Groups
to re-create Stonewall Jackson's funeral procession
Darrell Laurant
Lynchburg News & Advance
May 9, 2007
Even though their association was sad
and short, the packet boat Marshall and Confederate
Gen. Stonewall Jackson have been forever linked in Southern
history.
It was the Marshall that carried Jackson’s
body on the last leg of its journey from Chancellorsville,
where he had been accidentally but fatally wounded by
his own troops, to his waiting burial plot in Lexington.
The sendoff accorded Jackson was befitting
his status as a military star, a tactician second only
to Gen. Robert E. Lee on the Confederate side. After
his funeral was held in Richmond, the casket was transported
to Lynchburg by train, then via the James River &
Kanawha Canal to his final resting place in Lexington.
“They had to take the canal,”
said Sally Schneider of the Lynchburg Historical Foundation,
which is helping to sponsor a re-creation of the events
of May 13, 1863, this weekend, “because there
was no railroad to Lexington. The line stopped in Lynchburg.”
Jackson wasn’t the only famous
general to ride aboard the Marshall - Lee was also an
occasional passenger. But it was as a floating hearse,
bearing a fallen war hero into the surrounding darkness
at a solemn four miles an hour, that the Marshall became
synonymous with the Lost Cause.
Perhaps that’s why the boat was
allowed to sit moldering in the defunct canal when it
was bypassed by new railroad lines in the 1880s.
Prior to that, it had remained for
a time in Lexington, where it was partially burned by
the Union troops of Gen. David Hunter. Back in Lynchburg,
it was repaired and returned to service, only to be
rendered obsolete when the canal was finally shut down
as a transportation route in 1880.
Eventually, the 90-foot, iron-hulled
boat wound up as the residence of Corbin Spencer and
his sister, who purchased it and hauled it up on shore.
But a nasty James River flood in 1913 tore the wooden
portion of the boat to pieces and buried the hull in
more than two feet of river mud.
Two decades later, the Marshall was
finally salvaged and hauled to Riverside Park. There
it sat, as civic efforts to raise funds to repair it
flickered and died, until 2003, when Schneider saw the
pitiful state to which “Jackson’s boat”
had descended.
“I saw it in the park and said,
goodness sakes, this is history,” Schneider recently
told the Civil War News.
Aided by the Lynchburg Parks &
Recreation Department (and the city budget, which provided
$40,000), the Foundation constructed a building around
the Marshall to keep it out of the weather.
“It can’t really be restored
as it was, ” said Schneider earlier this week.
“There’s not enough left of it. But we can
still save the hull.”
Much of the crowd that greeted Jackson’s
casket when it pulled into the Lynchburg station consisted
of injured Confederate troops being treated in local
hospitals. The train had taken a roundabout route, first
from Richmond to Gordonsville, then switching to the
Orange & Alexandria for the next leg.
According to later accounts, it arrived
in Lynchburg at around 6:30 p.m. on the evening of the
May 13, whereupon Jackson’s casket was transferred
to a horse-drawn hearse from the Duiguid Funeral Service
(still operating today) and driven the length of Main
Street from 12th to Fifth as the curious and the mournful
lined the street. Saturday’s re-enactment of the
procession will follow the same route.
“The fact that this happened
at night made for a better painting,” said New
York historical artist Mort Kunstler, who will unveil
his “Going Home” on Friday night at a dinner
to benefit the Marshall recovery effort and the Civil
War Chaplains’ Museum at Liberty University. “The
torches and the moonlight must have been very dramatic.”
The remains of the canal still exist
on the Lynchburg riverfront, as does the old Ninth Street
bridge over the manmade waterway. In the backdrop of
his painting, Kunstler also included the Amazement Square
building, which housed a dry goods company in 1863.
Doug Harvey, head of the Lynchburg
Museum System, became fascinated by Stonewall Jackson
during previous jobs at the Manassas Museum and the
Museum of the Confederacy.
“He went out a winner,”
Harvey has said. “In that sense, he was luckier
than Lee and Ewell and Longstreet and the other major
Confederate generals who wound up tasting the dregs
of defeat.”
The Stonewall Procession
FRIDAY
6:30 p.m. Unveiling of the Lynchburg
print, ‘Going Home: Stonewall Jackson Procession,
Lynchburg, Va., May 13, 1863,’ by Mort Kunstler
at the Arthur S. DeMoss Learning Center, Grand Lobby,
Liberty University.
Tickets are $55; seating is limited.
Tickets available at Dixie Outfitter, Madison Heights,
846-3006; The Framery on Memorial Avenue, 846-2844;
and Lynchburg Historical Foundation, 528-5353.
Proceeds from this event will benefit
the National Civil War Chaplains Museum and Research
Center and the Lynchburg Historical Foundation. For
more information call the foundation at 528-5353 or
visit www.lynchburghistoricalfoundation.org.
SATURDAY
10 a.m. to 4 p.m.: Mort Kunstler and
Rod Gragg print and book signing at the Depot Plaza
off Jefferson Street
11 a.m.: A reading of the City Proclamation
by Mayor Joan Foster at the Confederate Monument at
the top of Monument Terrace.
1:30 p.m.: Memorial procession for
General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, beginning
on Jefferson Street and following procession route when
Jackson’s body came through Lynchburg on the way
to Lexington on May 13, 1863. The procession will end
at the bottom of Ninth Street, where there will be a
cannon fired and a 21-gun salute.
There also will be a Civil War encampment,
children’s activities and bus tours to historic
sites. Old City Cemetery will have its Antique Rose
Festival and Historic Sandusky will sponsor a Jackson
exhibit.
SUNDAY
11 a.m.: Church service at the encampment
by the Re-enactors Mission for Jesus Christ, Riverfront
Park.
