erican President before. To be accessible to all such was
the normal duty of a President; it was perhaps additionally incumbent on
him at this time. When in the course of nature the number of
office-seekers abated, they were succeeded, as will be seen, by
supplicants of another kind, whose petitions were often really harrowing.
The horror of this enduring visitation has been described by Artemus Ward
in terms which Lincoln himself could not have improved upon. His
classical treatment of the subject is worth serious reference; for it
should be realised that Lincoln, who had both to learn his new trade of
statecraft and to exercise it in a terrible emergency, did so with a
large part of each day necessarily consumed by worrying and distasteful
tasks of a much paltrier kind.

On the day after the Inauguration came word from Major Anderson at Fort
Sumter that he could only hold out a few weeks longer unless reinforced
and provisioned. With it came to Lincoln the opinion of General Scott,
that to relieve Fort Sumter now would require a force of 20,000 men,
which did not exist. The Cabinet was summoned with military and naval
advisers. The sailors thought they could throw men and provisions into
Fort Sumter; the soldiers said the ships would be destroyed by the
Confederate batteries. Lincoln asked his Cabinet whether, assuming it to
be feasible, it was politically advisable now to provision Fort Sumter.
Blair said yes emphatically; Chase said yes in a qualified way. The
other five members of the Cabinet said no; General Scott had given his
opinion, as on a military question, that the fort should now be
evacuated; they argued that the evacuation of this one fort would be
recognised by the country as merely a military necessity arising from the
neglect of the last administration. Lincoln reserved his decision.

Let us conceive the effect of a decision to evacuate Fort Sumter. South
Carolina had for long claimed it as a due acknowledgment of its sovereign
and independent rights, and for no other end; the Confederacy now claimed
it and its first act had been to send Beauregard to threaten the fort.
Even Buchanan had ended by withstanding these claims. The assertion that
he would hold these forts had been the gist of Lincoln's Inaugural. This
was the one fort that was in the eyes of the Northern public or the
Southern public either; they probably never realised that there were
other forts, Fort Pickens, for example, on