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[74] had the Cortlandt Street Ferry borne the last detachment of the Seventh across the Hudson when the newsboys were shrieking the tidings of the attack on the men of New England by the mob of ‘blood-tubs’ and ‘plug-uglies’ in the Maryland city.

It takes five hours to go from New York to Washington to-day; it took six days that wild week in 1861. The Seventh, with the Massachusetts Eighth for company, had to patch the railway and trudge wearily, yet manfully, from Annapolis to the junction of the old Baltimore and Washington Railroad, before it could again proceed by rail to its great reception on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Then New York's second offering started—another wonderful day in Gotham. In less than a week from the original call, the active militia was under arms in full ranks, and most of it en route for the front.

Farther west the Lake cities-Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago—each had mustered a regiment with its own favorite companies—Continentals, Grays or Light Guards as a nucleus. Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota each had been called upon for a regiment, and the response was almost instantaneous. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, more populated, had tendered more than the thousands demanded.

By the 1st of June, there was camped or billeted about Washington the cream of the State soldiery of every commonwealth east of the Ohio and north of the Potomac—except Maryland. Maryland held aloof. Pennsylvania, asked for twelve thousand men, had rushed twenty thousand to the mustering officers. Massachusetts, called on for fifteen hundred, sent more than twice that number within two days. Ohio, taxed for just ten thousand, responded with twelve thousand, and Missouri, where Southern sentiment was rife and St. Louis almost a Southern stronghold, tumultuously raised ten thousand men, unarmed, undrilled, yet sorely needed. But for Nathaniel Lyon of the regular army, and the prompt muster

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