Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 1.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

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[103] and placed under the authority of a few generals, who, nominally at least, had the supreme control of their movements. In reality, however, they preserved a perfect independence, and became, according to their respective characters and the qualities of their chiefs, either formidable soldiers, animated by a true military spirit, or merely armed marauders, who knew nothing of war except its most melancholy excesses.

Accordingly, the partisans who were organized in Virginia, the most ardent, but also the noblest and most disinterested of the Southern States, were nearly all animated by sincere zeal, earnest devotion to their cause, and a sentiment of honor incompatible with such excesses. Young men of wealth and of good family enrolled themselves among them, certain of finding, in the humblest positions, an opportunity for acquiring that quickness of perception, that knowledge of the country, and that foresight into details which form the warrior. The landowners and farmers, more numerous in Virginia than in the other slave States, who formed a large portion of these independent organizations, scarcely changed their habits on entering this new career. They had been acquainted from their infancy with the vast forests where they were going to make war. All able-bodied men left the few villages scattered among these forests to enlist, and there was not a solitary house where some soldier of these bands was not sure of meeting some female relative or friend, where indeed all could not be greeted with a few words of sympathy, so calculated to add fresh courage to the wearied soldier when they fall from the lips of a woman. Such troops, so adapted for intercepting the despatches of an enemy, for picking up his stragglers, or attacking his convoys, for cutting railways and telegraph lines in his rear, were to form an excellent body of scouts to the regular army about to defend Virginia against the Federal invasion.

It must be admitted that the conduct of the Virginians was not always imitated by the other Confederate partisans, who were induced by less worthy motives to enroll themselves under the banner of the guerilla chiefs. The reputation of the latter promised them, with great fatigue, equally great plunder. Consequently, the volunteers who gathered in crowds around them soon formed into bands which at times numbered several thousand