This was the situation during the year 1861 and the early part of the year 1862. There were destined soon to come upon the scene two great masters of the military art--the one upon the one side and the other upon the other--Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. But during the early part of the struggle neither of these great men was in a position of mastery or control. Grant was struggling against all the difficulties that technicality and official jealousy could plant in his pathway. He found it difficult to get into the service at all. He was a West Point graduate and he had served with distinction in the regular army, but he had long ago resigned his commission. He had thus forfeited all claim to command those who had remained in the service and who had been promoted by seniority. These, and not Grant, were made generals. When Grant offered his services and asked for the privilege of fighting the country's adversaries his application was left absolutely unanswered. His only way into the army was "by the back door." He was elected by the men to be colonel of a regiment of Illinois volunteers, but was not commissioned in the regular army until after he had conducted a campaign to the first considerable success achieved by the national arms, and not even then without every embarrassment and humiliation which it was possible for his inferiors in superior place to inflict upon him. Indeed, as will be related later, his first great victory, the first of any importance that had been anywhere won for the Federal arms, was promptly punished by his suspension from command and by the refusal of his distinctly inferior superiors to let him follow up his success with other and obviously easy operations. On the Confederate side the one masterful military mind was that of Robert E. Lee. As a matter of fact it was Lee who selected Manassas as the first point of resistance, and it was under his wise direction that Beauregard and Johnston were able to concentrate their forces there and to win the victory of July 21, 1861. But in the meanwhile Lee was not himself appointed to command any considerable army. He was sent to West Virginia to patch up a peace between the civilian brigadiers who commanded there and who had managed among themselves to lose every action that had occurred in that quarter. While Beauregard and Johnston were weakly throwing away the opportunity so conspicuously opened to them by the Manassas victory, this officer of commanding genius was set to the task of organizing a mountain defense against expeditions that had nothing of serious purpose in them except the prevention of Confederate enlistments west of the Alleghenies.