it
promised. One or two observers claimed that he was ambitious, but these
were chiefly laughed at. To the brigade at large he seemed prosaic,
tedious, and strict enough, performing all duties with the exactitude,
monotony, and expression of a clock, keeping all plans with the secrecy
of the sepulchre, rarely sleeping, rising at dawn, and requiring his
staff to do likewise, praying at all seasons, and demanding an implicity
of obedience which might have been in order with some great and glorious
captain, some idolized Napoleon, but which seemed hardly the due of the
late professor of natural philosophy and artillery tactics at the
Virginia Military Institute. True it was that at Harper's Ferry, where,
as Colonel T. J. Jackson, he had commanded until Johnston's arrival, he
had begun to bring order out of chaos and to weave from a high-spirited
rabble of Volunteers a web that the world was to acknowledge remarkable;
true, too, that on the second of July, in the small affair with
Patterson at Falling Waters, he had seemed to the critics in the ranks
not altogether unimposing. He emerged from Falling Waters
Brigadier-General T. J. Jackson, and his men, though with some mental
reservations, began to call him "Old Jack." The epithet implied
approval, but approval hugely qualified. They might have said--in fact,
they did say--that every fool knew that a crazy man could fight!

The Army of the Shenandoah was a civilian army, a high-spirited,
slightly organized, more or less undisciplined, totally inexperienced in
war, impatient and youthful body of men, with the lesson yet to learn
that the shortest distance between two points is sometimes a curve. In
its eyes Patterson at Bunker Hill was exclusively the blot upon the
escutcheon, and the whole game of war consisted in somehow doing away
with that blot. There was great chafing at the inaction. It was hot,
argumentative July weather; the encampment to the north of Winchester in
the Valley of Virginia hummed with the comments of the strategists in
the ranks. Patterson should have been attacked after Falling Waters.
What if he was entrenched behind stone walls at Martinsburg? Patterson
should have been attacked upon the fifteenth at Bunker Hill. What if he
has fifteen thousand men?--what if he has _twenty_ thousand?--What if
McDowell is preparing to cross the Potomac? And now, on the seventeenth,
Patterson is at Charlestown, creeping eastward, evidently going to
surround the Army