to report to Lincoln a “yarn” that had been told to him by some charming women who had insisted on an interview; they had heard from “a dashing Virginian” that inside forty-eight hours something would happen which would ring through the world.  The ladies thought this meant the capture or assassination of the President.  “Lincoln quietly grinned.”  But Hay who plainly enjoyed the episode, charming women and all, had got himself into trouble.  He had to do “some very dexterous lying to calm the awakened fears of Mrs. Lincoln in regard to the assassination suspicion.”  Militia were quartered in the Capitol, and Pennsylvania Avenue was a drill ground.  At the President’s reception, the distinguished politician C. C. Clay, “wore with a sublimely unconscious air three pistols and an ‘Arkansas toothpick,’ and looked like an admirable vignette to twenty-five cents’ worth of yellow covered romance.”

But Hay’s levity was all of the surface.  Beneath it was intense anxiety.  General Scott reported that the Virginia militia, concentrating about Washington, were a formidable menace, though he thought he was strong enough to hold out until relief should come.  As the days passed and nothing appeared upon that inscrutable horizon while the telegraph remained silent, Lincoln became moodily distressed.  One afternoon, “the business of the day being over, the executive office deserted, after walking the floor alone in silent thought for nearly a half-hour, he stopped and gazed long and wistfully out of the window down the Potomac in the direction of the expected ships (bringing soldiers from New York); and unconscious of other presence in the room, at length broke out with irrepressible anguish in the repeated exclamation, ’Why don’t they come!  Why don’t they come!’"(2)

His unhappiness flashed into words while he was visiting those Massachusetts soldiers who had been wounded on their way to Washington.  “I don’t believe there is any North. . . " he exclaimed.  “You are the only Northern realities."(3) But even then relief was at hand.  The Seventh New York, which had marched down Broadway amid such an ovation as never before was given any regiment in America, had come by sea to Annapolis.  At noon on April twenty-fifth, it reached Washington bringing, along with the welcome sight of its own bayonets, the news that the North had risen, that thousands more were on the march.

Hay who met them at the depot went at once to report to Lincoln.  Already the President had reacted to a “pleasant, hopeful mood.”  He began outlining a tentative plan of action:  blockade, maintenance of the safety of Washington, holding Fortress Monroe, and then to “go down to Charleston and pay her the little debt we are owing there."(4) But this was an undigested plan.  It had little resemblance to any of his later plans.  And immediately the chief difficulties that were to embarrass all his plans appeared.  He was a minority President; and he was the Executive of a democracy.  Many things