CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Jackson was waiting. Though he had already engineered one of the most stunning attacks of the war, and its most brilliant single march, he was not satisfied with the ground he had won, or that he had driven the 11th Corps clear through the center of Hooker’s army and out the other side. He wanted more. He wanted to hit the Yankee defenses on the Plank Road and around the Orange Turnpike, smash through them, and join forces with McLaws and Anderson, while his left swept the Union flank and cut off its main escape route at US Ford.2 The fact that darkness was falling and night attacks had proved difficult to manage (as at Second Manassas) did not seem to trouble him. Because the divisions of Rodes and Colston that had made the attack were now badly disorganized and commingled, the advance would be led by five fresh regiments from A. P. Hill’s division under Brigadier General James H. Lane, a former student of Jackson’s and colleague on the VMI faculty. In the weirdly still night air pierced occasionally by the shouts of Union soldiers, Jackson was waiting—he was actually riding restlessly back and forth in the rear of Lane’s brigade—for Lane to shake out his regiments into a line of battle.3
He soon encountered A. P. Hill and some of his staff and asked his West Point classmate how long it would be before he was ready to move. A few minutes, Hill replied, the time it would take to finish bringing his men forward of Rodes’s troops. Jackson assigned his chief engineer, Keith Boswell, to Hill as a guide, then said, “General Hill, as soon as you are ready push right forward. Allow nothing to stop you. Press on to the United States Ford.” Jackson rode forward on the Orange Plank Road, then shifted slightly north to the parallel Mountain Road. He was now in front of the men of the 18th North Carolina, in the margin between the Confederate lines and Lane’s skirmishers, who were deployed several hundred yards ahead. Such personal reconnaissance was an old habit of Jackson’s. He liked to scout the battlefield from as far forward as possible. Though this exasperated his staff, who feared for his safety, he persisted in doing it. With him were eight other riders, including his signal officer, Captain Richard Eggleston Wilbourn, his brother-in-law and aide-de-camp Lieutenant Joseph G. Morrison, a couple of Signal Corps enlisted men, and several couriers. One of them, who lived in the immediate neighborhood and knew the road and terrain well, served as guide. Following them eastward was another mounted group of nine riders with A. P. Hill. In all, nineteen riders went forward into that uneasy, moonlit darkness.4 Hill, who was following mainly out of military etiquette, lagged about fifty yards behind Jackson. In a remarkable lapse of communication, neither Brigadier General Lane nor the men in his regiments knew that Jackson and Hill were in front of them.
Jackson and his fellow riders continued forward, almost to where the skirmishers of the 33rd North Carolina were posted, where they could hear the sounds of Federal soldiers frantically felling trees to build obstructions to slow the rebel advance. To Jackson this would have been useful intelligence. Jackson listened for a time, then turned back toward the Confederate lines. At that point he was about 120 yards from his own infantry. It was after 9:00 p.m. A. P. Hill, still on the Plank Road, was now about 60 yards behind Jackson on a diagonal line. What happened next happened very quickly. A single shot, fired by a Confederate skirmisher, rang out well to the south of the Plank Road. Skirmishers on both sides took up the firing and it rolled in a northerly direction, and several hundred muskets were discharged in short order. Some of the men in the main Confederate line fired, too, which meant they were firing at the backs of their own skirmishers. Just as this small-scale firefight reached the center of the Confederate line around the Plank Road, the men of the 18th North Carolina, who occupied that position, saw what looked like enemy cavalry closing on them from short range. This was Hill, Boswell, and the rest of their group, returning to their lines. The infantry, of course, had no idea that there were Confederate horsemen in front of them, least of all A. P. Hill and Stonewall Jackson, and they knew that the mounted figures could not possibly have been their own footbound skirmishers. The 18th North Carolina opened fire.5
Their volleys tore through both Jackson’s and Hill’s parties. Since Hill was closest to the firing, his group suffered the worst. Two men were shot dead (including Jackson’s engineer, Boswell, shot twice through the heart), one mortally wounded, one shot twice in the face, and another severely injured when his horse was killed. The horses of two others were shot and carried their riders helplessly into Union lines, where they became prisoners. Only two staffers were neither killed nor injured, but both of their horses were killed. Hill escaped harm only by lying facedown on the ground. Farther off in the darkness, where the bullets found Jackson’s group, the damage was less severe to individuals and horses, but devastating to the Confederacy and its chances of winning the war. Six of the nine riders with him were untouched by bullets. One of the couriers was killed, another wounded and carried by his horse into Union lines.
Then there was Jackson himself, whose astonishing good luck on the battlefield had just run out. He was hit by three bullets. One, a smoothbore round, entered above the base of his right thumb, broke two fingers, and buried itself under the skin on the back of his hand. The other two hit his left arm and were far more destructive. One entered an inch below his elbow and exited just above the wrist. The other hit him three inches below the shoulder and completely shattered the bone. His signal officer, Richard Wilbourn, seeing that he was hit, managed to rein in the frantic Little Sorrel, who had initially taken off toward enemy lines, then helped his wounded general to the ground.6 Soon A. P. Hill arrived, and the two men ripped through Jackson’s jacket, pulled off his blood-filled gloves, tied handkerchiefs above and below his shoulder wound, and made a sling for his right arm.7
The problem was how to get him back to safety. The firing now became more widespread, and Union artillery opened on the suspected rebel advance. With more than a dozen men attending him at various times, Jackson was alternately supported while he walked and carried in a litter. Twice while being carried he fell to the ground: once when one of the litter bearers was shot, again when one tripped and fell. Both falls landed him on his shattered arm, which caused him excruciating pain. He groaned loudly. “At this moment the scene was a fearful one,” wrote Hunter McGuire. “The air seemed to be alive with the shrieks of shells and the whistling of bullets; horses, riderless and mad with fright, dashed in every direction.”8 According to Jackson’s aide James Power Smith, the men were so frightened by the barrage of shell and shrapnel that “we were obliged to lay the litter and its burden down, as the litter-bearers ran for the cover of the trees.”9 Smith himself lay down next to Jackson, covering him with his own body. At one point the group encountered Brigadier General Dorsey Pender, who was shocked to see Jackson and told him he was worried about the damage the Federal barrage was doing to his brigade. Jackson, defiant in spite of his wounds, pushed aside the men who were helping support him, raised himself up to his full height, and said in a weak voice, “General Pender, you must hold on to the field; you must hold out to the last.”
Once behind Confederate lines, Jackson was taken to the ambulance wagon Hunter McGuire had brought up.
“I hope you are not badly hurt, General,” McGuire said when he saw his pale general.
“I am badly injured, Doctor,” Jackson replied in a calm but feeble voice. “I fear I am dying.” After a pause he went on, “I am glad you have come. I think the wound in my shoulder is still bleeding.”
It was. Jackson in fact had lost a good deal of blood. His clothes were saturated with it. He had a very faint pulse. McGuire stopped the bleeding, administered some whiskey and morphine, and the ambulance rolled westward toward the field hospital that had been set up half a mile in the rear at Wilderness Tavern. Riding with Jackson in the bed of the wagon was his artillery chief, Colonel Stapleton Crutchfield, who had been wounded in the leg.10 Jackson was quite concerned about Crutchfield, and according to McGuire “expressed, very feelingly, his sympathy” for his former VMI student. At one point Jackson reached up and pulled McGuire down to him and asked quietly if Crutchfield was severely injured. “No, only painfully hurt,” replied McGuire. “I am glad it is no worse,” said Jackson. A few minutes later Crutchfield did exactly the same thing, and asked McGuire the same question about Jackson. When McGuire told him that the lieutenant general was “very seriously wounded,” Crutchfield groaned and cried out, “Oh, my God!” Jackson, mistaking this for an expression of agony, ordered the ambulance to stop to see if something could be done to ease his comrade’s pain.11
Two and a half hours later, Jackson’s pulse was finally strong enough to allow McGuire to examine the wounds. Before anesthetizing his patient with chloroform, McGuire told Jackson that his left arm would probably need to be amputated, and asked if, in the event that it was necessary, it should be done immediately. “Yes, certainly, Dr. McGuire,” Jackson replied. “Do for me whatever you think best.” Jackson was resolutely polite throughout his ordeal. McGuire took off the arm just below the shoulder.
At 3:30 a.m., while Jackson was recuperating, and with news of his injury pulsing through the ranks, his assistant adjutant, Sandie Pendleton, arrived at the Wilderness Tavern hospital with an urgent question. After Jackson was wounded, command had passed to A. P. Hill. But Hill himself had been hit in the legs a few minutes later by a shell fragment from the Federal artillery barrage triggered by the volleys that wounded Jackson. Hill could not walk or ride, so he had turned over temporary command to Robert Rodes. But he believed that the command should go to Jeb Stuart—the only other major general left in the 2nd Corps. Since Lee was too far away to receive a message quickly, Hill dispatched a courier to Stuart with orders to take over. At about midnight the latter reached the battlefield, where Hill, lying under a blanket on the Orange Plank Road with his wounded legs bandaged, told him what little he knew about Jackson’s battle plan. Jackson, typically, had given him only the barest outline. That left Stuart in a quandary. With part of A. P. Hill’s division poised for attack, what should he do? He sent Pendleton on an urgent mission to find out.
Though McGuire was at first reluctant to let Pendleton see Jackson, he relented when Pendleton explained the seriousness of the crisis. When he entered the tent, Jackson was awake.
“Well, Major, I am glad to see you,” he said to his favorite staff member. “I thought you were killed.”
Pendleton then explained the problem and Stuart’s request to know how to proceed. What followed was very likely the product of Jackson’s severe trauma and injury, major surgery, and the aftereffects of the chloroform, but it was shocking just the same. In McGuire’s description,
General Jackson was at once interested, and asked in his quick, rapid way several questions. When they were answered he remained silent for a moment, evidently trying to think; he contracted his brow, set his mouth, and for some moments was obviously endeavoring to concentrate his thoughts. For a moment it was believed he had succeeded, for his nostrils dilated, and his eye flashed its old fire, but it was only for a moment; his face relaxed again, and presently he answered very feebly and sadly, “I don’t know, I can’t tell; say to General Stuart he must do what he thinks best.”12
Pendleton saluted, left the tent, and wept freely, while McGuire tried to comfort him.
• • •
The next morning Jackson was feeling better. He dispatched Anna’s brother Joseph Morrison to Richmond to arrange for her to come. James Power Smith read him a message from General Lee. “I have just received your note, informing me that you were wounded,” Lee wrote. “I cannot express my regret at the occurrence. Could I have directed events, I should have chosen, for the good of the country, to have been disabled in your stead. I congratulate you upon the victory, which is due to your skill and energy.” Jackson listened, then said, “General Lee is very kind, but he should give the praise to God.”
His mental clarity seemed to return, too. He wanted to know the details of the battle, how individual brigades or officers had performed, and was pleased to learn that his old Stonewall Brigade had fought gallantly. “The men of that brigade will some day be proud to say ‘I was one of the Stonewall Brigade,’ ” he said, insisting at the same time that the famous nickname “belongs to the brigade, and not to me.”13 That same day he told Tucker Lacy that, in spite of what had happened, he was perfectly content with his situation. “You find me severely wounded,” Jackson said, “but not unhappy or depressed. I believe that it has been done according to the will of God; and I acquiesce entirely in His holy will. It may appear strange, but you never saw me more perfectly contented than I am today, for I am sure my heavenly father designs this affliction for my own good.”14 Later that day Jackson told Lacy that he had experienced a moment of revelation on the battlefield. “I thought, after I fell from the litter, that I would die upon the field,” he said, “and I gave myself up into the hands of my heavenly father without fear. I was in the possession of perfect peace.”15 He also spoke about the battle. He said that Hooker had had a good plan, “But he shouldn’t have sent away his cavalry; that was his great blunder.” Of his flank march, he said, “Our movement yesterday was a great success; I think the most successful military movement of my life. But I expect to receive far more credit for it than I deserve. Most men will think I had planned it all from the first; but it was not so. I simply took advantage of circumstances as they were presented to me in the providence of God.”16
Because Lee worried that Jackson might be captured, he ordered his wounded general transported from the hospital at Wilderness Tavern to a private home near Guiney’s Station, the railroad depot south of Fredericksburg. By now everyone in the Army of Northern Virginia and in the surrounding areas knew what had happened to him. As he traveled, lying on a mattress in the wagon bed, rough-hewn teamsters stood by the roadside with their hats off, weeping. At Spotsylvania Courthouse and along the entire route, men and women rushed to the ambulance and with tears in their eyes blessed him and prayed for his recovery.17 The most common sentiment was the one expressed in Lee’s note: “I wish it was me, sir.”18
Meanwhile, miles behind him, the battle that he had so brilliantly begun raged through the day. Jackson would have been proud of his men, many of whom cried, “Remember Stonewall Jackson!” or “Revenge Jackson!” as they advanced against their more numerous enemies.19 The Confederate attack resumed at five thirty the next morning. By 10:00 a.m. Hooker, who had been knocked briefly unconscious when an artillery projectile struck his headquarters, had fallen back to the north, allowing the two halves of Lee’s army to unite and ceding critical high ground to the Confederate artillery under Porter Alexander. Soon the Union army was conducting a fighting retreat to defensive positions near US Ford on the Rappahannock. While this was happening, four Union divisions under John Sedgwick broke through Confederate defenses under Jubal Early at Fredericksburg, took Marye’s Heights and the Sunken Road, and advanced west toward Chancellorsville to join Hooker. At 3:30 p.m. Sedgwick attacked and was repulsed by a small Confederate force under Lafayette McLaws. The following morning Early reoccupied Fredericksburg, and on May 4, Confederate forces under McLaws, Early, and Anderson attacked Sedgwick. Though these attacks were repulsed in the late afternoon, Sedgwick had had enough. He retreated across the river that night. On May 5 Hooker ordered the rest of the army to withdraw to the north side of the Rappahannock. The Battle of Chancellorsville, from Jackson’s stunning flank attack to the withdrawal of the immense Union army under cover of darkness, is considered Robert E. Lee’s greatest victory. He had won it without Longstreet and with less than half as many soldiers as his enemy. But at terrible cost. There were 30,500 casualties in all in three days of fighting: 17,197 Union and 13,303 Confederate. And the indomitable Jackson was convalescing miles behind the lines. “Jackson has lost his left arm,” Lee told Lacy. “But I my right arm.”20 Fifty miles away, in Washington, Lincoln’s reaction to Hooker’s defeat was, “My God, my God, what will the country say?”
• • •
Jackson was taken to a large house known as Fairfield, the residence of the Chandler family, where he was lodged in a tidy, whitewashed outbuilding that looked a good deal like his winter quarters at Moss Neck. Not far away was the bustling Guiney’s Station, the depot on the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad that handled supplies coming north from Richmond and had become a collection point for more than four thousand captured Union soldiers. Jackson arrived with a cavalry escort at about 8:00 p.m. after a harrowingly bumpy twenty-seven-mile ride through the Virginia outback. When he was greeted by the proprietor, Thomas Chandler, Jackson said in a tired voice, “I am sorry I cannot shake hands with you, but one arm is gone and my right hand is wounded.” Jackson was placed in a double, rope-trellis bed, ate some bread and drank tea, and fell asleep. Thanks to orders from Lee, Hunter McGuire, one of the finest medical officers in the war, had been released from his other duties to tend Jackson full-time. He, James Power Smith, Joseph Morrison, and Jackson’s servant Jim Lewis would be the only other occupants of the house.
For the next two days—Tuesday, May 5, and Wednesday, May 6 (he was wounded the night of May 2)—Jackson’s condition stabilized, then improved. McGuire was pleased with his progress. On Wednesday Jackson ate heartily and was, in McGuire’s words, “uniformly cheerful.” In his immobilized state, without immediate purpose in his life and free of the usual pull of duty, he became uncharacteristically talkative. He chatted with Lacy, Smith, and McGuire on a range of religious topics that included discussion of how every aspect of a man’s religious life should be a self-conscious religious act. While washing oneself, one might imagine the cleansing blood of Christ; while dressing, one might pray to be cloaked in the Savior’s righteousness; while eating, to be feeding on the bread of heaven. Jackson had long lived this way, consecrating even his most trivial actions to God. Now he had leisure time to discuss his beliefs in detail. He asked his aide Lieutenant Smith, a former theological student, where the Bible gives generals models for their official battle reports. Smith replied, laughing, that he would never have thought to find such a thing in Scripture. “Nevertheless,” said Jackson, “there are such, and excellent models too. Look, for instance, at the narrative of Joshua’s battle with the Amalekites. . . . It has clearness, brevity, fairness, modesty, and it traces the victory to its right source—the blessing of God.”21 He asked James Power Smith, “What were the headquarters of Christianity after the crucifixion?” and asked McGuire if he thought that diseased people who had been healed by Jesus’s touch ever suffered again from the same malady.22 Thus the unusually chatty lieutenant general passed the first days of his recovery.
In the early morning of Thursday, May 7, Jackson’s condition suddenly worsened. When McGuire examined him at dawn he complained of a sharp pain in his side. He had difficulty breathing. His diagnosis: pneumonia, probably brought on by a “contusion of the lung” produced by the fall from the litter.23 Up to this point, plans had been under way to move Jackson to Richmond for the rest of his recovery. Now all that changed. Whether McGuire was right is still a matter of debate: some present-day doctors think his diagnosis likely, others think sepsis produced by severe infection was the cause, others pulmonary emboli that damaged his lungs.24 But this was the diagnosis in 1863, confirmed by other doctors summoned by McGuire, and that was what Jackson would be treated for. Pneumonia was a major killer in the Civil War: some thirty-seven thousand soldiers on both sides would die of it.25 Jackson wasn’t going to Richmond. He would have to fight for his life in place at Guiney’s Station.
Joseph Morrison’s assigned task—retrieving his sister Anna—was not as easy as it might have seemed. George Stoneman’s ten thousand riders were roaming between Fredericksburg and Richmond relatively unchallenged, which meant that Confederate soldiers traveling in that corridor were in automatic danger. Morrison had been forced to hide in the woods and had narrowly escaped capture. It wasn’t until the early evening of Tuesday, May 5, nearly three days after he had set out, that he finally arrived at the house where his sister was staying. Though she had been told of her husband’s wounding, she had received conflicting reports of his condition. Now her brother reported the devastating news that his arm had been amputated. But he was alive and in cheerful spirits, he told her. Unfortunately, what little damage Stoneman’s cavalry had inflicted on the RF&P Railroad had just occurred, and all passenger trains had been stopped. Since it was far too dangerous to travel north in a private coach, Anna was forced to wait until Thursday morning, May 7, and even then had to board an armed train that in her words “was prepared to fight its way through.”26 She traveled with her brother; her five-and-a-half-month-old daughter, Julia; the wife of the Presbyterian pastor in Richmond; and Hetty, the Jacksons’ slave who had been Anna’s own nurse from infancy.27
When she arrived at the Chandler house at noon, Anna was told she could not see her husband right away because the doctor was dressing his wound. Frustrated, she was “walking off ” her “impatience” near the house when she saw a coffin being exhumed from the ground for reburial elsewhere. She inquired about it, only to be told, to her horror, that it was the body of her Lexington neighbor thirty-five-year-old Frank “Bull” Paxton, commander of the Stonewall Brigade, who had been shot in the chest and killed on the second day of battle. Anna remembered watching Paxton’s young wife weep bitterly when he left home in the early days of the war; now he would be returning to her in Lexington as a corpse in a wooden box.28
When she was finally ushered into the sickroom, Anna was appalled by what she saw. Only eight days earlier she had seen a man, in her own words, “in the full flush of vigorous manhood . . . I never saw him look so handsome, so happy, or so noble.”29 Now she saw a flushed, gaunt figure in a morphine stupor with sunken eyes and a mutilated body. His face bore “angry scars” of hitting tree branches after Little Sorrel had bolted. He had trouble breathing. Nothing had prepared her for his appearance, which she said “wrung my soul with such grief and anguish as it had never before experienced.” He had to be roused to speak to her, and though he “expressed much joy and thankfulness” at seeing her he quickly lapsed back into his opiated sleep.
She stayed with him for the next several days, leaving only to see her baby. He was now in a semiconscious state. When awakened, he was able to recognize people in the room, and would speak coherently for a few minutes before lapsing into unconsciousness again. “My darling, you must cheer up,” he said, “and not wear a long face. I love cheerfulness and brightness in a sickroom.” He always had something nice to say to her when he woke up: “My darling, you are very much loved,” or “You are one of the most precious little wives in the world.” He refused to see his daughter Julia, saying, “Not yet; wait til I feel better.” Sometimes when he was still asleep he spoke as if still in battle: “Tell Major Hawks to send forward provisions to the men,” or “Order A. P. Hill to prepare for action.”30
He was no better on Friday or Saturday, though by now no fewer than eight doctors had been brought to consult, including Dr. S. B. Morrison, a cousin of Anna’s and a surgeon in Jubal Early’s division. Jackson was getting the best medical treatment available, which included drawing blood from his chest, applying mustard plasters, and regular doses of laudanum (a mixture of opium and whiskey). On Saturday he began to speak more about the possibility of his own death. “I see from the number of physicians that you think my condition dangerous,” he said to McGuire, “but I thank God, if it is his will, that I am ready to go.”31 Still, he wasn’t sure he wanted to depart just yet. “I do not believe I shall die at this time,” he told Anna after she said she was worried his illness might be fatal. “I am persuaded the Almighty has yet a work for me to perform. I am not afraid to die. I am willing to abide [by] the will of my heavenly father.”
He was fading fast. On Saturday night he asked Anna and her brother Joseph to sing hymns. They sang several, including one of his favorites, “Harwell”:
King of glory! Reign forever—
Thine an everlasting crown;
Nothing from thy love shall sever
Those whom thou has made thine own;
Happy objects of thy grace,
Destined to behold thy face.
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
Sunday morning, May 10, 1863, was bright and still. If there had been fleeting moments of hope for Jackson in the last few days, now there were none at all. His illness was crushing him. Doctors McGuire and Morrison examined him, agreed that he did not have long to live, and told Anna, who went into the sickroom to tell Jackson the news. He had told her earlier that, though he was ready to die whenever God might call him, he would prefer to have a few hours to prepare himself for the moment. It was a difficult task. Jackson had never believed that he was really going to die.
“Do you know that doctors say you must very soon be in heaven?” she asked. She repeated words to that effect several times, with no response. Then she said, “Do you not feel willing to acquiesce in God’s allotment, if He wills you to go today?”
“I prefer it,” he said in a weak voice, and then louder, “I prefer it.”
“Well, before this day closes, you will be with the blessed Savior in His glory,” Anna said.
Jackson replied, “I will be an infinite gainer to be translated.”32
But he still struggled to accept his own death. Later Anna told him again that he would soon be in Paradise, to which he replied, “Oh, no! You are frightened, my child. Death is not so near. I may yet get well.” Anna, who until now had mostly maintained a stolidly cheerful manner—at Jackson’s request—now broke down sobbing. Jackson suddenly snapped out of his drug-induced daze and into focus. He called for Dr. McGuire, who came immediately to his bed. “Doctor,” he said, “Anna informs me that you have told her that I am to die to-day. Is it so?” McGuire told him it was. Jackson stared at him for a moment, then said, “Very good, very good. It is all right.”33
Still, there were matters to settle in the time he had left, and Anna did her best. She asked him where he wanted to be buried and he said, “Lexington, in my own plot.” He told her he preferred that she live with her father in North Carolina. Finally she had the nurse Hetty bring his daughter, Julia, in to see him. In Anna’s words,
As soon as they entered the door, he looked up, his countenance brightened with delight, and he never smiled more sweetly as he exclaimed: “Little darling! Sweet one!” She was seated on the bed by his side, and after watching her intently, with radiant smiles, for a few moments, he closed his eyes as if in prayer.34
Jackson slept. When he awoke, at about 1:00 p.m., he received a visit from Sandie Pendleton. The two men had a very close, almost father-son relationship. Jackson asked him who was preaching at headquarters that day, the Sabbath, May 10. Pendleton, barely in control of his emotions, told him that Reverend Lacy was. Jackson had forgotten that he had asked Lacy to do that, rather than stay with him. Then Pendleton said, in a wavering voice, “The whole army is praying for you, General.” “Thank God,” Jackson replied. “They are very kind.” That included Robert E. Lee, who had attended the services and asked about Jackson. Lacy said that he was nearly hopeless. “Surely Jackson must recover,” Lee replied. “God will not take him from us now that we need him so much.” After the service, Lee approached Lacy again and said, “When a suitable occasion arises, tell him I prayed for him last night as I never prayed, I believe, for myself.” Then he turned away, overcome by emotion.35
Jackson’s mind now began to fail as the last of his strength ebbed. Sometimes he would awaken and seem to be clear in his mind. Sometimes he gave orders, as though on the battlefield again. During a moment of apparent clarity, McGuire offered him some brandy and water. He declined it, saying, “It will only delay my departure, and do no good; I want to preserve my mind, if possible, to the last.” At one thirty he was told he had a few hours to live, and he replied, again, “Very good, it is all right.”
Shortly after 3:15 p.m. he awoke in a delirium, crying, “A. P. Hill to prepare for action! Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks . . .” Then he went abruptly silent. Soon “a smile of ineffable sweetness” came across his face and he said, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” Then, without pain or struggle, McGuire wrote, “his spirit passed from the earth to the God who gave it.”