the Eleventh Corps in its flight. All these
guns were double-shotted, and all due preparation was made for the
expected stroke. It was a moment of trembling suspense. Our heroes
waited not long, when the woods just in front of them began to swarm
with the advancing legions, who opened a fearful musketry, and charged
toward our guns. Darkness was falling; but the field where the batteries
were planted was so level that the gunners could do wonderful execution.
And this they did. The Rebel charge had just commenced when our guns
simultaneously opened with a withering fire, which cut down whole ranks
of living flesh like grass. As one line of embattled hosts melted away,
another rushed forward in its place to meet the same fate. Three
successive and desperate charges were made, one of them to within a few
yards of the guns, but each was repulsed with terrible slaughter. In
many places the dead were literally in heaps. Our resistance proved
successful.

A little later in the night, and right in front of these batteries, fell
Stonewall Jackson, mortally wounded by our scathing fire, as was at
first supposed, but more likely by the fire of his own infantry, as one
of their writers alleges. Speaking of Jackson, he says, "Such was his
ardor, at this critical moment, and his anxiety to penetrate the
movements of the enemy, doubly screened as they were by the dense forest
and gathering darkness, that he rode ahead of his skirmishers, and
exposed himself to a close and dangerous fire from the enemy's
sharpshooters, posted in the timber.

"So great was the danger which he thus ran, that one of his staff said:
'General, don't you think this is the wrong place for you?' He replied
quickly: 'The danger is all over; the enemy is routed. Go back, and tell
A. P. Hill to press right on.' Soon after giving this order General
Jackson turned, and, accompanied by his staff and escort, rode back at a
trot, on his well-known 'Old Sorrel,' toward his own men. Unhappily, in
the darkness--it was now nine or ten o'clock at night--the little body
of horsemen was mistaken for Federal cavalry charging, and the regiments
on the right and left of the road fired a sudden volley into them with
the most lamentable results. Captain Boswell, of General Jackson's
staff, chief of artillery, was wounded; and two couriers were killed.
General Jackson received one ball in his left arm, two inches below the
shoulder joint, shattering the bone and severing the chi