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Updated: May 8, 2025
In the second place, it is generally possible for an inferior force, if it puts every man into the fighting-line, to win some measure of success. But such success, as was shown at Kernstown, can seldom be more than temporary; and if the enemy makes good use of his reserves must end in defeat.
Jackson's numbers were estimated at 15,000, and Banks, who arrived in time to take direction of the pursuit, preferred to wait till Williams' two brigades came up before he moved. He encamped that night at Cedar Creek, eight miles from Kernstown. The next day he reached Strasburg. The cavalry pushed on to near Woodstock, and there, for the time being, the pursuit terminated.
One of the women nursed a baby; they all looked down like wraiths upon the passing soldiers. Firing broke out ahead. "Newtown," said the men beside Steve. "I've got friends there. Told 'em when we came up the Valley after Kernstown we'd come down again! 'N here we are, bigger 'n life and twice as natural! That's Rockbridge making that awful noise. Must be a Yankee battery There it opens!
Whether the chronicles of the Jewish kings threw any light on the tactical problem involved at Kernstown may be left to the commentators; but there can be no question as to the Maxims.
The boy raised the glasses and the great panorama of the valley sprang up to his eyes. It seemed to him that he could almost count the soldiers in the camps. There was a troop of cavalry riding to the southward, and further to the left was another. Directly to the north was their battlefield of Kernstown, and not far beyond it lay Winchester.
At the battle of Winchester, too, there was a gap of a mile between the brigades on the left of the Kernstown road and Ewell on the right; and owing to the intervening hills, one wing was invisible to the other. Here again, like Moltke at Koniggratz, Jackson realised that the principle might be disregarded not only with impunity but with effect.
Kernstown decided it; so off they went to West Virginia. Still fearing an attack on Washington, Lincoln halted McDowell's army corps, thirty-seven thousand strong, on the march overland to join McClellan on the Peninsula, and kept them stuck fast round Centreville, near Bull Run. And so McClellan's Peninsular force was suddenly reduced by forty-six thousand men.
I asked General Crook, who was acquainted with many of the Union people of Winchester, if he knew of such a person, and he recommended a Miss Rebecca Wright, a young lady whom he had met there before the battle of Kernstown, who, he said, was a member of the Society of Friends and the teacher of a small private school.
In the meantime Stonewall Jackson, still in the Shenandoah, had fought no battles since his tactical defeat at Kernstown on the twenty-third of March had proved such a pregnant strategic victory elsewhere. But late in April he had a letter from Lee, telling of the general situation and suggesting an attack on Banks.
It was a month since the battle of Kernstown, and yet the Confederate infantry, although for the greater part of the time they had been encamped within a few miles of the enemy's outposts, had not fired a shot.
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