Lee was not yet placed in any active military command, but at every step he was the supreme military adviser of the Southern authorities. When Beauregard, with all the laurels of popular praise upon him, reached Richmond he and not Lee was the idol of the hour. His spectacular and rather theatrical reduction of Fort Sumter had advertised him to the popular attention as nothing had advertised Lee. But Lee was his superior in rank as in genius and everything else, and it was he who directed Beauregard to establish himself at Manassas and along Bull Run as the fittest vantage ground from which to repel the first serious advance of the Federal Army which was then assembling at Washington. At that period of the war there prevailed at Washington what a military wit and critic afterwards called "the pepper box policy." That is to say, the policy was to send forces into all quarters at once, to defend large and small positions equally, and thus to scatter an army which if concentrated upon a single point might have achieved decisive results. Thus if the whole force available for eastern service had been brought at once to Washington and pushed thence toward Richmond it seemingly might have enveloped its adversary in superior numbers, and except for the uncertainty due to the untrained character of its men it might have been reckoned upon to achieve decisive results. But under the "pepper box policy," a part of this force was sent under McClellan to West Virginia; a part of it to the Valley of Virginia under Patterson; a part of it to Fortress Monroe, and the main body to Washington and its neighborhood, to protect the capital and presently to advance for the overthrow of Beauregard at Manassas and for a determined advance upon Richmond. This policy invited defeat and met it. On the tenth of June the small force at Fortress Monroe advanced and assailed the Confederates at Big Bethel. It was defeated with some loss, having inflicted no corresponding or compensatory injury upon the Confederates. Even had the expedition succeeded in driving the Confederates from Big Bethel, it could not possibly have accomplished anything of value to the Federal arms or cause. It was supported by no force at Fortress Monroe or elsewhere which was conceivably adequate to undertake an advance by that route upon Richmond. In default of such support the expedition was a foolish and futile one, and it must have been so reckoned even if it had succeeded in capturing the wholly unimportant works at Big Bethel.