o, were the similar cases of Adjutant-General Cooper and
Quartermaster-General Johnston. In gratifying contrast stands the
steadfast loyalty and devotion of Lieutenant-General Winfield Scott,
who, though he was a Virginian and loved his native State, never wavered
an instant in his allegiance to the flag he had heroically followed in
the War of 1812, and triumphantly planted over the capital of Mexico in
1847. Though unable to take the field, he as general-in-chief directed
the assembling and first movements of the Union troops.

The largest part of the three months' regiments were ordered to
Washington city as the most important position in a political, and most
exposed in a military point of view. The great machine of war, once
started, moved, as it always does, by its own inherent energy from
arming to concentration, from concentration to skirmish and battle. It
was not long before Washington was a military camp. Gradually the
hesitation to "invade" the "sacred soil" of the South faded out under
the stern necessity to forestall an invasion of the equally sacred soil
of the North; and on May 24 the Union regiments in Washington crossed
the Potomac and planted themselves in a great semicircle of formidable
earthworks eighteen miles long on the Virginia shore, from Chain Bridge
to Hunting Creek, below Alexandria.

Meanwhile, a secondary concentration of force developed itself at
Harper's Ferry, forty-nine miles northwest of Washington. When, on April
20, a Union detachment had burned and abandoned the armory at that
point, it was at once occupied by a handful of rebel militia; and
immediately thereafter Jefferson Davis had hurried his regiments thither
to "sustain" or overawe Baltimore; and when that prospect failed, it
became a rebel camp of instruction. Afterward, as Major-General
Patterson collected his Pennsylvania quota, he turned it toward that
point as a probable field of operations. As a mere town, Harper's Ferry
was unimportant; but, lying on the Potomac, and being at the head of the
great Shenandoah valley, down which not only a good turnpike, but also
an effective railroad ran southeastward to the very heart of the
Confederacy, it was, and remained through the entire war, a strategical
line of the first importance, protected, as the Shenandoah valley was,
by the main chain of the Alleghanies on the west and the Blue Ridge on
the east.

A part of the eastern quotas had also been hurried to Fortress Monroe,