race had not begun.

The defeat had given the sad-eyed President unlimited power to draw
on the resources of the nation for men and money. His call for half
a million soldiers met with instant response. The fighting spirit of
twenty-two million Northern people had been roused. They felt the
disgrace of Bull Run and determined to wipe it out in blood.

Three Northern armies were hurled on the South in a well-planned,
concerted movement to take Richmond. McDowell marched straight down to
Fredericksburg with forty thousand. Fermont, with Milroy, Banks and
Shields, was sweeping through the Shenandoah Valley. McClellan, with
his grand army of one hundred and twenty thousand men, had moved up
the Peninsula in resistless force until he lay on the banks of the
Chickahominy within sight of the spires of Richmond.

To meet these three armies aggregating a quarter of a million men, the
South could marshall barely seventy thousand. Jackson was despatched
with eighteen thousand to baffle the armies of McDowell, Fremont,
Milroy, Shields and Banks in the Valley and prevent their union with
McClellan.

The war really began on Sunday, the second of June, 1862, when Robert
E. Lee was sent to the front to take command of the combined army of
seventy thousand men of the South.

The new commander with consummate genius planned his attack and flung
his gray lines on McClellan with savage power. The two armies fought in
dense thickets often less than fifty yards apart. Their muskets flashed
sheets of yellow flame. The sound of ripping canvas, the fire of small
arms in volleys, could no longer be distinguished. The sullen roar was
endless, deafening, appalling. Over the tops of oak, pine, beech, ash
and tangled undergrowth came the flaming thunder of two great armies
equally fearless, the flower of American manhood in their front ranks,
daring, scorning death, fighting hand to hand, man to man.

The people in the churches of Richmond as they prayed could hear the
awful roar. They turned their startled faces toward the battle. It rang
above the sob of organ and the chant of choir.

The hosts in blue and gray charged again and again through the tangle
of mud and muck and blood and smoke and death. Bayonet rang on bayonet.
They fought hand to hand, as naked savages once fought with bare hands.
The roar died slowly with the shadows of the night, until only the crack
of a rifle here and there broke the stillness.

And then above the low m