On his journey from Springfield to Washington Mr. Lincoln had said that, devoted as he was to peace, he might find it necessary “to put the foot down firmly.”  That time had now come.  On the morning of April 15, 1861, the leading newspapers of the country printed the President’s proclamation reciting that, whereas the laws of the United States were opposed and the execution thereof obstructed in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, the militia of the several States of the Union, to the aggregate number of seventy-five thousand, was called forth to suppress said combinations and cause the laws to be duly executed.  The orders of the War Department specified that the period of service under this call should be for three months; and to further conform to the provisions of the Act of 1795, under which the call was issued, the President’s proclamation also convened the Congress in special session on the coming fourth of July.

Public opinion in the free States, which had been sadly demoralized by the long discussions over slavery, and by the existence of four factions in the late presidential campaign, was instantly crystallized and consolidated by the Sumter bombardment and the President’s proclamation into a sentiment of united support to the government for the suppression of the rebellion.  The several free-State governors sent loyal and enthusiastic responses to the call for militia, and tendered double the numbers asked for.  The people of the slave States which had not yet joined the Montgomery Confederacy—­namely, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware—­remained, however, more or less divided on the issue as it now presented itself.  The governors of the first six of these were already so much engaged in the secret intrigues of the secession movement that they sent the Secretary of War contumacious and insulting replies, and distinct refusals to the President’s call for troops.  The governor of Delaware answered that there was no organized militia in his State which he had legal authority to command, but that the officers of organized volunteer regiments might at their own option offer their services to the United States; while the governor of Maryland, in complying with the requisition, stipulated that the regiments from his State should not be required to serve outside its limits, except to defend the District of Columbia.

A swift, almost bewildering rush of events, however, quickly compelled most of them to take sides.  Secession feeling was rampant in Baltimore; and when the first armed and equipped Northern regiment, the Massachusetts Sixth, passed through that city on the morning of April 19, on its way to Washington, the last four of its companies were assailed by street mobs with missiles and firearms while marching from