ttention there, and preventing them from sending
re-enforcements to the troops engaged with Stuart. At night he himself
hurried away, took the command of the troops opposed to Sedgwick,
attacked him vigorously at daybreak, and drove him with heavy loss back
across the river. The next day he marched back with his force to join in
the final attack upon the Federals; but when the troops of Stuart and
Lee moved forward they encountered no opposition. Hooker had begun to
carry his troops across the river on the night he was hurled back out of
Chancellorsville, and the rest of his troops had crossed on the two
following nights.

General Hooker issued a pompous order to his troops, after getting
across the river, to the effect that the movement had met with the
complete success he had anticipated from it; but the truth soon leaked
out. General Sedgwick's force had lost 6000 men, Hooker's own command
fully 20,000 more; but splendid as the success was, it was dearly
purchased by the Confederates at the price of the life of Stonewall
Jackson. His arm was amputated the day after the battle; he lived for a
week, and died not so much from the effect of his wound as from the
pneumonia, the result of his exposure to the heavy dew on the night
preceding his march through the Wilderness.

During the two days' fighting Vincent Wingfield had discharged his
duties upon General Stuart's staff. On the first day the work had been
slight, for General Stuart, with the cannon, remained in the rear, while
Jackson's infantry attacked and carried the Federal intrenchments. Upon
the second day, however, when Stuart assumed the command, Vincent's
duties had been onerous and dangerous in the extreme. He was constantly
carrying orders from one part of the field to the other, amid such a
shower of shot and shell that it seemed marvelous that anyone could
exist within it. To his great grief Wildfire was killed under him, but
he himself escaped without a scratch. When he came afterward to try to
describe the battle to those at home, he could give no account of it.

"To me," he said, "it was simply a chaos of noise and confusion. Of what
was going on I knew nothing. The din was appalling. The roar of the
shells, the hum of grape and canister, the whistle of bullets, the
shouts of men, formed a mighty roar that seemed to render thinking
impossible. Showers of leaves fell incessantly, great boughs of trees
were shorn away, and trees themselves sometimes ca