The Civil War produced more than a thousand generals. Most of them survived the war and died of ordinary causes — heart failure, stroke, infection, old age. But the ones who died in uniform, or as a direct result of what the war did to them, left a strange and varied record.
Confederate generals were more than twice as likely to die of battle wounds as Union generals — about 19 percent against about 8 percent. That was not a matter of courage. It was what happened when officers rode forward in a smaller army that could not replace them.
The first general killed in the war did not live to see First Bull Run become a memory. Robert S. Garnett was shot in the back on July 13, 1861, in the mountains of western Virginia. Union soldiers sent his body home.
Albert Sidney Johnston was the man Jefferson Davis trusted most in the early West. He had fought for the United States, for the Republic of Texas, for the United States again, and then for the Confederacy. At Shiloh on April 6, 1862, he rode the front the way his generation of officers was taught to ride it — close enough to see a line buckle.
A bullet opened the popliteal artery behind his right knee. He stayed mounted. The boot filled with blood. No one tied a tourniquet in time. He died on the field at 59. No higher-ranking American officer has been killed in battle since.
Thomas Jonathan Jackson was the opposite kind of legend and the same kind of corpse. He held a ridge at First Bull Run, ran the 1862 Shenandoah campaign, and at Chancellorsville took a whole wing of Lee's army around the Union right. On the night of May 2, 1863, his own pickets fired on him in the dark.
The volley smashed his left arm. Surgeons took it. Pneumonia killed him eight days later at Guinea Station. He was 39. The famous last words about crossing the river were written into memory because the army needed a holy ending. The medical fact is simpler: friendly fire opened him, and infection finished him.
James Birdseye McPherson was the Union's answer to that kind of loss. He was first in his West Point class of 1853, an engineer by training, and the officer Grant and Sherman both wanted to keep alive. By 1864 he commanded the Army of the Tennessee in the move on Atlanta.
On July 22, he rode between his own corps to close a gap after John Bell Hood attacked. A Confederate skirmish line rose in woods he thought were still his. The shot hit him in the back. He was 35. He is the only Union army commander killed in action while leading his army.
John Sedgwick died for a different reason. At Spotsylvania on May 9, 1864, he was placing artillery under long-range Confederate fire. Soldiers were ducking. Sedgwick told them the enemy could not hit an elephant at that distance. A bullet struck his left cheek and killed him where he stood. He was 50.
Four Union corps commanders in the Army of the Potomac died in the saddle or beside the guns: Jesse Reno at South Mountain, Joseph Mansfield at Antietam, John Reynolds at Gettysburg, and Sedgwick at Spotsylvania. Sedgwick's death was the war saying that old habit out loud and then ending it.
J.E.B. Stuart made the opposite habit look like art until it killed him. He was Virginia cavalry, West Point, plumed hat, the ride around McClellan's army. In May 1864, Philip Sheridan took Union cavalry toward Richmond to make Stuart come to him. They met at Yellow Tavern on May 11.
Stuart was shot in the side. He died the next day in Richmond at 31. Cavalry generals in that war died because they sat a horse within pistol and carbine range of men who had learned to aim.
Patrick Cleburne was an Irish immigrant, a British Army veteran, and an Arkansas lawyer who became the best division commander in the Army of Tennessee. In early 1864 he proposed arming enslaved men and putting them in the ranks. The idea was buried.
On November 30, 1864, at Franklin, John Bell Hood sent his army across open ground against fortified Union works. Cleburne went in with his division. He was killed in the assault at 36. He did not die because he was careless. He died because a worse general still outranked him.
John Buford chose the first ground at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, and held it long enough for John Reynolds to come up. He did not die on Seminary Ridge. He died of typhoid in Washington on December 16, 1863. He was 37. Among ordinary soldiers, disease killed about twice as many men as battle. Among generals, the ratio flipped. Buford is the exception that keeps the script honest.
William Nelson did not die in any of those ways. He was a Kentucky-born Navy officer turned Union major general. On September 29, 1862, in the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, he quarreled with Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis, an Indiana officer he had insulted. Davis left, borrowed a pistol from a man in the lobby, came back, and shot Nelson in the chest.
Nelson lived long enough to ask for baptism. He died within the hour. Davis was arrested and never tried. The Union needed officers more than it needed a courtroom.
Earl Van Dorn was a Mississippi West Pointer, handsome, reckless, a man who looked like the war's idea of a cavalier. He lost badly at Pea Ridge and Corinth, then wrecked Grant's supply base at Holly Springs in December 1862. On May 7, 1863, at Spring Hill, Tennessee, Dr. George Peters walked in while Van Dorn sat at a desk writing a pass.
Peters believed Van Dorn had taken his wife. He shot Van Dorn in the head. There was no battle. There was no court that mattered. Peters went free.
John Bell Hood survived every kind of battlefield damage that killed the men above him, then died of a mosquito. Gettysburg wrecked the use of an arm. Chickamauga took a leg. In 1864 he took the Army of Tennessee and spent it at Atlanta, Franklin, and Nashville until there was almost no army left.
After the war he went into business in New Orleans, married, and fathered a house full of children. In 1879, yellow fever moved through the city. It killed Hood, his wife, and one of the children. He was 48. The war had already taken the limb. Peace took the rest.
Robert E. Lee is the death people think they already know, which means they usually have it wrong. He did not die on a ridge. He did not die of a last wound. On September 28, 1870, at home in Lexington, he suffered a stroke that wrecked his speech. Pneumonia took him on the morning of October 12, 1870. He was 63.
Ulysses S. Grant is the matching death on the other side of that table. In 1884, throat cancer announced itself. He wrote his memoirs at Mount McGregor so his family would not inherit the debt. He finished the work. He died on July 23, 1885, at 63 — the same age as Lee. The cigars are part of the folk version. The carcinoma is the medical one.
Joseph E. Johnston died of courtesy. When Sherman died of pneumonia in New York on February 14, 1891, Johnston stood as a pallbearer in the cold rain and would not put his hat on. Someone told him to cover his head. Johnston said that if their places were reversed, Sherman would not put his hat on either.
The rain did the rest. Johnston caught a cold that became pneumonia and died on March 21, 1891, at 84.
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was not a regular. He was a Bowdoin professor of rhetoric who went into the 20th Maine and became the war's most reusable citizen soldier. Little Round Top on July 2, 1863, is the scene that made him. The more important scene for this script is Petersburg, June 1864.
A bullet went through his pelvis and bladder. Surgeons thought he was dying. Congress promoted him on that assumption. He refused the assumption and lived. The wound never closed into a clean past. It leaked, infected, and defined the next 50 years of his body.
On February 24, 1914, it finally killed him. He was 85. The minie ball outlived the country that fired it.
Aaron Dagot enlisted as a private in 1861 and ended the century as a Civil War general. He died in a house in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, on May 14, 1938, at 100 years old. Appomattox was 73 years behind him. He had lived long enough to hear radio, watch airplanes, and read that another European war was coming.
Between Garnett's grave and Dagot's bed, the men who ran the armies did not die one way. They died of bullets, of their own pickets, of hotel pistols, of typhoid, of yellow fever, of stroke, of throat cancer, of pneumonia caught at an enemy's funeral, and of a wound that refused to close for 50 years.
The ones who mattered left the stage. Most of the thousand men who wore stars did not die in 1865. They died later of heart, stroke, kidneys, infection, wrecks, and age. Adelbert Ames, a substantive Union general at Gettysburg and Fort Fisher, lasted until April 13, 1933, in Florida at 97. Felix Robertson, the last Confederate general still walking, died in Waco in 1928.
The hook is the distance between July 1861 and May 1938. The story is what filled the distance. Not one glorious ending, but a set of endings so different they barely belong to the same war.