ch
the first move should be a call for volunteers to serve three years.(11)
The other conclusion was the choice of a conducting general. Scott was
too old. McDowell had failed. But there was a young officer, a West
Pointer, who had been put in command of the Ohio militia, who had
entered the Virginia mountains from the West, had engaged a small force
there, and had won several small but rather showy victories. Young as
he was, he had served in the Mexican War and was supposed to be highly
accomplished. On the day following Bull Run, Lincoln ordered McClellan
to Washington to take command.(12)

XVII. DEFINING THE ISSUE

While these startling events were taking place in the months between
Sumter and Bull Run, Lincoln passed through a searching intellectual
experience. The reconception of his problem, which took place in March,
necessitated a readjustment of his political attitude. He had prepared
his arsenal for the use of a strategy now obviously beside the mark. The
vital part of the first inaugural was its attempt to cut the ground
from under the slave profiteers. Its assertion that nothing else was
important, the idea that the crisis was "artificial," was sincere. Two
discoveries had revolutionized Lincoln's thought. The discovery
that what the South was in earnest about was not slavery but State
sovereignty; the discovery that the North was far from a unit upon
nationalism. To meet the one, to organize the other, was the double task
precipitated by the fall of Sumter. Not only as a line of attack, but
also as a means of defense, Lincoln had to raise to its highest power
the argument for the sovereign reality of the national government. The
effort to do this formed the silent inner experience behind the surging
external events in the stormy months between April and July. It was
governed by a firmness not paralleled in his outward course. As always,
Lincoln the thinker asked no advice. It was Lincoln the administrator,
painfully learning a new trade, who was timid, wavering, pliable in
council. Behind the apprentice in statecraft, the lonely thinker stood
apart, inflexible as ever, impervious to fear. The thinking which
he formulated in the late spring and early summer of 1861 obeyed his
invariable law of mental gradualness. It arose out of the deep places
of his own past. He built up his new conclusion by drawing together
conclusions he had long held, by charging them with his later
experience, by giving to th