of their army, which was absent with Longsteet. Lee and Jackson! How well I remember their meeting before this battle and their confiding conference! How these two men loved and trusted each other! Where in all history shall we find a parallel to their mutual faith and love and confidence? I can find none. Said Jackson, "Lee is a phenomenon, I would follow him blind-fold." And Lee said to an aide-de-camp of Jackson's, who reported that Hooker had crossed the river, "Go back and tell General Jackson that he knows as well as I what to do." After they arrived in front of Hooker our movements are described in a hitherto unpublished letter of General Lee's. That great commander, after saying that he decided not to attack in front, writes as follows: "I stated to General Jackson, we must attack on our left as soon as practicable," and he adds, "In consequence of a report from General Fitz. Lee, describing the position of the Federal army, and the roads which he held with his cavalry leading to its rear, General Jackson—after some inquiry concerning the roads leading to the Furnace—undertook to throw his command entirely in Hooker's rear, which he accomplished with equal skill and boldness." General Jackson believed the fighting qualities of the Army of Northern Virginia equal to the task of ending the war. During the winter preceding Chancellorsville, in the course of a conversation at Moss Neck, he said: "We must do more than defeat their armies; we must destroy them." He went into this campaign filled with this stern purpose; ready to stretch to the utmost every energy of his genius and push to its limit all his faith in his men in order to destroy a great army of the enemy. I know this was his purpose, for after the battle, when still well enough to talk, he told me that he had intended, after breaking into Hooker's rear, to take and fortify a suitable positon, cutting him off from the river and so hold him, until, between himserf and General Lee, the great Federal host should be broken to pieces. He had no fear. It was then that I heard him say, "We sometimes fail to drive them from position; they always fail to drive us."
