The Veneration of Limbs
Why an amputated arm is the ultimate symbol of the Lost Cause
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The Veneration of Limbs
One Sunday I went to visit the arm of Stonewall Jackson. The appendage of the Confederate general is buried beneath Virginia soil and marked by a stout stone monument with the words “Arm of Stonewall Jackson” and “May 3, 1863.” That is the date the arm left the body of the man many believe could have turned the war in the South’s favor had he survived the friendly fire that struck him in a nearby tangle of skeletal trees and bramble known as the Wilderness. The amputation was conducted in a medical tent in a fog of gunsmoke and chloroform, and when he awoke the next morning Jackson said the bonesaw had made “the most delightful music.” By then his extraordinary limb had been saved from a pile of ordinary ones by his military chaplain and spirited less than a mile away, as the carrion crow flies, to a family cemetery at Ellwood Manor, a plantation occupied by the chaplain’s brother. A small hole was dug. The arm was secured in a metal box (some say an ammunition canister) and covered with earth. 7 days later, Jackson was dead. 156 years later, his arm remains.
Were it not for the fact that dozens of enslaved people lived, worked, resisted, loved, struggled, and died here, and thousands more Americans fought and fell in these forests and fields, one might call this place peaceful. Before my visit I wondered if I would sense ghosts. If ever that were to happen, it would be here. This ground is more bloodsoaked than any other in North America, with 85,000 men wounded and 15,000 killed in the battles of Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania, and the Wilderness. I’d seen Sally Mann’s photographs of Civil War battlefields, including Chancellorsville, made in the early 2000s, more than a century after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Chemical imperfections and intrusions of dust and hair summon spectral impressions from her collodion negatives, a technology pioneered by Civil War documentarians like Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner. Every frame looks like twilight, when spirits are known to appear. But on the day I drove from Richmond to Ellwood the sun was bright. It was unseasonably warm. There were no specters. Just a few buzzards tracing tippy flight paths over the corn fields and a red-bellied woodpecker darting along the oak colonnade that frames the dirt road to the plantation house, tall and charmless. From there it is a short walk to the stand of trees that shades the monument, haloed by a low wooden fence.
To the naked eye, the monument to Stonewall Jackson’s arm is another roadside oddity. But when we recognize Jackson as a quasi-religious figure, it begins to shed its shock value and reveal the way humans use sacred relics to extend their reach beyond the present, in this case, to grasp a past defined by a sense of national dismemberment. The monument is, in its humble way, the ultimate fetish object to conjure and understand the Lost Cause, a term that describes attempts to mythologize the Confederacy and deprioritize slavery’s role in secession. As busts, monuments, flags, and other artifacts of the Lost Cause disappear, I was drawn to this quiet corner of Virginia to explore how these myths were made, and measure just how deeply they’re buried below the surface.
Generations of iconography and hagiography turned Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson into a secular Southern saint. To be clear, I do not conflate sainthood with saintliness, and anyone who does ought to read about Saint Thomas More’s persecution of William Tyndale and his followers, Saint Junípero Serra’s brutalization of American Indians, or Saint Olga’s subjugation of the Drevlians. Before the war, Jackson owned six enslaved people: George, Cyrus, Hetty, Amy, Albert, and Emma. During the war, he inspired countless men to take up arms against their country to sustain and spread the institution of slavery. As in many wars, they were mostly young and poor, with everything to lose and little to gain in victory.
Among a Confederate pantheon that includes Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and J.E.B. Stuart, Jackson’s place in historic imagination is unique, with a uniquely mystical tint. The simple white structure at Fairfield plantation where Jackson died was, until 2019, referred to in National Park signage and literature as the “Stonewall Jackson Shrine.” Depictions of the Confederate warlord, particularly his final meeting with Lee on the eve of Jackson’s death, became common fixtures in white Southern homes in the decades after the war, like icons or laminated likenesses of religious leaders seen on household walls around the world. Jackson was deified in statuary across the Southern states, including the bronze equestrian monument by Frederick William Sievers that patrolled Richmond for just shy of a century before its dismantling in 2020. And like a martial Bamiyan Buddha, Jackson was even chiseled 42 feet deep and 90 feet high into the cliffside at Stone Mountain, Georgia alongside Lee and Davis — the trinity of Confederate leadership. In life, Jackson was a strict Presbyterian, a denomination that regards all Christians as saints but elevates no saint above another, and abstains from relic-worship. In death, the man became a martyr, and his arm a relic.
Except for Judaism and Hinduism, every major religion employs, or has employed, bodily relics in devotional practice. I first encountered them in 2013 at Great Lavra, a monastery on Mount Athos, the semi-autonomous republic within Greece that is the spiritual epicenter of the Eastern Orthodox church. The 20 monasteries encircling its namesake mountain possess a horde of relics, part of the place’s draw for pilgrims. At Lavra alone you can kiss the skulls of saints including Basil the Great, John Koukouzelis, Michael Bishop of Synnadon, and Neilos the Myrrh-streamer, along with a portion of the skull of Mercurios the Martyr. (I assume these are heavy hitters, but can’t be sure.) I watched in awe as a monk plucked from a reliquary a series of cranial fragments polished by devoting lips and hands over centuries, setting them upon a heavy oak table to the awe of the assembled faithful. (I recorded this experience in my essay “A Jew on the Holy Mountain.”) In Judaism, corpses and anything related to them are associated with ritual impurity, part of our strict system of hygiene. Relics derived from physical bodies therefore never took root in our rituals. But on Athos and in the wider Christian world, I’ve seen my share of skeletons in religious spaces. One of my earliest encounters with mortality was a visit to a church crypt on the Greek island of Chios. Stacked to the ceiling were thousands of skulls, some children, some crushed, some bearing incisions where the yataghan swords of Ottoman troops struck. These were the victims of the island’s infamous massacre, a defining tragedy in the Greek War of Independence recorded in the 1824 painting by Delacroix now in the Louvre.
Christianity is hardly the only faith fixated on holy bones. After Gautama Buddha’s death, his remains were divided eight ways, each enshrined in a stupa marking the farthest reach of his teachings. In both Sunni and Shia Islam, particularly during the classical and medieval periods in the Near East and North Africa, saintly relics were common. Tribal and animist religions are replete with the use of bones in rites and rituals. And while Marxism was nominally atheist, it assumed the role of a state religion in the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and elsewhere. Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong were both embalmed and put on display in vast, public mausolea. This is all to say, at least since the hero cults of ancient Greece, we have sought to mediate contact with the divine through human remains, particularly those left behind by men and women of consequence.
What is it about Jackson’s character, career, and death that rendered his arm worthy of memorialization, if not worship? The answer has three layers. The first layer (the crust) includes the idiosyncrasies that lend a certain fallibility to a distant and unknowable figure. The hypochondriac who thought a single grain of pepper could make his leg stop working. The victim of indigestion, for which he sucked lemons around the clock, believing they offered relief. The subject of catatonic exhaustions caused by the pressures of his post, who napped through most of the Seven Days Battles around Richmond. The peacetime failure (like Grant) who was a tedious instructor of artillery and physics at the Virginia Military Institute loathed by the same students he later led into battle. And the slave owner who openly defied Virginia law to organize a Sunday School where enslaved people were taught to read scripture — a paternalistic attempt to “civilize” those he felt needed saving. These quirks, indexed ad nauseum by historians, help situate his odd memorial at Ellwood in a string of oddities stretching back before the war. The second layer of Jackson’s legend (the mantle) includes his wartime exploits. His sturdy defense at the Battle of First Manassas, when he earned his famous nom de guerre for standing “like a stone wall” in the face of a Union assault. The lightning campaign in the Shenandoah Valley he coordinated against 52,000 blues with 17,000 grays, whom he marched 646 miles over 48 days, five engagements, and many more skirmishes, losing up to 57 percent of his men on some stretches to illness, exhaustion, hunger, and desertion. His victories at Cedar Mountain and Second Manassas. This is the stuff of military academy curriculum. The third and deepest layer (the core) includes his death and its impact — both real and perceived. It is the most obscure, and, I believe, the most instructive ingredient in a myth personified in a disembodied arm.
When Jackson rode into the sparsely populated region of dense woodland and open farmland surrounding The Chancellor House inn in 1863, he was a celebrity in the saddle, commanding an army of underfed and overzealous troops and lieutenants who clung to his every command. It was in this landscape, on the afternoon of May 2nd, that Jackson led his army on a bold flanking maneuver to defeat a force twice its size, achieving what may be the South’s most decisive victory of the war. With the Union army in retreat by dusk, Jackson and his aides galloped ahead of the Confederate lines to survey the enemy and decide whether to press in pursuit. Night was falling and visibility with it when a picket line of North Carolina soldiers mistakenly fired on the entourage, thinking them Union cavalry. Jackson was struck in the hand and shoulder, severing an artery. Four of his fellow riders died instantly. He was carried off the field under heavy fire and brought to the aid station at Wilderness Tavern, where the amputation took place. Lee despaired: “I have lost my right arm. I’m bleeding at the heart.” Jackson was brought to the plantation office at Fairfield, where pneumonia soon set in, and on Sunday the 10th of May, he died. His final words were: “Let us cross over the river and rest beneath the shade of the trees.” The body was returned to his family in Lexington. I do not know if trees shade his bodily grave, but his arm is shielded from glare by the copse at Ellwood. In 1903, one of the general’s staff officers installed a granite marker at the site.
I have often wondered what became of the North Carolinians whose wild fire impacted the direction of the war, and in turn, their breakaway country’s bid for independence. Did they survive to live with the knowledge of their world-historical mistake? Or were they spared this, perishing along with 258,000 of their Southern compatriots?
Lee lived to 63, long enough to discourage his countrymen from memorializing the Confederacy. “I think it wiser,” he wrote, “not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.” Davis, on the other hand, spent his remaining years trying to justify secession in thousands of pages of legal exegesis. Jackson, for his part, was stopped by a volley of bullets at the peak of his most resounding triumph. His arm is glory in amber, a window of opportunity eternally open, a moment before the defeat at Gettysburg and the disgrace at Appomattox. Before Reconstruction. Before integration and the extension of voting rights to all Americans. The dream of victory that seemed within reach that balmy May day in 1863, was, of course, the nightmare of four million others — the 13% of the U.S. population for whom Confederate success meant indefinite servitude and unimaginable suffering.
Hypothesizing what might have been is a tempting sport for historians. If the Byzantines broke the siege at Constantinople. If Ferdinand was spared Princip’s bullet. If Byron didn’t die at Messolonghi. If France opted not to intervene in our Revolution. Something about the Civil War is especially ripe for this type of counterfactual conjecture. Union general George B. McClellan’s early miscalculations of Confederate strength, and his resulting reluctance to send his army into action (to the exasperation of Lincoln), is one example. Joseph E. Johnston’s wounding at Seven Pines is another. The consequences of Stuart’s late arrival at Gettysburg were mined in depth by none other than Winston Churchill in his fascinating essay “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” published in a 1931 collection titled If It Had Happened Otherwise, which includes such gems as “If Napoleon Had Escaped to America" and “If the Moors in Spain Had Won.” But of all of the decisive episodes of the war, none is more prone to what-ifs and might-have-beens than Jackson’s wounding and death at Chancellorsville. Of course, this type of speculation is good sport, but a lost cause in itself: we can never know.
Within the South, news of Jackson’s death forced the Confederacy to face its vulnerability, and was met with dread. Church bells tolled. A vast funeral procession snaked through Richmond. 20,000 mourners paid tribute at his casket, lying in state at the Virginia Capitol. Within his army, the loss of Jackson spawned a religious revival, something akin to a Confederate Ghost Dance, described by one of Jackson’s foot cavalry, John H. Worsham, in his memoirs: “The converts were so numerous that they were numbered not by tens and hundreds, but by thousands.” Faced with the mortality of their movement, the Confederacy came to resemble a death cult, fueled by what I see as a sense of national thanatos — the Freudian death instinct — that characterizes many unlikely causes. Palestinian nationalists and both parties of The Troubles, for example, actively encourage, or encouraged, cults of martyrdom. By the martyr’s logic, it is better to fall in battle than live to taste defeat. This is the essence of the Lost Cause: an attempt to resolve the dissonance between the Confederacy’s faith in its exceptionalism, and the fact of its failure. Jackson’s arm is wrapped tightly in this psychology.
As I drove back from Ellwood along the route the wounded general’s ambulance took from Wilderness Tavern to Fairfield, it dawned on me that this memento mori is not solely a Southern phenomenon. It is, in fact, rooted in an experience that transcends cultural, political, and even racial boundaries: amputation. The Civil War’s unprecedented carnage was the result of a lethal misalignment of military technology already presaging World War I’s weapons of mass death, and tactics that still recalled those of the Revolution. Coupled with poor sanitary conditions and a simplistic understanding of anatomy, even minor wounds could easily become infected, making amputation necessary and ubiquitous. Walt Whitman, who nursed wounded soldiers of both armies in Fredericksburg and Washington, bore witness, depicting a young soldier struggling to accept the loss of his arm in “The Wound Dresser.”
From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,
I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,
Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv’d neck and side falling head,
His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump,
And has not yet look’d on it.
Paradoxically, the partition of limb from body united not only North and South, but also, according to some, black and white. Writing in The Atlantic in 2012, Adam Arenson offered this observation: “The man on the street with a missing arm or leg was accorded respect. The veteran saluting with a crutch under one arm became a key symbol of national sacrifice, and the commonalities between white and black veterans' experiences in the North helped pave the way for the equal-rights commitments of the postwar Amendments.”
Amputation is a fitting symbol for our Civil War, which bisected our union and even families. When something comes apart, it becomes grotesque, unfinished and unstable, a Frankenstein yearning for a return to form. Jackson and his arm were forever separated between Lexington and Ellwood, but the North and South reunited, albeit not always harmoniously. The Civil War is a phantom limb in American memory, one that tingles every time a politician raises the specter of armed conflict among neighbors, or a protestor raises the Confederate battle flag, as we saw during the attack on January 6th, 2021. An estimated 230 Confederate symbols have been removed, relocated, or renamed since George Floyd’s death in 2020, their ability to intimidate and perpetuate the Lost Cause neutered. But symbols are like relics. Without interpretation, they are powerless, meaningless clusters of atoms. Deconstructing the myths that shape their interpretation is another, more difficult thing altogether. So for now, their presence lingers, in the empty space they once displaced.
Sources and further reading
Relic — Encyclopedia Britannica
Confederates in the Attic — Tony Horowitz
The Civil War — Shelby Foote
The Curious Fate of Stonewall Jackson’s Arm — Ramona Martinez (NPR)
Confederates — Richard Tillinghast (The New Criterion)
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