But ready and numberless as were the volunteers from the North, the resources of the States in the way of arms and ammunition, officers, and organisation, were utterly inadequate for the crisis. Although by many it had long been feared that the differences between the North and South were being accentuated to a dangerous degree, yet when the worst fears were realised and the actual outbreak of rebellion came, it took the country, as a country, completely by surprise. More than this, it caught those in authority unprepared. So it was that between the firing on Fort Sumter and the first great battle--Bull Run--three months elapsed. Those three months were spent in arming the volunteers--for the United States, then as now, had no standing army to speak of--in organising commissariat and other departments, transporting troops to various centres, and arranging the thousand and one details which, unless carefully attended to, would render the bravest army helpless. But during the months of April, May, and June the absence of any organised body of opponents in the field allowed much telling work to be done by small parties of Southern soldiers. Unfortunately for the North, Washington, the capital of the Union, was to all intents and purposes within the sphere of Southern influence--on the one side the State of Virginia, among the first States to refuse troops to Abraham Lincoln, and on the other, Maryland, riotous and to all appearances likely to cast in her lot with the rebel States. Federal soldiers on their way to guard the capital were shot and trampled to death in the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, but a few miles north from Washington. On the same day the railway bridges of lines running northward were destroyed, thus completely cutting Washington off from the North. To complete the dangerous position of the capital, a force of Confederate soldiers seized Harper’s Ferry--the Harper’s Ferry of John Brown notoriety--then a famous national arsenal, and there established a Southern camp. Next the important navy yard at Gosport, after the officers in charge had attempted to destroy it by fire, was captured by Southerners; and a number of other important points bearing on the capital city falling into the hands of the Confederates, Washington was surrounded. The battle of Bull Run was brought on by the North with the intention of relieving the capital of the Union by dispersing the enemies that surrounded it. [Illustration: “THEY WOULD NOT KEEP IN RANK, ORDER AS MUCH AS YOU PLEASED” (_p._ 95).]