When the last syllable had passed his lips, he stood still a moment, slowly sweeping the multitude with his eyes. Then he bowed to Chief Justice Taney, who, in a voice tremulous with emotion, administered the oath of office. Within six weeks thereafter Fort Sumter had been fired upon, and the new President had issued his call for seventy-five thousand volunteers to maintain the laws of the United States, and summoned Congress to meet in extra session on the fourth of July. Almost the first thing the Senate did when it came together was to expel six of its members who had cast their fortunes with the seceding States. Meanwhile, Washington had been transformed from an outwardly peaceful town into a military camp. A home defense corps was hurriedly enlisted by Cassius M. Clay of Kentucky and James H. Lane of Kansas, and a guard was posted around the White House every night. The minutemen were called out repeatedly for special service. Once they seized a vessel which was about to sail from a Potomac wharf for a southern port, laden with munitions of war alleged to have been stolen from the Government. Again, they marched to Georgetown and took forcible possession of the flour stored in a mill there and reported to them as destined for the Confederate army; this, by commandeering all the wagons in the neighborhood, they removed to the Capitol and stowed away in the basement rooms. In the streets, all strangers were eyed with suspicion. Signals to the police, the home defense corps, and the minutemen were conveyed by certain tollings of big bells; and, as every signal meant trouble either present or imminent, the townspeople lived continually as if on the brink of a volcano. Among the earliest State volunteers to reach the city were regiments from Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania. The Massachusetts Sixth, which had been fired on by a mob while passing through Baltimore, was quartered in the Hall of the Senate, and the New York Seventh in the Hall of Representatives; while bivouacked in other parts of the same building were about five hundred Pennsylvanians and a company of United States artillery, for there was general expectation of a Confederate attack upon the Capitol. The New York Seventy-first was assigned to the Washington Navy Yard, so as to be convenient for repelling approaches from Alexandria by way of the river.