Stonewall
Jackson with all his skill and fame was before them, but they meant to
stop him. Numbers were against them, and Banks, their leader, had been
defeated already by Jackson, but they meant to stop him, nevertheless.
The Southern guns replied. Posted along the slopes of Slaughter Mountain,
sinister of name, they sent a sheet of death upon the Union ranks.
But the regiments, the new and the old, stood firm. Those that had been
beaten before by Jackson were resolved not to be beaten again by him,
and the new regiments from the west, one or two of which had been at
Shiloh, were resolved never to be beaten at all.
"The lads are steady," said Colonel Winchester. "It's a fine sign.
I've news, too, that two thousand men have come up. We shall now have
nine thousand with which to withstand the attack, and I don't believe
they can drive us away. Oh, why isn't Pope himself here with his whole
army? Then we could wipe Jackson off the face of the earth!"
But Pope was not there. The commander of a huge force, the man of
boastful words who was to do such great things, the man who sent such
grandiloquent dispatches from "Headquarters in the Saddle," to the
anxious Lincoln at Washington, had strung his numerous forces along in
detachments, just as the others had done before him, and the booming of
Jackson's cannon attacking the Northern vanguard with his whole army
could not reach ears so far away.
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