At last the order came after night to advance.  In a semi-circle we swept through the thicket; turning, we came into the road, and over it into the opening in front.  The enemy was pushed back into the breastworks on the bluff at the river.  These breastworks had been built by our troops during the Fredericksburg battle, and afterwards to guard and protect Raccoon and Ely’s fords, just in rear.  As night was upon us, and the enemy huddled before us at the ford, we were halted and lay on the field all night.  This was the ending of the battle of Chancellorsville.

Next morning the sun was perfectly hidden by a heavy fog, so much so that one could not see a man twenty yards distant.  Skirmishers were thrown out and our advance made to the river, but nothing was found on this side of the river but the wounded and the discarded rifles and munitions of war.  The wounded lay in all directions, calling for help and heaping curses upon their friends, who had abandoned them in their distress.  Guns, tent flies, and cartridge boxes were packed up by the wagon loads.  Hooker’s Army was thoroughly beaten, disheartened, and disorganized.  Met and defeated at every turn and move, they were only too glad to place themselves across the river and under the protection of their siege guns on Stafford’s Heights.  Hooker’s losses were never correctly given, but roughly computed at twenty-five thousand, while those of Lee’s were ten thousand two hundred and eighty-one.  But the Confederates counted it a dear victory in the loss of the intrepid but silent Stonewall Jackson.  There was a magic in his name that gave enthusiasm and confidence to the whole army.  To the enemy his name was a terror and himself an apparition.  He had frightened and beaten Banks out of the Shennandoah Valley, had routed Fremont, and so entangled and out-generaled Seigle that he was glad to put the Potomac between himself and this silent, mysterious, and indefatigable chieftain, who oftened prayed before battle and fought with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other.  He came like a whirlwind upon the flank of McClellan at Mechanicsville, and began those series of battles and victories that terminated with the “Little Giant” being hemmed in at Drury’s Bluff and Malvern Hill.  While Pope, the “Braggart,” was sweeping the fields before him in Northern Virginia, and whose boast was he “saw only the enemy’s back,” and his “headquarters were in the saddle,” Jackson appeared before him like a lion in his path.  He swings around Pope’s right, over the mountains, back through Thoroughfare Gap; he sweeps through the country like a comet through space, and falls on Pope’s rear on the plains of Manassas, and sent him flying across the Potomac like McDowell was beaten two years before.  While pursuing the enemy across the river and into Maryland, he turns suddenly, recrosses the river, and stands before Harper’s Ferry, and captures that stronghold with scarcely a struggle.  All this was enough to give him the sobriquet of the “Silent Man,” the man of “mystery,” and it is not too much to say that Jackson to the South was worth ten thousand soldiers, while the terror of his name wrought consternation in the ranks of the enemy.