Thus, by her will and by fate, Virginia became the Flanders of the war. And already, from the moment the events in Charleston harbor made war flagrant, armed men, in troops and battalions, hurried forward, from the North and from the South, to her borders. An equal fire animated both sections. President Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand men; Mr. Davis, for a hundred thousand,—armies of a proportion never before seen on the Western continent. Yet such was the spontaneous alacrity with which on each side the summons was obeyed, that within the space of a few weeks, these limits were greatly overpassed, and an additional call for a half million men on the part of the North, and a levy en masse on the part of the South, met a like response. Then by that new agent of transport that has wrought a revolution in military operations no less than in the movement of commerce, the volunteers were quickly conveyed to Virginia from points so distant and divergent as to strike the imagination with wonder. It is estimated that for many weeks after the first call for troops, armed men arrived in Richmond, from all parts of the South, at the rate of from fifteen hundred to two thousand daily; and the multitude poured forth from the populous North was not less, but greater. From the loyal States, the point of concentration was Washington, where for a time the gathering force held a simply defensive attitude: then bursting the
