William Swinton, Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac

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[28] authorities to assign to its command the man enjoying the first military reputation in the South. This man was General Beauregard, and the region of country under his control was named the ‘Department of the Potomac.’

The body of troops collected at Harper's Ferry, and which, at the close of the month of May, consisted of nine regiments and two battalions of infantry, four companies of artillery, and about three hundred troopers,¹ had been formed under the hand of a man, then of no name, but destined to become one of the foremost figures of the war—Colonel Thomas Jonathan Jackson, better known in the world's bead-roll of fame as ‘Stonewall Jackson.’ A lieutenant of artillery in the United States service during the Mexican war, he had at its close retired to a professorship in the Virginia Military Institute, beyond whose walls he was quite unknown, and within which he was marked only for his personal eccentricities, stern puritanism, and inflexible discipline. Upon the secession of Virginia, Professor Jackson resigned his chair, and being appointed by Governor Letcher to a colonelcy in the Virginia line, he was immediately sent forward to command the Confederate troops at Harper's Ferry. About the time, however, that Bonham was replaced by Beauregard, the command of the force at Harper's Ferry, which bore the style of the ‘Army of the Shenandoah,’ was committed to the hands of General J. E. Johnston; and Colonel Jackson, assigned a subordinate command under that able soldier, devoted himself to moulding into form and stamping with the qualities of his own genius that famous ‘Stonewall brigade,’ whose battle-flag led the van in that series of audacious enterprises that afterwards rendered the Valley of the Shenandoah historic ground. General Johnston's other subordinates were men of scarcely inferior ability to Jackson. Colonel A. P. Hill, subsequently one of Lee's ablest lieutenants, was at the head of another of his brigades; Pendleton was chief of artillery; and his few squadrons of Virginia