Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

---

[380] later period of his military career, when he made his terrible wintry march in 1861-2, from Winchester to Bath and Romney, and became involved in differences with Gen. Loring, it was actually reported that he was insane. A colonel came to Richmond with the report that Jackson had gone mad; that his mania was that a familiar spirit had taken possession of a portion of his body; and that he was in the habit of walking by himself and holding audible conversations with a mysterious being.

It was about this time that Gen. Jackson came under the fitful cloud of President Davis' displeasure; and he was so much affected by the course of the Richmond authorities towards him in his affair with Loring, that, at one time, he determined to resign. The extreme sensibility of his nature, and his ardent ambition, were unmasked in the letters he wrote his wife, alluding to the then probable close of his military career, and submitting to what he supposed “the will of God” in this abrupt termination of his hopes. But it was not decreed by Providence that the Confederate cause should then lose the services of Jackson, and its chief ornament be plucked from it, and its great pillar of strength cast down through a paltry official embroilment in Richmond. By the earnest persuasions of Governor Letcher and others, Gen. Jackson was induced to withdraw his letter of resignation; and that sword which might have been dropped in an obscure quarrel was yet to carve out the most brilliant name in the war.

The fame of Jackson was first secured, and permanently erected in the popular heart, by his splendid and ever-memorable campaign in the valley of Virginia, in the spring of 1862. In that campaign, as we have seen, in the period of three weeks, he fought four battles; recovered Winchester; captured four thousand prisoners; secured several million dollars' worth of stores; chased Banks' army out of Virginia and across the Potomac, and accomplished a list of deeds that threw the splendour of sunlight over the fortunes of the Confederacy, and broke, at the critical moment, the heaviest shadows of defeat and misfortune that had so far befallen them. In the Seven Days Battles the name of Jackson again rose like a star. And yet it was to gather new effulgence, when the names of Second Manassas and the Wilderness were to be inscribed, alike on the banners of the Confederacy and the escutcheon of his own fame.

Jackson's intense religious character has naturally come in for a large share of public admiration and curiosity. To his merits as a commander, he added the virtues of an active, humble, consistent Christian, restraining profanity in his camp, welcoming army colporteurs, distributing tracts, and anxious to have every regiment in his army supplied with a chaplain. Prayer-meetings and “revivals” were common occurrences in his camp, and in these he was quite as active and conspicuous as in the storm and action of battle. It was said that he treated the itinerant preachers and