"Let us make quick work. The Rebellion is an unborn tadpole. Let us not fall into the delusion of mistaking a local commotion for a revolution. A strong active pull together will do our work in thirty days. We have only to send a column of twenty-five thousand men across the Potomac to Richmond to burn out the rats there; another column of twenty-five thousand to Cairo to seize the Cotton ports of the Mississippi and retain the remaining twenty-five thousand called for by the President at Washington—not because there is any need for them there but because we do not require their services elsewhere."
The staid old Philadelphia Press declared:
"No man of sense can for a moment doubt that all this much-ado-about-nothing will end in a month. The Northern people are invincible. The rebels are a band of ragamuffins who will fly like chaff before the wind on our approach."
The West vied with the East in boastful clamor.
The Chicago Tribune shouted from the top of its columns:
"We insist that the West be allowed the honor of settling this little trouble by herself since she is most interested in its suppression to insure the free navigation of the Mississippi River. Let the East stand aside. This is our war. We can end it successfully in two months. Illinois can whip the whole South by herself. We insist on the affair being turned over to us."
With prospects of a short war and cheaply earned glory the rage for volunteering was resistless. The war for three months was to be a holiday excursion and every man would return a hero crowned with garlands of flowers, the center of admiring thousands. The blacksmiths of Brooklyn were busy making handcuffs for one of her crack regiments. Each volunteer had sworn to lead at least one captive rebel in chains through the crowded streets in the great parade on their return.
Socola on his arrival at Montgomery from Charleston read these fulminations from the North with amazement and rage. He sent his bitter and emphatic protest against such madness to Holt. The faithful Joseph had been rewarded with an office to his liking. He was now the Judge Advocate General of the United States Army. He turned Socola's letters over to Cameron, the new Secretary of War, who read them with rising wrath.
"The author of those letters," he said with a scowl, "is either a damned fool, or traitor."
Holt's lower lip was thrust out and the lines of his big mouth drawn into a knot.