The news of the rout at Bull Run did not spread through Washington until close to midnight.  It caused an instantaneous panic.  In the small hours, the space before the Treasury was “a moving mass of humanity.  Every man seemed to be asking every man he met for the latest news, while all sorts of rumors filled the air.  A feeling of mingled horror and despair appeared to possess everybody. . . .  Our soldiers came straggling into the city covered with dust and many of them wounded, while the panic that led to the disaster spread like a contagion through all classes.”  The President did not share the panic.  He “received the news quietly and without any visible sign of perturbation or excitement"’(10) Now appeared in him the quality which led Herndon to call him a fatalist.  All night long he sat unruffled in his office, while refugees from the stricken field—­especially those overconfident Senators and Representatives who had gone out to watch the overthrow of the Confederates—­poured into his ears their various and conflicting accounts of the catastrophe.  During that long night Lincoln said almost nothing.  Meanwhile, fragments of the routed army continued to stream into the city.  At dawn the next day Washington was possessed by a swarm of demoralized soldiers while a dreary rain settled over it.

The silent man in the White House had forgotten for the moment his dependence upon his advisers.  While the runaway Senators were talking themselves out, while the rain was sheeting up the city, he had reached two conclusions.  Early in the morning, he formulated both.  One conclusion was a general outline for the conduct of a long war in which the first move should be a call for volunteers to serve three years.(11) The other conclusion was the choice of a conducting general.  Scott was too old.  McDowell had failed.  But there was a young officer, a West Pointer, who had been put in command of the Ohio militia, who had entered the Virginia mountains from the West, had engaged a small force there, and had won several small but rather showy victories.  Young as he was, he had served in the Mexican War and was supposed to be highly accomplished.  On the day following Bull Run, Lincoln ordered McClellan to Washington to take command.(12)

XVII.  DEFINING THE ISSUE

While these startling events were taking place in the months between Sumter and Bull Run, Lincoln passed through a searching intellectual experience.  The reconception of his problem, which took place in March, necessitated a readjustment of his political attitude.  He had prepared his arsenal for the use of a strategy now obviously beside the mark.  The vital part of the first inaugural was its attempt to cut the ground from under the slave profiteers.  Its assertion that nothing else was important, the idea that the crisis was “artificial,” was sincere.  Two discoveries had revolutionized Lincoln’s thought.  The discovery that what