CAPTAIN WAYNE MARLEY'S BLOOD GREW COLD MAY 7 WHEN he heard the news that Stonewall Jackson was coming after the brigade of Robert Milroy, in which he now served, near the town of McDowell. Milroy led Fremont's push west out of Virginia through the Alleghenies to converge with other Union forces in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Marley's appreciation for the direction of Stonewall's in his spiritual rebirth had been submerged in his growing bitterness toward the Virginian and his key role in the death of Cousin Joe. The hardened horseman got a fight the next day with Stonewall's men, an all day fight. But in the end, Milroy's outnumbered force was driven from the field and Fremont's drive to Tennessee was derailed by Stonewall. Marley's fury deepened when two of his closest friends were killed by Confederate sharpshooters, and when he learned Stonewall himself had not even arrived on the field until the battle had ended.

Stonewall chased Milroy through the Alleghenies. Heading toward Franklin, a nearly palpable presence came over him. He stopped Little Sorrel and gazed around the beautiful spring foliage. He saw a stand of towering pines and a blue pool of water fronting them. Now he remembered. He and Ellie had giggled together at that same pool upon passing it during their journey to see Laura years before. They had giggled how the next time they passed the pool they would not be riding a stagecoach, and would stop for a long “swim” together in the crisp clean water. He stared at the pool.

I know Laura has gone with the Union, he thought with a twinge. I wonder how she is. And Ellie. I wonder if she is waiting for me.

Back across the Shenandoah Valley to the east, Ewell, ordered anew to stay put at Swift Run Gap, boiled over again, this time to his cavalry commander. “This man Jackson is certainly a crazy fool, an idiot. General Lee at Richmond will have little use for wagons if all these people close in around him and we are left out here in the cold. I swear, my ulcer will never survive this war or this looney General Jackson.”

Cavalry commander Tom Munford chuckled, remembering how “Tom Fool” Jackson looked dodging bricks dropped out of windows and wives’ hairpins in church. He also realized for the first time just how much he had learned about war and the military on the artillery drill ground with “Tom Fool.”

Stonewall eventually let the retreating Yankees go, and turned back into the Valley. General Richard Taylor of Louisiana, son of former U.S. president Zachary Taylor, and a graduate of Yale, joined the Virginian with his raucous Louisiana Tigers as the leader of the Army of the Valley crossed eastward again across that lush spring expanse.

The urbane and intellectual Taylor could not figure Stonewall. Mile after mile he rode next to him, clear across the Valley. Yet neither Taylor nor any of Stonewall's other commanders had any more idea where their leader proposed to take his army than did the lowliest Irish or Cajun criminal that had been conscripted into the Confederate army off a New Orleans wharf (and spread as much terror among the Southern populace as among Northern soldiery).

Such an ungraceful horseman, Taylor thought to himself as he watched Stonewall gnaw on a lemon for hours on end, mounted on a sorry chestnut with a shambling gait. Our new commander is not prepossessing.

Mid-May came and went and Stonewall, unbeknownst even to his closer advisers, prepared to lead his army east out of Harrisonburg and turn it north into the Luray Valley, the easternmost of two parallel north-south valleys comprising much of the northern half of the Shenandoah Valley and separated by the fifty-mile-long Massanutten Mountain. While Taylor and other officers fumed at Stonewall's total secrecy, Ewell, at Swift Run Gap, received a flurry of telegrams and dispatches from Johnston, Lee, and other War Department administrators in Richmond. Varying in content, they all ordered him in one direction: east. Ewell was to cross over the Blue Ridge from the Luray and head toward Gordonsville to help fend off McDowell. Subsequent communiques ordered Stonewall himself not to attack General Banks, entrenched at Strasburg, just north of the Massanutten.

Still furious himself at Stonewall's mysterious ways, Ewell nonetheless spoiled for a fight. And he had an odd intuition that “that enthusiastic fanatic” had a method to his certifiable madness. However, the orders from highers-up—highers-up across Virginia who don't understand the situation here, Ewell thought with a grimace—were crystal clear. He did not know what to do.

Most of all, he had had his fill with being treated like an old yard dog by that mystical “Ironside” Presbyterian. As he slung himself into the saddle, the old Indian fighter thought, I'll have me some answers this night or that loon will have my resignation and I'll go soldier with Loring, Taliaferro, Garnett, and all his other unfortunate victims. Despite an aide's warnings of an approaching storm, Ewell galloped cursing out of camp, taking only his Apache sidekick Friday with him, toward Stonewall at Harrisonburg as night came on Saturday, May 17.

Trouble marked Stonewall's soul as well. Late the previous evening he had read a heartfelt letter from Maggie. Drawn from a conversation of hers with her husband, who had been in Richmond, her portrait of the capital rent his heart. Certain parts of the beautiful old city had become impassable due to roving bands of criminals, some of them army deserters. Foreign speculators, swindling subtlers, and houses of ill repute, seizing the opportunity to gain at the expense of others’ suffering, with a lack of armed good men to preserve sufficient law and order, had sprung up in various sections of the city. And their tawdriness spawned additional evil. Sin begetting sin…

For the decent and upright folk, Maggie said, even the essentials of living—flour, coffee, sugar, soap, cotton for clothing—grew difficult to obtain, and when found, their prices proved exorbitant. Stonewall's heart sorrowed as she explained the paucity of any sort of medicines.

And the controversial scuttling of the South's ironclad warrior ship Virginia—which had taken on all comers in the vastly superior Federal navy and sent most to the bottom of the sea—by its own crew, had left the River James open to the enemy's fleet, up to the very wharves of Richmond! Only now were the Confederates frantically attempting to mount guns and barriers before the Yankees realized their opportunity.

McClellan and his one hundred thousand, flanked by other warships on the Chesapeake River and by heavy field guns, had stormed up the peninsula and stood at the eastern gates of the city. Lee and less than half their number stood against them. General McDowell's thirty-seven-thousand-man Fredericksburg force sat poised north of Richmond, with little more than scattered Confederate guerilla units between it and the ramparts of the city.

In the face of this terror, Maggie wrote, came the fevered removal of military stores to the southwest, the packing of Confederate government archives, and the departure south of scores of government officials and employees. It all told a signal story: Richmond would be deserted to the enemy.

At the last moment, however, she continued, the people of Richmond had risen up and demanded the State Assembly present a resolution to President Davis proclaiming their desire that he defend the city, if necessary, until one stone was not left upon another, and proposing to lay it as a sacrifice, with all its wealth, upon the country's altar.

“The people of Richmond have purposed,” Maggie went on, “that if the city cannot be successfully defended, it should only be yielded to the enemy as a barren heap of rubbish, at once the sepulchre and glorious monument, of its defenders.

“We know other Union forces under Fremont and Rosencrantz lie to our own west,” she concluded, “that could march on Lexington at any time. Most of us have determined in a like manner not to abandon our hearths and homes even if the Federals burn them down over our heads.”

Stonewall sat staring at the letter for a very long time. Maggie. Dear Maggie, a Yankee nearly your whole life. And my dear Virginia. My land. My people. Outside, thunder crashed, and rain cascaded in under the sides of his tent. The water drenched his trousers as he knelt for the next three hours before his heavenly Father, in much weeping and with many tears, confessing and asking forgiveness, begging mercy for himself and his people, and beseeching the Almighty's wisdom and direction on what to do.

So was he postured when Ewell shoved Jim and a white guard to the side and flung open the tent flap, the torment and chagrin of his long ride having brought his angry soul to a boil.

Ewell's mouth flew open and the first profane words were halfway up his throat when he realized that his commanding general, in pitch dark and three inches of water, illuminated to Ewell only by the fulguration of lightning, was not dispensing orders to aides in his quick firm voice, but was imploring the mercy and intervention of Almighty God.

Ewell stood, dumb, thunder crashing and the storm raging harder. Jim and the guard backed away and found cover.

As water poured down Ewell's large bald pate, a single realization came home to him. If that is religion, I must have it.

He turned and walked away, Stonewall never aware of his presence. Jim approached Ewell. “I just don't understand that man,” the general muttered.

“Well, sir,” Jim said with a smile, “General Jackson, he pray a lot. But when he go to spending a whole lot of a night praying, then I know something big's fixing to happen.”

Dabney's soul-searching sermon the next morning, drawn from Jesus’ text “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” led to several men trusting Christ as their Savior, and numerous other “backsliders” voicing sorrow and repentance over recent wickedness, and turning back to Christ. And it buoyed Stonewall. He needed it when he heard Ewell's news.

“But I have telegraphed General Lee, clarifying our opportunity,” Stonewall said, the color rising on his high forehead. “He is still officially President Davis's military advisor, and I am requesting him to preempt the no-fight orders with Banks. Since I am your commanding major general, surely you can remain in the Valley at least until we hear back from General Lee.”

A muscle in Ewell's jaw twitched and he shifted from one booted foot to the other.

“I'm sorry, General,” he said finally, “that could bring the wrath of Hades down not just on you and me, but on Lee. And that's one man I would never do that to.”

“Then Providence denies me the privilege of striking a decisive blow for my country,” Stonewall said. The picture of Maggie and her houseful of children and servants suffering without the comforts of medicines and basic food items filled his mind's eye and his head drooped. “I must be satisfied with the humble task of hiding my little army about these mountains, to watch a superior force.”

So soft were the last words that Ewell could not hear them. Then, seeing Stonewall for once, evidently, defeated and vulnerable, and sensing the justness of the man's convictions—convictions shared by Ewell—his heart swelled and he blurted out, in spite of himself, “Sir, sign me an order commanding me to stay with you until Bobby Lee gets us back an answer. I bet he'll side with us. He's forgotten more about soldiering than that whole band of fools in Richmond will ever know.”

Slowly, Stonewall's head rose. When he again faced Ewell, that general saw for the first time the eyes that had given rise to another of Stonewall's sobriquets: “Old Blue Light.”

If Stonewall's own commanders had been in the dark regarding his plans, Banks and the remaining Yankees in the Valley had not even a clue as to his location. Rumors flew from one Union camp to another, placing Stonewall everywhere from western Virginia to the Tidewater peninsula. But the old college professor knew all about the Federals’ disposition. He knew that Shields had himself “flown from the department” to join McDowell between the Blue Ridge and Washington at Manassas. He knew that Banks's forces no longer boasted their formidable numerical advantage. Following the military philosophy espoused by Clausewitz, the Virginian largely ignored the other players on the field and drew a bead on what he felt to be the decisive point—the first decisive point.

Ashby and his Rangers proved so effective at screening the movements of the Valley army as it moved north toward Stonewall's target of Front Royal that the Yankees did not know of their presence until the Confederates had virtually arrived at the town. Then, helped by the “scouting” report of comely eighteen-year-old Belle Boyd, a childhood friend of Douglas's, Stonewall unleashed his men on the outnumbered Federals and routed them.

After this, he turned toward Strasburg, ten miles west, and Banks. That Union general could so little believe that Stonewall would actually bring the Valley army to his doorstep that he barely left Strasburg in time to avoid being captured himself. As it was, Stonewall's cavalry barreled into Banks's mammoth, miles-long supply wagon train five miles out of Strasburg at Middletown. They cut it in half. Banks and most of his infantry got away to the north to Winchester, but some infantry, the cavalry, artillery, and most of the wagons were caught in Stonewall's vice grip. They fought for a while, then lit out in a hundred different directions. Hundreds were killed and hundreds more taken prisoner. And the Confederate haul of guns, ammunition, medical supplies, food, and other equipment proved staggering.

Willy had fought and marched for two solid days with nothing to eat or drink besides water. Finally, that evening, he obtained the reward of gorging on the bounty of abandoned Union wagons. Cake and pickled lobsters, piccolomini and candy, canned peaches and cheese, pickled crab, honeyed ham, coffee, and condensed milk. He consumed until he could barely walk, anticipating the order to bed down for the night to come at any moment.

Willy's continuing intestinal disorders disallowed him from enjoying the banquet for longer than it took him to ingest it, then discharge it right back out again. He had lost twenty pounds in six months, from a lean and taut frame. At least the bloody discharges seemed to have receded into intermittent episodes.

When the order came to close ranks and march for Winchester after Banks and what was left of his command, the boy nearly dissolved into tears. No one part of him hurt. A horrible all-consuming (he could not even classify it as pain) suffering possessed his body.

His own colonel, Samuel Fulkerson, pleaded with Stonewall to let the men rest, both to ease their suffering and to enable them to fight well at Winchester.

Stonewall answered quickly, his face firm, but his tone gentle, “Colonel, I do not believe you can feel more for your men than I do. This is very hard on them, but by this night march I hope to save many valuable lives. I want to get possession of the hills of Winchester before daylight.”

Stonewall could not pray on his knees in his tent, so he applied himself silently and wholly to communion with his God as he rode through the dark, praying for the grace to ignore his hurting back, buttocks, and legs.

As You restrained and diminished Israel's enemies in preparation for the time of David and Solomon so that they could be enabled opportunity to bring glory to You through the suppression of those—weakened—adversaries, and not themselves, Almighty God, he prayed, I see how, even in the face of our initial victory against McDowell, you have allowed the enemy to weaken his force in this sweet valley for a season, that we might accomplish for Your glory in a succession of actions what we could never do against his fully arrayed forces. I do see how only You have enabled us to honor and glorify Yourself, not through the winning of military battles, but so that those triumphs might allow a broader platform upon which to trumpet the salvation message of Your dear Son's death. O great God in heaven, affix my heart and mind to the remembrance that without spiritual victories for Your kingdom, earthly accomplishments ring hollow and lay spread before us as so many whitewashed sepulchres. May our gallant little army be an army of the living God, as well as of its country.

For a moment Stonewall rehearsed in his head what his “sources” had informed him had occurred in recent days. Blenker gone west from Banks to support Milroy, after we have already stopped that force and driven it across the Alleghenies; Shields gone away east from Banks and out of the Valley just when he is needed here. Lord, these are not ignorant men, no matter what the quaking bureaucrats in Washington City spew about them. And it is certainly not our woefully small band that is to credit for their confoundedness. Keep me, keep us all, mindful that without Providence's kind restraining hand, we must certainly have been swallowed whole by this multitude.

Just then, the unmistakable sound of bullets whistling past Stonewall's ears jolted him, followed by the crackle of rifle fire. That was close, he thought. Douglas and Sandie awoke from slumber. They could not understand Stonewall's determination that he and his staff, including his cavalry chief Ashby, should continue to ride at the head of the entire Confederate column—In the dark, most of them sound asleep in the saddle! Douglas thought with incredulity.

The ambushers, perhaps twenty of them, fled into the trackless night. Then Stonewall himself dozed off, declining to alter the position in the column of himself or his staff.

The column, most of it exhausted and footsore infantry, many of their feet now bare and bloody, moved past scores of burning wagons the Federals had fired to deprive the Rebels of food, medicine, ammunition, and other stores. The fires gave temporary light, but soon another ambuscade sounded, close by this time, knocking a couple of staff member's horses out from under them. Again, Stonewall heard a couple of the unseen messengers of death sing past, inches from his head.

Ashby, whom Douglas had noticed never closed his eyes, but rode silent, brooding, rose in his stirrups. He unleashed every cartridge of the Spencer repeater he had taken off a dead Yank cavalryman in the direction of the fleeing ambushers.

This time, Stonewall sent a party of infantry ahead. And he moved himself and his staff farther back in the line.

When another ambush sounded a few minutes later, Stonewall's advance party swarmed on them, killing every one, with bullets, bayonets, knives, and in one case, a heavy rock to the skull. Thus ended the night's bushwhacking.

Stonewall did not need Jed Hotchkiss to tell him the topography around Winchester. And he knew where the Yankees would make their stand. As he suspected, they formed atop the hills on either side of the Valley Turnpike. But they were outnumbered and shaken from the previous days’ drubbings.

The Virginian rode to the crest of the ridge where the shot and shell flew thickest. With him rode three colonels, one of them thirty-year-old Johnny Patton. Stonewall ignored the musket balls and shell fragments zinging all around the little group and raised his binoculars to his eyes to scout the Yank positions. The fusillade knocked the colonel to Stonewall's left out of the saddle with a gaping chest wound. Shrapnel tore a hole in the sleeve of the colonel to Stonewall's right, prompting a streak of excited oaths from that man. Patton, whom Stonewall had acknowledged seeing for the first time in a decade with an immediate nod of recognition and a “My compliments, Mr. Patton,” sat silent and erect. He knew he had been lucky to escape “Tom Fool” Jackson and graduate the VMI. He did not intend to give the new “Stonewall” Jackson any cause to dampen his chances of graduating this war. But fear clawed his insides and if anyone but his old professor had been present, he would have thrown up, or turned his horse and raced for cover, or both.

Patton marveled at how Stonewall could ignore the screaming, the shooting, the soldiers falling around him, the ordnance flying sometimes within inches of his head, even the other colonel's cursing. But this he did, gazing all the while through the glasses and barking tactical orders for the attack.

When Stonewall raised his old cap and shouted, “Let's holler!” Willy and his fellow sons of the South, hurt, tired, and weary to the bone, rose to the occasion, loving him whom they had cursed, and advanced with a thousand shrieking yells on Winchester. They took back the town of their brothers and sisters, where Yankee subtlers had placed their own goods for sale in the finest shops, and they received the hoarse shouts and tears of appreciation from the once-again liberated folk.

“General, sir,” Douglas opined that evening to Stonewall during a rare moment when the two sat alone next to a crackling fire in the Grahams’ parlor. “Am I right that had the cavalry done its job—er, been more efficient today, that perhaps Banks's entire command could have been bagged?”

Stonewall hesitated, poking a stick at the fire. He knew Douglas's suggestion was correct as it applied to both the Middletown and Winchester encounters, as well as, earlier, at Romney. “In his way, Colonel Ashby is a great soldier,” the general said, his voice soft. “And, I suppose Washington will find precious small consolation in the day's events.”

The Virginian had found great consolation in the response of the women of Winchester to his request that they knit socks and other garments for his tattered soldiers. The ladies had swarmed him, their adulation scarcely allowing him room to breathe. His request had delivered him from their collective grasp, if only for their desire to please him through providing the desperately needed items for his troops. Already, piles of garments streamed in.

“Sir?” Stonewall looked up to see McGuire. “Sir, I have found something I believe you should see.”

Stonewall and Douglas accompanied the doctor to one of the largest storehouses in Winchester. Captured Union medicines, surgical instruments, and hospital appliances filled it to overflowing. The three men stared in speechless stupor.

“This building contains more medical stores than are to be found in the entire Confederacy,” McGuire said, his voice lower than usual.

From around a corner came Rev. Dabney. A strange expression contorted his face. Stonewall could tell from wet streaks down the great theologian's face that he had been crying.

“Reverend Dabney, sir, are you well?” Stonewall asked.

Dabney stopped and looked him full in the eye.

“My good friend, as I observe this, this mountain of priceless treasure, I am filled with loathing for a people who would perpetrate an inhumanity unknown in modern history,” Dabney said, his teeth clenched and his voice a growl unlike Stonewall had ever heard it. “I see this, and I think of the blockade they have imposed to all medicines and hospital stores for the Southern people.”

For a moment, Stonewall thought Dabney's voice would break, but it did not.

“With this blockade, sir,” the preacher continued, “they can only hope not only to make the hurts of every wounded adversary mortal, where brave men would have been eager to minister to a helpless foe, but to deprive suffering age, womanhood, and infancy of the last succors that the benignity of the universal Father has provided for their pangs.”

Now, the strong voice did crack. “I tell you, sir, it is a cold and malignant design.”

Dabney turned, head bowed, and stepped back into the shadows.

“Uh, sir,” McGuire said, “the Yankees have cleared out the First Winchester Bank building and made it into their own hospital. They left behind seven hundred sick and wounded, doctors, and—a lot more of what we see here. It is a completely self-contained hospital, sir.”

Stonewall pondered that. He saw the rage painted on Douglas's handsome young features. And the deadness in McGuire's eyes.

He knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to torch the whole bloody “hospital.” Or drag every manjack out of it into the street and allow the good folks of Winchester to take turns shooting them. He thought of little George Preston, who Maggie wrote had nearly died of a slight cough because not even the simplest medication could be found to help wash out his tiny lungs. But then he remembered his Savior's words. Oh, the fools who campaigned him that the Old Testament and its Law was the more difficult of the two books to live by! They had forgotten, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

The pained expressions on Douglas's and McGuire's faces when they heard his response did not bother him in the least. “Make sure the hospital has plenty of food and water, Doctor,” Stonewall said, “then leave them alone—and leave their stores alone—and allow them to do their work for their people. As the soldiers are able to leave, have them paroled, not to fight again until they are exchanged for prisoners of ours.”

The warm late spring sun bathing Washington City belied the cold pallor enveloping President Lincoln's chambers the next day.

“Mr. President, I am sending forth telegrams immediately to all the governors of the Northern states, imploring them to send forward every possible soldier they can muster,” Stanton said, a bead of perspiration perched on his normally steady brow.

Lincoln stared out the window for a long time before he spoke. “The weight of this entire nation thrown against the Southern capital and this one Rebel is about to descend on our own capital with his own army. I just do not understand it, man. With Richmond about to be overrun, why have they such a detachment storming down the Shenandoah?”

“Sir,” Stanton replied, “now that Johnston has been wounded and Lee is in charge of the Army of Northern Virginia, there is no telling what the Rebels might try.”

“Yes,” Lincoln nodded with a frown, “that is precisely why I wished him to be leading my army. But this Jackson—who knew anything about him? Tecumseh Sherman told us it was Jackson who turned the day against him at Bull Run. And by combining the reports of our other generals, it appears this “Stonewall” Jackson has now thrown three separate Union army forces back across the Potomac in the past ten months.”

Lincoln turned to Stanton. Fatigue and sorrow etched their deep marks in his honest midwestern face. “Yes, Mr. Secretary, send for those troops. And I want McDowell, Shields, and every blessed Union soldier between the Alleghenies and Richmond descending on Mr. Stonewall Jackson. Before, God forbid, he gets across the Potomac and descends on us.”