to the President, begging him to desist from his bloodthirsty preparations, but found him “constitutionally genial and jovial,” and “wholly inaccessible to Christian appeals.”  It mattered more that a majority of the Maryland Legislature was for the South, and that the Governor temporised and requested that no more troops should pass through Baltimore.  The Mayor of Baltimore and the railway authorities burned railway bridges and tore up railway lines, and the telegraph wires were cut.  Thus for about five days the direct route to Washington from the North was barred.  It seemed as if the boast of some Southern orator that the Confederate flag would float over the capital by May 1 might be fulfilled.  Beauregard could have transported his now drilled troops by rail from South Carolina and would have found Washington isolated and hardly garrisoned.  As a matter of fact, no such daring move was contemplated in the South, and the citizens of Richmond, Virginia, were themselves under a similar alarm; but the South had a real opportunity.

The fall of Washington at that moment would have had political consequences which no one realised better than Lincoln.  It might well have led the Unionists in the border States to despair, and there is evidence that even then he so fully realised the task which lay before the North as to feel that the loss of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri would have made it impossible.  He was at heart intensely anxious, and quaintly and injudiciously relieved his feelings by the remark to the “6th Massachusetts” that he felt as if all other help were a dream, and they were “the only real thing.”  Yet those who were with him testify to his composure and to the vigour with which he concerted with his Cabinet the various measures of naval, military, financial, postal, and police preparation which the occasion required, but which need not here be detailed.  Many of the measures of course lay outside the powers which Congress had conferred on the public departments, but the President had no hesitation in “availing himself,” as he put it, “of the broader powers conferred by the Constitution in cases of insurrection,” and looking for the sanction of Congress afterwards, rather than “let the Government at once fall into ruin.”  The difficulties of government were greatly aggravated by the uncertainty as to which of its servants, civil, naval, or military, were loyal, and the need of rapidly filling the many posts left vacant by unexpected desertion.  Meanwhile troops from New England, and also from New York, which had utterly disappointed some natural expectations in the South by the enthusiasm of its rally to the Union, quickly arrived near Baltimore.  They repaired for themselves the interrupted railway tracks round the city, and by April 25 enough soldiers were in Washington to put an end to any present alarm.  In case of need, the law of “habeas corpus” was suspended in Maryland.  The President had no wish