Lee’s decision was made with much reluctance and, it seems, hesitation.  He was not only opposed to the policy of secession, but denied the right of a State to secede; yet he believed that his absolute allegiance was due to Virginia.  He resigned his commission in the United States Army, went to Richmond, and, in accordance with what Wolseley describes as the prevailing principle that had influenced most of the soldiers he met in the South, placed his sword at the disposal of his own State.  The same loyalty to Virginia governed another great soldier, Thomas J. Jackson, whose historic nickname, “Stonewall,” fails to convey the dashing celerity of his movements.  While they both lived these two men were to be linked together in the closest comradeship and mutual trust.  They sprang from different social conditions and were of contrasting types.  The epithet Cavalier has been fitly enough applied to Lee, and Jackson, after conversion from the wild courses of his youth, was an austere Puritan.  To quote again from a soldier’s memoirs, Wolseley calls Lee “one of the few men who ever seriously impressed and awed me with their natural, their inherent, greatness”; he speaks of his “majesty,” and of the “beauty,” of his character, and of the “sweetness of his smile and the impressive dignity of the old-fashioned style of his address”; “his greatness,” he says, “made me humble.”  “There was nothing,” he tells us, “of these refined characteristics in Stonewall Jackson,” a man with “huge hands and feet.”  But he possessed “an assured self-confidence, the outcome of his sure trust in God.  How simple, how humble-minded a man.  As his impressive eyes met yours unflinchingly, you knew that his was an honest heart.”  To this he adds touches less to be expected concerning a Puritan warrior, whose Puritanism was in fact inclined to ferocity—­how Jackson’s “remarkable eyes lit up for the moment with a look of real enthusiasm as he recalled the architectural beauty of the seven lancet windows in York Minster,” how “intense” was the “benignity” of his expression, and how in him it seemed that “great strength of character and obstinate determination were united with extreme gentleness of disposition and with absolute tenderness towards all about him.”  Men such as these brought to the Southern cause something besides their military capacity; but as to the greatness of that capacity, applied in a war in which the scope was so great for individual leaders of genius, there is no question.  A civilian reader, looking in the history of war chiefly for the evidences of personal quality, can at least discern in these two famous soldiers the moral daring which in doubtful circumstances never flinches from the responsibility of a well-considered risk, and, in both their cases as in those of some other great commanders, can recognise in this rare and precious attribute the outcome of their personal piety.  We shall henceforth have to do with the Southern Confederacy and its armies, not in their inner history but with sole regard to the task which they imposed upon Lincoln and the North.  But at this parting of the ways a tribute is due to the two men, pre-eminent among many devoted people, who, in their soldier-like and unreflecting loyalty to their cause, gave to it a lustre in which, so far as they can be judged, neither its statesmen nor its spiritual guides had a share.