stationed at Hanover Junction, about 25 miles north of Richmond. While there, Jackson learned of Robert E. Lee’s victory at Chancellorsville during the first week of May. From their post guarding a railroad bridge, the men watched some 5,000 Union prisoners shuffle past, a powerful sign of Southern triumph. Yet that victory was shadowed by the loss of a revered leader. Private Jackson wrote on May 11, “General Jackson departed this life yesterday.” Not present at the battle, he recounted the circulating rumors, incorrectly reporting “that it was a bumshell that struck him and that he never recovered from the shock.” Regardless of how he died, Jackson noted, “It is a great loss to us and I fear that it will bother us to find a man to fill his place.” That sentiment proved prophetic; Lee never found another commander quite like Stonewall. As for Private Jackson, his own trials in war were just beginning. Less than two months later his unit was devastated at the battle of Gettysburg. His captain described him as “brave to a fault,” always in the thick of the fighting. Jackson survived the war only to suffer severe postwar injuries–a hand mangled in a cotton gin, and a nose shattered by a kick from a horse. When he died in 1896, his obituary echoed the famous last words of the general he had once mourned: Private Jackson had also “passed over the river and is now resting under the shade of the trees.”
Photo: Death of Stonewall Jackson, Library of Congress
Sources: Weymouth T. Jordan, Jr., comp., North Carolina Troops, 1861-1865: A Roster, 7:566; 1860 U.S. Census: Moore County; Carthage Blade, April 7, 1896; Christopher M. Watford, ed., The Civil War in North Carolina: Soldiers and Civilians Letters and Diaries, 1861-1865, Volume 1: The Piedmont, 343-344.
