ng back venomously from White Oak Swamp and Malvern
Hill--till he had reached Harrison's Landing upon the James, where
gunboats sheltered and supply-ships fed his men.

Lee felt disappointed with the seven days' fighting in that he had not
crushed McClellan. He had, however, forced him to raise the siege of
Richmond and to retreat thirty or forty miles. The Confederacy breathed
freely again, and its gallant chieftain began to be famous.

The new leader had thus far given only hints of his fertile strategy.
McClellan's army was still but two days' march from Richmond. Its front
was perfectly fortified,--McClellan was an engineer; gunboats protected
its flanks. Lee--an engineer, too--knew that to attack McClellan there
would be too costly; yet McClellan must be removed, and this before he
could be re-enforced for an advance. His removal was accomplished.

General Pope was threatening Richmond from the North. The government
expected great things of him. In a pompous manifesto he had given out
that retreating days were over, that his headquarters were to be in the
saddle, and, that, as he swept on to Richmond, where he evidently
expected to arrive in the course of a few days, his difficulty was going
to be not to whip his enemy but to get at him in order to do so.

When Pope wrote that manifesto he knew many men, but there was one man
whom he did not yet know. It was Stonewall Jackson, the most unique and
interesting character rolled into notice by those tempestuous years,
unless Nathan Bedford Forrest is the exception. Like the great
Moslem warrior,

"Terrible he rode, alone,
With his Yemen sword for aid;
Ornament it carried none
Save the notches on its blade."

Jackson was an intensely religious man. Unlike many good soldiers he
wore his piety into camp and on to the battlefield, and would not have
hesitated to offer prayer to the God of battles where every one of his
thirty thousand men could see and hear. And all those soldiers believed
in the efficacy of their commander's prayers. Jackson was also a stern
disciplinarian. If men in any way sought to evade duty, provost-marshals
were ordered to bring them into line, if necessary at the pistol's
point. In consequence, when the day of battle came, there was not a man
in the corps who did not feel sure that if he shirked duty Stonewall
Jackson would shoot him and God Almighty would damn him. This helped to
render Jackson's thirty thousand perha