States to supply seventy-five thousand men for the restoration of the
authority of the government. Massachusetts was the first State to
respond by despatching to the front, within twenty-four hours of the
publication of the call, its Sixth Regiment of Militia; the Seventh of
New York started twenty-four hours later. The history of the passage of
the Sixth through Baltimore, of the attack upon the columns, and of the
deaths, in the resulting affray, of soldiers and of citizens has often
been told. When word came to Washington that Baltimore was obstructing
the passage of troops bound southward, troops called for the defence of
the capital, the isolation of the government became sadly apparent. For
a weary and anxious ten days, Lincoln and his associates were dreading
from morning to morning the approach over the long bridge of the troops
from Virginia whose camp-fires could be seen from the southern windows
of the White House, and were looking anxiously northward for the arrival
of the men on whose prompt service the safety of the capital was to
depend. I have myself stood in Lincoln's old study, the windows of which
overlook the Potomac, and have recalled to mind the fearful pressure of
anxiety that must have weighed upon the President during those long
days; as looking across the river, he could trace by the smoke the
picket lines of the Virginia troops. He must have thought of the
possibility that he was to be the last President of the United States,
that the torch handed over to him by the faltering hands of his
predecessor was to expire while he was responsible for the flame. The
immediate tension was finally broken by the appearance of the weary and
battered companies of the Massachusetts troops and the arrival two days
later, by the way of Annapolis, of the New York Seventh with an
additional battalion from Boston.

It was, however, not only in April, 1861, that the capital was in peril.
The anxiety of the President (never for himself but only for his