It

and he was using decidedly energetic language in condemnation of the recall of the troops. was Mr. Logan, who had gone out on the advanced picket line with Colonel Richardson, and who was emphatic in his assertions that the reserved regiments should have been ordered forward into the fight.

Two days afterward, General McDowell, having found that the enemy's works commanding the fords could not be carried by assault without a great loss, concentrated his forces at Centreville, and advanced by the flank around the fords. to attack the Confederates at Manassas. The advancing columns of Union soldiers, with glistening bayonets, gay flags, and bands performing patriotic airs, moved through the primeval forests of the Old Dominion. They were accompanied by a crowd of spectators, who had driven out from Washington to witness the fight, as they would have gone to witness a horse-race or a game at base-ball. The Union officers, smarting under the insinuations of politicians that they dared not fight, gallantly led their undisciplined commands into the range of the enemy's guns, where they fought like veterans. At first it was thought that victory had perched on the Union flags, but the decimated Confederate regiments received fresh courage from the arrival of reinforcements, and the tide of battle was turned in their favor. A retreat was ordered, which soon become a dis

graceful rout, and it was impossible to control men who had lost all presence of mind and only longed for absence of body.

The Confederates were in no condition to follow up the victory which they had gained and to press on to Washington, and the defeat secured the support of every loyal man in the Northern States for the Union cause whatever his previous political convictions might have been. Practical issues were presented, and there was no time for hesitation or indecision.

Thenceforth Mr. Logan was animated by the sentiment uttered by his deceased political leader, Stephen A. Douglas, in his last public speech: "The conspiracy is now known, armies have been raised, war is levied to accomplish it. There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war; only Republicans or traitors." Believing this, Mr. Logan wrote to his relatives and friends in Illinois, telling them that there were but two sides to the question, and that he intended to take up arms for the Union.

CHAPTER V.

THE COLONEL-BELMONT FORT HENRY-FORT

C

DONELSON.

ONGRESS adjourned on the 6th day of August, and Mr. Logan, hastening to Illinois, obtained the recruiting papers for the Thirty-first Regiment of Volunteers, which he proceeded to raise in the immediate neighborhood of his home, having first enlisted as a private himself. Attempts had been made there to induce the young men to enter the Confederate service, and a few of them had crossed the Ohio and enlisted in the Thirteenth Tennessee Confederate Regiment. Mr. Logan's appearance turned the scale. On the 3d of September he addressed a public meeting at Marion, announcing his intention to enter the Union service as a private, or in any capacity in which he could serve his country best in defending the old blood-stained flag over every foot of soil in the United States. His eloquence and high personal reputation rallied friends and neighbors around him, and on the 13th of November, 1861, the Thirty-first Regiment of Illinois Volunteers was organized, and he was chosen and commissioned as its colonel.