Valley with Patterson's superior force, while McDowell's superior
force attacked or turned Beauregard's position at Bull Run. The
Confederate problem was how to give Patterson the slip and reach
Bull Run in time to meet McDowell with an equal force. The
Confederates had the advantage of interior lines both here and in
the semicircle as a whole, though the Union forces enjoyed in
general much better means of transportation. The Confederates
enjoyed better control from government headquarters, where the
Cabinet mostly had the sense to trust in Lee. Scott, on the other
hand, was tied down by orders to defend Washington by purely
defensive means as well as by the "on to Richmond" march.
Patterson was therefore obliged to watch the Federal back door at
Harper's Ferry as well as the Confederate side doors up the
Shenandoah : an impossible task, on exterior lines, with the kind
of force he had. The civilian chiefs at Washington did not see
that the best of all defense was to destroy the enemy's means of
destroying THEM, and that his greatest force of fighting MEN, not
any particular PLACE, should always be their main objective.

On the fourteenth of June Johnston had destroyed everything
useful to the enemy at Harper's Ferry and retired to Winchester.
On the twentieth Jackson's brigade marched on Martinsburg to
destroy the workshops of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway and to
support the three hundred troopers under J. E. B. Stuart, who was
so soon to be the greatest of cavalry commanders on the
Confederate side. Unknown at twenty-nine, killed at thirty-one,
"Jeb" Stuart was a Virginian ex-officer of United States
Dragoons, trained in frontier fighting, and the perfect type of
what a cavalry commander should be: tall, handsome, splendidly
supple and strong, hawk-eyed and lion-hearted, quick, bold,