He peremptorily declined. “I know nothing of the military art,” he wrote to the committee that had laid the proposal before him. “There are scores of men in the community better fit than I am for military command. Especially there is your fellow citizen, John Meaux, trained at West Point and eminently fit for a much higher command than any that you can offer him. Put him, I earnestly adjure you, into the line of promotion. Elect him to the highest military office within your gift, and let me serve as a private under him, in either of your companies, if no opportunity offers for me to render a larger service and a more valuable one than that. There is scarcely a man among you who couldn’t handle a military force more effectively than I could. Let your most capable men be your commanders, big and little. I believe firmly in the dictum ‘the tools to him who can use them.’ For myself I see a more fruitful opportunity of service than any that military command could bring to me. I have a certain skill which, I think, is going to be sorely needed in this war. It is my firm belief that the struggle upon which we are entering is destined to last through long years of suffering and sore want. We are mainly dependent upon importation not only for the most pressingly necessary of our medicines but for that absolute necessity of life, salt. If war shall shut us in, as it is extremely likely to do, we must find means which we do not now possess of producing these and other things for ourselves, including the materials for that prime requisite of war--gunpowder. It so happens that I have skill in such manufactures as these, and I purpose to turn it to account whenever the necessity shall come upon us. In the meantime, as a surgeon and, upon occasion, as a private soldier I may perhaps be able to do more for Virginia and for the South than I could ever hope to do by assuming those functions of military command for which I have neither natural fitness nor the fitness of training.”