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The regiment was en route to the Army of the Potomac when a special messenger arrived with instructions to turn around and head for the Shenandoah Valley as quickly as possible, where it was to join a force under General McDowell, of Bull Run fame. Jefferson Davis’s military chief of staff, Robert E. Lee, had ordered Stonewall Jackson to create a diversion in the Shenandoah Valley so that Lincoln would not dare to send all the soldiers at his disposal to McClellan. The valley was like a gently undulating corridor with high, wooded mountain ranges on either side. The Shenandoah Valley Turnpike stretched 125 miles from the Potomac River all the way down to the bottom of the valley, making it an ideal conduit for an invading force.

Stonewall Jackson, a dour Presbyterian who rarely spoke, even to explain his orders, had originally been sent to defend the valley’s abundant orchards and lush pastures. His performance in Virginia during the winter had been lackluster, but since the beginning of McClellan’s peninsula campaign, he had beaten every force sent to stop him. He disabled one Federal army, under Frémont, on May 8. Next he turned on Union general Nathaniel P. Banks on the twenty-third at Front Royal. This was Sam Hill’s, and the 6th Louisiana’s, first experience of fighting. Their commander, Dick Taylor, recorded in his memoirs that at midday on May 23, they were marching along a road heading north, when

there rushed out of the wood to meet us a young, rather well-looking woman, afterward widely known as Belle Boyd. Breathless with speed and agitation, some time elapsed before she found her voice. Then, with much volubility, she said we were near Front Royal, beyond the wood; that the town was filled with federals, whose camp was on the west side of the river, where they had guns in position to cover the wagon bridge, but none bearing on the railway bridge below the former.… All this she told with the precision of a staff officer making a report.45

It has been disputed whether Belle Boyd’s courageous dash through active battle lines did indeed provide Jackson with new intelligence, but it was certainly news to Taylor, who ordered his troops to storm the town. The Federals surrendered after five hours of fighting. Colonel Henry Kyd Douglas, a childhood friend of Belle Boyd’s, bumped into her “standing on the pavement in front of a hotel, talking with some few federal officers (prisoners) and some of her acquaintances in our army.… As I stooped from my saddle she pinned a rose to my uniform, bidding me remember that it was blood-red and that it was her ‘colors.’ ”46

Two days after the Confederates’ success at Front Royal, Sam Hill’s brigade tore through Winchester, liberating it from Federal occupation. Mary Sophia Hill heard that Sam had been killed, “so off I started for Staunton,” she wrote, “nearly crazy.” She eventually found Sam in a makeshift hospital. He was dirty and in shock, but his wounds were not life-threatening. She became determined to have him transferred out of his regiment.47

On June 1, Sir Percy and his rerouted Cavaliers arrived at Strasburg, to the west of Front Royal, just as Stonewall Jackson’s troops were evacuating the area. Turner Ashby, a recently promoted Confederate brigadier general, was picking off Union soldiers who had had the ill luck to advance too far forward. Sir Percy was fed up with hearing about the “Black Knight of the Confederacy,” as Ashby was called, and had declared to a journalist covering Federal movements that he was going to “bag” the rebel. Shortly after breakfast on June 6, Sir Percy learned that one of Stonewall Jackson’s wagon trains was stuck in the mud on the road to Port Republic, guarded by just a handful of Ashby’s men. His orders did not include mounting offensives, but he could not resist the prize. Just before two o’clock, he ordered his cavalry into formation and started off at a gallop in the direction of the stranded wagons. But Ashby and his entire cavalry were actually grazing their horses not far away. As Sir Percy galloped