rson fell; and that
Cheatham's, at Spring Hill, during his northward pursuit of Thomas, lost
him another. Yet Hooker, Hardee, and Cheatham were men to whom personal
fear was a meaningless phrase. Stonewall Jackson was personally no
braver than they; it was his bravery of the higher sort that set him as
a general so incomparably above them. The same high quality belonged to
Grant and Sherman, and to Washington and Greene in the Revolutionary War.

It was in this supreme kind of boldness that Robert Lee pre-eminently
excelled. Cautious always, he still took risks and responsibilities
which common generals would not have dared to take; and when he had
assumed these, his mighty will forbade him to sink under the load. The
braying of bitter critics, the obloquy of men who should have supported
him, the shots from behind, dismayed him no more than did Burnside's
cannon at Fredericksburg. On he pressed, stout as a Titan, relentless as
fate. What time bravest hearts failed at victory's delay, this
Dreadnaught rose to his best, and furnished courage for the whole
Confederacy.

Lee's campaigns and battles "exhibit the triumph of profound
intelligence, of calculation, and of well-employed force over numbers
and disunited counsels."

Lee always manoeuvred; he never merely "pitched in." As he right-flanked
McClellan, so both at Manassas and at Chantilly he right-flanked
Pope,--all three times using for the work Jackson, the tireless and the
terrible. At Second Bull Run, to show that he was no slave to one form
of strategy, he muffled up Pope's left instead of his right, here using
Longstreet. His tactics were as masterful as his strategy. At Second
Bull Run, fearfully hammered by the noble Fifth Corps, that had fought
like so many tigers at Gaines's Mill and Malvern Hill, even Stonewall
Jackson cried to Lee for aid. Aid came, but not in men. Longstreet's
cannon, cunningly planted to enfilade the Fifth Corps' front, shattered
the Federals' attacking column and placed Stonewall at his ease.

Considering everything, his paucity of men and means, the necessity
always upon him of reckoning with political as well as with military
situations, and his success in holding even Grant at bay so long, Lee's
masterful campaigns of 1862, 1863, 1864, and 1865 not only constitute
him the foremost military virtuoso of his own land, but write his name
high on the scroll of the greatest captains of history, beside those of
Gustavus Adolphus, Willia