Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 3.djvu/97

Rh from Mississippi, if they could be armed, and that he had numerous tenders of troops from Georgia, but he had to answer all that he had no arms to spare them.

The lower valley of the Shenandoah (the northeastern part of Virginia's unfailing storehouse for supplying Confederate armies) furnished Johnston an abundant supply of provisions and forage, which the people, staunchly loyal, were willing to sell to his quartermasters and commissaries on credit, so he had no need for subsistence supplies from Richmond, except rations of coffee and sugar. He wrote that under the management of Maj. G. W. T. Kearsley, his chief commissary, the valley could have abundantly supplied an army four times as large as his. The great difficulty was to procure ammunition, as but little had been imported and the partially organized Confederate ordnance department had neither time nor means to prepare the half that was needed. The small supply brought from Harper's Ferry was increased by some from Richmond and by sending officers elsewhere to collect caps as well as cartridges.

On the 15th of July, Stuart reported that Patterson's army had advanced from Martinsburg to Bunker Hill, where it remained the next day; but on the 17th it moved from that village and the Winchester road, by its left, to Smithfield, a few miles on the turnpike road to Charlestown. This suggested to Johnston that the Federal commander designed to continue his movement on through Berryville, to place his army between the Confederates, at Winchester and those at Manassas Junction, to hold Johnston in the valley while McDowell was assailing Beauregard; or, perhaps, to attack Winchester from the south and turn its slight intrenchments.

After the Confederate army retired from Darkesville toward Winchester, the Thirty-third Virginia, under Col. A. C. Cummings, was added to Jackson's brigade; the Sixth North Carolina to Bee's; the Eleventh Georgia to Bartow's, the Ninth Georgia having joined that brigade soon after the troops left Winchester; and a fifth brigade was formed, for Brig.-Gen. E. Kirby Smith, of the Eighth, Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Alabama and the Nineteenth Mississippi regiments, and Stanard's Virginia battery. At that time the effective strength of the regiments in the army of the Shenandoah did not much exceed 500 men each, so many were sick with