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