He first went to California as manager of the San Francisco branch of a St. Louis bank, but the ill success of the enterprise drove him east again in 1857, when he engaged in the banking business in New York City. To this enterprise, however, the famous panic of 1857 put an early end, and in 1858 he was embarked in the law, with an office at Leavenworth, Kan. This, too, failing to supply sufficient bread and butter, he tried farming in Ohio for a while, and then applied for a government position in Washington. Instead of this, however, he secured an appointment as Superintendent and Professor of Engineering in a new military college just started at Alexandria, in Louisiana. He entered upon the duties of his position on the 1st of January, 1860, when the mutterings of rebellion were already abroad; and just as he had put the academy into good working order the war-cloud became so black that Sherman, in a manly letter to Governor Moore, of Louisiana, declared his intention of maintaining his allegiance to "the old constitution as long as a fragment of it survives," resigned his office, and returned to Ohio. In April, 1861, he accepted the presidency of a St. Louis street railway company. Then Sumter was fired on, the war fever filled the land, troops were hurried to the front, and Sherman signified to the Secretary of War his desire to serve his country "in the capacity for which I was trained." On May 14, 1861, he was appointed colonel of the Thirteenth United States Infantry, and assigned to inspection duty in Washington under General Scott, the commander-in-chief; and then the real story of his life began. At first fate seemed to be against him. He was too outspoken and hard-headed to suit the reckless and effusive boasters of those early days of the war, which he insisted would be long and bloody, unless the whole military power of the Republic was put into the field to crush the rebellion before it could grow into a revolution. He was as disgusted as Washington had been in revolutionary times, with short-service enlistments, and refused point-blank to go to Ohio to enlist "three-months men," saying, in his blunt way, "You might as well try to put out fire with a squirt gun as expect to put down this rebellion with three-months troops." He was assigned to the command of the Third Brigade of the First Division of McDowell's army, and had his "baptism of fire" upon the disastrous field of Bull Run, which he has characterized as "one of the best planned and worst fought battles of the war." That famous "skedaddle," as it was the fashion to call it, he frankly admitted, in his official report, began among the men of his brigade, and the "disorderly retreat" speedily became a humiliating rout, which only a few cool-headed officers, such as Colonel Sherman, could check or control.