Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 3.djvu/217



N the 7th of October, 1861, in recognition of his distinguished services at the first battle of Manassas, Stonewall Jackson was commissioned major-general. On November 4th he left Manassas to take command of the Valley district, to which, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, in command of the department of Northern Virginia, had assigned him, and established his headquarters at Winchester. Although forming the left wing of Johnston's army, the main body of which was in the vicinity of Manassas Junction, Jackson's command was, in some respects, an independent one, as he had assigned to him not only the protection of the lower valley of the Shenandoah, but also the extensive Appalachian country to the northwest that drained into the Potomac, and along the northeastern border of which ran the Baltimore & Ohio railroad. It was all a region of parallel mountains and narrow valleys with which he was quite familiar, not only in consequence of his campaigning there in the earlier part of 1861, but from his knowledge of it from his boyhood days. Entering upon his command with but a small body of soldiers, no one would have forecast that he had taken possession of a field which would make both that and himself famous for all time. The enemy, through the exigencies of war, had become possessed of a large part of both the Appalachian and the Trans-Appalachian portions of Virginia, and Jackson had frequently expressed a desire to be placed in position to free that land of his nativity from the Federal invaders. To him, this assignment, even with an inferior force, appeared to open the way for the fulfillment of his cherished hopes.

First the Virginia, and then the Confederate campaigns in the mountain regions of Virginia, during the spring, summer and fall of 1861, had not only been barren of results, but in the main well-nigh disastrous. Garnett had been out-maneuvered and defeated, in the Tygart