Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

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[265] to find only a small force of the enemy at the point of attack. He had less than twenty-five hundred men. It will amuse the Southern reader to find it stated in Gen. Shields' official report that Jackson had in the engagement of Kernstown eleven thousand men, and was, therefore, in superiour force.

The engagement between these unequal forces commenced about four o'clock in the evening of the 23d of March, and terminated when night closed upon the scene of conflict. Jackson's left flank, commanded by Gen. Garnett, was finally turned, and forced back upon the centre, but only after a most desperate and bloody encounter. A long stone fence ran across an open field, which the enemy were endeavouring to reach. Federals and Confederates were both in motion for this natural breast-work, when the 24th Virginia, (Irish), ran rapidly forward, arrived at the fence first, and poured a volley into the enemy at ten paces distant. But the overwhelming numbers of the enemy soon swept over the fence, and drove the Confederate left into the woods, taking two guns and a number of prisoners.

During the night Gen. Jackson decided to fall back to Cedar Creek. The enemy pursued as far as Harrisonburg, but with little effect, as Ashby's famous cavalry, the terrour of the Federals, covered the retreat. In his official report Gen. Shields wrote that the retreat “became flight ;” but in a private letter to a friend in Washington, he had previously written of the Confederates: “Such were their gallantry, and high state of discipline that at no time during the battle or pursuit did they give way to panic.”

The Confederate loss in killed, wounded and prisoners is carefully estimated at 465. Gen. Shields stated his loss as 103 killed, and 441 wounded. It had been a fierce and frightful engagement; for Jackson had lost nearly twenty per cent. of his force in a very few hours of conflict. [But the battle was without any general signification. It drew, however, upon Jackson a great deal of censure; “he was,” says one of his officers, “cursed by every one;” and it must be confessed, in this instance at least, the great commander had been entrapped by the enemy.

But public attention in Richmond was speedily taken from an affair so small by daily announcements of fleets of transports arriving in Hampton Roads, and the vast extension of the long line of tents at Newport News. McClellan, having the advantage of water-carriage, had rapidly changed his line of operations, and was at the threshold of a new approach to Richmond, while the great bulk of the Confederate force was still in motion in the neighbourhood of the Rappahannock and the Rapidan.

It was a fearful crisis. The fate of Richmond hung upon the line held across the Peninsula, from Yorktown on the York River to Mulberry Island on James River, by Gen. Magruder with little more than ten thousand