And calling with the voice of her rills
Upon the ancient Hills,
To fall and crush the tyrants and the slaves
Who turn her meads to graves.
Spring brought with it another bloody engagement and Confederate victory, the Battle of Chancellorsville, fought in the first four days of May. In that, however, it caused the death of Stonewall Jackson it was, next to the actual surrender of the Southern army, the worst blow the Confederacy could have sustained. His death, some one once said, was like the death of an army. Certainly it took from Lee, already overburdened, his good right hand.
The outburst of mourning that followed on Jackson’s death, has already been noted. The South and her poets loved him, not only as a leader, but personally, as a great and good man. He represented, moreover, that element of faith and religious fervor which was one of the essential factors of the Southern character, and without which the faith that sustained the Confederacy through four years of war, and the days of ruin that followed, is inexplicable.
“Let me say,” wrote Dr. Gildersleeve,[15] “that the bearing of the Confederates is not to be understood without taking into account the deep religious feeling of the army and its great leaders. It is a historical element, like any other, and is not to be passed over in summing up the forces of the conflict.” Many are the poems, the “Prayers for the South,” and the individual supplications which still remain to attest the fact. For example, there is the “Battle Hymn of the Virginia Soldier,” an anonymous lyric of striking beauty. There is the simpler, yet equally sincere and devout “Soldier’s Battle Prayer” from the Southern Literary Messenger for April, ’62. “A Mother’s Prayer,” is another very touching poem, in the same theme: and there could be no more impressive evidence of the true religious strain in Southern hearts, than the verses, terrible in their satire, and burning in their indignant phrases, “The War Christians’ Thanksgiving,” by S. Teackle Wallis of Maryland, occasioned by the Union proclamation for a day of prayer in the North, and “Respectfully Dedicated to the War-Clergy of the United States, Bishops, Priests and Deacons.” Written as it was by a prisoner then in the dungeon of Fort Warren, it is one of the most powerful human documents of the War. At the same time, the South held her own days of national prayer and fasting: and the verses which her poets wrote on these occasions, were quite in character with the national temper.
In the dark days of the next two years, the South was to find need for all her faith and confidence in the right. As if Jackson’s death was not sufficient evil, July first to third brought Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg, and on the day after this battle, the fall of Vicksburg, on the Mississippi. This meant the complete breaking of the Confederate line in the Southwest, and the return of the Army of Northern Virginia to its original position in Virginia. To complete the rout of the Confederate line, the Union forces now began to beat through the Southern defense in Tennessee and Kentucky, while Lee, back once more in Virginia, maneuvered to and fro against Meade. In the Southern campaign, the Confederates were steadily forced out of Tennessee, and Chattanooga, the objective of the Union troops. This, (which was with Richmond, the last important strategic point left to the Confederacy) was wrested from Bragg, and occupied by Rosecrans on the ninth. The latter thought that the fall of the city would be sufficient warning to the Southerner, and that he and his forces would at once withdraw. Far from doing that, however, Bragg engaged him, ten days later, at Chickamauga. It was a two days’ battle, on the nineteenth and twentieth, and was, next to Sharpsburg, the bloodiest engagement of the War. Though a Confederate victory, it was dearly bought. Yet even after all her suffering, the South willingly paid the price. Verses in the Richmond Sentinel called the river “Chickamauga, The Stream of Death,” where the foe—
Learned, though long unchecked they spoil us,