There were many such instances.  One stood out above the others.  A certain seaboard State contained in its Congressional delegation one of the most influential men in the Senate, and one of the most influential men in the lower house.  These two men had been worse than lukewarm about building up the navy, and had scoffed at the idea of there ever being any danger from any foreign power.  With the advent of war the feelings of their constituents, and therefore their own feelings, suffered an immediate change, and they demanded that a ship be anchored in the harbor of their city as a protection.  Getting no comfort from me, they went “higher up,” and became a kind of permanent committee in attendance upon the President.  They were very influential men in the Houses, with whom it was important for the Administration to keep on good terms; and, moreover, they possessed a pertinacity as great as the widow who won her case from the unjust judge.  Finally the President gave in and notified me to see that a ship was sent to the city in question.  I was bound that, as long as a ship had to be sent, it should not be a ship worth anything.  Accordingly a Civil War Monitor, with one smooth-bore gun, managed by a crew of about twenty-one naval militia, was sent to the city in question, under convoy of a tug.  It was a hazardous trip for the unfortunate naval militiamen, but it was safely accomplished; and joy and peace descended upon the Senator and the Congressman, and upon the President whom they had jointly harassed.  Incidentally, the fact that the protecting war-vessel would not have been a formidable foe to any antagonists of much more modern construction than the galleys of Alcibiades seemed to disturb nobody.

This was one side of the picture.  The other side was that the crisis at once brought to the front any amount of latent fighting strength.  There were plenty of Congressmen who showed cool-headed wisdom and resolution.  The plain people, the men and women back of the persons who lost their heads, set seriously to work to see that we did whatever was necessary, and made the job a thorough one.  The young men swarmed to enlist.  In time of peace it had been difficult to fill the scanty regular army and navy, and there were innumerable desertions; now the ships and regiments were over-enlisted, and so many deserters returned in order to fight that it became difficult to decide what to do with them.  England, and to a less degree Japan, were friendly.  The great powers of Continental Europe were all unfriendly.  They jeered at our ships and men, and with fatuous partisanship insisted that the Spaniards would prove too much for our “mercenaries” because we were a commercial people of low ideals who could not fight, while the men whom we attempted to hire for that purpose were certain to run on the day of battle.