allenge, much less overcome. Lee was the military
adviser to the Confederate Government at Richmond as Scott then
was to the Union Government at Washington.

Such was the central scene of action, where the first great battle
of the war was fought. The Union forces were based on the Potomac
from Washington to Harper's Ferry. The Confederates faced them
from Bull Run to Winchester, which points were nearly sixty miles
apart by road and rail. The Union forces were fifty thousand strong,
the Confederate thirty-three thousand. The Union problem was how to
keep "Joe" Johnston in the Winchester position by threatening or
actually making an invasion of the Shenandoah Valley with Patterson's
superior force, while McDowell's superior force attacked or turned
Beauregard's position at Bull Run. The Confederate problem was how to
give Patterson the slip and reach Bull Run in time to meet McDowell
with an equal force. The Confederates had the advantage of interior
lines both here and in the semicircle as a whole, though the Union
forces enjoyed in general much better means of transportation. The
Confederates enjoyed better control from government headquarters,
where the Cabinet mostly had the sense to trust in Lee. Scott, on
the other hand, was tied down by orders to defend Washington by
purely defensive means as well as by the "on to Richmond" march.
Patterson was therefore obliged to watch the Federal back door
at Harper's Ferry as well as the Confederate side doors up the
Shenandoah: an impossible task, on exterior lines, with the kind
of force he had. The civilian chiefs at Washington did not see
that the best of all defense was to destroy the enemy's means of
destroying _them_, and that his greatest force of fighting _men_,
not any particular _place_, should always be their main objective.

On the fourteenth of June Johnston had destroyed everything useful
to the enemy at Harper's Ferry and retired to Winchester. On the
twentieth Jackson's brigade marched on Martinsburg to destroy the
workshops of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway and to support the
three hundred troopers under J. E. B. Stuart, who was so soon to
be the greatest of cavalry commanders on the Confederate side.
Unknown at twenty-nine, killed at thirty-one, "Jeb" Stuart was a
Virginian ex-officer of United States Dragoons, trained in frontier
fighting, and the perfect type of what a cavalry commander should
be: tall, handsome, splendidly supple and strong, hawk-eyed