great future of this nation, to call into the field at once 300,000 men."

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At the same time from Maine W. P. Fessenden wrote: Rely upon it, you cannot at Washington fairly estimate the resolute determination existing among all classes of people in the free States to put down at once and forever this monstrous rebellion."

Under this pressure, regiment after regiment was added to the three years' volunteers. It was Mr. Lincoln's personal interference which brought in many of these regiments.

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Why cannot Colonel Small's Philadelphia regiment be received?" he wrote to the Secretary of War on May 21, "I sincerely wish it could. There is something strange about it. Give those gentlemen an interview, and take their regiment." Again on June 13 he wrote: "There is, it seems, a regiment in Massachusetts commanded by Fletcher Webster, and which the Hon. Daniel Webster's old friends very much wish to get into the service. If it can be received with the approval of your department and the consent of the Governor of Massachusetts, I shall indeed be much gratified. Give Mr. Ashmun a chance to explain fully." And again on June 17: "With your concurrence, and that of the Governor of Indiana, I am in favor of accepting into what we call the three years' service any number not exceeding four additional regiments from that State. Probably they should come from the triangular region between the Ohio and Wabash rivers, including my own old boyhood home.”*

So rapid was the increase of the army under this policy, that on July 1, the Secretary of War reported 310,000 men at his command, and added: “At the present moment the government presents the striking anomaly of being em

*These extracts are from letters to Mr. Cameron found in a volume of the War Records as yet unpublished. Others of the same tenor are in the volume.

barrassed by the generous outpouring of volunteers to sup port its action."

But Mr. Lincoln soon found that enrolling men does not make an army. He must uniform, arm, shelter, feed, nurse, and transport them as needed. It was in providing for the needs of the men that came so willingly into service that the Administration found its chief embarrassment. The most serious difficulty was in getting arms. Men could go ununiformed, and sleep in the open air, but to fight they must have guns. The supplies of the United States arsenals in the North had been greatly depleted in the winter of 1860 and 1861 by transfers to the South, between one-fifth and onesixth of all the muskets in the country and between onefourth and one-fifth of all the rifles having been sent to the six seceding States. The Confederates had not only obtained a large share of government arms, but through January, February, March, April, and May they bought from private factories in the North, " under the very noses of the United States officers." This became such a scandal that the Administration had to send out an agent to investigate the trade. At the same time the Federal ministers abroad were warning Mr. Lincoln that the South was picking up all the arms Europe had to spare, and the North was buying nothing. The need of arms opened the way for inventors, and Washington was overrun with men having guns to be tested. Mr. Lincoln took the liveliest interest in these new arms, and it sometimes happened that, when an inventor could get nobody else in the government to listen to him, the President would personally test his gun. A former clerk in the Navy Department tells an incident illustrative. He had stayed late one night at his desk, when he heard some one striding up and down the hall muttering: "I do wonder if they have gone already and left the building all alone." Looking out, the clerk was surprised to see the President.

"Good evening," said Mr. Lincoln. "I was just looking for that man who goes shooting with me sometimes.”

The clerk knew that Mr. Lincoln referred to a certain messenger of the Ordnance Department who had been accustomed to going with him to test weapons, but as this man had gone home, the clerk offered his services. Together they went to the lawn south of the White House, where Mr. Lincoln fixed up a target cut from a sheet of white Congressional note-paper. "Then pacing off a distance of about eighty or a hundred feet," writes the clerk," he raised the rifle to a level, took a quick aim, and drove the round of seven shots in quick succession, the bullets shooting all around the target like a Gatling gun and one striking near the centre.

"I believe I can make this gun shoot better,' said Mr. Lincoln, after we had looked at the result of the first fire. With this he took from his vest pocket a small wooden sight which he had whittled from a pine stick, and adjusted it over the sight of the carbine. He then shot two rounds, and of the fourteen bullets nearly a dozen hit the paper!"

It was in these early days of preparing for war that Mr. Lincoln interested himself, too, in experiments with the balloon. He was one of the first persons in this country to receive a telegraphic message from a balloon sent up to make observations on an enemy's works. This experiment was made in June, and so pleased the President that the balloonist was allowed to continue his observations from the Virginia side. These observations were successful, and on June 21, Joseph Henry, the distinguished secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, declared in a report to the Administration that, "from experiments made here for the first time, it is conclusively proved that telegrams can be sent with ease and certainty between the balloon and the quarters of the commanding officer."

The extraordinary conditions under which Mr. Lincoln

entered the White House prevented him for some weeks from adopting anything like systematic habits. By the time of his second call for troops, however, he had adjusted himself to his new home as well as he ever was able to do. The arrangement of the White House was not materially different then from what it is now. The entrance, halls, the East Room, the Green Room, the Blue Room, the State Diningroom, all were the same, the only difference being in furnishings and decorations. The Lincoln family used the west end of the second floor as a private apartment; the east end being devoted to business. Mr. Lincoln's office was the large room on the south side of the house, between the office of Private Secretary Nicolay, at the southeast corner, and the room now used as a Cabinet-room.

"The furniture of this room," says Mr. Isaac Arnold, a friend and frequent visitor of the President, "consisted of a large oak table covered with cloth, extending north and south, and it was around this table that the Cabinet sat when it held its meetings. Near the end of the table and between the windows was another table, on the west side of which the President sat, in a large arm-chair, and at this table he wrote. A tall desk, with pigeon-holes for papers, stood against the south wall. The only books usually found in this room were the Bible, the United States Statutes and a copy of Shakespeare. There were a few chairs and two plain hair-covered sofas. There were two or three map frames, from which hung military maps, on which the positions and movements of the armies were traced. There was an old and discolored engraving of General Jackson on the mantel and a later photograph of John Bright. Doors opened into this room from the room of the Secretary and from the outside hall, running east and west across the house. A bell cord within reach of his hand extended to the Secretary's office. A messenger sat at the door opening from the hall, and took in the cards and names of visitors."

One serious annoyance in the arrangement of the business

alarm our Southern Union friends and turn them against us; perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect for Kentucky. Allow me, therefore, to ask that you will, as of your own motion, modify that paragraph so as to conform to the first and fourth sections of the act of Congress entitled, "An act to confiscate property used for insurrectionary purposes," approved August 6, 1861, and a copy of which act I herewith send you.

This letter is written in a spirit of caution, and not of censure. I send it by special messenger, in order that it may certainly and speedily reach you.

But Lincoln did more than this. Without waiting for Frémont's reply to the above, he went over carefully all the criticisms on the General's administration, in order to see if he could help him. His conclusion was that Frémont was isolating himself too much from men who were interested in the same cause, and so did not know what was going on in the very matter he was dealing with. That Mr. Lincoln hit the very root of Frémont's difficulty is evident from the testimony of the men who were with the General in Missouri at the time. Colonel George E. Leighton of St. Louis, who became provost-marshal of the city in the fall of 1861, says:

Frémont isolated himself, and, unlike Grant, Halleck, and others of like rank, was unapproachable. When Halleck came here to assume command and called on Frémont, he was accompanied simply by a member of his staff; but when Frémont returned the call, he rode down with great pomp and ceremony, escorted by his staff and bodyguard of one hundred men.

General B. G. Farrar recounts his experience in trying to get an important message to Frémont from General Lyon, who was at Springfield with an insufficient force:

Word was returned to me that General Frémont was very busy, that he could not receive the dispatch then, and re