Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 40.djvu/328

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Southern Historical Society Papers.

be compelled to withdraw. But the general walked the floor of his headquarters office and said with some heat: "I will do no such thing. I wish that my wife could come to see me."

The first winter of the war Mrs. Jackson spent two or three months with the general in Winchester. And she came again for a week at Hamilton's Crossing, just before the battle of Chancellorsville, and at the last was at his bedside when he "crossed over the river" at the Chandler home at Guineas Station, May 10, 1863.

For more than fifty years she has been a widow, a patient, cheerful, Christian woman, honoring and loving the good and great man who was her husband, submissive to the will of God, faithful to every duty, having her own sickness and her own more painful sorrow, but gentle, steadfast, biding the time when she would find her appointed rest "under the shade of the trees."

It will be a pleasing and abiding memory with the people of Richmond and Virginia that last May, at our earnest solicitation, Mrs. Jackson came to join us in the honor we wished to give to the memory of General Jackson on our "Stonewall" Jackson Memorial Day. Thinking not at all of herself, but only of him, she was as gentle, unaffected and cheerful as we had always known her. More frail in body, showing the traces of her many years, she was uncomplaining, placid in countenance and peaceful in spirit. Happy in the enthusiasm of our hero worship, she was biding the time when she would enter in through the gates and find those whom by the wise and loving will of her heavenly Father she had lost awhile.

The women of the South have been teaching us that "love makes memory eternal," and with us all the loving memory of this most womanly woman, this widow so greatly widowed, this faithful and fruitful follower of Christ, will endure to the end of our days, and make the world better and our lives sweeter because she was given to us through half a century.