Audio
Jackson Death Site Audio Tour, #4, Smith Marker
Transcript
Located in front of you is a granite marker placed here by a former member of Thomas Jackson’s staff in 1903 to mark the site where Jackson died. As the nation began the work of reuniting at the war’s end, Americans wrote about the conflict and emphasized what they considered to be the most important aspects of the war. This marker is an example of how former Confederates chose to remember the war.
The first efforts to memorialize Jackson’s wounding and death took place as early as 1876 when former Confederates placed a large boulder at the site of his wounding. Local residents pushed for a formal monument to be placed at the wounding site after U.S. veterans placed a monument to U.S. General John Sedgwick on the Spotsylvania Court House Battlefield. The placement of the Jackson Monument in 1888 coincided with efforts to memorialize the Confederacy as a whole. These efforts led to the creation of an ideology known as the Lost Cause. After the war, former Confederates sought to redeem their history by crafting a false narrative of the war. They romanticized the pre-war South, denied the role of slavery in the secession movement, and emphasized the superiority of Confederate soldiers.
Former Confederates writing after the war popularized the idea that after Jackson’s death, the Confederacy entered a period of never-ending decline. They placed great importance on the Battle of Chancellorsville, which they deemed Lee’s “greatest victory.” The Confederate Army’s tactical victory at Chancellorsville was followed by a major defeat at Gettysburg. Many writers argued that if Jackson had lived, the Confederate Army would not have faced defeat at Gettysburg or at the end of the war. One of Jackson’s many biographers, William Chase, wrote that after his death, “the Confederacy was in an eclipse from which it never passed.” In reality, the Confederacy was already in a state of decline before the Battle of Chancellorsville. There were also other Confederate armies besides Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in motion. Rather than embrace these truths, former Confederates used Jackson’s death as an excuse for defeat, overlooking the two years of war that followed.
Writers of the Lost Cause had an easy time memorializing Jackson because of the lack of criticism he received after his death. Since Jackson was not present for the defeats that followed his death, no blame could be placed on his shoulders. Biographer George Henderson wrote in 1898 that during his time as a Confederate general, Jackson “never committed a single error.” Another writer, John Esten Cooke, admitted in 1866 that Jackson’s merits were “exaggerated” by former Confederates, including himself. Writers were also able to speculate about Jackson’s views on slavery because he wrote little about his life. While Jackson enslaved seven people during his life, former Confederates portrayed him as a blameless supporter of racial equality and muddied facts about the people he enslaved, including Jim Lewis, to build Jackson’s credibility as a Confederate hero and to obscure the role of slavery as the war’s root cause.
As former Confederates fabricated Jackson’s memory in writing, Fairfield Plantation fell into disrepair. The instability and destruction brought by war made recovery difficult. During Edgar McKenney’s ownership, he reduced the property’s size to 172 acres after going bankrupt. The property traded hands three additional times between 1884 and 1909. Property owners continued to sell off land over time, and the house and outbuildings fell into disrepair. While former slave plantations like Fairfield faded from prominence, the community of Guinea Station experienced a period of rapid growth at the turn of the century. The Richmond, Fredericksburg, & Potomac Railroad rebuilt Guinea Station, and new factories and businesses opened.
Around the same time that the community of Guinea Station grew, former Confederates finally took on the task of preserving the office building where Thomas Jackson died. By 1900, his role as a Confederate martyr had been solidified. That same year, the Virginia General Assembly chartered the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Association. A group of former Confederates created the organization with the sole purpose of purchasing the building where Jackson died. They hoped that it would serve as a “perpetual memorial” to Jackson. Two of the founding members were Hunter McGuire and James Power Smith, a former member of Jackson’s staff. At the time, the property was owned by another Confederate veteran, George Robert Collins, who rented out the property to a Black family. The family lived in the office building, while the main house was used as a storehouse. The Evening Star, a newspaper in Winchester, Virginia, applauded the group’s effort to save the site from what the writer deemed “ruin’s ravages,” an unfair judgement made against the property’s Black tenants. In the late 1800s, White preservationists frequently took issue with the presence of Black people at sites associated with White historical figures.
The Stonewall Jackson Memorial Association never realized their dream to purchase the building. Despite this major setback, James Power Smith continued in his mission to memorialize the Confederacy. In 1903, Smith oversaw the placement of this marker, which reads: “Stonewall Jackson, Died May 10, 1863. Buried Lexington, VA.” It was originally located at the base of the hill in view of the railroad tracks; park staff moved the marker to its present location during the 1960s for easier access. Not long after the marker’s placement in 1903, the president of the RF&P, William White, became interested in the site of Jackson’s death. White had actively supported the Confederacy during the war and served in the Confederate army. In 1909, White purchased the 5-acre tract of land on which the office building sat. Around that time, White oversaw the demolition of the house and outbuildings, except for the office building. Two years later, White sold the property to the RF&P.
When William White died in 1920, his successor, Eppa Hunton, Jr., the son of a Confederate general, carried on the task of preserving the building where Jackson died. He coordinated with a committee of women formed within the railroad company, some of whom were members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, to carry out a rehabilitation project on the office building. The group also gathered historic artifacts related to Stonewall Jackson, including the bed in which he died. After two years of work, the RF&P opened the building to the public in 1928 as a “shrine” to Jackson. Hunton coordinated the opening with the dedication of the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park that same year. In commemoration of its opening, the Charlotte Chronicle in North Carolina reported that the site would become “the Mecca of Southern pilgrimage.”
In 1937, the RF&P Railroad Company donated the property to Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park. National Park Service officials named the site the “Jackson Shrine.” At the opening ceremony, the acting U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Charles West, gave a speech in which he promised the federal government’s “sacred trust” in promoting Jackson’s “valor and character.” The Jackson Shrine came into the National Park Service during a time when the federal government prioritized reconciliationist memories of the Civil War that focused on the shared valor of soldiers on both sides rather than the actual causes of the war. For decades, park rangers working at the Jackson Shrine focused solely on Jackson’s death, overlooking the broader story of this place. Former NPS historian, Ralph Happel, wrote that in the Fairfield office, which he referred to as “that old house,” both the Confederacy and “a way of life” died with Jackson. By calling the office a house, Happel removed the building from its original setting. His usage of the phrase “way of life” sought to romanticize life on a plantation and ignore the horrors of slavery. With ideas like these placed at the forefront of the park’s interpretive goals, visitors to the Jackson Shrine encountered a one-sided version of the past.
Today, the National Park Service aims to represent this site in a more holistic way. In 2019, in the wake of public critique of its administration of the site, the National Park Service renamed the site the “Jackson Death Site.” In making this change, the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park embraced a new goal: to discuss all of the important events that took place here over time and recognize its role in perpetuating Lost Cause mythologies in the past. While the physical remnants of the many people who came through this place are gone, their stories remain. These stories teach us important lessons about our shared history and how what we choose to remember can change what we think about the past.
Description
In the years after the war, Jackson's death became central to the Lost Cause, an ideology created by former Confederates that argued the Civil War was not fought over the issue of slavery. At this final stop on the Jackson Death Site Audio Tour, think about what it means to remember the past. How does the way we chose to represent history impact our understanding of the present?
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