Death
Lee wrote to Jackson after learning of his injuries, stating "Could I have directed events, I would have chosen for the good of the country to be disabled in your stead." Jackson died of complications from pneumonia on May 10, 1863. On his death bed, though he became weaker, he remained spiritually strong, saying towards the end "It is the Lord's Day; my wish is fulfilled. I have always desired to die on Sunday." Dr. McGuire wrote an account of his final hours and his last words:
A few moments before he died he cried out in his delirium, "Order A.P. Hill to prepare for action! Pass the infantry to the front rapidly! Tell Major Hawks"—then stopped, leaving the sentence unfinished. Presently a smile of ineffable sweetness spread itself over his pale face, and he said quietly, and with an expression, as if of relief, "Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees."
His body was moved to the Governor's Mansion in Richmond for the public to mourn, and he was then moved to be buried in the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery, Lexington, Virginia. However, the arm that was amputated on May 2 was buried separately by Jackson's chaplain, at the J. Horace Lacy house, "Ellwood", in the Wilderness of Orange County, near the field hospital.
Upon hearing of Jackson's death, Robert E. Lee mourned the loss of both a friend and a trusted commander. As Jackson lay dying, Lee sent a message through Chaplain Lacy, saying "Give General Jackson my affectionate regards, and say to him: he has lost his left arm but I my right." The night Lee learned of Jackson's death, he told his cook, "William, I have lost my right arm" and "I'm bleeding at the heart."
Harpers Weekly reported Jackson's death on May 23, 1863, as follows:
DEATH OF STONEWALL JACKSON.- General "Stonewall" Jackson was badly wounded in the arm at the battles of Chancellorsville, and had his arm amputated. The operation did not succeed, and pneumonia setting in, he died on the 10th inst., near Richmond, Virginia.
Read more about this topic: Stonewall Jackson
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“We achieve “active” mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)