With the echo of its first thunder came President Lincoln's call for troops, and Vermont responded with a regiment of her sons, as brave, though their lives had been lapped in peace, as the war-nurtured Green Mountain Boys of old. The military spirit had been but feebly nursed during many tranquil years, yet, at the first breath of this storm, it blazed up in a fervor of patriotic fire such as never before had been witnessed. At the outbreak of the Rebellion, no Northern State was less prepared for war than Vermont. Except in the feeble existence of four skeleton regiments, her militia was unorganized, the men subject to military service not being even enrolled. Some of the uniformed companies were without guns, others drilled with ancient flintlocks; and the State possessed but five hundred serviceable percussion muskets, and no tents nor camp equipage; while the Champlain arsenal at Vergennes, like other United States arsenals in the North, had been stripped by Floyd, the Secretary of War, of everything but a few superannuated muskets and useless cannon. The continual outflow of emigration had drawn great numbers of the stalwart young men of the rural population to the Western States, in whose regiments many of them were already enlisting, and she had not the large towns nor floating population which in most other States contributed so largely the material for armies. The governor, Erastus Fairbanks, immediately issued a proclamation, announcing the outbreak of rebellion, and the President's call for volunteers, and summoning the legislature to assemble on the 25th of April. His proclamation bore even date with that of the President, and is believed to have antedated by at least a day the like proclamation of any other governor.[111] In the brief interval between the summoning and the assembling of the legislature, in all parts of the State men were drilling and volunteering. Banks and individuals tendered their money, railroad and steamboat companies offered free transportation for troops and munitions of war, and patriotic women were making uniforms of "Vermont gray" for the ten companies of militia chosen on the 19th of April to form the 1st regiment.