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between the time Jackson fought Shields at Kernstown, March 23, 1862, and his defeat of Milroy at McDowell, May 8, following. Re- turning swiftly to the Valley of Virginia, Jackson prepared to pursue the campaign, which resulted in the quick and successive defeats of the armies of Banks, Fremont and Shields, which made Jackson master of the entire Valley.
In May, 1862, the First Maryland Infantry, under Major-General Ewell, joined Jackson in the Valley. Major W. W. Goldsborough, in his Maryland Line, C. S. A., 1869, tells of Jackson at this time, thus:
" To our utter amazement, when we turned our faces to where we had passed his army the evening previous, nothing met our gaze but the smouldering embers of his deserted camp-fires. We rubbed our eyes and looked again and again, loth to believe our sense of vision. But gone he was, and whither and for what, no one could tell. Quietly, in the dead of night, he had arisen from his blanket, and calling his troops around him, with them had disappeared.
" For more than two weeks his whereabouts remained a mystery, and various were the conjectures as to what had become of him, when one day there came the news of Milroy's defeat at McDowell, more than one hundred miles away. Swiftly he had traversed the steep ranges of mountains that separated him from his prey, and with ir- resistible fury had hurled his legions upon the astonished foe in his mountain fastness, and routed him with heavy loss, and was even now on his return, and within two days' march of us."
"In Stonewall Jackson's way," he annihilated Milroy and tele- graphed these words: ' 'God blessed our arms with victory at McDowell to-day; " hurried back to the Valley and whipped in detail the other Yankee armies; then by a ruse de guerre, threw his force upon Lee's flank at Richmond, crushed McClellan's right and suddenly caused the star of that much vaunted " Young Napoleon " to set!
By the strategem of Lee and Jackson and the valor of their armies, the Federal army of 40,000 at Fredericksburg was kept ' ' in the air ' ' (like McClellan's right flank) between Washington and McClellan's army beleaguring Richmond, but a day's march from him!
The historical connection between the First Maryland Regiment and General Ashby had a tragic termination during the fight near Harrisonburg, Va. , on the evening of June 6, 1862, when, that reg- iment being hotly engaged with the Pennsylvania Bucktail Regiment, Ashby, while rallying the 58th Virginia Regiment to support the
