Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/488

 456 McClellarfs rise to high command. request, and sent Governor Peirpoint authority under which he soon organised and placed in the field four Union regiments. Sustained by Federal troops, the loyal reaction against secession was fully maintained ; and in due course of time the new State of West Virginia was consoli- dated and organised, and formally admitted as a member of the Union. West Virginia lies contiguous to the State of Ohio; and, as the quota of three-months' militia from that State under Lincoln's first call consisted of thirteen regiments, that quota itself formed a Major-General's com- mand. Upon advice from eminent citizens of Cincinnati, Governor Dennison appointed to this office Captain George B. McClellan, an officer born in 1826, reared and educated in Philadelphia, who had graduated from the West Point Military Academy in 1846. He had rendered gallant service in the Mexican war as a member of the engineer corps, and afterwards discharged several special duties in exploration and scientific work, also as member of a commission to gather military information in Europe. He had resigned his commission as Captain of Cavalry in 1857, and was at the moment serving as president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad. His appointment as Major-General of the Ohio Militia was especially gratifying to General Scott, who had personal knowledge of his acquirements and talents ; and upon Scott's suggestion, President Lincoln appointed him, on May 3, to the command of the Military Department of the Ohio. Ten days later, under the imperative need of officers for the rapidly expanding military establishment, the President appointed him a Major-General in the regular army, which changed his three-months' militia commission to one of permanent service. It was the beginning of a series of rapid military promotions which make the history of the first year of the civil war read more like fiction than reality. Only a few months later McClellan was General-in-Chief of all the armies of the United States, a leap in rank and power from a simple captaincy that eclipses plausible romance. General McClellan was instructed to use the Ohio quota to guard the line of the Ohio river, to encourage and support Union sentiment wherever it might be manifested south of that stream, and especially to sustain the Unionists of West Virginia in their movement of separation from the eastern half. General Lee at Richmond, pushing forward the organisation of Virginia Secessionist troops, had scattered his proclama- tions and sent his recruiting agents through the western half of the State, but they reported opposition and failure from the beginning ; whereupon he ordered a few companies to Beverly as a nucleus around which to gather sufficient force to control the western end of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. To meet this show of force, McClellan, under a call from the Union leaders, moved forward four regiments to the railroad junction at Grafton. Porterfield, the Confederate colonel, retired fifteen miles south to Philippi, at which place he was, however, on June 3, routed and