well supplied with cannon and small arms from the captured navy-yards at Norfolk and Pensacola and the six or eight arsenals located in the South.  The martial spirit of their people was roused to the highest enthusiasm, and there was no lack of volunteers to fill the companies and regiments which the Confederate legislators authorized Davis to accept, either by regular calls on State executives in accordance with, or singly in defiance of, their central dogma of States Rights, as he might prefer.

The secession of the Southern States not only strengthened the rebellion with the arms and supplies stored in the various military and naval depots within their limits, and the fortifications erected for their defense:  what was of yet greater help to the revolt, a considerable portion of the officers of the army and navy—­perhaps one third—­abandoned the allegiance which they had sworn to the United States, and, under the false doctrine of State supremacy taught by Southern leaders, gave their professional skill and experience to the destruction of the government which had educated and honored them.  The defection of Robert E. Lee was a conspicuous example, and his loss to the Union and service to the rebel army cannot easily be measured.  So, also, 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