so severely as
at the East; yet Halleck and Buell needed it and got it more than once.
The Western commanders, like those at the East, and with better reason,
were importunate for more men and more equipment. The President could
not, by any effort, meet their requirements. He wrote to McClernand
after the battle of Belmont: "Much, very much, goes undone; but it is
because we have not the power to do it faster than we do." Some troops
were without arms; but, he said, "the plain matter of fact is, our good
people have rushed to the rescue of the government faster than the
government can find arms to put in their hands." Yet, withal, it is true
that Mr. Lincoln's actual interferences at the South and West were so
occasional and incidental, that, since this writing is a biography of
him and not a history of the war, there is need only for a list of the
events which were befalling outside of that absorbing domain which lay
around the rival capitals.

Along the southern Atlantic coast some rather easy successes were
rapidly won. August 29, 1861, Hatteras Inlet was taken, with little
fighting. November 7, Port Royal followed. Lying nearly midway between
Charleston and Savannah, and being a very fine harbor, this was a prize
of value. January 7, 1862, General Burnside was directed to take command
of the Department of North Carolina. February 8, Roanoke Island was
seized by the Federal forces. March 14, Newbern fell. April 11, Fort
Pulaski, at the mouth of the Savannah River, was taken. April 26,
Beaufort was occupied. The blockade of the other Atlantic ports having
long since been made effective, the Eastern seaboard thus early became a
prison wall for the Confederacy.

At the extreme West Missouri gave the President some trouble. The
bushwhacking citizens of that frontier State, divided not unequally
between the Union and Disunion sides, entered upon an irregular but
energetic warfare with ready zeal if not actually with pleasure.
Northerners in general hardly paused to read the newspaper accounts of
these rough encounters, but the President was much concerned to save the
State. As it lay over against Illinois along the banks of the
Mississippi River, and for the most part above the important strategic
point where Cairo controls the junction of that river with the Ohio,
possession of it appeared to him exceedingly desirable. In the hope of
helping matters forward, on July 3, 1861, he created the Department of
the West, and p