Whenever it started, the 'valley campaign' would take on the qualities of a holy war. Others say it began a bit later, after Jackson slipped eastward out of the Shenandoah on May 2 - a feint toward Richmond meant to deceive his adversaries - then put his weary men on railway cars and shipped them back into the valley two days later. Nathaniel Banks's larger forces and moved his ragged troops south toward New Market, determined to try again. Some say it began immediately after the battle of Kernstown, just below Winchester, Va., in late March 1862, when Jackson suffered a tactical defeat at the hands of Gen. The original Shenandoah campaign lasted more than a month, with scholars disagreeing over the actual dates.

I figured such a trip could probably be done in a long weekend. Camp-following requires some concomitant good eating, or fly-fishing, and the Shenandoah offers both, as well as the usual distractions of hiking, canoeing, 'rooming (collecting mushrooms) and searching for overpriced objects in A-word shops. Jackson's little army snaked its way through riverine country with some epicurean possibilities, a great advantage then and now, since battlefields alone don't quite do it for me. I wondered what it would be like to follow the route taken by the most famous lemon-sucker ever to be a general. His was a masterful, bloody blitz of such cunning that it has been studied ever since by tacticians, among them Rommel and Patton.

Forget Antietam, Gettysburg and the siege of Richmond: For physical beauty and sheer audacity in battle, nothing equals the Shenandoah Valley campaign of Stonewall Jackson, the 'pious blue-eyed killer' who pushed his men so hard in the spring of 1862 that their shoes fell apart. Washington is a mere hundred miles from the most spectacular Civil War terrain.

Henry kyd douglas i rode with stonewall