In the same way, early in July, McClellan gained some notable advantages at Rich Mountain and elsewhere in West Virginia. He had distinctly the best of it in the fighting; he dislodged his adversaries from their chosen positions; and he made prisoners of a considerable number of men. But his expedition led nowhither. His position and the positions which he captured from the Confederates were alike strategically unimportant from the point of view of an aggressive campaign. His victories commanded no strategic points and opened no road to any desirable objective. In the Valley of Virginia the Confederates abandoned Harper's Ferry--carrying off everything there that had military value, and General Patterson occupied the place. This made good dispatches for the newspapers and justified startling headlines of victory. But in very truth it meant nothing whatever except that the wily Fabian, Joseph E. Johnston, in command of the Confederate forces in that quarter, was wisely determined to keep himself and his army within reinforcing distance of Beauregard at Manassas, where the first great battle of the war was obviously destined to occur. Harper's Ferry and Martinsburg were clearly of no value whatsoever to General Johnston. By abandoning them and retiring to Winchester he placed his army twenty-five or thirty miles nearer to Manassas than it had been and drew Patterson by so much farther from the fighting points. For in order to reach and reinforce McDowell for the impending Manassas fight Patterson must march north, recross the Potomac, move thence eastward to Washington and then move southwest again to McDowell's assistance. Johnston meanwhile secured to himself a short line of march which gave him a very great advantage. When the time came for the first great battle of the war to be fought, it was hoped at Washington that Patterson with his strong force, numbering about twenty-two thousand men, might be able to reinforce McDowell, while real or pretended operations might detain Johnston in the valley and prevent him from reinforcing Beauregard with his much smaller force. But by retiring to Winchester Johnston had secured for himself the certainty of joining Beauregard in time for the battle. When Patterson threw forward a cloud of skirmishers as if intending to offer battle at Winchester and secure the mountain passes into eastern Virginia, it did not take the ceaselessly active cavalry leader J. E. B. Stuart many hours of continuous skirmishing within his enemy's lines to discover that the movement was a feint and that Patterson was in fact hurrying the main body of his army toward Manassas, by way of Harper's Ferry and Washington.