innati under young
George B. McClellan, soon to be major-general, at Louisville under Don
C. Buell, and at St. Louis under the erratic John C. Fremont. When
Congress met, all these movements were quickly ratified, and the two
sections of a country of more than thirty million people, all supposed
to be devotees of commerce, industry, and agriculture, "worshipers of
money," entered with unparalleled eagerness upon a war which was soon to
surprise and even appall the world. What industry lost in the North by
secession of the South was regained in the manufacture or preparation of
military supplies for soldiers who fought the South; and in the
Confederacy men who knew little of industry and of seafaring soon
established great plants where the munitions of war were readily made,
or they turned with a strange facility to improvising gunboats and
blockade runners. Within a year or two the people of the North showed
the most bitter hatred of the South and everything Southern, and in the
South women sold their hair for the common cause, and sent their gold
and silver ornaments to the Government to be converted into implements
of war. Such results could hardly have been the outcome of a hasty
decision on either side. The long-nursed dislike of the people of each
section now became a consuming hatred; it was a mighty struggle for the
mastery of the Government which had been founded in 1787-89, for the
control of the vast territory which composed the heart of North America.
One party or the other must be vanquished, one section or the other must
become a second Ireland.

On July 20, General McDowell attacked the army under General Beauregard
near Centreville, a Virginia village to the northward of a little stream
which gave its name to the battle that ensued,--Bull Run. About 35,000
Northerners made up the army of invasion; Beauregard commanded less than
20,000, but Joseph E. Johnston brought his army of 15,000 from the
Valley of Virginia in time to decide the fortunes of that hot summer
day. After stout fighting on both sides during the earlier part of the
onset, these fresh troops of the Valley were seen marching into action.
To Union eyes the 15,000 easily appeared to be 30,000. Panic seized men
and officers alike, and a stampede for Washington and safer ground
followed. Arms, provisions, horses, even, and the carriages of
stiff-backed Republican Congressmen, who had left their posts to see the
fun, were left upon the field and