A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [246]
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Lee had maintained a sanguine demeanor throughout the battle—until the moment he learned that Stonewall Jackson had been shot. Jackson had been reconnoitering positions when he accidentally galloped into his own picket line. The nervous Confederate guards shot blindly at the group, killing several riders and striking Jackson. Two bullets tore through his left arm; another hit his right wrist. He was also dragged along by his horse and dropped by his stretcher bearers. The damage to his left arm was irreparable; the limb had to be amputated the next morning. Lee sent Jackson a message via the chaplain begging him to recover quickly, adding, “He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right arm.” As soon as doctors deemed he could be moved, Jackson was loaded onto an ambulance and taken on a twenty-seven-mile journey to a plantation at Guinea Station.
Francis Lawley followed behind, arriving at the plantation on May 7. Jackson had been moved to the estate office, where he could recuperate in private. “With a beating heart I rode up to ask after him,” wrote Lawley. The doctor stepped outside so that he could speak plainly; the general’s wife and infant daughter were inside. Jackson had appeared to be recovering, but late the previous night the classic signs of pneumonia had set in. Lawley knew what this meant: “I gave up all hope of his recovery.”13
Lawley could not bear to wait for the end, so he boarded one of the trains taking the wounded back to Richmond. On May 8 he sent a letter to the Confederate secretary of war, James Seddon, warning him of Jackson’s desperate condition. Two days later, on the tenth, Jackson died. Lee cried when he learned the news; there was not a man or woman, North or South, who failed to understand the meaning of Jackson’s death or his vital importance to the Confederacy.20.2
The loss of Jackson posed a dilemma for Lawley. If he made too much of it in his reports, readers might think that the South had suffered a mortal blow. Yet here was an opportunity to create a mythic figure whose heroic end would elevate the entire Southern cause. Lawley did his best, eulogizing Jackson as both an earthly saint and a military genius whose death would only inspire the South to “deeds of more than mortal valor.” (Unfortunately, the blockade was playing havoc with Lawley’s dispatches; his obituary of Jackson reached London before the news of his shooting.)15
Lawley was so concerned about presenting Jackson’s death in the best possible light that he deliberately obscured the gravity of the situation out west. On May 19, 1863, he finally revealed to the English public that Vicksburg might not be impregnable after all. The news was “contrary to my own and the general anticipation,” Lawley admitted at the end of yet another article on Stonewall Jackson. General Grant had won a series of tactical victories, beginning with a successful night raid by the Union navy on April 16 that enabled the fleet to steam up the Mississippi River past Vicksburg’s thirty-one guns. Grant stopped all the useless digging and canal building and set his army loose against the Confederates. On May 1 his troops crushed the small force holding the town of Port Gibson, thirty miles south of Vicksburg. Suddenly it was as though the wind was at their backs. The Federal army raced toward Vicksburg, fighting four battles in seventeen days, swatting aside the Confederates’ resistance. General Sherman razed most of Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, on May 14, in a fiery portent of what was to come in 1864.
Grant’s success frightened Richmond, but there was no agreement on how he should be stopped. Longstreet thought they should provoke a battle against the Union Army of the Cumberland, which was stationed in Tennessee. This, he argued, would