of the South; the situation of the Southern Government in this respect was precisely the same.  The North had enough to do meantime in making sure of the States which were still debatable ground.  Such forces as were available must of necessity be used for this purpose, but for any larger operations of war military considerations, especially on the side which had the larger resources at its back, were in favour of waiting and perfecting the instrument which was to be used.  But in the course of July the pressure of public opinion and of Congress, which had then assembled, overcame, not without some reason, the more cautious military view, and on the 21st of that month the North received its first great lesson in adversity at the battle of Bull Run.

Before recounting this disaster we may proceed with the story of the struggle in the border States.  At an early date the rising armies of the North had been organised into three commands, called the Department of the Potomac, on the front between Washington and Richmond, the Department of the Ohio, on the upper watershed of the river of that name, and the Department of the West.  Of necessity the generals commanding in these two more Western Departments exercised a larger discretion than the general at Washington.  The Department of the Ohio was under General McClellan, before the war a captain of Engineers, who had retired from active service and had been engaged as a railway manager, in which capacity he has already been noticed, but who had earned a good name in the Mexican War, had been keen enough in his profession to visit the Crimea, and was esteemed by General Scott.  The people of West Virginia, who, as has been said, were trying to organise themselves as a new State, adhering to the Union, were invaded by forces despatched by the Governor of their old State.  They lay mainly west of the mountains, and help could reach them up tributary valleys of the Ohio.  They appealed to McClellan, and the successes quickly won by forces despatched by him, and afterwards under his direct command, secured West Virginia, and incidentally the reputation of McClellan.  In Kentucky, further west, the Governor endeavoured to hold the field for the South with a body known as the State Guard, while Unionist leaders among the people were raising volunteer regiments for the North.  Nothing, however, was determined by fighting between these forces.  The State Legislature at first took up an attitude of neutrality, but a new Legislature, elected in June, was overwhelmingly for the Union.  Ultimately the Confederate armies invaded Kentucky, and the Legislature thereupon invited the Union armies into the State to expel them, and placed 40,000 Kentucky volunteers at the disposal of the President.  Thenceforward, though Kentucky, stretching as it does for four hundred miles between the Mississippi and the Alleghanies, remained for long a battle-ground, the allegiance of its people to the Union was unshaken.  But the