A battery of artillery, raised in Rockbridge County, was attached to the brigade.  Commanded by the Reverend Dr. Pendleton, the rector of Lexington, an old West Point graduate, who was afterwards distinguished as Lee’s chief of artillery, and recruited largely from theological colleges, it soon became peculiarly efficient.* (* When the battery arrived at Harper’s Ferry, it was quartered in a church, already occupied by a company called the Grayson Dare-devils, who, wishing to show their hospitality, assigned the pulpit to Captain Pendleton as an appropriate lodging.  The four guns were at once christened Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.) % No better material for soldiers ever existed than the men of the Valley.  Most of them were of Scotch-Irish descent, but from the more northern counties came many of English blood, and from those in the centre of Swiss and German.  But whatever their origin, they were thoroughly well qualified for their new trade.  All classes mingled in the ranks, and all ages; the heirs of the oldest families, and the humblest of the sons of toil; boys whom it was impossible to keep at school, and men whose white beards hung below their cross-belts; youths who had been reared in luxury, and rough hunters from their lonely cabins.  They were a mountain people, nurtured in a wholesome climate, bred to manly sports, and hardened by the free life of the field and forest.  To social distinctions they gave little heed.  They were united for a common purpose; they had taken arms to defend Virginia and to maintain her rights; and their patriotism was proved by the sacrifice of all personal consideration and individual interest.  Nor is the purity of their motives to be questioned.  They had implicit faith in the righteousness of their cause.  Slave-owners were few in the Valley, and the farms were tilled mainly by free labour.  The abolition of negro servitude would have affected but little the population west of the Blue Ridge.  But, nevertheless, west of the Blue Ridge the doctrine of State Rights was as firmly rooted as in the Carolinas, the idea that a State could be coerced into remaining within the Union as fiercely repudiated; and the men of the Valley faced the gathering hosts of the North in the same spirit that they would have faced the hosts of a foreign foe.

In the first weeks of June the military situation became more threatening.  The Union armies were taking shape.  The levies of volunteers seemed sufficiently trained to render reconquest practicable, and the great wave of invasion had already mounted the horizon.  A force of 25,000 men, based on the Ohio, threatened North-west Virginia.  There had been collisions on the Atlantic seaboard, where the Federals held Fortress Monroe, a strong citadel within eighty miles of Richmond, and Richmond had become the capital of the Confederacy.  There had been fighting in Missouri, and the partisans of the South in that State had already been badly worsted.  The vast power of the North was making itself felt