Jackson had, with inferior numbers, defeated successively four generals, with as many armies, swept the Valley of Virginia of hostile forces, made the Federal authorities tremble in their capital, and frustrated the combinations by which the enemy had purposed to aid General McClellan and environ Richmond by large converging armies.

Our loss of life in this campaign was inconsiderable in numbers; but on the black list of killed, there was one name conspicuous throughout the Confederacy, and especially dear to Virginians. Colonel Turner Ashby, whose name was linked with so much of the romance of the war, and whose gentle and enthusiastic courage and knightly bearing had called to mind the recollections of chivalry, and adorned Virginia with a new chaplet of fame, had, on the 5th of June, fallen in a skirmish near Harrisburg.

"The last time I saw Ashby," writes a noble comrade in arms, Colonel Bradley T. Johnson of the Maryland Line, "he was riding at the head of the column with General Ewell-his black face in a blaze of enthusiasm. Every feature beamed with the joy of the soldier. He was gesticulating and pointing out the country and positions to General Ewell. I could im agine what he was saying by the motions of his right arm. I pointed him out to my adjutant. 'Look a' Ashby; see how he is enjoying himself.""

A few hours later, and the brave Virginian, so full of life, was a corpse. Our men had fallen upon a body of the enemy concealed in a piece of woods and under the cover of a fence. Ashby was on the right of the 58th Virginia. He implored the men to stop their fire, which was ineffectual, and to charge the enemy. They were too much excited to heed him, and turning towards the enemy he waved his hand-" Virginians, charge!" In a second his horse fell. He was on his feet in an instant. "Men," he cried, "cease firing-charge, for God's sake, charge!" The next instant he fell dead-not twenty yards from the concealed marksman who had killed him.

To the sketch we have briefly given of this campaign, it is just to add one word of reflection. It had been frequently and very unwarrantably asserted that the people of what was once the garden spot of the South, the Shenandoah Valley, were favorably inclined to the Union cause, and that many of them

had shown a very decided spirit of disloyalty to the Confed. erate authority. The best refutation of this slander is to be found in the enemy's own accounts of his experiences in tha region.

The fact is, that the people of this Valley had suffered to a most extraordinary degree the fiery trials and ravages of war. Their country had been bandied about from the possession of the Confederates to that of the Yankees, and then back again, until it had been stripped of every thing by needy friends on the one side, and unscrupulous invaders on the other. Some portions of the country were actually overrun by three armies in two weeks. In such circumstances there were, no doubt, expressions of discontent, which had been hastily misinterpreted as disloyal demonstrations; but, despite these, there is just reason to believe that a spirit of patriotism and integrity abided in the Valley of Virginia, and that it had been maintained under trials and chastisements much greater than those which had befallen other parts of the Confederacy.

MEMOIR OF TURNER ASHBY.

The writer had proposed a record in another and more extensive form of the principal events of the life of Turner Ashby; but the disappointment of assistance to sources of information from persons who had represented themselves as the friends of the deceased, and from whom the writer had reason to expect willing and warm co-operation, has compelled him to defer the execution of his original and cherished purpose of giving to the public a worthy biography of one whose name is a source of immortal pride to the South, and an enduring ornament to the chivalry of Virginia. But the few incidents roughly thrown together here may have a certain interest. They give the key to the character of one of the most remarkable men of the war; they afford an example to be emulated by our soldiers; they represent a type of courage peculiarly Southern in its aspects; and they add an unfading leaf to the chaplet of glory which Virginia has gathered on the blood-stained fields of the war.

It is not improper here to state the weight and significance

given to the present revolution by the secession of Virginia. It takes time for revolutions to acquire their meaning and proper significance. That which was commenced by the Cotton States of the South, attained its growth, developed its purpose, and became instantly and thoroughly in earnest at the period when the second secessionary movement, inaugurated by Virginia, confronted the powers at Washington with its sublime spectacles.

Virginia did not secede in either the circumstances or sense in which the Cotton States had separated themselves from the Union. She did not leave the Union with delusive prospects of peace to comfort or sustain her. She did not secede in the sense in which separation from the Union was the primary object of secession. Her act of secession was subordinate; she was called upon to oppose a practical and overt usurpation on the part of the Government at Washington in drawing its sword against the sovereignty of States and insisting on the right of coercion; to contest this her separation from the Union was necessary, and became a painful formality which could not be dispensed with.

A just and philosophical observation of events must find that In this second secessionary movement of the Southern States the revolution was put on a basis infinitely higher and firmer in all its moral and constitutional aspects; that at this period it developed itself, acquired its proper significance, and was broadly translated into a war of liberty. The movement of Virginia had more than any thing else added to the moral influences of the revolution and perfected its justification in the eyes of the world. It was plain that she had not seceded on an issue of policy, but one of distinct and practical constitutional right, and that, too, in the face of a war which frowned upon her own borders, and which necessarily was to make her soil the principal theatre of its ravages and woes. Her attachment to the Union had been proved by the most untiring and noble efforts to save it; her Legislature originated the Peace Conference, which assembled at Washington in February 1861; her representatives in Congress sought in that body every mode of honorable pacification; her Convention sent delegates to Washington to persuade Mr. Lincoln to a pacific policy; and in every form of public assembly, every expedient of negotiation was essayed to save the Union. When these

efforts at pacification, which Virginia had made with an unselfishness without parallel, and with a nobility of spirit that scorned any misrepresentation of her office, proved abortive, she did not hesitate to draw her sword in front of the enemy, and to devote all she possessed and loved and hoped for to the fortunes of the war. It is not necessary to recount at length the

services of this ancient Commonwealth in the war for Southern independence. She furnished nearly all of the arms, ammunition, and accoutrements that won the early battles; she gave the Confederate service, from her own armories and stores, seventy-five thousand rifles and muskets, nearly three hundred pieces of artillery, and a magnificent armory, containing all the machinery necessary for manufacturing arms on a large scale; and on every occasion she replied to the call for troops, until she drained her arms-bearing population to the dregs.

It is a circumstance of most honorable remark, that such has been the conduct of Virginia in this war, that even from the base and vindictive enemy tributes have been forced to the devoted courage and heroic qualities of her sons. The following extraordinary tribute from the Washington Republican, the organ of abolition at the Yankee capital, is a compliment more expressive than any thing a Virginian could say for his own State and its present generation of heroes.

"If there has been any decadence of the manly virtues in the Old Dominion, it is not because the present generation has proved itself either weak or cowardly or unequal to the greatest emergencies. No people, with so few numbers, ever put into the field, and kept there so long, troops more numerous, brave, or more efficient, or produced generals of more merit, in all the kinds and grades of military talent. It is not a worn-out, effete race which has produced Lee, Johnston, Jackson, Ashby, and Stuart. It is not a worn-out and effete race, which, for two years, has defended its capital against the approach of an enemy close upon their borders, and outnumbering them thirty to one. It is not a worn-out and effete race which has preserved substantial popular unity under, all the straits and pressure and sacrifices of this unprecedented war. Let history,' as was said of another race, which records their unhappy fate as a people, do justice to their rude virtues as men.' They are fighting madly in a bad cause, but they are fighting bravely.

They have few cowards and no traitors. The hardships of war are endured without a murmur by all classes, and the dangers of war without flinching, by the newest conscripts; while their gentry, the offshoot of their popular social system, have thrown themselves into the camp and field with all the dash and high spirit of the European noblesse of the middle ages, risking, without apparent concern, upon a desperate adventure, all that men value; and after a generation of peace and repose and security, which had not emasculated them, presenting to their enemies a trained and intrepid front, as of men born and bred to war."

What has been said here of Virginia and her characteristics in the present revolution, is the natural and just preface to what we have to say of the man who, more than any one else in this war, illustrated the chivalry of the Commonwealth and the virtues of her gentry. Turner Ashby was a thorough Virginian. He was an ardent lover of the old Union. He was brought up in that conservative and respectable school of politics which hesitated long to sacrifice a Union which had been, in part, constructed by the most illustrious of the sons of Virginia; which had conferred many honors upon her; and which was the subject of many hopes in the future. But when it became evident that the life of the Union was gone, and the sword was drawn for constitutional liberty, the spirit of Virginia was again illustrated by Ashby, who showed a devotion in the field even more admirable than the virtue of political principles.

Turner Ashby was the second son of the late Colonel Turner Ashby, of "Rose Bank," Fauquier county, and Dorothea F. Green, the daughter of the late James Green, Sr., of Rappahannock county. Colonel Ashby, at his death, left three sons and three daughters-the eldest of whom did not exceed twelve years of age at the time of his death-to the sole care of their devoted mother. To her excellent sense, generous disposition, and noble character, the Confederacy is indebted for two as noble and gallant men as have won soldiers' graves during this war.

The father of Turner Ashby was the sixth son, that reached manhood, of Captain Jack Ashby, a man of mark in the day in which he lived, and of whom many anecdotes are still