All this, however, was hardly an excuse for absolute inaction.  The Confederate position on the open ridge called Rude’s Hill, two and a half miles south of Mount Jackson, was certainly strong.  It was defended in front by Mill Creek, swollen by the snows to a turbulent and unfordable river; and by the North Fork of the Shenandoah.  But with all its natural strength Rude’s Hill was but weakly held, and Banks knew it.  Moreover, it was most unlikely that Jackson would be reinforced, for Johnston’s army, with the exception of a detachment under General Ewell, had left Orange Court House for Richmond on April 5.  “The enemy,” Banks wrote to McClellan on April 6, “is reduced to about 6000 men (sic), much demoralised by defeat, desertion, and the general depression of spirits resting on the Southern army.  He is not in a condition to attack, neither to make a strong resistance, and I do not believe he will make a determined stand there.  I do not believe Johnston will reinforce him.”  If Banks had supplies enough to enable him to remain at Woodstock, there seems to have been no valid reason why he should not have been able to drive away a demoralised enemy, and to hold a position twelve miles further south.

But the Federal commander, despite his brave words, had not yet got rid of his misgivings.  Jackson had lured him into a most uncomfortable situation.  Between the two branches of the Shenandoah, in the very centre of the Valley, rises a gigantic mass of mountain ridges, parallel throughout their length of fifty miles to the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies.  These are the famous Massanuttons, the glory of the Valley.  The peaks which form their northern faces sink as abruptly to the level near Strasburg as does the single hill which looks down on Harrisonburg.  Dense forests of oak and pine cover ridge and ravine, and 2500 feet below, on either hand, parted by the mighty barrier, are the dales watered by the Forks of the Shenandoah.  That to the east is the narrower and less open; the Blue Ridge is nowhere more than ten miles distant from the Massanuttons, and the space between them, the Luray or the South Fork Valley, through which a single road leads northward, is clothed by continuous forest.  West of the great mountain, a broad expanse of green pasture and rich arable extends to the foothills of the Alleghanies, dotted with woods and homesteads, and here, in the Valley of the North Fork, is freer air and more space for movement.

The separation of the two valleys is accentuated by the fact that save at one point only the Massanuttons are practically impassable.  From New Market, in the western valley, a good road climbs the heights, and crossing the lofty plateau, sinks sharply down to Luray, the principal village on the South Fork.  Elsewhere precipitous gullies and sheer rock faces forbid all access to the mountain, and a few hunters’ paths alone wind tediously through the woods up the steep hillside.  Nor are signal stations to be found on the wide area of unbroken forest which clothes the summit.  Except from the peaks at either end, or from one or two points on the New Market-Luray road, the view is intercepted by the sea of foliage and the rolling spurs.