Gods and Generals

...it was attributable to the fall from the litter the night he was wounded. The General himself referred it [the pneumonia] to this accident...Contusion of the lung, with extravasation of blood in his chest, was probably produced by the fall referred to, and shock and loss of blood prevented any ill effects until reaction had been well established, and then inflammation ensued.

At 3:15 that Sunday afternoon, with his wife and physicians (including Anna’s brother, Samuel B. Morrison) attending him, Thomas Jonathon Jackson spoke his last words:

Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.

The brilliant military strategist, photographed by George W. Minnis one month before he died, was 38 years old. Many in the south viewed the "terrible blow" of his death as "a national calamity." Even a Union officer, calling the fallen general "a host in himself," acknowledged Jackson as "the bravest of the brave."

Anna Jackson, who returned with Julia to her father’s North Carolina home, never remarried. Until she died in 1915, she was known as "The Widow of the Confederacy."

Three years after the war, VMI Cadets gathered around Stonewall Jackson’s grave in Lexington, Virginia, as did a group of young women, likely from a local girls’ school. The place where he died has since become a shrine to his memory, and his initial burial site (in the Stonewall Jackson Cemetery) was changed.

He now rests underneath the monument erected in his honor.