At the Stonewall Jackson Shrine

NEIL SCHMITZ At the Stonewall Jackson Shrine IHAVE just come out of the small frame office building where Jackson died, 10 May 1863, giving this Confederate sentence to world literature: "Let us cross over the fiver and rest under the shade of the trees."1 I thought the place would have some power, some presence. It does not. Inside I walked on the original floor, regarded furniture, looked at Jackson's gray uniform, hung, displayed. Here is the deathbed, an antique double-rope trellis bed, acorn posts at the corners. Seven days Jackson lay in it, doctors treating him, his closest aides hovering, his wife, Mary Anna Morrison Jackson, soon at his side, his petsonal servant, Jim Lewis, providing towels and bandages, removing bowls and bottles. Seven days Jackson lay in this bed suffering the terrible wound, the loss of his left arm at the shoulder, getting better early on, articulate in conversation, poetic in his laconic phrasing, at times imagining his return to the battlefield. On the fourth day, relapse, something like pneumonia, a fatal illness. On the seventh day his wife gently breaks it to him that he will die before sunset. "Doctor," said Jackson, "Anna informs me that you have told her I am going to die today. Is it so?" (SJ 751). On the seventh day, in this bed, Jackson is at the river giving his final order. It is now the coldest emptiest bed you could imagine, its coverlet tight, no particle ofJackson's being present, no sense ofthat final oracular sentence remaining. Ranger historians, in brown and olive uniforms, are federal officers. Nothing they say, in whatever accent, encourages emotion. Outside I stand blinking in the sun, dumbly looking at the severe landscaping, its sparse, weird shrubbery. The flagpole in the parking lot is noisy. A large federal American flag is flapping in the brisk May wind, the halyard rattling against the pole. The Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park presents four major Civil War battlefields: Fredericksburg (1862), ChanArizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 2, Summer 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1 6 10 Neil Schmitz cellorsville (1863), Wilderness (1864), and Spotsylvania Court House (1864). At Chancellorsville the Army of Northern Virginia, brilliantly deployed by General Robert E. Lee and General Thomas Jonathan Jackson, nearly destroyed General Joseph Hooker's larger and better equipped Army of the Potomac. Here the Confederacy almost had its breakthrough military victory, its dictation of peace terms, its recognized independence. Jackson falls at Chancellorsville, struck down by Confederate musketry, a fusillade, this in the early evening of his greatest day. The Chancellorsville sites (Salem Church, Lee-Jackson Bivouac, Chancellorsville Inn, etc.) should offer respectful visitors a certain ground for good Confederate feeling, if indeed that is possible. Here, perhaps, some parts and pieces of a Confederate sublime might be found, might still be expressive. I am at the Stonewall Jackson Shrine, still so designated on the National Park Service map. Depression poor Virginians deeded the building and its relics to the National Park Service in 1937. The National Park Service, for its good reason, continues to call the building and site the Stonewall Jackson Shrine. It expects map users to understand that a major federal agency does not itself enshrine Stonewall Jackson. The weird shrubbery outside, the factual exhibition inside, rigorously desublimate. Of course the Shrine is a museum , one that reduces Confederate meaning and value to dead issues and dead things, that puts Jackson's last sentence, as it were, under the irony of the federal flag in the patking lot. The Stonewall Jackson Shrine is a cold site in the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. It might well be the coldest Confederate shrine in federal custody. At the Chancellorsville Battlefield Visitor Center I stood in the fragrant woods where soldiers of the Eighteenth North Carolina infantry regiment accidentally shot Jackson, 2 May, at 9:30 in the evening. He was coming from a staff meeting where he had urged his field commanders to press the attack. Hooker was not to retreat across the Rappahannock Rivef. Jackson wanted General A. P. Hill to seize the United States ford, entrench, be bristling, formidable, as...