About forty yards from Reilly’s works, and nearly in front of the salient at the cotton gin, an ounce of lead, little more than half an inch in diameter and traveling about 1,000 feet per second, found its mark. It was the work of an instant; a great chasm in Southern history frozen in microseconds. In one shocking moment Patrick Cleburne collapsed to the ground, carrying with him perhaps the best hopes of a dying Confederacy’s western army…Perhaps the South’s most brilliant major general, the “Stonewall Jackson of the West,” his ideas scorned by his president and his competence punished by his commanding general, had been required to lead a suicidal frontal attack like some captain of infantry. Was it God’s decreed fate or simply man’s stupidity. — Wiley Sword