An army of invasion gathered rapidly in Washington, seized Arlington,
General Lee's ancient family estate, on the Virginia shore of the
Potomac, for a drill ground, took possession of recalcitrant Maryland,
and made of all railroads entering the capital the highways and
instruments of war. Winfield Scott, the old and vacillating general of
the regular army, was quickly set aside, and the able General Irvin
McDowell took his place. Thirty thousand troops moved slowly into
Virginia under the pressure of public opinion stimulated by newspaper
editors, ministers of the Gospel, and stiff-backed Republicans, who,
like similar classes in the South, declared that the war was to be over
in three months. Other armies collected at Cincinnati under young
George B. McClellan, soon to be major-general, at Louisville under Don
C. Buell, and at St. Louis under the erratic John C. Fremont. When
Congress met, all these movements were quickly ratified, and the two
sections of a country of more than thirty million people, all supposed
to be devotees of commerce, industry, and agriculture, "worshipers of
money," entered with unparalleled eagerness upon a war which was soon to
surprise and even appall the world. What industry lost in the North by
secession of the South was regained in the manufacture or preparation of
military supplies for soldiers who fought the South; and in the
Confederacy men who knew little of industry and of seafaring soon
established great plants where the munitions of war were readily made,
or they turned with a strange facility to improvising gunboats and
blockade runners. Within a year or two the people of the North showed
the most bitter hatred of the South and everything Southern, and in the
South women sold their hair for the common cause, and sent their gold
and silver ornaments to the Government to be converted into implements
of war. Such results could hardly have been the outcome of a hasty
decision on either side. The long-nursed dislike of the people of each
section now became a consuming hatred; it was a mighty struggle for the
mastery of the Government which had been founded in 1787-89, for the
control of the vast territory which composed the heart of North America.
One party or the other must be vanquished, one section or the other must
become a second Ireland.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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