1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [125]
Luckily for him, the country needed even “show business” officers now. Immediately after the fall of Sumter, Lincoln called upon the state governors to mobilize their militias and organize new state regiments to meet the crisis. His proclamation of April 15 asked for seventy-five thousand troops “to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government.”
He need hardly have asked, given the national mood at that moment. Volunteers were coming, whether the president and his cabinet were ready for them or not. “All the world wants to march,” wrote one of Lincoln’s confidants.75
In New York, the first soldiers to depart for Washington were members of the high-society Seventh Regiment, who marched proudly down Broadway in their fine gray uniforms, with heavy dirks and bowie knives tucked into each belt for hand-to-hand fighting, and cigars in each hatband for the more leisurely hours of soldiering.76 (At least a few fashion-conscious militiamen, it was said, had stashed white kid gloves in their knapsacks, thoughtfully preparing to dress appropriately for the victory balls in Washington in just a few weeks’ time.)
The sudden flash of national solidarity dazzled even Lincoln’s most outspoken critics in the metropolis. The New York Herald’s editor, the feistily idiosyncratic James Gordon Bennett, had quite recently favored avoiding war at any cost, and at one point even suggested that the mid-Atlantic states should join the Southern Confederacy, leaving New England to fend for itself as an independent republic. The day after Major Anderson’s surrender, the paper had taken almost comical pains to ignore the subject entirely, relegating the outbreak of civil war to its back pages, after reports on the new April fashions, harness races in Paris, and some interesting correspondence just received from Constantinople. But now even the perfidious Herald’s offices were duly adorned in red, white, and blue. This might have had something to do with a mob of pro-Union toughs that had hooted its editor down Fulton Street, then stormed the building and nearly destroyed it. Finally reemerging before the crowd to a chorus of jeers, Bennett had promised not just to raise the Stars and Stripes without further delay but also to reverse his previous stance on the secession crisis. He hoisted one flag on a staff, draped another from a front window, and hastily penned an editorial invoking Lexington and Yorktown, the Fourth of July and the Ship of State, the Potomac River and the Rocky Mountains, before declaring: “The North is consolidated as one man … we can no longer treat or temporize—we must fight.” The Herald’s offices, and its editor, were allowed to remain intact.77
Back in Chicago, crowds jammed the Wigwam, where a judge stood up and administered a solemn oath of allegiance: ten thousand hats came off and ten thousand right hands went up, in a pledge to the Union and Constitution.78 Recruiting stations were jammed; the crowd in front of the Zouaves’ old armory was so dense that a group of students from Northwestern University, who had come into the city from campus in the hopes of enlisting, couldn’t even get near it.79 As for the former cadets themselves, they were soon scattered among a dozen different regiments, as most were given officers’ commissions on the merit of their military prowess—“show business” fame notwithstanding.80
In Washington, in the telegraph office at the War Department, the overheated machine tapped for hours on end with messages from every corner of the Union. Since Lincoln had requested only seventy-five thousand volunteers, governors in the North worried not about whether they could fill their quotas but about how they could deal with the onrush of eager patriots. Governor Denison of Ohio begged Secretary Cameron to take as many militiamen from his state as humanly possible. From New York came