G. B. Gordon.  Introduction to Memoirs of Stonewall Jackson page 14.) But it was not only in the field, when the necessity for action was pressing, that he was accustomed to seclude himself with his own thoughts.  Nor was he content with considering his immediate responsibilities.  His interest in the general conduct of the war was of a very thorough-going character.  While in camp on the Rappahannock, he followed with the closest attention the movements of the armies operating in the Valley of the Mississippi, and made himself acquainted, so far as was possible, not only with the local conditions of the war, but also with the character of the Federal leaders.  It was said that, in the late spring of 1862, it was the intention of Mr. Davis to transfer him to the command of the Army of the Tennessee, and it is possible that some inkling of this determination induced him to study the Western theatre.* (* In April he wrote to his wife:  “There is increasing probability that I may be elsewhere as the season advances.”  That he said no more is characteristic.) Be this as it may, the general situation, military and political, was always in his mind, and despite the victory of Fredericksburg, the future was dark and the indications ominous.

According to the Official Records, the North, at the beginning of April, had more than 900,000 soldiers under arms; the South, so far as can be ascertained, not more than 600,000.  The Army of the Potomac was receiving constant reinforcements, and at the beginning of April, 130,000 men were encamped on the Stafford Heights.  In the West, the whole extent of the Mississippi, with the exception of the hundred miles between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, was held by the Federals, and those important fortresses were both threatened by large armies, acting in concert with a formidable fleet of gunboats.  A third army, over 50,000 strong, was posted at Murfreesboro’, in the heart of Tennessee, and large detached forces were operating in Louisiana and Arkansas.  The inroads of the enemy in the West, greatly aided by the waterways, were in fact far more serious than in the East; but even in Virginia, although the Army of the Potomac had spent nearly two years in advancing fifty miles, the Federals had a strong foothold.  Winchester had been reoccupied.  Fortress Monroe was still garrisoned.  Suffolk, on the south bank of the James, seventy miles from Richmond, was held by a force of 20,000 men; while another small army, of about the same strength, occupied New Berne, on the North Carolina coast.

Slowly but surely, before the pressure of vastly superior numbers, the frontiers of the Confederacy were contracting; and although in no single direction had a Federal army moved more than a few miles from the river which supplied it, yet the hostile occupation of these rivers, so essential to internal traffic, was making the question of subsistence more difficult every day.  Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas, the cattle-raising States, were