his master, had tried in vain; namely, to make it democratic. He was at the Willard. There were thousands of Republicans, young and old, lame and halt, alert and designing, bent upon serving their country, Simon Cameron's hordes from Pennsylvania, men from Michigan, and earnest souls from Iowa; they filled the lobbies, piled in twos and fours upon the beds, lounged at night in the corridors and under the staircases: all eagerly awaiting the great event and the good things that were to follow, damning the wicked Southerners for the treason they had not committed, but not unhappy that so many offices were falling vacant.

Washington was a dreary city, its aristocratic curtains lowered, black crape on the doors and chandeliers of fashionable houses, distinguished gentlemen keeping to themselves and fine ladies drawing their skirts about beautiful ankles lest they be contaminated by the barbaric hordes that filled the public places. General Scott was there and busy in spite of his years and his huge fat form, warning his captains that the "minions of Jefferson Davis" might break into the city and capture the president. Senator Seward, big with great events, slipped in and out of the presidential rooms with the mysterious air of a mighty man. Edwin M. Stanton, intimate of the "traitor in the White House," could hardly keep his counsels and his poise, wondering whether the new cabinet could be formed without his presence.

Armed and uniformed soldiers, for the first time in history, waited along the avenue for the unmilitary president elect. At last Lincoln appeared at the appointed place, a vast

uneasy audience before him, to read his inaugural address, little Douglas at his side-the divine Adele and the perturbed Mary not far away. As Lincoln arose, he looked about for a place to put the indispensable tophat. He was embarrassed. Douglas stepped forward with the ease and aplomb which ever marked his movements and took the hat, thus saying to a million ardent followers, "We support the president of the United States": the one auspicious moment of an inauspicious day, the last act of Douglas but one before the grave on the shore of Lake Michigan opened to receive his remains.

Lincoln looked out to the east and south where he must have imagined he could hear the movements of the excited Southerners as they formed their armies, seized public armories, and marched to strategic places, Jefferson Davis, tall, lean, sallow, half ill and of troubled soul, their president. Everywhere there was life, hope, and zeal: young men on horseback and making ready to command other men; young women, unused to needles and thread, making uniforms, knitting socks, or unfurling the banners of revolution. What could Lincoln say?

He took the doubtful ground of Webster and Jackson that the Union antedated the States, that there could be no secession: "I consider the Union unbroken and shall execute the law in all the States. But there needs to be no bloodshed, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority." It was the only position the president could take since he had refused the olivebranch of the preceding December. But gentle of spirit and sanguine of

"I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection."

It was no light occasion. The South meant to be free or make a war the like of which the world had not seen-desperately afraid of the future. The North, busy with its machines, its banks, its party hucksters, its incoming hordes of immigrants-the riches of a great future beckoning had no time for war; nor did the son of Nancy Hanks have any stomach for the game of kings. The secretary of state in the language of Sir Oracle declared every day there would be no war. Samuel P. Chase, of the famous Address, in immaculate attire, planning the day when he would sit at the head of the cabinet table, thought there would be no war. Over in the War Department the most unwarlike of secretaries thought less of generals than of contracts for Pennsylvania railroads, while neither Seward nor Chase nor Cameron had love for any one of their group. A little apart one sees the correct square-headed Gideon Welles, the righteous, eying sharply the doings of all his fellows, ready to run off and put it all down in his crabbed diary. But the most remarkable of Lincoln's political family was the young upand-coming Montgomery Blair, son of old Frank Blair, marked all over with the scars of political battles, postmaster-general-the only member of the cabinet, I believe, who owned slaves-ever buckling on or taking off a sword, rather than hastening off postboys with fat bags

a staid attorney-general from Missouri peering anxiously into ancient law-books to find precedents for the unprecedented dilemma. It was a new, awkward, unwelcome régime, Abraham Lincoln, “a felt hat on the back of his head, in ill-fitting clothes, striding like a crane in a bulrush swamp and mopping his face with a red handkerchief-Mrs. Lincoln hurrying off of afternoons to milk her cows"-this from William H. Russell.

But there in Charleston, brave Union soldiers, cooped up in an ancient fort, besought him daily for relief. If Lincoln gave relief, he would start the guns of war; if he did not give relief, he would leave the Union to fall to pieces. Ruefully he gave notice to the governor of South Carolina that he must feed his own. The military men, grown weary of politicians, North and South alike, let loose the dogs of war, April 12, 1861. All that night the shells rose high over the harbor and fell upon the fort, the wit and the beauty of the proud South watching and shouting and praying from the roofs of Charleston, Colonel Anderson and his men making what resistance the honor of the Union required, helpless, starving, powder-blackened men. It was war. But on the morrow the sun rose calm and red from the waters of the sea: not a man had been killed. The aged bishop of South Carolina thanked the god of battles for the divine intervention; the Roman communion sang in their little cathedral the first Confederate Te Deum.

The president of the United States called for seventy-five thousand vol

unteers, three months' men; so short a struggle! The busy North ruefully buckled on the harness of war, ready to fight with one hand and run their mills with the other. Ancient Virginia, long in convention assembled, took sides, called home her Lees and her Johnstons, seized the United States navy-yard at Norfolk, the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, and staked anew her far-flung boundary: the Chesapeake Bay, the Potomac, thence, to Wheeling, and the Ohio River to the borders of Kentucky! Maryland forbade the incoming volunteers to cross her narrow territory and made ready to declare inviolable neutrality. Kentucky was about to take the same course-and make the invasion of the seceded States impossible. Invasion of sovereign States! The wise men of the cabinet knew not what to do. Seward and Chase and Cameron were poor counselors. Edwin M. Stanton wrote his friend, James Buchanan, that their mutual friend, Jefferson Davis, would soon come and make an end of the miserable régime. General Scott, seventy-five years old, hobbling about between two orderlies, his gouty legs wholly unequal to his three hundred pounds of weight, and not forgetful of his lifelong feud with the president of the Confederacy, was both the hope and the despair of Lincoln. Happily, the irrepressible Benjamin F. Butler, fat, wabbly, coarse-built and coarse of character, with big bulging eyes and a nose that almost hid his generous mouth, a Democrat who had done his utmost to make Jefferson Davis president of the United States the year before, brought a Massachusetts regiment into Maryland and

with the support of Scott compelled the legislature to yield the control of her soil to the new administration; strange savior of Abraham Lincoln! And Lincoln promptly put the railroad zones from Washington to New York under martial law, the Supreme Court of the United States to the contrary notwithstanding. Before the first of May, Kentucky took warning, and Missouri was gripped to the Union through the courage and the chicane of Frank Blair, representative of that State in Congress and brother to the belligerent Montgomery Blair, postmastergeneral-always ready to resign if he did not have his way. A dangerous moment for Lincoln sighing, “When will they come?"

The longed-for relief came, and Lincoln breathed easily when he learned that young George McClellan, a former protégé of Jefferson Davis and friend of Stephen A. Douglas, was marching from Cincinnati into the mountains of western Virginia. Nor could Lincoln now escape the invasion of Virginia. He made the home of Robert E. Lee the headquarters of General Irvin McDowell, himself of Virginia stock; and McDowell, holding the bridges across the Potomac, stretched his lines to Fairfax Court-House, twenty miles southwest. How many thousand indignant volunteers did not that give to the Confederates, their president settled in Richmond, great training-camps spreading their white tents around the devoted city! All over the South young men hastened North, young women made uniforms and knitted socks-three million slaves hardly lifting their black sweaty faces from their tasks, three

million negroes singing and frolicking at their work. Thirty miles southwest of Washington Pierre G. Beauregard, recent superintendent of the Military Academy at West Point and master of McDowell there, commanded twenty thousand soldiers; at Winchester Joseph E. Johnston, prize officer of General Scott, watched the movements of General Robert Patterson, master of mills in Pennsylvania and plantations in the South, with twenty thousand men dismantled Harper's Ferry. There were skirmishes here and there, rumors of victory and defeat-the distraught people of the United States about to come to deadly grips.

In this state of things Congress assembled the early days of July. There was Senator Sumner ready to give law to the rebels in Richmond and read them the Sermon on the Mount; Benjamin F. Wade, of "bloodletting" temper, an old rifle at his side in the Senate; and the redoubtable Lyman Trumbull whom Lincoln had helped into high office six years before-all restless, angry, complaining of a do-nothing president. In the House there was the suave young George W. Julian, sonin-law of the implacable Joshua Giddings; the sour Thaddeus Stevens, dragging his deformed foot after him, ready to put the South to fire and sword and call it the work of the Lord; and General Frank Blair, Lincoln's candidate for the speakership. A Republican Congress of an anti-Lincoln temper, as was shown when Galusha A. Grow, a friend of Thaddeus Stevens, and not of Lincoln, was made speaker. But there

were more hostile members, John C. Breckinridge, recently vice-president, tall, gentle, clever, and resolute, contemplating a general's command in the Confederacy, and Jesse Bright, Indiana senator and Kentucky slaveholder, to be expelled a year later for writing a letter to Jefferson Davis. An interesting Congress, to become more interesting as the ordeal of war pressed more hardly and revealed more clearly the characters of men.

Lincoln sent his first war message, an able statement, arguing again the famous Webster thesis that the Union antedated the States and asking for four hundred thousand volunteers and four hundred million dollars! A huge army and huge sums to support it. Not a word against slavery and slaveholders. Was he retreating to the camp of compromise? But the money and the men were voted, even if the means of raising them were left in doubt. Congressmen were more interested in hastening the army under McDowell into Virginia, "on to Richmond," where the miserable rebels were to be dispersed and their government dissolved-before July 20. Lincoln gave the order. The motley regiments moved forward burning traitors' houses and taking traitors' property; had not the government taken Robert E. Lee's ancestral estate? It was the twentyfirst of July before the impatient Sumner and Wade could get the regiments past Fairfax Court-House, a sultry day, several inches of dust on the roads, great oaks screening Confederate movements about Centreville, silent witnesses to the bloody struggle so soon to begin. Wade and Trumbull and Chandler fol

lowed, swords and horse-pistols handy-making ready to make short work of the bedeviled Southerners. Only the innate dignity of Lincoln saved him from joining the lusty Western warriors who had urged him against all compromise and plagued him into this hasty march, Lincoln waiting and pondering and praying to his unknown god. There was firing early that Sunday morning, near Bull Run Creek, firing that men heard half-way to Washington. Then fighting, maneuvering, death-grapples between the ill trained Yankees and the ill trained Rebels, bitter oaths and cursings filling the air, great guns roaring and, unlike their kindred guns at Charleston, doing deadly work, choking the ravines and the sluggish creek with the dead and the half-dead that fell thick and fast through the hot morning hours, their horses running, riderless, hither and thither, falling in windrows where the bursting shells caught their retreat; through the hot morning hours the thirsty men fought on, now victorious, now in retreat, frightened but resolute, into the sultry afternoon when Johnston brought his fresh farmer-soldiers from the valley fifty miles away where Patterson was to watch and hold them. Their numbers seemed myriad, their step swift and terrible as they bore down on McDowell's weary men. It was too much. The Union regiments began to give way; they retreated, leaving their big guns to the needy Confederates; companies collided, firearms went off unawares; the retreat became a rout, congressmen, crowded too near the fighting-line in the hope of taking the scalp of a former political enemy,

hastening with the rest to Centreville, to Fairfax, into the fortified lines near Washington. It was an awful day; the night was worse. Over all the dusty roads, through the forests and fields, men hastened, shouted, threw down their arms, dropped all dispensable clothes, running in the full belief that a vast army of cavalry pursued them. Wade made a poor spectacle, his unfleshed sword still at his side; Trumbull was hardly in better plight, his long-tailed senatorial coat flapping against his busy legs. There had been some bloodletting.

It was an awful day for the simple couple in the White House. Lincoln had sat that day at the telegraph to get the first news of victory. He learned of the initial successes and drove about the suburbs meditating perhaps what the victorious president would say to his defeated and flying fellow-Southerners. When he returned to the White House: "The day is lost; the army is in full retreat; save Washington." Lincoln received the shock without a tremor, his looseknit frame hardly tightening its tendons. He went quietly to dinner and told Mary, Douglas dead and buried there in Chicago-no clarion Democratic voice to call again the people to war and to defend a friendless chief.

About midnight the fragments of McDowell's army crowded helterskelter, swearing, drinking at the dram-shops, and damning aloud the miserable abolitionist régime. There was no sleep for the troubled soul in the White House. Would the suppressed Confederate majority of the city join the victorious army of Beauregard on the morrow? Shouts,