The retention of the Fourth Division between Washington and Centreville would seem to have been a blunder; another 5000 men on the field of battle should certainly have turned the scale.  But more men were hardly wanted.  The Federals during the first period of the fight were strong enough to have seized the Henry Hill.  Bee, Bartow, Evans, and Hampton had been driven in, and Jackson alone stood fast.  A strong and sustained attack, supported by the fire of the regular batteries, must have succeeded.* (* “Had an attack,” said General Johnston, “been made in force, with double line of battle, such as any major-general in the United States service would now make, we could not have held [the position] for half an hour, for they would have enveloped us on both flanks.”  Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac, W. Swinton page 58.) The Federal regiments, however, were practically incapable of movement under fire.  The least change of position broke them into fragments; there was much wild firing; it was impossible to manoeuvre; and the courage of individuals proved a sorry substitute for order and cohesion.  The Confederates owed their victory simply and solely to the fact that their enemies had not yet learned to use their strength.

The summer months went by without further fighting on the Potomac; but the camps at Fairfax and at Centreville saw the army of Manassas thinned by furloughs and by sickness.  The Southern youth had come out for battle, and the monotonous routine of the outpost line and the parade-ground was little to their taste.  The Government dared not refuse the numberless applications for leave of absence, the more so that in the crowded camps the sultry heat of the Virginia woodlands bred disease of a virulent type.  The First Brigade seems to have escaped from all these evils.  Its commander found his health improved by his life in the open air.  His wound had been painful.  A finger was broken, but the hand was saved, and some temporary inconvenience alone resulted.  As he claimed no furlough for himself, so he permitted no absence from duty among his troops.  “I can’t be absent,” he wrote to his wife, “as my attention is necessary in preparing my troops for hard fighting, should it be required; and as my officers and soldiers are not permitted to visit their wives and families, I ought not to see mine.  It might make the troops feel that they are badly treated, and that I consult my own comfort, regardless of theirs.”

In September his wife joined him for a few days at Centreville, and later came Dr. White, at his invitation, to preach to his command.  Beyond a few fruitless marches to support the cavalry on the outposts, of active service there was none.  But Jackson was not the man to let the time pass uselessly.  He had his whole brigade under his hand, a force which wanted but one quality to make it an instrument worthy of the hand that wielded it, and that quality was discipline.  Courage and enthusiasm it possessed