Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 3.djvu/95

Rh on, and being unwilling to attack superior numbers in a town so defensible as Martinsburg, with its numerous stone and brick buildings, he ordered his troops back to Winchester, much to their disappointment, as they were all eager to fight. Johnston's effective force at that time was not quite 9,000 men of all arms.

In a letter to General Cooper, from Darkesville, July 4, 1861, transmitting the reports of Colonel Jackson and Lieutenant-Colonel Stuart, General Johnston wrote: "Each of these two officers has, since the commencement of hostilities, been exercising the command corresponding to the next grade above the commission he holds, and proved himself fully competent to such command. I therefore respectfully recommend that Colonel Jackson be promoted without delay to the grade of brigadier-general, and Lieutenant-Colonel Stuart to that of colonel."

Capt. W. N. Pendleton wrote, concerning the affair at Falling Waters, that the enemy praised the Confederate artillery firing. Pendleton says his orders for aiming the gun were: "Steady, now; aim at the horses' knees," which he considered the first important lesson for making efficient artillerists.

Stuart's exploit at Falling Waters, which introduced this young Scotch-Irish Virginia cavalryman as a wily strategist and bold fighter, furnishes a good opportunity for telling how he got into the Virginia army and more about this exploit, as told by his biographer, Maj. H. B. McClellan.

In March, 1861, Lieut. J. E. B. Stuart obtained a two months' leave of absence from his regiment, the First United States cavalry, then at Fort Lyon, Kan., a portion of which he spent with his family in St. Louis. After three weeks of anxious waiting on Virginia's action, he returned to Fort Riley, where he learned that Virginia had adopted an ordinance of secession. As his leave had not yet expired, he promptly removed his family to St. Louis, and himself took steamboat for Memphis, forwarding from Cairo, to the United States war department, his resignation as an officer in the United States army, at about the same time that he received notice that he had been promoted to a captaincy in his regiment. He reached Wytheville, Va., the nearest railway station to his old home in Patrick county, on the 7th of May, the very day his resignation was accepted by the United