told plainly of secessionist owners, who could stay at home and cut their grain while the rebels were in force, but who fled before the advance of Union troops, and deserted their homes; while the fields of standing grain, with the golden kernels ripe and almost rotting on the stalks, and the cheerless-looking houses, tenanted only by women and children, told as plainly of the poor Unionists, driven from home and family by the ‘Border Guard’ who so bravely ‘defended the sacred soil.’  With the advance of the Union army came back hundreds of Union refugees from Maryland; poor, half-starved men crept out to the roadside from their hiding-places, and told the Union troops that they now first saw daylight for several weeks; and the lonely yet brave women displayed from their hovels the Union flags, the true ‘Red, White, and Blue,’ which their loyalty had kept for months concealed.  And as the army tarried at Martinsburg, and reinforcements came in, the secret Unionists avowed their real sentiments; the Union flag was displayed from many a dwelling; and the fair hands of Martinsburg women stitched beautiful banners, which, with words of eloquent loyalty, were presented to the favorite Union regiments, and even now are cherished in Northern homes, or in Union encampments, as mementos of the gratitude of Berkeley County for its deliverance from the reign of terror.  Yet how was the confidence repaid which these loyal people thus reposed in Gen. Patterson?  In less than three weeks, not a Union soldier was left in Martinsburg, and before the first of August they were withdrawn wholly from Berkeley and Jefferson Counties.  And the poor refugees who had returned to their homes in good faith, and the loyalists who in equal good faith had spoken out their true patriotism and their love of the Union, were left to the tender mercies of the ‘Berkeley Border Guard,’ and such braves as the Texan Rangers, the Mississippi Bowie-knives, and the Louisiana Tiger Zouaves.  Gray-headed men like Pendleton and Strother were dragged from their homes to languish for weeks in Richmond jails, and the old reign of terror was reestablished with renewed virulence.  Shall we ask these poor, deceived Unionists of Northern Virginia what they think of Gen. Patterson, and of the success of his campaign?  How can we estimate the injury to the cause of the Union inflicted in this way alone by a grossly inefficient Federal general?

There were other reasons than those already enumerated why Patterson should have occupied Harper’s Ferry at an early day, and these were reasons of economy, which commended themselves to the judgment of almost every one except the commanding general.  The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad is the natural and only good thoroughfare along the valley of the upper Potomac.  Harper’s Ferry, confessedly the strongest and best military point in Northern Virginia, and the one best fitted for a base of offensive operations, is on this railroad, and, of course, of easy access from Baltimore and