The secretaries of Lincoln have preserved a picture of his
desperate anxiety, waiting, day after day, for relief from the
North which he hoped would speedily come by sea. Outwardly he
maintained his self-control. "But once, on the afternoon of the
23d, the business of the day being over, the Executive office
being deserted, after walking the floor alone in silent thought
for nearly half an hour, he stopped and gazed long and wistfully
out of the window down the Potomac in the direction of the
expected ships; and, unconscious of other presence in the room,
at length broke out with irrepressible anguish in the repeated
exclamation, "Why don't they come! Why don't they come!"
During these days of isolation, when Washington, with the
telegraph inoperative, was kept in an appalling uncertainty, the
North rose. There was literally a rush to volunteer. "The
heather is on fire," wrote George Ticknor, "I never before knew
what a popular excitement can be." As fast as possible militia
were hurried South. The crack New York regiment, the famous,
dandified Seventh, started for the front amid probably the most
tempestuous ovation which until that time was ever given to a
military organization in America. Of the march of the regiment
down Broadway, one of its members wrote, "Only one who passed as
we did, through the tempest of cheers two miles long, can know
the terrible enthusiasm of the occasion.
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