The troops of Lee were now at the zenith of their perfection and glory.  They looked upon themselves as invincible, and that no General the North could put in the field could match our Lee.  The cavalry of Stuart and Hampton had done some remarkably good fighting, and they were now looked upon as an indispensable arm of the service.  The cavalry of the West were considered more as raiders than fighters, but our dismounted cavalry was depended upon with almost as much confidence as our infantry.  This was new tactics of Lee’s, never before practiced in any army of the world.  In other times, where the cavalry could not charge and strike with their sabres, they remained simply spectators.  But Lee, in time of battle, dismounted them, and they, with their long-ranged carbines, did good and effective service.

Grant had been foiled and defeated at Vicksburg.  At Holly Springs, Chickasaw Bayou, Yazo Pass, and Millikin’s Bend he had been successfully met and defeated.  The people of West Virginia, that mountainous region of the old commonwealth, had ever been loyal to the Union, and now formed a new State and was admitted into the Union on the 20th of April, 1863, under the name of “West Virginia.”  Here it is well to notice a strange condition of facts that prevailed over the whole South, and that is the loyalty to the Union of all mountainous regions.  In the mountains of North Carolina, where men are noted for their hardihood and courage, and who, once in the field, made the very best and bravest of soldiers, they held to the Union, and looked with suspicion upon the heresy of Secession.  The same can be said of South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama.  These men would often go into hiding in the caves and gorges of the mountains, and defy all the tact and strategy of the conscript officers for months, and sometimes for years.  It was not for want of courage, for they had that in abundance, but born and reared in an atmosphere of personal independence, they felt as free as the mountains they inhabited, and they scorned a law that forced them to do that which was repugnant to their ideas of personal liberty.  Living in the dark recesses of the mountains, far from the changing sentiments of their more enlightened neighbors of the lowland, they drank in, as by inspiration with their mother’s milk, a loyalty to the general government as it had come down to them from the days of their forefathers of the Revolution.  As to the question of slavery, they had neither kith nor kin in interest or sentiment with that institution.  As to State’s rights, as long as they were allowed to roam at will over the mountain sides, distill the product of their valleys and mountain patches, and live undisturbed in their glens and mountain homes, they looked upon any changes that would effect their surroundings as innovations to be resisted to the death.  So the part that West Virginia and the mountainous regions of the South took in the war was neither surprising to nor resented by the people of the Confederacy.