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Seward’s memo, insulting as it was, steeled Lincoln’s nerves, rousing him fully from the funk of the past several days. He, the upstart lawyer from Illinois, had now bid defiance to both the nation’s most powerful soldier and to its most powerful politician. The path ahead would be his alone. He also realized now that he could no longer rely solely on the wise old men of his cabinet for information and advice. Recalling the candid letters he had received the prior autumn from one of the artillery captains at Fort Sumter, the president contacted Mary Doubleday, asking if she would mind sharing any of her husband’s correspondence that might shed unbiased light on the circumstances in Charleston Harbor. Mrs. Doubleday, after busying herself with a pair of scissors to excise the purely personal passages of Abner’s recent letters, gave several excerpts to Lincoln. “If Government delays many days longer,” one read, “it will be difficult to relieve us in time, for the men’s provisions are going fast.”64

Letting the garrison be starved out would be equivalent to surrender. War must not only come but come soon.

As Fox hurriedly readied his expedition to embark from New York, Lincoln took stock of the Union’s military preparedness. On the same day Seward received his presidential rebuke, a White House courier arrived at the War Department with one for the general-in-chief. “Would it impose too much labor on General Scott,” the president’s note asked tartly, “to make short, comprehensive, daily reports to me of what occurs in his department, including movements by himself, and under his orders, and the receipt of intelligence? If not, I will thank him to do so.”

What Lincoln learned was not encouraging. In the entire country east of the Mississippi, the United States Army numbered fewer than four thousand men—several thousand fewer than the rebel forces at Charleston alone. Only a few hundred men defended such places as New York, St. Louis, Baltimore, the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, and even Washington itself. Most of the national military was stationed in forts along the trails of the Far West and the Pacific coast. In all, the troops totaled just over seventeen thousand enlisted men and officers, many of whom could be expected to defect to the South once hostilities began. Even the military bureaucracy was almost laughably undermanned. The entire War Department had only ninety-three employees, from Secretary Simon Cameron down to the file clerks. No wonder Scott and Seward, poring over the columns of these statistics in the most recent departmental annual reports, were so anxious to avoid the clash of arms, or at least delay it.65

Yet Lincoln, the Sangamon County militiaman, would step decisively into his role as commander-in-chief. This new assertiveness, too, would require him to look beyond War Department memos and official chains of command in Washington. Outside the purview of General Scott, Secretary Cameron, and their assorted file clerks, American citizens in the loyal states were arming themselves—in fact, had been doing so for months. Companies of Wide Awakes that had marched with lit torches to celebrate the Republican victory in November were now drilling with muskets. And amid the excitement that followed the occupation of Sumter, men throughout the North had formed new militia companies, “putting on their war paint to fight for the Union,” as one newspaper had reported back in January. By the end of that month, according to one estimate, nearly half a million had pledged to take up arms against secessionist treason.66

The White House mail bags bulged with more and more letters like the one that arrived in mid-March from an old Springfield acquaintance, James L. Hill. Addressing his letter to “Dear Old Abe,” Hill wrote:

We hear with pain and regret that you are debating about evacuating Sumter lowring our Glorious old Flag that Washington through so many trials and Privations unfurled and sustained to be trampled on by traitors and to be made