CHAPTER XIX.

THE emergency which the rebellion forced upon the government found that government no less prepared to meet it than it found the loyal people of the country wanting in military knowledge and experience. The people were so eager to furnish men and supplies that they at once became impatient for results. No one among them seemed to doubt that the rebellion might be crushed in a few months, at most. They did not comprehend the almost infinite detail of a war. Patience was a virtue which it took four years to teach them; and when every man connected with the government was making all the efforts possible to forward the preparations for the struggle, the popular press-meaning well, but much misapprehending the difficulties of the situation-were already finding fault with the tardiness of operations. They had apparently forgotten how long it took to bring the Mexican war to a successful termination;-indeed, they stood in a very different relation to this war from that which they had held toward the Mexican war. That was a war of the government against another power; this was a war of their own, against domestic traitors who sought to overthrow the government. Every loyal man had a direct interest in the war; and he judged every movement and every delay as if it were his own private enterprise. There were inconveniences in this; but, in this universal personal interest, lay the secret of those four years of popular devotion to the war which so astonished the observers of other lands, and made ultimate victory, under Providence, a certainty from the first.

This popular impatience was, during the first two or three years of the war, one of the serious difficulties with which the administration had to deal. It had its advantages in holding to vigilance and industry all who were in responsible positions, but it had disadvantages in sometimes compelling precipitancy of action, and in breeding in the administration the idea that the people were to be managed like children whose food should be carefully prepared in the departments whenever it was administered, or carefully withheld when their stomachs were not able to receive it. This idea of the people was not born in the White House. Mr. Lincoln had a profound respect for the people, and never had any sympathy with efforts which aimed to make them instruments in the hands of the government, or which ignored the fact that they were the source of all his power.

During the latter part of April, certain important military operations were effected. Washington, the safety of which was the first consideration, was relieved from immediate danger; Fortress Monroe, commanding the water gateway of Virginia, was reinforced and held; the government works at Harper's Ferry were blown up and burned by Lieutenant Jones, in command of a company of regulars, moved by the intelligence of an advance of a large confederate force; Cairo, Illinois, an important strategic point at the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers, had been occupied by government forces, and the blockade was extended so as to embrace the states of Virginia and North Carolina. Then began organization. On the twenty-seventh of April, Adjutant General Thomas made the following announcement of new military departments: First, The military department of Washington, including the District of Columbia, according to its original boundary, Fort Washington and the adjacent country, and the state of Maryland as far as Bladensburgh, to be under the charge of Colonel Mansfield, with head-quarters at Washington. Second, The department of Annapolis, headquarters at that city, and including the country for twenty miles on either side of the railroad between Annapolis and

Washington, under command of General B. F. Butler, of the Massachusetts volunteers. Third, The department of Pennsylvania, including that state, Delaware and all of Maryland not included in the other departments already mentioned, and with Major General Patterson in command. The extension of the department of Washington to the old limits of the district was for the purpose of including territory absolutely necessary for the defense of the capital.

On the following tenth of May, another department was added to this list, including the states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, under the charge of General George B. McClellan. The object of this department was to maintain a defensive line on the Ohio River from Wheeling to Cairo.

On the twenty-ninth of April, Jefferson Davis convened his Congress at Montgomery, and sent them a message which was intended to be a justification of himself and his cause, before the country and the world. It was a document of rare ability, in its plausible presentation of the favorite southern doctrine of state rights, and its rehearsal of the pretended wrongs which the South had suffered at the hands of the North. It must have made a profound impression upon the great multitude of minds ready to receive it among his own people, and upon statesmen abroad who, from the first opening of the American difficulties, manifested a strange ignorance of the genius and structure of American institutions.

It is interesting to notice here the attempt on the part, both of Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Davis, to argue the rightfulness of their respective positions, in a great number of their state papers. Mr. Lincoln's old intellectual struggle with Mr. Douglas had ceased, and Jefferson Davis was now his antagonista man of higher culture and deeper character.

Mr. Davis, in his message, assumed the role of the wronged party. Notwithstanding the fact that he had seized all the property of the United States upon which he could lay his hands, and had, by bombardment, compelled the surrender of Fort Sumter, he tried to shift the burden of opening the war upon Mr. Lincoln, whose call for troops, weeks after a con

federate army was on its feet and actively gathering numbers, was the pretended cause of the convening of the rebel Congress. In this very message, indeed, he announces that there were already nineteen thousand men in different forts, and that sixteen thousand were on their way to Virginia.

In the doctrine of state rights was the only justification of the rebellion; and it was necessary that Mr. Davis should labor to establish it. With him, a state was greater than the United States. The state was sovereign, and the Union was essentially subject. Whenever, therefore, any state should have a plausible pretext for dissolving its union with other states, it had a right to do so. Mr. Davis did not stop to consider that he could not establish a government on any such basis as this, and that the doctrine of state rights would, in the end, be just as fatal to his confederacy as he was endeavoring to make it to the United States. On the other hand, Mr. Lincoln held the Union sovereign and the state subject. A state had no right to coerce a nation into dissolution, any more than a county had a right to force a state into dissolution. He maintained that the United States were a nation, one and indivisible, and that any attempt to dissolve it on the part of a state, or a combination of states, was treason. Here was where the Union and the new confederacy separated. The confederacy was a logical result of the doctrine of state rights, and its destruction, by all the power of the federal government, was the logical necessity of its contravention. Mr. Lincoln believed that a nation had a fundamental right to live, and that the United States were a nation. Mr. Davis believed that the United States were not a nation-or, if onee-that it held its only right to live at the will of any state that might choose to exercise it.

On the third of May, Mr. Lincoln found it necessary to call for forty-two thousand additional volunteers, to serve for three years, unless sooner discharged, and for an aggregate of twentytwo thousand seven hundred and fourteen men for different classes of service in the regular army. An additional call for eighteen thousand men to serve in the navy was also made in

the same proclamation. The country gave quick response to this call, and the demand for army volunteers was soon answered to excess.

The area of operations was rapidly spreading. Secessionists in and around St. Louis, Missouri, were plotting for the seizure of the arsenal in that city, but Captain (afterward General) Lyon promptly thwarted the scheme, and secured the arms for the government forces. A secession camp, forming in the same city, was captured, and many within it taken prisoners. The Governor of Missouri was disloyal, and did what he could to throw that state into the hands of the rebels; and General Harney, for a short time in command of the military department of the West, so far aided his schemes as to agree with Sterling Price that the whole duty of maintaining order in the state should be intrusted to the state authorities. Harney was removed, and General Lyon put in his place, with a force for which he found abundant employment, and at the head of which he afterwards fell-one of the first and costliest sacrifices of the war.

During all the first part of May, a secession flag floated over a building in Alexandria, in sight of the capitol at Washington; the rebel forces were gathering at Manassas Junction, and rebel troops held Harper's Ferry. On the twenty-second of May, General Butler took command of the new department of the South, with head-quarters at Fortress Monroe. Five days afterward, he issued his famous order declaring slaves "contraband of war." The phrase imbodied a new idea, which was the germ of a new policy, as well as the basis of a new name for the freed negro. General Butler had under command here about twelve thousand men. Confederate troops were already gathering and fortifying in the vicinity, and on the tenth of June occurred the first considerable battle of the war at Big Bethel. It was a badly managed affair on the part of the Union forces; and, in the excited and expectant state of the public mind, produced a degree of discouragement in the country quite disproportioned to the importance of its results. Here fell Major Winthrop, a young