But inferiority of force was by no means the sorest difficulty that Jackson had contended with during all those months of winter marchings and fightings amid snowstorms. On the Southern as on the Northern side every really capable general was embarrassed by the ignorant and intrusive dictation of men in place above him. As Grant was paralyzingly dominated by Halleck's interference at every critical moment in his western campaigns, and as Farragut was restrained from obviously easy and supremely desirable achievement by the hand of ignorant authority in the Navy Department at Washington, so Jackson, in the Valley, found his military plans brought to naught by the interference of a civilian Secretary of War who, having authority, chose to use it in giving orders to Jackson's troops in the field without so much as consulting Jackson as to his reasons for posting them as he had done. Beauregard and Johnston at Manassas had encountered a like difficulty and had several times been upon the point of resigning their commissions in despair of achieving any worthy results under such conditions of ignorant and arbitrary control. Jackson was driven further and on the thirty-first of January, 1862, he wrote in despair to Governor Letcher of Virginia, asking that he be ordered back to his professor's chair in the Virginia Military Institute, and tendering his resignation as a major-general if such an order could not be given. The circumstances were these. With great difficulty, at serious risk of defeat and by exacting a positively heroic endurance on the part of his men in marches through snow and sleet and mud, Jackson had conquered the strategic control of the region under his command from an enemy greatly outnumbering him. The strategic key to the position thus conquered was Romney and there Jackson had stationed Loring with a force strong enough to hold the place while keeping in touch with Jackson himself. This disposition rendered the valley, with all its strategic advantages, a secure Confederate possession and a military base from which it was easy to threaten or with reinforcements to assail Washington and the country north of the Potomac. No sooner had Jackson by genius and heroic endeavor secured this advantage for the Confederate arms than the lawyer at the head of the War Department at Richmond assumed to undo his work by an order which Jackson obeyed as a soldier, but bitterly resented as a strategist baffled by the ignorance and arrogant assumption of his civilian superior officer. His letter to Governor Letcher which follows sufficiently explains the matter: Winchester, January 31, 1862