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It has already been related in a previous chapter how the incidents immediately following the fall of
Sumter and the
President's Proclamation — the secession of
Virginia and the adhesion of other Border States-had doubled the strength and augmented the war preparations of the
Rebellion.
Upon the
Government and the people of the
North the experience of those eventful days was even more decisive.
Whatever hope
President Lincoln and his Cabinet may have entertained at the beginning, that secession could be controlled by the suppression of sporadic insurrections and the reawakening of the slumbering or intimidated loyalty of the
South, necessarily faded out before the loss of
Virginia,
North Carolina,
Tennessee, and
Arkansas, and the dangerous uprising in
Maryland.
Not alone prompt measures to save the capital of the nation were imperatively dictated by the sudden blockade and isolation of
Washington, but widespread civil war, waged by a gigantic army and navy, must become the inevitable price of maintaining the
Union.
For this work the seventy-five thousand three-months militia were clearly inadequate.
It marks
President Lincoln's accurate diagnosis of the public danger, and his prompt courage and action to avert it, that, as early as April 26th, ten days after the first proclamation, the formation of a new
