The new leader had thus far given only hints of his fertile strategy. McClellan's army was still but two days' march from Richmond. Its front was perfectly fortified,--McClellan was an engineer; gunboats protected its flanks. Lee--an engineer, too--knew that to attack McClellan there would be too costly; yet McClellan must be removed, and this before he could be re-enforced for an advance. His removal was accomplished.
General Pope was threatening Richmond from the North. The government expected great things of him. In a pompous manifesto he had given out that retreating days were over, that his headquarters were to be in the saddle, and, that, as he swept on to Richmond, where he evidently expected to arrive in the course of a few days, his difficulty was going to be not to whip his enemy but to get at him in order to do so.
When Pope wrote that manifesto he knew many men, but there was one man whom he did not yet know. It was Stonewall Jackson, the most unique and interesting character rolled into notice by those tempestuous years, unless Nathan Bedford Forrest is the exception. Like the great Moslem warrior,
"Terrible he rode, alone,
With his Yemen sword for aid;
Ornament it carried none
Save the notches on its blade."
Jackson was an intensely religious man. Unlike many good soldiers he wore his piety into camp and on to the battlefield, and would not have hesitated to offer prayer to the God of battles where every one of his thirty thousand men could see and hear. And all those soldiers believed in the efficacy of their commander's prayers. Jackson was also a stern disciplinarian. If men in any way sought to evade duty, provost-marshals were ordered to bring them into line, if necessary at the pistol's point. In consequence, when the day of battle came, there was not a man in the corps who did not feel sure that if he shirked duty Stonewall Jackson would shoot him and God Almighty would damn him. This helped to render Jackson's thirty thousand perhaps the most efficient fighting-machine which had appeared upon the battlefield since the Ironsides of Oliver Cromwell.
Pope was destined to make Jackson's acquaintance speedily--and rather unceremoniously, for Jackson was ill-mannered enough, instead of passing in his card at Pope's front door, as etiquette required, to present it at the kitchen-gate. Before Pope was aware, his enterprising opponent, whose war motto was that one man behind your enemy is worth ten in his front, had gone around through Thoroughfare Gap to Manassas Junction and planted himself (August 26, 1862) square across the only railroad that ran between Pope's army and Washington. Pope should have volted and struck Jackson like lightning before the rest of Lee's army could come up; but two considerations made him slow. One was that Longstreet's wing of Lee's army was now rather close in his front, and the other, mortification at turning back after having started southward with such a blare of trumpets.
Brave Confederate soldiers who were at Cedar Mountain, Second Bull Run, and Chantilly, bear witness that the blood Pope's men shed in those battles ran red. But dazed, tired, lacking confidence, and at last on short rations, and faced or flanked by Lee's whole army, while but part of McClellan's was at hand, they fought either to fall or to retreat again.