Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 13.djvu/283

 282 Southern Historical Society Papers.

ragged uniforms, worn-out shoes, dilapidated tents, old-fashioned arms, and scanty fare. Yet this same ragged, illy-equipped army, without any new sources of supply or recruitment held on for two years longer, defeating Pope at Cedar Mountain and Second Manas- sas, driving back Burnside at Fredericksburg, routing Hooker at Chancellorsville, and, finally, when reduced to fifty-nine thousand, hurling themselves with incredible valor against a newly equipped army of one hundred and one thousand on the heights of Gettysburg. If these achievements did not require and avouch the power to bear fatigue and privation, then must we acknowledge that the Army of Northern Virginia lacked fortitude and was not equal to the Napo- leonic test already quoted. If, on the other hand, these undisputed facts are to be given their full force and significance, let us do the Great Army justice and say that they lacked nothing which is re- quisite to the true soldier : discipline, enthusiasm, love of country, courage, and fortitude under privation in the highest degree were all theirs.

Take again the career of Stonewall Jackson's command in the same summer of 1862, as an illustration of the endurance of the Army of Northern Virginia in encountering fatigue. Let us com- mence at Kernstown. At this point Jackson attacked seven thousand with twenty-seven hundred, and desired to court-martial General Garnett, who held the center, for retreating before four times his number, after his ammunition was exhausted.

Afterwards, in the next forty days, with an average force of fifteen thousand men, he amused himself (as the Prince de -Joinville ex- presses it) by baffling and in four pitched battles, defeating as many successive generals; he marched his troops four hundred miles, cap- tured thirty-five hundred prisoners of war, together with vast mili- tary stores and supplies, and kept employed against him, paralyzing in and around Washington, eighty thousand men.

In advance and retreat he double-quicked the soldiers of the Shenandoah Valley through their native villages, amid waving of handkerchiefs and salutations of wives, children, sisters, and sweet- hearts without breaking ranks.

These men were called "Jackson's foot-cavalry" because one soldier covered as much ground and bore as much fatigue as is ordi- narily demanded of a soldier and a horse. They were the Centaurs of modern warfare.

After the campaign in the Valley these same men left Mount Meridian, which is not far from Staunton, on the I7th of June, 1862,