From Battlefields to Gardens: The Hidden Tenderness of Stonewall Jackson

May 2, 1863

On this day, the illustrious Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson was shot by his own men in what this author can only describe as a moment of supreme military irony.

The Confederate general, who could command battalions with unwavering precision, found himself unable to convince his own soldiers he wasn't the enemy. How dreadfully inconvenient.

Gentle readers, before we delve into this tragic tale of mistaken identity, permit me to reveal something deliciously unexpected about our stern military commander. Would you believe that beneath that stoic exterior beat the heart of an enthusiastic gardener? Indeed, just before our current conflict erupted, Jackson developed what one might call a passionate affair with horticulture.

His life reads like a Greek tragedy penned by someone with a particularly vindictive quill. By seventeen, nearly all his immediate family had been claimed by death's greedy hands – father and sister lost to typhoid when he was but two years old, mother departed when he was seven. His first wife died after delivering his stillborn son. His first daughter with his second wife, Anna, succumbed within a month of birth.

After such relentless personal devastation and a lifetime battling both mental and physical afflictions, is it any wonder Jackson sought solace among growing things? The garden became his sanctuary, a place where life flourished under his command rather than perished.

Jackson, ever the man of principle, once scrawled in a schoolbook, "A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds." How perfectly fitting that he would later turn to botanist Robert Buist's "The Family Kitchen Gardener: Containing Plain and Accurate Descriptions of All the Different Species and Varieties of Culinary Vegetables" as his horticultural bible. One imagines him studying its pages with the same intensity he reserved for military strategies, leaving precise marginal notations as he campaigned through its guidance.

The Washington Post reveals that beside entries for tomatoes, asparagus, watermelon, spinach, and turnips, our methodical general simply wrote "plant." No flourishes, no sentimentality – just a command to be executed with military precision.

Yet when it came to his beloved wife Anna, Jackson's stern facade melted away like morning frost. In his meticulously ordered garden (would we expect anything less?), he cultivated flowers specifically for her pleasure. While she recovered in New York, his letters revealed a tenderness that would shock those who knew only his battlefield persona.

Imagine the fearsome Stonewall Jackson penning these words:

"I was mistaken about [our] large garden fruit being peaches... It turns out to be apricots and I enclose one which I found on the ground today... just think, my little Dove has a tree full of them."

One almost blushes at such intimacy! And yet there is more:

"Our potatoes are coming up and I shall send you a sample of a leaf. . . . [our] garden has been thirsting for water until last evening."

And most charmingly:

"I watered [our] flowers this morning, and hoed another row of turnips, and expect to hill some celery this evening."

That autumn, duty called our reluctant gardener away as the governor requested his assistance in maintaining order in Virginia. The seeds of war had been sown, and Jackson could no longer tend merely to his own plot.

Four years later – on this very day – Jackson and his men were returning from an attack when Confederate soldiers mistook them for Union forces and opened fire. Our general had ironically once suggested, "I recommend that we should strip ourselves perfectly naked," to avoid such friendly fire. Alas, fully uniformed, he received two bullets in his left arm, necessitating amputation at the nearby Wilderness tavern.

His chaplain, Beverly Tucker Lacy, so moved by this grievous injury, personally carried Jackson's severed arm across the fields to his brother's family home, Ellwood. There, behind the herb garden (how fitting!), lay a family cemetery where the arm was interred. Today, among Ellwood's many Civil War dead, only one grave bears a marker: "Stonewall" Jackson's left arm. A peculiar honor, indeed.

As Jackson struggled to recover, General Lee lamented that while Stonewall may have "lost his left arm, I have lost my right." Eight days after being shot, complications from pneumonia claimed Jackson at the young age of 39. His poetic final words – "Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of trees" – suggest that perhaps, at the end, his thoughts returned to those peaceful moments in his garden, where life flourished under his careful tending rather than withered under the harsh sun of war.