action, he failed to strike home at the critical moment.

Yet though he failed in arms he won by proclamations; so much so,
in fact, that _Words not Deeds_ might well have been his motto. He
began with a bombastic address to the inhabitants and ended with
another to his troops, whom he congratulated on having "annihilated
two armies, commanded by educated and experienced soldiers, intrenched
in mountain fastnesses fortified at their leisure."

It disastrously happened that the Union public were hungering for
heroes at this particular time and that Union journalists were itching
to write one up to the top of their bent. So all McClellan's tinsel
was counted out for gold before an avaricious mob of undiscriminating
readers; and when, at the height of the publicity campaign, the
Government wanted to retrieve Bull Run they turned to the "Man
of Destiny" who had been given the noisiest advertisement as the
"Young Napoleon of the West." McClellan had many good qualities
for organization, and even some for strategy. An excited press and
public, however, would not acclaim him for what he was but for
what he most decidedly was not.

Meanwhile, before McClellan went to Washington and Lee to West
Virginia, the main Union army had been disastrously defeated by
the main Confederate army at Bull Run, on that vital ground which
lay between the rival capitals.

In April Lincoln had called for three-month volunteers. In May the
term of service for new enlistments was three years. In June the
military chiefs at Washington were vainly doing all that military
men could do to make something like the beginnings of an army out of
the conglomerating mass. Winfield Scott, the veteran General-in-Chief,
rightly revered by the whole service as a most experienced, farsighted,
and practical man, was ably assisted by W. T. Sherman and Irvin
McDowell. But civilian interference ruined all. Even Lincoln had
not yet learned the quintessential difference between that civil
control by which the fighting services are so rightly made the
real servants of the whole people and that civilian interference
which is very much the same as if a landlubber owning a ship should
grab the wheel repeatedly in the middle of a storm. Simon Cameron,
then Secretary of War, was good enough as a party politician, but
all thumbs when fumbling with the armies in the field. The other
members of the Cabinet had war nostrums of their own; and every
politician with a pull di