Gods and Generals - Jeff Shaara [252]
— BENEDICTION GIVEN BY FATHER HUBERT, OF HAYS’S
LOUISIANA BRIGADE, AT THE UNVEILING OF THE JACKSON
MONUMENT IN NEW ORLEANS, 1881
Mary Anna Morrison Jackson
She is the widow now of the South’s most beloved hero, and readily accepts the responsibility of that role. From the first memorial services in 1863, throughout the rest of her life, she represents her husband’s memory at ceremonies, presentations, statues, and monuments for Jackson and for the Confederacy. Her daughter Julia survives only to age twenty-six, dies of typhoid fever, leaving a husband and two children. Anna retires finally to North Carolina, and never considers remarrying. While covering her invited visit to President Taft in Washington, D.C., in 1910, a Washington newspaper reported:
Those who had the great honor of meeting Mrs. Jackson found her a fragile little woman with keen bright eyes, and the alert air which characterizes those whose interest in life and its best endeavors is undimmed by sorrow or the passing years. Time seems to have passed over her lightly. Having known her worst grief when life was young, she had been enabled to take up the thread again and to weave some brightness into what was left. She delights in recalling old days and she speaks now with calmness which comes only from Christian resignation.
She dies in March 1915 of heart disease and is buried beside her husband and her two children beneath the Jackson Memorial in Lexington, Virginia. (Jackson’s first wife, Ellie, and her stillborn infant are buried nearby.) One of Anna’s funeral party is the Reverend James Power Smith, the final surviving member of Jackson’s staff.
Mary Randolph Custis Lee
She outlives her husband, maintains a home in Lexington, Virginia. The great mass of the memorabilia of George Washington had been confiscated by the Union occupiers of Arlington, is stored after the war in Washington. She petitions the government for the return of her family’s cherished heirlooms, but Congress still regards Lee as the enemy, and refuses. Widowed by her husband’s death in 1870, she yearns for one last visit to the old homestead of Arlington, and even as an invalid, makes the difficult journey with her youngest son, Robert, Jr. In 1872, returning to Lexington, she is with her daughter Agnes when Agnes is stricken ill and dies. Mary Lee thus outlives not only her husband, but two of her daughters (Annie had died in 1862). Her grief at this irony is overwhelming, and Mary dies soon after, in November 1873.
Almira Russell Hancock
Left nearly penniless after Hancock’s death in 1886, she receives an outpouring of generosity from his many friends of influence, and is provided several homes, finally settles in New York City, where she writes her own memoirs of her remembrances of Hancock’s life and career.
Hamilton Fish, an old friend, and the Secretary of State to President Ulysses Grant, wrote of her that “she was always so bright, so gay, so full of sunshine.” Known always as a woman who stood close beside her husband throughout his extraordinary career, she is considered the shining ideal of the Soldier’s Wife. Thus, when she dies in 1893, it is a strange and unexplained contradiction that she is buried not beside her husband, but in the Russell family plot in St. Louis.
Frances “Fannie” Adams Chamberlain
Her marriage is never without great stress. At the conclusion of the war, she receives her husband’s return from the army with much graciousness, but his subsequent political career, and thus frequent absences from their home, take a serious toll. Withdrawing often into long depressions, she even confides to her closest friends of the unthinkable possibility of divorce. She is eventually stricken with blindness and failing health, but their marriage endures until her death in 1905.
Those Who Wore Gray
Major General Daniel Harvey Hill
Jackson’s brother-in-law serves in the defense of Richmond while the battle rages in Gettysburg. Promoted