Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 40.djvu/171

 friend in Winchester, where, by the way, on hastening to see him, I had the unexpected happiness to find my wife also, who had managed, with much difficulty, to reach there two days before. The exigencies of the times had prevented our meeting for many months previously, and our brief interview by the bedside of our wounded son was the only we had for more than a year thereafter. Truly war, under any circumstances and in any shape, is a sad disturber of domestic life. In its best aspects it is a deplorable calamity to any country. But, when it comes in that direct of forms—in the hideous guise of a fratricidal civil war—raging in the region of one's own residence, with its debasing system of social espoinage and ex parte criminations, alienating communities and separating friends, filling the hearts of families with anxieties and dread, desolating their fair fields and destroying their happy homes, even over the defenseless heads of women and children, the horrors of that calamity, to say nothing of its sanguinary features, are enhanced a hundredfold, and no people of the South experienced them in greater degree or endured them with more heroic and uncomplaining fortitude than those whose fate it was to live during the late war in the lower Valley of Virginia, within a radius of forty miles around the battle-scarred town of Winchester. Especially may this be said of those "ministering angels," the mothers and daughters of that historic valley, where the most delicately nurtured and refined ladies of the land were ever found among the foremost in all good works, and never weary in well-doing for the sick and suffering soldiers of both sections throughout the whole of that sad and sanguinary episode of our country's history.

Having lingered to the last allowable moment with the members of my family "hereinbefore mentioned"—as the legal documents would term them it—was after 10 o'clock at night when I returned to headquarters for final instructions, and before going to the general's room I ordered two whiskey toddies to be brought up after me. When they appeared, I offered one of the glasses to Jackson, but he drew back, saying: