During the night of May 9–10, four regiments were dispatched, but a squabble between two generals about rank hampered their progress. Meanwhile, Lincoln asked Joseph R. Carr why his troops were not participating in the advance. When the colonel explained that General Wool had ordered them to Camp Hamilton, Lincoln vehemently flung down his hat and gave vent to his keen disappointment and disapproval. “Send me some one who can write,” he barked. To Wool’s aide, he dictated an order that Carr’s troops should be dispatched to Norfolk and that the Union forces already underway should press forward swiftly. A Union captain observed the president “rushing about, hollering to someone on the wharf—dressed in a black suit with a very seedy crape on his hat, and hanging over the railing, he looked like some hoosier just starting for home from California, with store clothes and a biled shirt on.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃