The next day the remains were borne, attended by a guard of honor, to Lexington, where they were received by General Smith, the corps of cadets, the professors, and many sorrowing citizens. They were borne to the barracks of the Military Institute and placed in the old class-room of the dead general. Every half hour, the cadet battery pealed forth a fitting requiem to the great teacher of artillery tactics. Then “escorted by infantry, cavalry, and artillery, under command of Col. Shipp, and borne to the grave upon a caisson of the cadet battery,” he was laid to rest beside the graves of his first wife and child in the beautiful cemetery of Lexington.
The “right hand” of Lee was thus taken away just as the heaviest stroke had fallen upon the enemy. General Lee, the army, the whole South mourned for their fallen hero. There were other generals as brave and true as Jackson, but none who possessed his keen insight into the movements of the enemy, his celerity of action, and the wonderful certainty of victory which made him the idol of his own soldiers and the dread of the foe.
But the renown of Jackson is not confined to the limits of his own land. It has crossed the ocean, and now the plans of his battles in the Valley of the Shenandoah and of Second Manassas and of Chancellorsville are studied by military men, and used by them as models of strategy and tactics. All English-speaking people are justly proud that the greatest military genius of the age belongs to them.
Jackson’s Statue in Capitol Square, Richmond, Va.
Not long after the end of the war, his admirers and friends in England presented to the State of Virginia a statue of Jackson in bronze. It was placed in the Capitol Square in Richmond not far from the statue of Washington and the great Virginians of his time.
In the spring of 1891, a beautiful and imposing statue of our hero was erected in Lexington, Virginia, by his old soldiers and friends throughout the South. On July 21st of that year, it was unveiled in the presence of a vast multitude of people.
The anniversary of the First Manassas, when Jackson, in a “baptism of fire,” received the new name of “Stonewall,” and flashed like a meteor upon the wondering world, was thought a fitting day on which to display to his countrymen his figure in enduring bronze.
For days and nights, the trains bore into the historic town crowds of soldiers and visitors from all parts of the country. Beautiful arches and mottoes graced the buildings and highways, and the whole was crowned by perfect weather.
At 12 o’clock, the great parade moved from the Virginia Military Institute. General James A. Walker, the only commander of the Stonewall Brigade then living, was chief marshal of the day.