Forty eight years after the Scotch-Greys pierced the uplifted visors of the old guard, there glided down the echoing corridors of time this sententious order; "Shoot down without halting the man who dares to cross the lines to-night."
The catastrophe that rode as a courier upon the flank of this order, hacked the sword, unnerved the arm that was carving out of a heart of fire a civilization whose altars and whose shrines were relumed by the torch of liberty; but the God of battles, amid the carnage, called a halt. It was a night of exasperation, of despair. Ten million people watched, as watchers never watched before, the last flickering of a life that laid down its all, at the altar of love and duty. Those ten million people kept their vigil like vestal virgins, and saw, alas, the frenzied spirit of hate and wrath snuff out the candle and heard the groans of the victim of his own blunder, as he cried out in his delirium, "Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees."
There has been now and again an illustrious personage, who appears to us to have been mirrored upon the foreground of events like some titanic silhouette. The irony of fate has dealt with such a man, as the creature of an hour, holding him in thrall in time of peace, to become the storm spirit in some great crisis. When he dies the face of history is saddened and obscured, and a twilight like that observed under Southern skies, falls upon the world. Such a person may be fitly called the courier of fate; or better still, the tragedian of revolution. He cannot be weighed or measured by the definitive judgment of contemporaries. When he dies the stride of conquest is checked; sword blades dripping with human blood are thrust back into scabbards. In war, he is its inspiration; its providence.
I make no allusion just now to that splendid effigy that is yet discerned in the haze that lowers over Vienna, Berlin and Moscow; that incomprehensible tutor of strategic science, who with sword and cannon cut a red swath through the capital cities of Europe; and partitioned the world into two dominions, as if he were only dividing in twain an apple. I speak not of him, whom this man that "embarrassed God," found a waif, and made a giant, whose death hastened to its decline that splendid imperialism that the great Napoleon erected on the ruins of the commune.
The fall of Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville thrust betwixt the Confederacy and independence a pall so dense, that it could not be cut asunder with the sword.
I can compare Stonewall Jackson with no hero, living or dead. He stood in the foreground an unique personality—a phenomenon. With the genius of war he appeared almost supernaturally mated. Whether his unparalleled victories were the result of combinations essentially tactical, of methods logically conceived, or of an intuition that almost without arrangement forced its power upon vast evolutions, will perhaps never be known.
The plain profile of this man reminds one of the hard-hitting, rough-riding Roundhead. His dispatches smacked of the Calvinism of Ireton and Cromwell. "God blessed our arms at McDowell yesterday." Wherever there was a downpour of leaden rain Jackson and the "Ironsides" would have been in accord. His was the spirit that resolved combinations in his favor. His masterly apprehension of issues diminished the carnage by plucking the fruit before it was fully ripe. In war as elsewhere he was absorbed by a fatalism, such as Mohammedans sum up when they say "What is to be, will be." Napoleon, like an astrologer, believed in a star; Jackson, unlike an astrologer, believed in Him who made the star and lighted it in the candelabra of night.
A few years ago an American asked a halting, mutilated soldier of the Old Guard to tell him how Napoleon died? "The great Emperor dead! He will not die," was the sententious answer from the man who had fought under the shadow of his eagles at Wagram and Marengo. It was with something of this vague, indefinable superstition, of this heroic belief in "Old Stonewall" as their providence that one of the "Old Brigade" would hearken dubiously to such a challenge, "Tell us how Stonewall Jackson died?"
Critics who have judged with more or less asperity have said that his capacity as a commander was limited to the manoeuvres of a corps. Strange fatuity! A score of battle fields prove the opinion false. If such had been the case, the history of Port Republic, Harper's Ferry, Groveton and Winchester would have been written the other way.
I saw this imperturbable man at Cold Harbor. Again he reminded one of the "predestined" leader of the Ironsides. "If the enemy stand at sunset, press them with the bayonet." All commands issuing from him found their climax in this supreme order. The hero of Toulon never caressed the fire throated 12 pounder more ardently than did Jackson. He would have swept every obstruction from the field with a single battery, or failing in this would have "pressed" them with the bayonet. His camp fires are now extinguished. The old army of the Shenandoah is an aggregation of phantoms. Winchester, Port Royal, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville appear as mirage reminiscences rather, that steal unbidden upon the soul when its depths are full of darkness and shadows.