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They feared that Beauregard’s South Carolina army would be transported North as fast as the railroads could carry it and, reënforced in Richmond by Virginia troops, would easily take Washington. Preparations were made to withstand a siege. Panic seized the crowds of office-seekers, driving them northwards. Many secessionist citizens, fearing that the whole male population of the city would be impressed for its defence, left for the South. Washington, wrote General Scott, on April 22, is “now partially besieged, threatened and in danger of being attacked on all sides in a day or two or three.” The arrival of the Eighth Massachusetts and Seventh New York at Annapolis, who had finished their journey to that point by water, prompted the governor to telegraph to the President advising that “no more troops be ordered or allowed to pass through Maryland”; and he suggested “that Lord Lyons [the English minister] be requested to act as mediator between the contending parties of our country.” 1 20 John Hay, then one of the President’s private secretaries, has given in his diary a graphic account of these days. Of the novel scene of the Sixth Massachusetts quartered in the Capitol, he wrote, “The contrast was very painful between the grey-haired dignity that filled the Senate chamber when I saw it last, and the present throng of bright-looking Yankee boys, the most of them bearing the signs of New England rusticity in voice and manner, scattered over the desks, chairs and galleries, some loafing, many writing letters slowly and with plough-hardened hands or with rapid-glancing clerkly fingers while Grow [representative from Pennsylvania, later speaker of the House] stood patient by the desk and franked for everybody.… The town is full to-night (April 20) of feverish rumors about a meditated

Note 1. III, 364 et seq. [back]

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