ent in his plans and movements, in a country the pride of his heart, with his every faculty bent in intense strain upon baffling and beating the enemy, the trials of his early life, his dismal experience at West Point, his habits of self control, perfected under the almost fanatical discipline of years, and above all his genius as a combatant, all bounded to the surface to lead him in this his time of trial. His winter expedition to Bath and Romney, the apparent uselessness of the suffering to which his little army was exposed, and his singular and unusual conduct brought again to the front the suspicion which had always been felt while he was at Lexington, as to the entire soundness of his mind. As he rode quietly and serenely along the battle line at Manassas his men saw the warrior and forgot the eccentric man, but suffering in the blasts of winter, discontent at the failure to accomplish anything and the usual readiness of civilian soldiers to find fault, revived the old stories of his unaccountable singularity. The Loring episode was undoubtedly precipitated by the belief that Jackson's brilliancy at Manassas had been dimmed by the emptiness of his winter campaign, and that the ante-bellum peculiarities of the curious man were leading to his downfall.
How narrow the escape from immortality. One cannot but speculate upon the consequences an acceptance of his resignation would have brought to him, and to the Confederate cause. No Confederate officer feels disparaged when he hears it said that no man the South could have so effectually neutralized the 70,000 men commanded by McDowell, Banks, Fremont, Shields and Milroy as did General Jackson. Colonel Henderson views the great achievements of the spring of 1862 in the Valley of Virginia and the mountains of the west of the Valley, as if, looking upon a map of McClellan's battlefield, he had located this host as his strong right wing. And so it was, taking the simultaneous advance of the Federal army into Virginia as one grand mass movement extending from the Alleghanies on the west to the James River on the south and east. The true conception of the work of Jackson is thus to consider what he did. His army barely averaged 20,000 men of all arms during his Valley Campaign, and yet boldness, swiftness of movement, firmness in battle and supreme untiring energy held in check
