who have had but little experience attempt to protect every point, while those who are better acquainted with their profession, having only the capital object in view, guard against a decisive blow, and acquiesce in smaller misfortunes to avoid greater.”  Frederick the Great’s Instructions to his Generals.) The cries and complaints of those who find themselves abandoned do not penetrate to the camp, but they may bring down an administration.  It is easy to contrive excuses for the inaction of the President, and it is no new thing to find the demands of strategy sacrificed to political expediency.  Nor did the army which had suffered so heavily on the banks of Bull Run evince any marked desire to be led across the Potomac.  Furloughs were liberally granted.  Officers and privates dispersed to look after their farms and their plantations.  The harvests had to be gathered, the negroes required the master’s eye, and even the counties of Virginia asked that part of the contingents they had furnished might be permitted to return to agricultural pursuits.

The senior generals of the Virginia army were not alone in believing that the victory they had won would be barren of result unless it were at once utilised as a basis for further action.  Jackson, engrossed as he was with the training of his command, found time to reflect on the broader aspects of the war.  Before he left for the Shenandoah Valley he sought an interview with General G.W.  Smith, recently appointed to the command of his division.  “Finding me lying down in my tent,” writes this officer, “he expressed regret that I was sick, and said he had come to confer with me on a subject of great importance, but would not then trouble me with it.  I told him that I wished to hear whatever he desired to say, and could rest whilst he was talking.  He immediately sat down on the ground, near the head of the cot on which I was lying, and entered on the subject of his visit.

“‘McClellan,’ he said, ’with his army of recruits, will not attempt to come out against us this autumn.  If we remain inactive they will have greatly the advantage over us next spring.  Their raw recruits will have then become an organised army, vastly superior in numbers to our own.  We are ready at the present moment for active operations in the field, while they are not.  We ought to invade their country now, and not wait for them to make the necessary preparations to invade ours.  If the President would reinforce this army by taking troops from other points not threatened, and let us make an active campaign of invasion before winter sets in, McClellan’s raw recruits could not stand against us in the field.