Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson

by S.C. Gwynne

It was also overshadowed in history by another, more momentous passing almost exactly two years later: that of President Abraham Lincoln. The similarities between the two are striking, starting with their symbolism. All that wild grief was not just for the two leaders. Their deaths embraced the deaths of all soldiers on battlefields far away; their bodies became the bodies of young men who would never come home; their funerals stood in for the hundreds of thousands of funerals of dead soldiers that would never take place.19 They were vessels into which the vast, pent-up heartache of the American nation, North and South, could be poured. The great effusions of anguish and sorrow were for the war itself, for the totality of its sadness and affliction. “We were not in any sense spectators,” wrote Maggie’s stepdaughter of the crowd at the Lexington funeral, but she might have been speaking for the entire South. “We were heart-broken mourners, a clan bereft of its chieftain, a country in peril.” Drew Gilpin Faust called Lincoln’s procession “the national funeral.” In Confederate terms, Jackson’s was, too.