| TRAVELOGUE, PT.8: Fredericksburg was a nightmare: Jamba Juices and Bed, Baths and Beyonds fighting for roadside mall space with Waffle Houses. Droves of automobiles coagulated in narrow roads and made just getting from a coffee house to the Interstate and war of attrition. It took me a moment to realize that Fredericksburg is a suburb of Washington DC, which is an hour north without traffic. I drove to Chancellorsville and found the spot were Stonewall Jackson was shot and fatally wounded. The noise from the adjacent highway made an attempt at contemplation an exercise in futility. Jackson was a fundamentalist nutcase, an eccentric and only somewhat reliable. (He once fell asleep under an apple tree when he was supposed to take part in one of Robert E. Lee's multi-faceted attacks.) But when he was on, he was a house a-fire. Perhaps because he considered himself an "instrument of God," he was absolutely fearless, and this boldness often came at the sacrifice of large casualty counts within his ranks. Dying just meant that his men were nearer to God, which Stonewall considered not only good, but also desirable, spiritually speaking... All of which meant he got results, and Robert E. Lee considered Stonewall absolutely indispensable in the field of battle... Anyway: What the roadside plaque doesn't say is that two different stretcher-bearers dropped Stonewall on his injured right arm. While rushing the General to a field hospital, one man was shot in both arms (of which, both were amputated) and let go. Later, another stretcher-bearer tripped over a corpse. Stonewall Jackson's wounds were relatively docile until he was loaded onto the stretcher... these repeated traumas ratcheted up the blood loss, weakening Jackson and making him susceptible to pneumonia. Being dropped twice from his stretcher is what some experts say doomed him to his final rest under of the shade of the trees. After the amputation of Jackson's traumatized limb, Robert E. Lee remarked that, "He has lost his left arm and I have lost my right." |