Northern Virginia Legend and Lore
Celebrity graves draw fans from all over the world but perhaps none so strange as the grave of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s … arm.
Yes, if you take a trip to the 8,000-acre National Military Park in Fredericksburg, you can visit the final resting place of Stonewall Jackson’s left arm.
On May 2, 1863, after Stonewall succeeded in a full assault on the Union right flank, he rode through the woods with some of his men to spy on the enemy’s new position. Within the chaos of a nighttime reconnaissance mission, one of Stonewall’s confused and armed men accidentally shot him in the arm.
The next day, Stonewall’s left arm was amputated. The unofficial chaplain for Stonewall’s Second Corps, Reverend Beverley Tucker Lacy hurried to the field tent and seized the arm before it was thrown on the scrap pile of other amputated limbs outside the hospital. The reverend wrapped the arm in a blanket and rode a mile to his brother’s home of Ellwood. There, the reverend gave Stonewall’s arm a full Christian burial in the private family cemetery at Ellwood Manor.
With 85,000 wounded and 15,000 killed during the four major battles fought in the area, Stonewall was lucky to walk away missing only his arm.
Soon after, his luck ran out. Still in the Fredericksburg area, Stonewall died of pneumonia, taking his last breath in Woodford 30 miles from where his left arm lay 6 feet under. Stonewall died in a small plantation outbuilding by the train tracks. His body was promptly returned to Lexington, Virginia, and upon discovering his arm had already been buried with Christian rites, Mrs. Jackson asked that the arm stay put rather than exhuming it to be buried with the rest of her husband’s body.
Of course, that’s not the end of the story.
Forty years later, Lt. James Power Smith, a former member of Jackson’s staff now settled in the area, placed 10 granite monuments around the local battlefields, one of which marked the place of Stonewall’s arm and is the only marker in the cemetery. You can’t miss it: The marker states “Arm of Stonewall Jackson, May 3, 1863.”
But did the monument mark the actual place of Stonewall’s arm? Rumors spread for years that Union soldiers dug up the arm in 1864 and reburied it; others say it was stolen and put into storage. Such rumors were strengthened by the discovery of journal entries by a Maryland colonel stationed on the Ellwood estate. He wrote: “200 yard from here where S. Jackson dies. His arm dug up by some pioneers and reburied.”
And after World War I, while Marine Corps troops trained on the farm, the legendary Gen. Smedley Butler ordered some of his men to dig up the marker to prove the arm wasn’t there. But, as the story goes, there it was—Stonewall Jackson’s arm—which Butler promptly ordered reburied. Butler had a bronze plaque cemented onto the marker.
Whether the limb lies in the ground at Ellwood Manor or not, no one truly knows. But that doesn’t seem to bother the thousands of visitors who come to pay their respects to Stonewall Jackson’s arm every single year.