Gettysburg Foundation
Gettysburg Foundation
“He has lost his left arm, but I my right arm.”
The purported words of Robert E. Lee after learning that the wound Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson (above) had received at the Battle of Chancellorsville, which resulted in the amputation of his left arm, would be fatal.
Library of CongressThomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson
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“The country has lost one of its best soldiers, and I have lost my best friend.”
The reported remarks of Ulysses S. Grant after learning of the death of Union general James B. McPherson at the Battle of Atlanta.
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“It was the first time my brother had been on the firing line…. He was killed instantly and never spoke, but looked straight at me, with a silent understanding reflected in his eyes, and I caught him as he fell…. We had always been as twins, being so nearly the same age, and his tragic and pathetic passing from life left in my heart a burning scar which the long years, with their submerging floods of joy and sorrow, have never wiped out.”
Confederate soldier Thomas Duncan, on the death of his brother during a skirmish with Union troops in 1864, in his memoir of the war.
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“Then followed a lull in the firing and … we knew the rebels were whipped…. [T]he boys all jumped to their feet and rushed over to the firing line. It was something to see the dead and wounded. Many of the boys were crying like children, running back and forth without hats or guns and cursing the rebels for killing their comrades. The whole army seemed to be turned into a mob. I never saw such a mixup.”
Chauncey H. Cooke, 25th Wisconsin Infantry, in a letter to his father during the Atlanta Campaign, July 8, 1864.
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Civil War battlefield
Library of Congress
“[W]hen it come to telling about the way he died and how we buried him I could hardly write. I had to get away of by my self, and I am afraid she will have hard work to read it for I could not help blotting the paper some.”
Theodore Upson, 100th Indiana Infantry, describing his emotions at writing the wife of a fallen comrade to inform her about his death in battle.
Sources
James I. Robertson Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend (1997) and Soldiers Blue and Gray (1988); Recollections of Thomas D. Duncan, A Confederate Soldier (1922); A Badger Boy in Blue (2007); The United States Service Magazine Vol. 2 (1864).
