profession, and had made his own the methods of war which the greatest of modern soldiers both preached and practised.  Maturer years and the search for wisdom had steadied his restless daring; and his devotion to duty, always remarkable, had become a second nature.  His health, under careful and self-imposed treatment, had much improved, and the year 1861 found him in the prime of physical and mental vigour.  Already it had become apparent that his life at Lexington was soon to end.  The Damascus blade was not to rust upon the shelf.  During the winter of 1860-61 the probability of a conflict between the free and slave-holding States, that is, between North and South, had become almost a certainty.  South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, had formally seceded from the Union; and establishing a Provisional Government, with Jefferson Davis as President, at Montgomery in Alabama, had proclaimed a new Republic, under the title of the Confederate States of America.  In order to explain Jackson’s attitude at this momentous crisis, it will be necessary to discuss the action of Virginia, and to investigate the motives which led her to take the side she did.

Forces which it was impossible to curb, and which but few detected, were at the root of the secession movement.  The ostensible cause was the future status of the negro.

Slavery was recognised in fifteen States of the Union.  In the North it had long been abolished, but this made no difference to its existence in the South.  The States which composed the Union were semi-independent communities, with their own legislatures, their own magistracies, their own militia, and the power of the purse.  How far their sovereign rights extended was a matter of contention; but, under the terms of the Constitution, slavery was a domestic institution, which each individual State was at liberty to retain or discard at will, and over which the Federal Government had no control whatever.  Congress would have been no more justified in declaring that the slaves in Virginia were free men than in demanding that Russian conspirators should be tried by jury.  Nor was the philanthropy of the Northern people, generally speaking, of an enthusiastic nature.  The majority regarded slavery as a necessary evil; and, if they deplored the reproach to the Republic, they made little parade of their sentiments.  A large number of Southerners believed it to be the happiest condition for the African race; but the best men, especially in the border States, of which Virginia was the principal, would have welcomed emancipation.  But neither Northerner nor Southerner saw a practicable method of giving freedom to the negro.  Such a measure, if carried out in its entirety, meant ruin to the South.  Cotton and tobacco, the principal and most lucrative crops, required an immense number of hands, and in those hands—­his negro slaves—­the capital of the planter was locked up.  Emancipation