8 the field an army of six hundred thousand men, to be supplied with all the needs of a moderfl army, and that to© without even the skeleton of a veteran force on which to build, was indeed a work of frightful magnitude. And yet this was accomplished in the space of three months—an achievement that has extorted the wonder and admiration of military men throughout the world. IV. THE FIRST YEAR OF THE WAR. As the chief force of the rebellion—the head and front of the offending—was collected in Virginia, it became a necessity to place here an army of proportions- fitting it to foil the purpose of the enemy touching the capture of our capital, at the same time to drive the opposing force out of Virginia. With this view .a gramd army of over 200,000 men was collected at Washington and placed under command of Major General G. B. McClellan, whose name, from a series of successful minor operations in Western Virginia, which another than he had planned and executed, had acquired a halo that did not properly belong to it. It was not until sometime afterwards that that constitutional inactivity, which seems to be a part of General McClellan’s nature, and that secret sympathy with treason that has always made him tender of hurting traitors, began to be appreciated, and hence it was that for many months our armies were kept at a dead-lock, thus giving the rebels the opportunity to prepare their plans, and the rebellion its best ally, time, and we put in a position of humiliation before the world. There was one result springing from the presence of our army in Virginia, however, which even the generalship of McClellan could not prevent; it thwarted the realization of those dreams of invasion that had fired the southern imagination. A powerful party of red-hot belligerents had made the carrying of the war into northern soil their rallying cry. Washington was in particular the object of their chief desires, and their direst hate. The rebel Secretary of War boasted at Montgomery, on the 12 th of April, that “ the flag which now flaunts the breeze here will float over the dome of the old Capitol at Washington before the 1st of July.” After Bull Run the same ambition fired these men. Said the Richmond Examiner : “ From the mountain tops and valleys to the shores of the sea there is one wild shout of firce resolve to capture Washington city at all and every human effort.” But this “ wild shout of fierce resolve” was vain against the 200,000 bayonets present to defend the capital; and though the early history of our army in Virginia was not of the character the people justly expected and the army eagerly desired, it was at least something, in view of these desperate projects of the rebels, that Washington, by its presence, was rendered safe. But outside of the immediate influence of the McClellan strategy, * a series of operations in the western theatre of war had been inaugurated, which laid the foundation of the splendid victories of the Union arms in that quarter* While McClellan during the winter of 1861-2, kept his magnificent armv of two hundred thousand men in inaction, maturing plans which were never matured, the early pages of the his-
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