He was on the field at First Manassas when that unprecedented panic seized the federal army. It was instantaneously understood by the latest recruit looking on from our side. The men and line officers around me ejaculated, "We ought to press forward and go into Washington with 'em." Davis with his training should have seen better even than these raw volunteers, and recognized it was his part by pursuit to accelerate the flight and raise that panic to its top. There were remaining several hours of daylight, during which five of his men could chase a hundred and a hundred put ten thousand to flight, and when night came the excited imagination of the fliers would re-enforce the confederates with a vast host of destroying monsters behind and before. The federals losing all organization, were racing to escape over the bridge at Washington which was a little more than twenty miles away. They were choking the roads with abandoned vehicles and artillery. As it was, they seriously choked the bridge. Had there been rapid advance by us, and firing in the rear, it is more than probable we should have got the bridge unharmed. We should have added thousands to our prisoners. But far more important than this, would have been the arms, ammunition, wagons, horses, quartermaster and commissary supplies of all sorts--in short, the entire baggage of the enemy--that would have been ours for the taking. And if the federals had destroyed the bridge before we reached it, we should have had McDowell's pontoons, or captured material out of which to make a bridge of our own. We should have crossed somehow, and at the place which circumstances and the insight of genius suggested. The capital would have fallen, really without a blow; and what an immense addition to our booty would have been here. And the prestige! In a day or two our flag would have waved over Baltimore, the consequence being that Maryland, with a throng of most true and valiant fighters, would have been won for the Confederate States, and its northern line instead of the Potomac would have become the frontier. All this would have happened if Davis had been a Cæsar and had Cæsar-like used the one great opportunity of the war. It must be set down to his credit that he did far more than Johnston and Beauregard insist upon pursuit. But he does not seem to have thought of it until night; and at last he permitted himself to be reasoned out of it.