rdial admirers. While Lincoln
was quietly, gradually exercising his strong will upon Seward, he was
doing the same with the other members of his council. Presently they
awoke--the majority of them at least--to the truth that he, for all his
odd ways, was their master.

Meanwhile the gradual readjustment of all factions in the North was
steadily going forward. The Republicans were falling into line behind
the Government; and by degrees the distinction between Seward and
Lincoln, in the popular mind, faded into a sort of composite picture
called "the Administration." Lincoln had the reward of his long
forbearance with his Secretary. For Seward it must be said that, however
he had intrigued against his chief at Washington, he did not intrigue
with the country. Admitting as he had, too, that he had met his master,
he took the defeat as a good sportsman and threw all his vast party
influence into the scale for Lincoln's fortunes. Thus, as April wore on,
the Republican party settled down to the idea that it was to follow the
Government at Washington upon any course that might develop.

The Democrats in the North were anti-Southern in larger proportion,
probably, than at any other time during the struggle of the sections.
We have seen that numbers of them had frankly declared for the Union.
Politics had proved weaker than propinquity. There was a moment when it
seemed--delusively, as events proved--that the North was united as one
man to oppose the South.

There is surely not another day in our history that has witnessed so
much nervous tension as Saturday, April 13, 1861, for on that morning
the newspapers electrified the North with the news that Sumter had been
fired on from Confederate batteries on the shore of Charleston Harbor.
In the South the issue was awaited confidently, but many minds at
least were in that state of awed suspense natural to a moment which the
thoughtful see is the stroke of fate. In the North, the day passed for
the most part in a quiet so breathless that even the most careless could
have foretold the storm which broke on the following day. The account
of this crisis which has been given by Lincoln's private secretary is
interesting:

"That day there was little change in the business routine of the
Executive office. Mr. Lincoln was never liable to sudden excitement
or sudden activity.... So while the Sumter telegrams were on every
tongue...leading men and officials called to learn or impart the ne