ician as one who
"when he is bought, will stay bought." As Secretary of War he showed no
particular ability.

In 1861, when the tide of enthusiasm was in flood, and volunteers
in hosts were responding to acts of Congress for the raising and
maintenance of a volunteer army, Cameron reported in December that the
Government had on foot 660,971 men and could have had a million except
that Congress had limited the number of volunteers to be received. When
this report was prepared, Lincoln was, so to speak, in the trough of two
seas. The devotion which had been offered to him in April, 1861, when
the North seemed to rise as one man, had undergone a reaction. Eight
months without a single striking military success, together with
the startling defeat at Bull Run, had had their inevitable effect.
Democracies are mercurial; variability seems to be part of the price of
freedom. With childlike faith in their cause, the Northern people,
in midsummer, were crying, "On to Richmond!" In the autumn, stung by
defeat, they were ready to cry, "Down with Lincoln."

In a subsequent report, the War Department confessed that at the
beginning of hostilities, "nearly all our arms and ammunition" came from
foreign countries. One great reason why no military successes relieve
the gloom of 1861 was that, from a soldier's point of view, there
were no armies. Soldiers, it is true, there were in myriads; but arms,
ammunition, and above all, organization were lacking. The supplies
in the government arsenals had been provided for an army of but a few
thousand. Strive as they would, all the factories in the country could
not come anywhere near making arms for half a million men; nor did the
facilities of those days make it possible for munition plants to spring
up overnight. Had it not been that the Confederacy was equally hard
pushed, even harder pushed, to find arms and ammunition, the war would
have ended inside Seward's ninety days, through sheer lack of powder.

Even with the respite given by the unpreparedness of the South, and
while Lincoln hurriedly collected arms and ammunition from abroad, the
startled nation, thus suddenly forced into a realization of what
war meant, lost its head. From its previous reckless trust in sheer
enthusiasm, it reacted to a distrust of almost everything. Why were the
soldiers not armed? Why did not millions of rounds of cartridges fall
like manna out of the sky? Why did not the crowds of volunteers become
armies a