Stonewall Jackson is buried in Lexington, Virginia, near the Virginia Military Institute, where he taught before the Civil War. But his arm, which he lost at Chancellorsville, where he received the wounds that killed him, is buried near that battlefield.
When Jackson's shattered arm was cut off after the battle it was thrown onto a pile of amputated limbs, as was customary, but his chaplain decided to retrieve it and he took it to the nearby farm of a relative, who buried it in the family plot. Eventually a small stone marker was erected over its final resting place.
The grave can be visited today, but it's not easy. When I toured the Chancellorsville battlefield two summers ago, with some relatives, we had to park at a gate about a mile from the cemetery and walk to the grave. My eighty year-old mom was along, and she made the trek with the rest of us, in the hot Virginia sun.
The cemetery was beautiful -- a small fenced-in plot on a knoll overlooking cornfields, shaded by old trees. There was no particular emotion associated with visiting the site. An arm is a tool. It was like visiting the grave of Stonewall Jackson's sword. It was the walk with family that was moving -- and surreal, like the Civil War itself. We Americans are going to take up arms and kill each other in great numbers, they said back then. We are going to make a pilgrimage to the grave of Stonewall Jackson's arm, we said generations later. Somehow it all made sense. I kept thinking of Jackson's famous last words:
Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.
There are some mysterious, unexplainable journeys that just have to be made.