"As God gives us to see the right, John—Good-bye."
"Good-bye, Boy,—it's hard to say it!"
They clung to each other for a moment and slowly drew apart as the shadows of the soft spring night deepened.
[CHAPTER VIII]
[THE TRIAL BY FIRE]
The troops transformed Washington from a lazy Southern town of sixty thousand inhabitants into an armed fortress of the frontier, swarming with a quarter of a million excited men and women. Soldiers thronged the streets and sidewalks and sprawled over every inch of greensward, their uniforms of every cut and color on which the sun of heaven had shone during the past two hundred years of history.
When the tumult and the shouts of departing regiments had died away from the home towns in the North and the flags that were flying from every house had begun to fade under the hot rays of the advancing summer, the patriotic orators and editors began to demand of their President why his grand army of seventy-five thousand lingered at the Capital. When he mildly suggested the necessity of drilling, equipping and properly arming them he was laughed at by the wise, and scoffed at as a coward by the brave.
Mutterings of discontent grew deeper and more threatening. They demanded a short, sharp, decisive campaign. Let the army wheel into line, march straight into Richmond, take Jefferson Davis a prisoner, hang him and a few leaders of the "rebellion," and the trouble would be over. This demand became at length the maddened cry of a mob:
"On to Richmond!"