150 years ago this week, the hopes of the Confederacy died beneath the light of the moon.<\/p>\n
And just when things seemed brightest.\u00a0 At the Battle of Chancellorsville in northern VA, Robert E. Lee achieved one of the most noteworthy victories in American military history.\u00a0 He had been outmaneuvered by the northern army led by \u201cFighting Joe\u201d Hooker.\u00a0 But at the critical moment, Fighting Joe lost his nerve and adopted a defensive position in a thick forest.\u00a0 Lee took the initiative and \u2013 breaking a cardinal military rule \u2013 split his forces in the face of Hooker\u2019s larger army.\u00a0 Lee sent Stonewall Jackson and his famed \u201cfoot cavalry\u201d on a rapid march around the enemy\u2019s flank.\u00a0 It was done silently and worked perfectly, and Hooker was taken completely by surprise.\u00a0 Suddenly, as if out of a nightmare, the terrifying rebel yell echoed out of the trees to Hooker\u2019s right, and thousands of confederate soldiers came crashing through the trees.<\/p>\n
In an instant, the entire right flank of the union army disintegrated.\u00a0 The rest of the northern forces, caught between Jackson to their right and Lee now attacking from their front, ran for their lives.\u00a0 The southerners surged forward while the northerners tried to regain their discipline. \u00a0The two armies became jumbled and confused in the thick forest, the noise and the smoke.\u00a0 Pandemonium ensued. \u00a0Disorganized fighting went on for hours, and only halted when darkness fell.\u00a0 The south had won a massive victory, but Stonewall Jackson wanted more.\u00a0 He rode forward on a night reconnaissance to see if he could press the issue further.\u00a0 While returning back to his own lines \u2013 coming from the direction of the northern forces \u2013 he was mistaken for a union officer.\u00a0 His own men opened fire.\u00a0 Stonewall was hit by three bullets, two in the left arm and one in the right hand. \u00a0He was taken to the surgeon, who amputated his shattered arm.\u00a0 Stonewall survived the operation, but he soon developed pneumonia, and 8 days later he was dead.<\/p>\n
This week there was a final coda to this legendary story.\u00a0 In the latest issue of Sky and Telescope Magazine, two astronomers have published the results of their research into the death of Stonewall at Chancellorsville. Using sophisticated software, they calculated the moon’s lunar phase and position, and plotted the exact locations of Stonewall and the 18th<\/sup> North Carolina regiment that fired on him, at the fateful moment of 9PM on May 2, 1863.\u00a0 They cross-referenced these positions with battle maps created by military historians, almanacs from the Virginia Historical Society, and eyewitness accounts of the shooting.\u00a0 Given these inputs, they have concluded that, from the perspective of the southern soldiers, Stonewall Jackson had a bright moon shining behind him, and would have appeared as a menacing silhouette riding at them through the trees.\u00a0 They had no choice but to open fire, and only once they had brought Stonewall down would they have learned to their horror what they had done.<\/p>\n Thus a rising moon crowned Lee\u2019s greatest victory with the South\u2019s greatest loss.\u00a0 Two months later, Stonewall\u2019s absence would be profoundly felt when the South suffered a fatal defeat at Gettysburg.\u00a0 The confederacy would sense that their cause was waning, and would be left to ponder the dying words of Stonewall Jackson:<\/p>\n \u201cLet us cross over the river and rest beneath the shade of the trees.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"150 years ago this week, the hopes of the Confederacy died beneath the light of the moon. And just when things seemed brightest.\u00a0 At the Battle of Chancellorsville in northern VA, Robert E. Lee achieved one of the most noteworthy victories in American military history.\u00a0 He had been outmaneuvered by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1582,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[228,259,281,431,492,1042,1175,1271],"class_list":["post-591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-8","tag-chancellorsville","tag-civil-war","tag-confederacy","tag-fighting-joe-hooker","tag-gettysburg","tag-robert-e-lee","tag-stonewall-jackson","tag-union"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/stonewall.jpg?fit=206%2C245&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1583,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions\/1583"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}