se, ringed with mulberry trees, made the
headquarters of Joseph E. Johnston, commanding the forces of the
Confederacy--an experienced, able, and wary soldier, engaged just now,
with eleven thousand men, in watching Patterson with fifteen thousand on
the one hand, and McDowell with thirty-five thousand on the other, and
in listening attentively for a voice from Beauregard with twenty
thousand at Manassas. It was the middle of July, 1861.

First Brigade headquarters was a tree--an especially big tree--a little
removed from the others. Beneath it stood a kitchen chair and a wooden
table, requisitioned from the nearest cabin and scrupulously paid for.
At one side was an extremely small tent, but Brigadier-General T. J.
Jackson rarely occupied it. He sat beneath the tree, upon the kitchen
chair, his feet, in enormous cavalry boots, planted precisely before
him, his hands rigid at his sides. Here he transacted the business of
each day, and here, when it was over, he sat facing the North. An
awkward, inarticulate, and peculiar man, with strange notions about his
health and other matters, there was about him no breath of grace,
romance, or pomp of war. He was ungenial, ungainly, with large hands and
feet, with poor eyesight and a stiff address. There did not lack spruce
and handsome youths in his command who were vexed to the soul by the
idea of being led to battle by such a figure. The facts that he had
fought very bravely in Mexico, and that he had for the enemy a cold and
formidable hatred were for him; most other things against him. He
drilled his troops seven hours a day. His discipline was of the
sternest, his censure a thing to make the boldest officer blench. A
blunder, a slight negligence, any disobedience of orders--down came
reprimand, suspension, arrest, with an iron certitude, a relentlessness
quite like Nature's. Apparently he was without imagination. He had but
little sense of humour, and no understanding of a joke. He drank water
and sucked lemons for dyspepsia, and fancied that the use of pepper had
caused a weakness in his left leg. He rode a raw-boned nag named Little
Sorrel, he carried his sabre in the oddest fashion, and said "oblike"
instead of "oblique." He found his greatest pleasure in going to the
Presbyterian Church twice on Sundays and to prayer meetings through the
week. Now and then there was a gleam in his eye that promised something,
but the battles had not begun, and his soldiers hardly knew what