It is worth remembering this moment, in the middle part of the chilly, rainy month of March 1862, in the second year of the war. Joe Johnston and D. H. Hill are falling back to the Rappahannock; Confederate armies are being routed in the West; Confederate coastal defenses in North Carolina are crumbling; Jackson is on the run in the Shenandoah Valley; the once buoyant optimism of the South is giving way to fear and hopelessness. Jackson’s opponent Nathaniel Banks holds such a crushing numerical advantage that he is less worried about Jackson’s pathetic, slapdash army than about missing the
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