recluse. Moderately tall, with large hands and feet,
stiff in his movements, ungainly in the saddle, he was a mere nobody
in public estimation when the war broke out. A few brother-officers
had seen his consummate skill and bravery as a subaltern in Mexico;
and still fewer close acquaintances had seen his sterling qualities
at Lexington, where, for ten years, he had been a professor at
the Virginia Military Institute. But these few were the only ones
who were not surprised when this recluse of peace suddenly became
a very thunderbolt of war--Puritan in soul, Cavalier in daring:
a Cromwell come to life again.

Harper's Ferry was a strategic point in northern Virginia. It was
the gate to the Shenandoah Valley as well as the point where the
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad crossed the Potomac some sixty miles
northwest of Washington. Harper's Ferry was known by name to North
and South through John Brown's raid two years before. It was now
coveted by Virginia for its Arsenal as well as for its command of
road, rail, and water routes. The plan to raid it was arranged at
Richmond on the sixteenth of April. But when the raiders reached
it on the eighteenth they found it abandoned and its Arsenal in
flames. The machine shops, however, were saved, as well as the
metal parts of twenty thousand stand of arms. Then the Virginia
militiamen and volunteers streamed in, to the number of over four
thousand. They were a mere conglomeration of semi-independent units,
mostly composed of raw recruits under officers who themselves knew
next to nothing. As usual with such fledgling troops there was no
end to the fuss and feathers among the members of the busybody
staffs, who were numerous enough to manage an army but clumsy enough
to spoil a platoon. It was said, and not without good reason, that
there was as much gold lace at Harper's Ferry, when the sun was
shining, as at a grand review in Paris.

Into this gaudy assemblage rode Thomas Jonathan Jackson, mounted
on Little Sorrel, a horse as unpretentious as himself, and dressed
in his faded old blue professor's uniform without one gleam of
gold. He had only two staff officers, both dressed as plainly as
himself. He was not a major-general, nor even a brigadier; just a
colonel. He held no trumpeting reviews. He made no flowery speeches.
He didn't even swear. The armed mob at Harper's Ferry felt that
they would lose caste on Sunday afternoons under a commandant like
this. Their feelings were sti