I never meant to kill General Jackson, I swear it was an accident. At least that’s what I keep telling myself after all these years, but there were plenty of reasons to suspect I might have done it on purpose. We spent years fighting together and we rarely saw eye to eye on any decision, but we had respect for each other and none of our quarrels ever came to violence. All the same, if there had been a trial, it’s hard to say how the jury might have voted.
Colonel Jackson and I first met in Winchester when I was working as Roadmaster on the B&O railroad out of Martinsburg. I always called him Colonel because that was what he went by when we were stationed together long before the beginning of the war. I never did take to calling him Stonewall because the first time I ever heard that usage it was in a derogatory tone as if to say he should have moved to help during the battle of Bull Run but instead he stood still, like a stone wall. I still called him Colonel even after he got promoted to General but only as an inside joke and never to his face.
The oldest of all reasons for me to have any quarrel with the Colonel was when he took a fancy to my favorite girl and he ended up getting all the dances, if you catch my drift, but that was all way back before the Gold Rush. For all that, neither of us ended up with her and she was gone and married by the time the war started so that was an old wound at best and certainly not one worth killing for all those years later. I wasn’t even close to being jealous back then.
I will admit to a being a little jealous of his later success and maybe a small portion of anger when I had to leave my railroad job behind to help him and his Army of Virginia by way of acting as Aide-de-Camp in charge of transportation when I preferred to stay on back at the roundhouse but as there were no trains or tracks left anyway and I felt I could do no better than agree to his terms. But in this case as the others there was no grievance bad enough to make me purposely kill the best Officer in the Confederacy.
I will acknowledge I was angry when the Colonel came through our section of track and tore up every rail and spike so they could build new lines in the Richmond area at the beginning of the war. I got over being mad because we had enough extra material to rebuild and I accepted it as an equaling of resources, so to speak, but I could not accept it when they came through again one year later and this time they stole most of our best railroad engines. Then came the last straw when he burned down the bridge at Harper’s Ferry; twice!
It is also true that on the very night of his death at the battle of Chancellorsville I had argued with the Colonel at length not to keep fighting after dark while he insisted on rushing ahead to “…out-flank them again!” That was how we got separated in the heat of the battle and I got turned around in the darkness convinced he was behind me so the riders coming fast must be those damn Yankees and I had to protect his retreat, but instead my shot was the fatal wound for the poor Colonel. But it was all purely unintentional, circumstantial. It was an accident I swear.
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