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ginia was complete. General McClellan telegraphed to Washington the inspiring news of the capture of a thousand prisoners, with all the stores, baggage, and artillery of the enemy. Secession," he added, "is killed in this country." This proved to be no empty boast.

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The judicious measures which General McClellan had six weeks before taken to appease the alarms and make easy the submission to law of the West Virginia population now bore their fruit abundantly. The armed force which had represented the rebel government being entirely dispersed, and the army of General McClellan conducting itself as in a friendly country, the yeomanry of the mountains, never very warmly disposed towards the great slaveholding interest of the further South and of Eastern Virginia, rapidly made up their minds to stand by the Federal authority.

After accepting the surrender of "John Pegram, Esquire, styling himself Colonel in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States," General McClellan treated his prisoners with marked kindness and consideration, and eventually paroled them all. The effect of this course was greatly to indispose the majority of these prisoners to the further prosecution of hostilities, and for many subsequent months the most passionate organs of public opinion in the Confederate States took frequent occasion to point out the evil influence upon the Confederate army of conduct so entirely in contrast with the popular convictions on the subject of Northern feeling towards the South.

The moral advantages of the victory of Rich Mountain to the cause of the Union, great as they were, were not greater than its material consequences might have proved to be, had not the successes of the Federals in Western Virginia been practically nullified by the terrible disaster which was about to overtake them in the East.

Immediately after the battle of the 11th of July, General McClellan advanced his headquarters to Huttonsville, where

he held the only pass available in that region, for many miles, by which an army could be successfully moved into Eastern Virginia. From Huttonsville a decent road leads to Staunton, sixty miles distant, a point of great strategic importance, lying in the rear both of Winchester, and of Richmond, and commanding the lines of the James River canal, and of the Virginia and Tennessee Railway.

Had any unity of design existed at Washington as to the prosecution of the war, it is easy to see how favorable an opportunity was here presented for new and formidable movements against the enemy in Eastern Virginia. As things actually were, however, no such results were to be looked for; and General McClellan, learning that the position of affairs in the Kanawha Valley was far from satisfactory, prepared himself at once for an effort in that direction, and was on the point of moving in person to the assistance of General Cox, there commanding, when he was suddenly summoned to Washington.

CHAPTER IV.

GENERAL MCCLELLAN TAKES COMMAND IN WASHINGTON.

THE BAT

TLE OF BULL RUN, AND THE CONDITION OF THE ARMY. CHANGE IN THE PROSPECTS OF THE WAR. REORGANIZATION OF THE FORCES. GENERAL MCCLELLAN APPOINTED TO THE CHIEF COMMAND UPON THE RESIGNATION OF GENERAL SCOTT.

GENERAL MCCLELLAN, on arriving in Washington, found himself called upon not merely to assume the command of an army shattered and demoralized by defeat, but to construct a military system for a continent at war.

The persistent opposition of Lieutenant-General Scott to any advance of the army at Washington upon the positions of Beauregard at Manassas had been overcome by the "pressure" which politicians and the press had brought to bear upon the president and his cabinet. General Scott knew the true condition of that army; he was opposed, to use his own words, "to a little war by piecemeal," and he desired time enough to organize a force in some degree proportionate to the work which was to be done before attempting to do that work. Of the whole force called into the field under the president's proclamations of April 17th and May 3d, and which amounted in the aggregate to about one hundred and fifty thousand men, including eighteen thousand sailors, much more than one half, or seventy-five thousand men, had been summoned under arms for three months only; the president's most conspicuous advisers, if not the president himself, having expected that before the expiration of this term the rebel government at Montgom

ery would have ceased to exist, and the seceding States have been restored to their places in the Federal system.

Of these troops it was perfectly idle to expect anything like effective service in a campaign of invasion. The testimony taken by the Committee on the Conduct of the War in respect to the battle of Bull Run conclusively proves that it was hardly worth while to seek for strategic explanations of the results of that battle elsewhere than in the simple fact of its having been fought at all. General McDowell, who commanded the expedition, and with whose plan of operations it is not easy to find any substantial fault, testifies: "I had had no opportunity to test my machinery, to move it around and see whether it would work smoothly or not. In fact, such was the feeling, that when I had one body of eight regiments reviewed together, the general censured me for it, as if I was trying to make some show." "I wanted very much a little time; all of us wanted it. We did not have a bit of it. The answer was, 'You are green, it is true, but they are green also; you are all green alike.' We went on in that way."

Of such a way there was but one end.

The country could not understand, ignorant as it was of war and war's requirements, how it could possibly be true that after three months of preparation and of parade an army of thirty thousand men should be still utterly unfit to move thirty miles against a series of earthworks held by no more than an equal number of other men. Those whose duty it was to enlighten the country were as much in the dark on the subject themselves as their fellow-citizens, and the few military men who pleaded for patience and practical measures got neither justice nor comprehension at their hands. Not all military men, it is true, did so plead. Professional rivalry, jealousy, envy; the desire of promotion and of conspicuous command; in some cases a mere craving for the popularity to be so easily won by falling in with the public clamor of the hour, led some men who should have known better, and probably did know

lantry, had been sent with a force, chiefly from Tennessee and Mississippi, of less than nine thousand men and thirty guns, by Jefferson Davis, to the important advanced position of Harper's Ferry. Alexandria was held by a small body of Virginia cavalry. The bulk of the Confederate forces were concentrating at Manassas Junction, a plateau of moderate elevation, twentyfive miles west of Alexandria, which commands the intersection of the great line of railway leading from Washington to Richmond with a branch road, called the Manassas Gap Railway, which runs westward through the Blue Ridge to the valley of the Shenandoah river. This plateau, flanked by two small but deeply bedded streams, the river Occoquan and the now worldfamous Bull Run, was admirably fitted for the purposes of the Confederates. The broken and wooded country which surrounds it is traversed, like all northern Virginia, both east and west of the Shenandoah Valley, by few, and for the most part, miserable roads. The Warrenton turnpike, a good Macadamized road, which leads from Alexandria west to Centreville, twenty-two miles distant, turns at that place to the South, and crosses Bull Run at a point now become historical, and known as Stone Bridge.

The Confederate troops here assembled were left under the orders of General Bonham, of South Carolina, until the nature and proportions of the Federal campaign became irresistibly clear, when General Beauregard, who had been previously appointed to the defense of the lower Mississippi, was suddenly recalled to Virginia, and sent to this important command.

Lieutenant-General Scott, being required to invest and invade Virginia, made the best disposition possible of the forces under his command. To Fortress Monroe he sent MajorGeneral Butler, a lawyer of Massachusetts, who had been a conspicuous supporter of the policy of Mr. Jefferson Davis in the Democratic party, but who had thrown himself eagerly into the war, and happening to be sent into Maryland immediately after the Baltimore riots of April 19th, had astonished the

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