He then wrote, “If you can use General Ewell’s division in an attack on General Banks, and to drive him back, it will prove a great relief to the pressure on Fredericksburg.”28 Attack. Drive him back. Lee had watched Jackson’s bold, if imperfect, moves in the campaigns leading to Romney and Kernstown. Reading Jackson’s correspondence from the valley, he was convinced that the two shared the same deeply aggressive instincts. It is worth noting that, at this moment, few in either the United States or the Confederate States yet had any idea of this rougher, more combative side of the courtly,
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