My Dear Friend:--I have just read with profound regret your letter to the Secretary of War asking to be relieved from your present command, either by an order to the Virginia Military Institute or the acceptance of your resignation. Let me beg you to reconsider this matter. Under ordinary circumstances a due sense of one's own dignity, as well as care for professional character and official rights, would demand such a course as yours. But the character of the war, the great energy exhibited by the government of the United States, the danger in which our very existence as an independent people lies, require sacrifices from us all who have been educated as soldiers. _I receive my information of the order of which you have such cause to complain from your letter. Is not that as great an official wrong to me as the order itself to you?_ Let us dispassionately reason with the government on this subject of command, and if we fail to influence its practice, then ask to be relieved from positions _the authority of which is exercised by the War Department while the responsibilities are left to us_.[6] I have taken the liberty to detain your letter, to make this appeal to your patriotism, not merely from warm feelings of personal regard but from the official opinion which makes me regard you as necessary to the service of your country in your present position. [6] The italics are inserted by the author of this work to emphasize the peculiar stupidity that on both sides in the war permitted ignorance to overrule knowledge and self-assumption to dominate skill. This particular interference came near depriving Lee of the superb genius of Stonewall Jackson as Halleck's interference well nigh lost Grant to the Federal army. General Johnston's appeal to Jackson to continue in the service in spite of the ignorant, embarrassing, and grossly ill-mannered interference with his operations by the Secretary of War, was supported by a multitude of letters and appeals from statesmen, citizens, generals and common soldiers--many of the latter being men of high social and political distinction who had enlisted in the ranks in a war that all regarded as their own, but whose enlistment had in no wise invalidated their right to speak with authority as representative citizens.