The rations were terrible, the cooks careless. Hardly any fruit or vegetables were available, and scurvy was an ever-present threat. The mainstay was salted beef, foul tasting and leather tough. Though designed to withstand summer heat, by the time it was consumed, it had often gone rancid anyway. Another staple was hardtack: thick, flavorless crackers that had to be soaked in water before one could manage a bite.
But perhaps the most discouraging sign: As Olmsted visited the various camps, he encountered almost no one who could make even the vaguest claim to medical knowledge. Precious little medicine had been stockpiled.
Taken together, Olmsted’s camp inspections offer a snapshot of the Union army before it had fought its first major battle. He drew up a report full of dire warnings, such as: “It is now hardly possible to place the volunteer army in a good defensive condition against the pestilential influences by which it must soon be surrounded.” In his report, Olmsted offered a series of recommendations. Some were self-evident: Hire better cooks! And some were novel: Maybe a depot could be set up in Washington to greet incoming volunteers. That way, soldiers who arrived ill could be quarantined and kept separate from the crowded camps.
Olmsted’s report fell on deaf ears; his recommendations went straight to the dustbin. The army’s job was to prepare legions of men for battle, period, and military convention held that privation was a natural state and perhaps a desirable one, too, as it kept the troops focused. The matters Olmsted had raised—diet, hygiene, availability of medicine—were so very soft and secondary.
During his first weeks in Washington, Olmsted was struck by how tawdry and makeshift everything appeared, right down to the USSC’s temporary offices in the Treasury building. He was constantly battling the flies—worse than on his Staten Island farm, he noted. Most nights, he worked past midnight before retiring to his stuffy room at the Willard, where he’d lie down still in his clothes, tossing and turning, worrying about money.
Olmsted had accepted the job at the USSC without settling on a salary. He assumed he’d be making something like $2,000 per year. At the same time, he expected to lose something like $2,000 over the next year due to his diminished role with Central Park. Again, nothing definite had been arranged.
While walking to the USSC offices, Olmsted caught his first glimpse of Abraham Lincoln. The president was moving at a brisk clip, headed to the War Department, accompanied by three other men. Olmsted thought the president looked younger than expected. He was put off by the president’s style of dress, describing Lincoln as wearing a “cheap & nasty French black cloth suit just out of a tight carpet bag. Looked as if he would be an applicant for a Broadway squad policemanship, but a little too smart and careless.”
On another occasion, he spotted Mary Todd Lincoln. Again, his first impression was not favorable. While taking an after-dinner stroll, Olmsted wandered over to the little park in front of the White House. A German marine band was playing Verdi’s opera Nabucco. Mary Lincoln was standing on the White House’s grand portico looking down at the performance. Nearby was Henry Wikoff, an American notorious for his foreign adventures such as advising European royalty, perhaps spying, even—according to rumor—abducting an American heiress in Italy. Wikoff had written an antiabolition pamphlet, A Letter to Viscount Palmerston, K. G., Prime Minister of England, on American Slavery. Olmsted was troubled that Mary Lincoln appeared so solicitous of Wikoff. During the opera, she smiled at him and followed his conversation with apparent interest. How could the first lady be in the thrall of this “insufferable beast,” as Olmsted termed him?
All seemed folly to Olmsted: the fragile Union, its clay-foot leaders, the ragtag army, the toothless USSC. His letters of the time show a growing despondency. “Lincoln has no element of dignity; no tact, not a spark of genius,” he writes in one, and in another: “The official machinery is utterly and absurdly inadequate for the emergency & there is no time to think of enlarging it. I feel the whole business is exceedingly uncertain & should not be much surprised to get up & find Jeff Davis in the White House.” To Mary, he struck this plaintive note: “Give me some good news of yourself, please, and of the park. I can not get on long without you here.”
July 21, 1861: The day had finally arrived for the Union army to be tested by a major battle. Roughly 35,000 troops arrived at Manassas, Virginia, thirty miles southwest of the capital. If they could capture the railroad junction there, then it would be on to Richmond unimpeded. The ninety-day enlistment period for the volunteers was about to end, and as Lincoln well knew, progress was needed.
Because it was a summer Sunday, many of Washington’s haut monde, including several congressmen, set out in carriages carrying picnic baskets and wine. The revelers expected to witness a decisive victory, perhaps one that would instantly quell the rebellion.
The two sides engaged near a small creek named Bull Run. By afternoon, they were seesawing back and forth, trying to seize control of Henry House Hill. About four o’clock, reinforcements arrived to help Beauregard’s army. They proceeded to break the Union right flank. As wave upon wave of fresh troops poured down Henry House Hill, the Confederates debuted a blood-chilling banshee shriek, what came to be known as the rebel yell.
The Union fell back. Arriving at the main road, the retreating troops were forced to spill around a clot of carriages; the picnickers now headed north. It was then that panic set in.
Olmsted was in New York during Bull Run, but news of the battle reached him quickly. It was a time of high anxiety, as many feared the South would storm the capital. But Confederate troops were also exhausted, so much so that they were unable to take advantage of their victory. Olmsted boarded the next train and returned to a Washington in pandemonium.
Wild-eyed Union soldiers milled in the streets, filthy and unshaven, caps gone, muskets gone, uniforms shredded, many of them barefoot. Some busied themselves tearing up citizens’ wooden fence posts to build fires. Others wandered door to door begging for food. Still others lay asleep, heads resting on lampposts, or lay passed out full-length in gutters. “A large portion of our forces were stricken with a most terrible mental disease,” Olmsted wrote, “under which all manliness was lost and utmost cowardice, unreasonableness and fiendish inhumanity were developed.”
What about the officers? Where were the men who were supposed to be in command? The officers were nowhere to be seen—that is, until Olmsted arrived at the Willard. The hotel’s bar and lobby fairly crawled with them. “They, too, were dirty and in an ill-condition,” he observed, “but appeared indifferent, reckless, and shameless, rather than dejected and morose. They were talking of the battle, laughing at the incidents of the retreat, and there was an evident inclination among them to exaggerate everything that was disgraceful.” Olmsted even recorded a telling snatch of dialogue that he overheard.
Where is your regiment? an officer was asked.
“Completely demoralized, sir; completely demoralized.”
But where could it be now? the questioner persisted.
“All disorganized—all disorganized.”
But your men simply have to be somewhere?
“I’m told that there are two or three hundred of them together somewhere near the Capitol,” said the officer, “but I have not seen them yet since the battle.”
Just four days after Bull Run, in his capacity as USSC head, Olmsted launched an inquiry into the causes of the defeat. He drew up a list of seventy-five questions. How much sleep did you get the night before the battle? What was your most recent meal? How far did you march on the day of July 21?
Olmsted dispatched seven inspectors, including his friend Brace, to track down the dispersed battle participants and pose the questions. The data were then tabulated by Ezekiel Elliott, a USSC employee who had worked before the war as an actuary for a Boston life insurance firm. To make sense of the first major battle of the Civil War, Olmsted was relying on empirical methods and drawing on his earlier experience as a scientific farmer.
The da
ta was stark. Of twenty-nine regiments surveyed, ten reported that at least a third of their number had simply collapsed from exhaustion before the battle even started. For many of these soldiers, the cause of such breakdown was want of water, food, or sleep. Others had been worn out by the need to march the final miles to battle at a punishing pace known as “double-quick.” Combining the march and the retreat, Olmsted determined that the average soldier traveled forty-four miles on foot the day of the battle.
He was even able to provide a side-by-side comparison of two regiments that experienced vastly different outcomes at Bull Run. The 2nd Rhode Island was well rested and well fed, enjoying soft bread, butter, and fresh fruit. To keep up morale, they had a chaplain and even a crack marching band. At Bull Run, the 2nd Rhode Island was first to engage, lost 16 percent of its ranks, but the regiment stood firm while others panicked.
A study in contrast was the Fire Zouaves, a regiment that favored garish desert garb and was composed mostly of New York City firemen. For several nights prior to Bull Run, the soldiers had slept on the ground without tents or blankets. The regiment hadn’t been paid, either, leaving many of its members agitated. (Soldiers that volunteered to serve still got paid—$11 a month for an infantry private at the beginning of the war.) The Fire Zouaves were routed at Bull Run.
Olmsted wrote up the findings in the USSC’s Report on the Demoralization of the Volunteers. His conclusion: The prevailing wisdom about Bull Run was completely backward. The soldiers wandering around Washington weren’t demoralized because they had lost in battle. Rather, the demoralized Union army had already lost Bull Run before the first shot was fired. This was a provocative idea. To assign a battlefield loss not to botched strategy but to such seemingly ancillary variables as bad diet and lack of sleep was utterly out of step with then-current thinking. Olmsted even called this demoralization a mental disease. He was now so far ahead of his time that understanding from his contemporaries was inconceivable. When it came to naming a culprit for the debacle, Olmsted did not flinch. He placed the blame squarely on a government that would send woefully unprepared soldiers to certain death.
The first draft of Olmsted’s report hasn’t survived. Something of its flavor can be found in a letter to Mary, where he refers to the “imbecility of the government.”
Olmsted read the report to an assembled group of USSC colleagues. It was not well received. Board members with government ties, especially, worried about Olmsted’s controversial conclusions. The USSC had been created by executive order and could easily be uncreated. The board asked Olmsted to revise his report, a task he did over a weekend. But even in the new draft, Olmsted could not contain his reformer’s fire. “Did the government really care at all for the ‘brave volunteer?’” writes Olmsted. “If so, why did he sometimes have food that he could not eat, and sometimes none at all, for days together? Why should he be left to sleep in rotten straw and shoddy blankets, and sometimes for months with nothing at all, on the bare ground?”
The board’s solution was that Olmsted’s report would receive a private printing. In other words, it was to be circulated only within the USSC. A few copies were printed, “Confidential” was stamped on the cover, and that was that. “So it will become a historical document,” Olmsted observed wryly in a letter to his father.
After Bull Run, it was clear that the Union was in for a prolonged conflict, not the one-big-battle-and-done that many had envisioned at the outset. Olmsted now predicted the war would last two or three years. The USSC moved into more permanent headquarters, a three-story townhouse at 244 F Street, once owned by John Quincy Adams. It was also clear that certain things stood in the USSC’s way, preventing it from being truly effective.
The major hindrance was the Medical Bureau, composed for the peacetime needs of 15,000 soldiers and adjusting ever so slowly to the new realities. Remarkably, the bureau had begun the Civil War with just twenty-six surgeons and eighty assistants. Most of them had spent recent years at isolated frontier outposts, and as a consequence their skills were dangerously outdated.
The Medical Bureau was headed by the surgeon general, a man named Clement Alexander Finley. Ramrod stiff, with a fondness for capes, the sixty-four-year-old Finley was a career army doctor with a reputation for extreme parsimony. He was routinely suspicious of new medical practices. As a military man, and a pompous one at that, Finley reminded Olmsted of no one so much as Egbert Viele. From the outset, he and Finley clashed repeatedly. Olmsted had suggested that soldiers be given quinine to fight malaria. Finley pronounced this an experimental treatment and resisted. Olmsted had suggested smallpox vaccines for the troops. Unnecessary, said Finley. So the USSC spent money raised by its network of women’s aid groups to buy 5,000 vaccines and distributed the doses itself.
Privately, Olmsted described Finley as “a self-satisfied, supercilious, bigoted blockhead,” adding, “He knows nothing and does nothing and is capable of knowing nothing and doing nothing.” How could the USSC offer any kind of support or counsel if it was forced to work with a retrograde outfit like the Medical Bureau? Finley had to go.
Hoping to accomplish this, Olmsted arranged to meet with General George McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac. The meeting was held on September 12, 1861, at McClellan’s private quarters in Washington. The general adopted a surprisingly confidential manner, telling Olmsted the estimated size of the Confederate army. He also told him how large the Confederates estimated the Union force to be. Olmsted returned that same Friday evening to further their business. Now he broached the subject of replacing the surgeon general, and McClellan appeared receptive. The two men enjoyed glasses of Pennsylvania whiskey, and Olmsted left at midnight feeling confident.
But McClellan reneged. Looking back, Olmsted reflected that he’d have to credit McClellan with a political subtlety that hadn’t registered during their meeting. After all, the general had speculated on the size of the Confederate force. He’d provided a Confederate estimate of the Union force. What he’d held close was the one fact he knew cold: the actual size of the Union army.
Olmsted kept at it, camping out in the lobbies and anterooms of the Washington power elite. Bellows was forever impressed by Olmsted’s drive: “His mind is patient in meditation, capable & acute, his will inflexible, his devotion to his principles & methods, confident and unflinching.” On another occasion, the reverend offered a telling backhand assessment, describing Olmsted as “a severe judge, seldom pleased & whose presence I dread more than every body else’s.”
Olmsted even managed to gain an audience with Lincoln. On October 17, 1861, he and several other USSC commissioners visited the White House from nine to eleven in the morning. Lincoln not only refused to remove Surgeon General Finley but also suggested that the USSC was trying to “run the machine.”
Following the meeting, Olmsted composed a letter to his nine-year-old stepson, John Charles. Ordinarily, Olmsted wrote at tremendous speed in a dense scrawl. This time, he wrote slowly, forming his letters with great care. Given that his recipient was a child, Olmsted was more charitable toward Lincoln than in earlier impressions, but still it’s possible to read between the lines. “Dear Charley,” Olmsted wrote. “I went to the White House to-day and saw the President. He is a very tall man. He is not a handsome man. He is not graceful. But he is good. He speaks frankly and truly and straight out just what he is thinking. Commonly he is very sober but sometimes he laughs. And when he laughs he laughs very much and opens his mouth very deep.”
Olmsted had gone to the top of the chain of command without success, but he wasn’t done. He convinced Henry Wilson, a Massachusetts senator, to introduce a bill calling for the reorganization of the Medical Bureau. The bill got off to an extremely unpromising start, kicking around in various committees. But soon this bill would change everything for the USSC.
Olmsted was driving himself hard. It wasn’t until six months into the USSC job that he spent a night at the Willard without sleeping in his clothes. He crowed in
a letter, “I have discovered that pale ale is an admirable prophylactic of nervous exhaustion.” A friend had brewed him a number of bottles.
Mary had the baby, a girl. This was Olmsted’s second child. Little John Theodore had died just over a year earlier. Olmsted rushed back to New York. He’d been so busy that he wasn’t clear on the child’s birth date. It was October 28, 1861.
“We have a girl,” Olmsted wrote to Brace, “which though not what the country wants right now is to me personally more agreeable than a man-child would have been.” He added that he and Mary were considering the name: “Thank God things can’t be much meaner in mytimes.” Although that was a grim joke, there was serious discussion about naming the baby Content. Content Pitkin Olmsted was the paternal grandmother whose books had given FLO so much precocious enjoyment. While the name was hopeful, it just didn’t feel right. They named her Marion instead.
Returning to Washington, Olmsted began contemplating an enticing possibility. A joint army-navy expedition, led by General Thomas Sherman, had recently captured the Sea Islands, a plantation region in the Port Royal Sound off the coast of South Carolina. The slave masters, foremen, and other whites had all fled the region. But the slaves had stayed behind and were, in effect, living as a free community. Olmsted began thinking about leaving the USSC to work with these former slaves instead.
The war was only a few months old, and everything about his current post remained distressingly undefined. Could the USSC make a difference in the lives of soldiers? Would the USSC even survive? Meanwhile, working with freed slaves seemed uniquely designed for him, something where he might be able to put to good use his very specific knowledge about the South and slavery.
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