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When this dispatch was handed to me at the tent, and I read it aloud,General Jackson turned his face away and said, “ General Lee is very kind,but he should give the praise to God .”
The long day was passed with bright hopes for the wounded general, withtidings of success on the battle-field, with sad news of losses, and messagesto and from other wounded officers brought to the same infirmary.
On Monday the general was carried in an ambulance, by way of Spotsybvania Court House, to most comfortable lodging at Chandler’s, near Guinea ’sStation, on the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac, railroad. And here?against our hopes, notwithstanding the skill and care of wise and watchfulsurgeons, attended day and night by wife and friends, amid the prayers andtears of all the Southern land, thinking not of himself, but of the cause heloved, and for the troops who had followed him so well and given him sogreat a name, our chief sank, day by day, with symptoms of pneumonia andsome pains of pleurisy, until, at 3 :15 P. M. on the quiet of the Sabbath after-noon, May 10th, 1863, he raised himself from his bod, saying, “ No, no, let uspass over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees”; and,falling agaiuto his pillow, he passed away, “ over the river, where, in a land where war-fare is not known or feared, he rests forever ‘under the trees.’”
His shattered arm was buried in the family burying-ground of the Ellwoodplace—Major J. H. Lacy’s—near his last battle-field.
His body rests, as ho himself asked, “ in Lexington, in the Valley of W'ginia.” The spot where he was so fatally wounded in the shades of theWilderness is marked by a large quartz rock, placed there by the carehis chaplain and friend, the Rev. Dr. B. F. Lacy, and the latter’s brother?Major Lacy.
Others must tell the story of Confederate victory at Chancellorsville. ^has been mine only, as in the movement of that time, so with my pen no^?to follow my general himself. Great, the world believes him to have been 111many elements of generalship; he was greatest and noblest in that hegood, and, without a selfish thought, gave his talent and his life to a causethat, as before the God he so devoutly served, he deemed right and just.
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