. . . . The whining traitors from Baltimore were here again
this morning. The President, I think, has done with them. In conversation with
Major Hunter last night, in reply to the Major's blunt assertion that the
troops should have been brought through Baltimore if the town had to be leveled
to the earth, he said that that order commanding them to return to Pennsylvania
was given at the earnest solicitation of the Maryland conservatives who avowed
their powerlessness in Baltimore, but their intention to protect the federal
troops elsewhere, granted them as a special extension; as an exhaustion of the
means of conciliation and kindness. Hereafter, however, he would interfere with
no war measures of the army.
A young lady called to-day from Baltimore, sent by her
father, H. Pollock, Esq., to convey to the Government information as to the
state of affairs in the Plug-ugly city. She was very pretty and southern in features
and voice, and wonderfully plucky and earnest in the enunciation of her
devotion to the Stars and Stripes. She stated that the mails had been stopped
at the Baltimore Post-office — arms expected from Virginia — Fort McHenry to be
attacked tonight — the scared Commanders here thoroughly traitorous, and other
things. I met her again this afternoon and talked three hours. Her quiet
courage and dauntless patriotism brought back to me the times of De Montfort
and Queen Eleanor, and the girl of Dom Remy. I gained a new idea of the
possibilities of true, brave hearts being nourished in Republics. Just as she
stepped into her carriage, her friend called her “Lilie,” and I knew her name.
She seemed so heart whole in her calm devotion to the Union that flirtation died
in her presence and better thoughts than politicians often know, stole through
the mind of one who listened to the novelty of an American woman, earnest,
intelligent, patriotic and pretty.
This afternoon the Pocahontas and the Anacostia came
peacefully back from their cruise and folded their wings in the harbor. The
Pocahontas has done her duty at Norfolk and is welcome to our bay, with its
traitor-haunted shores. She reports no batteries at the White House Point, and
makes no record of any hostile demonstration from the banks of Alexandria. The
very fact of the Pocahontas coming so quietly in, is a good one.
A telegram intercepted on its way to Baltimore states that
our Yankees and New Yorkers have landed at Annapolis. Weary and foot-sore but
very welcome, they will probably greet us tomorrow.
. . . . It is amusing to drop in some evening at Clay’s
Armory. The raw patriots lounge elegantly on the benches, drink coffee in the
ante-room, change the boots of unconscious sleepers in the hall, scribble
busily in editorial note-books, while the sentries snore at the doors, and the
grizzled Captain talks politics on the raised platform, and dreams of border
battle and the hot noons of Monterey.
It was melodramatic to see Cassius Clay come into the
President's reception room to-day. He wore, with a sublimely unconscious air,
three pistols and an Arkansas tooth pick, and looked like an admirable vignette
to 25 cents worth of yellow-covered romance.
Housekeepers here are beginning to dread famine. Flour has
made a sudden spring to $18 a barrel, and corn-meal rejoices in the respectable
atmosphere of $2.50 a bushel. Willard is preparing for war, furling all sails
for the storm. The dinner-table is lorn of cartes, and the tea-table
reduced to the severe simplicity of pound-cake.
SOURCES: Clara B. Hay, Letters of John Hay and
Extracts from Diary, Volume 1, p. 18-21; Michael Burlingame, Inside Lincoln's White House: The Complete
Civil War Diary of John Hay, p. 6-8
