Federal war stores, magazines, and naval materials were handed over to the new State claimants by their loose-wristed custodians, who, although educated by the Federal government, generously gave away her property on the principle of that testator, who requested his own debtors, forthwith after his decease, to pay what they owed to his executors, and nobly forgave his creditors the debts which he owed them. Floydism became as fashionable South as cotton, butternut-colored clothing and long hair. Just as the tree was bent the Twiggs inclined. At Little Rock, Pensacola, Portsmouth, Virginia, and in Texas, large masses of stores, cannon, guns, and naval materials were transferred, like the allegiance of the officers in charge, to the strange African fetich. It looked as if the American people were moving out of the lower story of their large, constitutional bazaar into the upper lofts, and were giving away generously a part of the expensive fixtures to the new incoming tenant.
In May some Confederate cotton curtains, striped with rough military lines, were hung before Washington. They concealed much real weakness and want of furniture behind them, and enabled those, who kept up a confused shouting in the darkened recesses and away from the front, to convey an impression of numbers which did not exist.
Thirteen thousand Federal troops,—part of the seventy-five thousand,—led by General Mansfield, desiring to get a nearer view of the curtain, crossed over the Potomac to Arlington Heights. The Virginia soil, it was found, no more spurned Northern feet than its cultivation was spurned by the hands of its white owners. The next day Colonel Ellsworth, with a Zouave regiment, entered the ancient town of Alexandria. Seeing the new flag swaying in its sluggish air, he tore down, as he supposed, the fetich symbol; but received almost on the instant a fatal shot, and was borne away with slow requiems to the vast Northern cemetery, in which new graves were soon rapidly to be opened. The struck symbol of the Confederacy was not cut down, but only lowered to half-mast, emblem of American hopes and pride.
May 9, Mr. Lincoln made a new call for forty-two thousand men. As quickly as May blossoms come to the expected call of the shower they came in rosy-hearted responses. General Butler hastened with twelve thousand men to Fortress Monroe, whence on the 9th of June he sent a detachment to Big Bethel. No wrestling-match, however, came off there, and no pillar of stone, of course, set up. Meanwhile, Missouri, Maryland, and Kentucky,—resisting the second secession cleavage, started by Virginia, and which had drawn after her Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina,—trembled with the forces contending for ascendency in their several borders. In the first State, General Jackson attempted in vain to mesmerize Lyons. Failing in these passes, he made several upward strokes, destroying railroads, bridges, and telegraph wires. But the Federal commander, pursuing him to Boonesville, disabled his arm from renewing such tricks. Uniting his forces with General Sigel’s,—making from their junction six thousand men,—General Lyons attacked at Wilson’s Creek, near Springfield, Ben McCullough and Sterling Price, with a force of twenty thousand.
The attacking party was repulsed, and its brave leader killed, but the followers of the Ranger were too weary to pursue them.
In Virginia, early in July, General George B. McClellan, then in his thirty-sixth year, and General Rosecrans, in his forty-second, collecting the cream of their little armies, skimmed the Confederate pans at Rich Mountain, while immediately after, the Confederate pails were completely upset or seized by General Morris, assisted by some help from Ohio and Indiana, at Carrick’s Ford. General Rosecrans, flowing towards the Southwest, came down like a mountain torrent in the Kanawha valley, even flooding such water-logged estrays as Henry A. Wise and the indicted Floyd. The salt springs of the valley, towards which they sped, could not preserve them from becoming spoiled, and held ever afterward, even by their friends, in bad odor.
A few days afterwards, the troops near Washington, numbering about 35,000 under General McDowell, were moved in a body towards the curtain,—which was drawn back and back by its supporters to Manassas Junction,—where Beauregard, intrenched with 27,000 men, assisted by General Joseph E. Johnston and 16,000 more close at hand in Winchester, steadied and upheld it. As the 35,000 thousand went forward, the three months’ men, whose time had expired, went backward, seeking the far rear to the sound of the enemy’s cannon, until the Federal inspecting force was reduced to 18,000. As they approached that historic little rill, Bull Run, they met the combined forces of the Confederates, and after holding the field against them and even advancing upon it, until late in the afternoon, they fell into one of those panics, not unfrequent among troops, raw or seasoned, in which the wild run of frightened bulls or the disordered summersaulting and tumbles of a herd of buffaloes is an orderly march. A mass of huddling soldiers, civilians, teamsters, members of Congress, and other muddled material was thrown upon Washington. The puzzled Confederates, unconscious of victory and of course unpursuing, at length got back to their capital. Discovering at last their stupendous victory, they made up for lost time by shouts so loud that every European echo repeated it, like a very Lurlei. In this big scare were many of the leading generals on either side,—among those on the Federal, Sherman, Burnside, and Heintzelman; and on the Confederate, Longstreet, Ewell, Early, Bonham, and that praying soldier, Stonewall Jackson, then thirty-five years old, and whose saintly, fanatical bravery recalls the gallant slaughterers in the civil wars of Scotland, who tempered their prayers with bayonet-pushing amens, and ended their fervid hacking of enemies with hearty thanksgivings to Heaven.
The losses on either side in men were nearly balanced,—the Federal dead amounting to 481, and the Confederate to 378; the Federal wounded to 1011, the Confederate to 1489; but in prestige, self-respect, and that subtle moral force which cannot be weighed even by grains or scruples, the advantage was greatly with the insurrectionists.
Congress immediately voted to raise 500,000 men for the army, two hundred and fifty millions of dollars in money, and to issue fifty millions of treasury-notes. The Confederate gathering determined to set 400,000 men to help the existing 210,000 hold up the cotton veil, now becoming so heavy and thick with dust and clots, that even Mr. Seward began to doubt whether it could be lifted in thirty days.
In August, Forts Hatteras and Clark were pulled by Commodore Stringham into Pamlico Sound.