ABSTRACT
A West Pointer who had served in the Mexican War and seen something of the Crimean War, he left the army in 1857 but responded to the call to arms in 1861 and quickly made a name for himself in minor operations in West Virginia. However, the campaigns in the east were not just a series of face-to-face slogging matches; each side varied the direct approach by moves against its opponent’s right flank. The rich harvest of new opportunities yielded by the spring campaign proved too much for Henry Wager Halleck’s modest appetite. What Halleck might easily have taken in the summer of 1862 was to be won twelve months later only after much costly effort, and one of the war’s most brilliant campaigns. But the Valley campaign was soon to make him a hero to his men and to the whole South, and mark his emergence as one of the great soldiers of the war.
