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THE FIRST BATTLE OF BULL RUN.

Mexican war I had great confidence in intelligent volunteer troops, if rightlyhandled; and with such an active and victorious war-engine as the Con-federate Army of the Potomac could have immediately been made,— reen-forced, as time went, by numbers and discipline,— the Federal militarypower in the East could never have reached the head it took when McClellanwas allowed to organize and discipline at leisure the powerful army that,in the end, wore outthe South. In warone success makesanother easier, andits right use is asthe step to another,until final achieve-ment. This was theuse besought by mein the plan of cam-paign I have men-tioned as presentedto Mr. Davis on the14th of July, a fewdays before the bat-tle, but rejected byhim as impractica-ble, and as rather of-fering opportunityto the enemy to crush us. To supply the deficiency of transportation (ourvehicles being few in number, and many so poor as to break down in ordinarycamp service), I myself had assigned to special duty Colonel (since Governor)James L. Kemper, of Virginia , who quickly obtained for me some two hundredgood wagons, to which number I had limited him so as not to arouse againthe jealousy of the President’s staff. If my plan of operations for the captureof Washington had been adopted, I should have considered myself therebyauthorized and free to obtain, as I readily could have done, the transportationnecessary. As it was—though the difficult part of this “impracticable” planof operations had been proven feasible, that is, the concentration of the Shen-andoah forces with mine (wrung later than the eleventh hour through thealarm over the march upon Richmond , and discountenanced again nervouslyat the twelfth hour by another alarm as to how “ the enemy may vary hisplans ” in consequence), followed by the decisive defeat of the main Federalforces — nevertheless the army remained rooted in the spot, although wehad more than fifteen thousand troops who had been not at all or but littlein the battle and were perfectly organized, while the remaining commands,in the high spirits of victory, could have been reorganized at the tap of thedrum, and many with improved captured arms and equipments. I hadalready urged my views with unusual persistency, and acted on them againstall but an express order to the contrary; and as they had been deliberately

FAIRFAX COURT HOUSE. FROM A WAR-TIME rHOTOGRAPII.

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