Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868

by Cokie Roberts

  THE SIGHT OF the American flag under attack at Fort Sumter caused the North, which had been somewhat indifferent up to this point, to rally. Men rushed to join their militias as tens of thousands of troops were summoned to defend the vastly vulnerable nation’s capital. The Richmond Enquirer had been sounding a drumbeat for months: “Can there not be found men bold and brave enough in Maryland to unite with Virginians in seizing the Capital?” Now the newspaper’s call to action appeared all too likely as Confederates destroyed the U.S. naval base in Norfolk, Virginia, and took the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, where the defending officer had escaped after destroying most of the weapons to keep them from falling into enemy hands. General Scott feared that the city was surrounded. The “military appearance” that Louisa Meigs had complained of was really only about six hundred U.S. Army regulars who had come in from Texas plus 1,500 ill-trained local troops guarding government buildings, nowhere near enough to protect the city against a full-scale attack even if all the soldiers could be counted on to fight.

  That was far from certain—no one could be sure where the men’s sympathies lay now that nearby Virginia was out of the Union and Maryland seemed to be teetering on the edge of secession. Imminent invasion appeared inevitable. As the city waited anxiously for reinforcements to arrive, some prominent men in town feebly tried to ward off total destruction by raising small militias, but those units represented little more than bravado as they bivouacked in the East Room of the White House. Men over forty formed their own “Fossil Guards,” men over sixty the “Silver Grays.” But none of them could mount a true defense. If the South marched on Washington, as most of the men in power thought likely, the city would fall, the war would be over, and the Union would be dismantled. The British ambassador warned his government that there was urgent apprehension “for this city.” The secretary of state received a letter from a businessman in New York informing him that a cocky Varina Davis had written her friends there to invite them to her White House reception on May 1. The office-seekers who had been swarming over government buildings pressing for jobs dispersed from the overcrowded hotels. Women and children fled along with any men who could. They staged a run on the banks as they demanded hard currency. Those who stayed hoarded food and supplies; the price of flour jumped from $6 a barrel to $15.20. “The papers report our condition to be very critical—immediate danger of bombardment and thousands of other rumors,” Louisa Meigs anguished in a letter to her mother. “Many persons in the city have been subject with a panic and have taken flight with their families.” She planned to stay put for the time being, but “Heaven only knows what a few days may disclose to us.”

  Billboards posted to summon soldiers warned of an anticipated attack on Washington, and young men rushed to defend their capital. But it took some time to assemble the troops and get them in place, and the question was whether the Union soldiers would reach the city before the Confederates, who were rumored to be on the move, with the southern newspapers ballyhooing their advance. Three days after Lincoln’s call went out for volunteers, the first fresh troops arrived—the First Pennsylvania and Company F of the Fourth U.S. Artillery, but they arrived beaten and bloodied by a mob of southern sympathizers in Baltimore who had set upon them as they transferred from one train station to another. The soldiers made camp in the chamber of the House of Representatives, the only place big enough to hold them, and government worker Clara Barton and her sister arrived to tend to the wounded. By the next day, many more men would need attention.

  This time, instead of a somewhat spontaneous demonstration by Baltimore rowdies, the anti-Union forces in the Maryland city were ready. When the Sixth Massachusetts pulled into the station on the north side of town, the soldiers had prepared for harassment. But the size of the force meeting them made it almost impossible for them to reach the next station. With every manner of missile hurled at them, the troops opened fire. By the time they reached the next train the body count stood at four soldiers and at least nine civilians, with many more injured. But the toll was much higher in terms of its effect on Washington—as the Sixth Massachusetts made their wounded way to the Senate chamber, the city feared attack would come that night from both Virginia and Maryland. “Our hitherto peaceful town and city presents a fearful spectacle,” Ann Green shivered with trepidation; “a drawn sword keeping sentinel meets you at almost every square—while the squads of men at the corners and the collected mob along the streets show you that fearful apprehensions rule the hour.”

  And the next day, April 20, the city awakened to the news that Governor Hicks of Maryland, prodded by the mayor of Baltimore, who claimed he could not control the mobs, had burned the bridges connecting the rail lines to the North. Washington was completely cut off from the loyal states. No troops, no supplies, no food, no mail, no newspapers could relieve the besieged bastion. “A beautiful bright day—but the inhabitants in terror and confusion at the hourly rumors of the coming foe—the greater part turn out false—but there is enough of truth to startle the reflecting mind,” Ann Green trembled. “There is a report today that martial law will be proclaimed in Washington tomorrow but no one knows what to believe.” No one included the president of the United States, who a year later described these days as a “condition of siege.” The only preparation for that siege seemed to be the stockpiling of thousands of barrels of flour seized by the military from the Georgetown mills and ships in the harbor and an attempt to protect the treasures of the Capitol. “About the entrance and between the pillars were barricades of iron plates, intended for the dome,” Julia Taft later remembered in amazement. “All the statuary in the rotunda had been boxed and the pictures covered by rough boards.”

  With the rail lines mangled, the troops moving south from New York and Massachusetts were forced to go by boat to Annapolis, Maryland, much against the wishes of Governor Hicks, who feared civil unrest. His old supporter Anna Carroll was outraged: “You cannot deny the right of transit to the Northern troops through the territory of Maryland, called by the President to defend their capital and your own,” she lectured. With or without Hicks’s approval, the soldiers pushed on, managing to make their way from Annapolis even though the tracks had been destroyed. First they repaired an old steam engine and then they patched together tracks to take them to Annapolis Junction, where they could hook up with the undamaged Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. While they worked, rumors spread among the troops that the Rebels had taken the Capital City; rumors spread around Washington that the troops had been killed along the way. With the telegraph lines down and no communication, anything could be true. “The rumor of invasion and battle was startling,” Ann Green confessed.

  But then at last, after five days without information, as food supplies dwindled and terror of annihilation escalated, the train filled with the exhausted, hungry, but triumphant men of the long-awaited New York Seventh chugged into the B&O station to the great rejoicing and relief of the country’s capital. “The city was in commotion with all sorts of rumors. The far famed Seventh Regiment arrived and was submitted to the President’s inspection,” Ann Green advised her daughter in Virginia. “There are several other regiments in Annapolis which will continue to arrive.” Soon soldiers from Rhode Island and Massachusetts filled government buildings, including the White House: “Troops occupy the Capitol, the East room at the Presidents and there is a large company at Silver Spring to make Mr. Blair safe. Indeed the times are worse than anyone at the distance could imagine. What it will all end in God alone knows.” But relieved residents of Washington did finally know that if attacked, the city could fight back.

  AS MRS. GREEN reported, more troops did keep arriving. “There is something grand and sublime in the unanimity with which the whole North has responded to the call for the defense of the Capital,” Louisa Meigs cheered to her son at West Point. “I think this unanimity of feeling on men of all classes and all parties—of all ages will astound and appall the South when it is fully understood.” The most eye-cat
ching of the recruits were the rambunctious “Fire Zouaves” from New York, with their colorful baggy pants and their choleric boastful personalities. Troops around the world had taken to copying the somewhat outlandish costumes of particularly fierce Berber soldiers in North Africa, called Zouaves. Twenty-four-year-old Elmer Ellsworth, who had worked with the president’s secretaries and become something of a surrogate son to Abe and Mary Lincoln, adopted the attire for the boisterous young volunteer firemen he brought in from New York. Before leading them merrily to their campground in the Capitol building he proudly paraded them by the White House, where Willie and Tad, the Lincoln boys, watched with such excitement that they insisted on having their own outfits made and dubbed themselves Mrs. Lincoln’s Zouaves.

  With all of the troops swarming the city, Washington was relatively safe, and since the president had essentially declared martial law along the railroad line to Philadelphia, supplies were coming in, but the citizens now had another complaint: all those soldiers made for a rowdy bunch. Some of their antics were harmless, like the mock congressional sessions they held in the halls of the House and Senate, but there were thousands of men sleeping under desks and in hallways, wreaking destruction in the government buildings, which soon smelled like latrines: “You would not know this God-forsaken city, our beautiful capital, with all its artistic wealth, desecrated, disgraced with Lincoln’s low soldiery,” a friend of Virginia Clay raged in a letter to her departed fellow secessionist. And one of the architects of the Capitol divulged to his wife in disgust: “The building is like one grand water closet—every hole and corner is defiled.” Even staunch Unionist Louisa Meigs looked with dismay on the Capitol as campground: “The frescoed walls are lined with flour barrels—the corridors resound with the tramp of armed men and the click of the rifle and the clatter of arms is heard all over that great building which was constructed for the purpose of peaceful legislation.” Still, Louisa was at first impressed by the demeanor of the soldiers: “It is said that there are over 20,000 soldiers in Washington—The avenue swarms with them—but in all the other streets an unusual quiet and stillness appears which is actually painful—it seems like the dead calm which often precedes the storm.” That didn’t last long; soon boredom set in and the soldiers’ restless escapades unnerved the somewhat somnambulant city.

  Also, a good many residents remained either supporters of the Confederacy or at least sympathetic to their family members in the South and the Yankee soldiers frightened them. “The whole district is filled with spies, every word is caught up and reported to the powers that be, and individuals are marked for vengeance. It is a complete reign of terror,” Ann Green recounted angrily, describing “a man shot in his own door by a troop of four or five men, for expressing secession sentiments.” Ann was desperately trying to keep her own children from voicing their views; she felt that their insistence on “the right of independence of speech” was dangerously unwise: “I only ask the common sense of silence.” But the troops were edgy as Maryland’s loyalty remained uncertain, and southern members of the U.S. military followed their states out of the Union. “Every officer at the Navy Yard here sent in his resignation the same day,” Louisa Meigs told her son with sadness. “Being Southerners they all resigned. It was a hard struggle for them. Many of them shed tears on handing in their resignation. A sense of duty and honor which we think mistaken has impelled them to this sacrifice.” It was not just military men who headed south; so did civilian public servants. All told about four hundred left to take positions in the Rebel Army and Confederate government. And as more southerners left, more northerners kept coming. “Troops are still pouring in, and affairs continue worse and worse,” Ann Green moaned. Georgetown College had been completely surprised, she noted, when New York’s Sixty-Ninth Regiment, the so-called Irish Brigade, was dispatched to the campus where Father John Early, the college president, “had no choice in the matter, and was allowed but two hours and a half to vacate one of his buildings, for the purpose of receiving fourteen hundred and fifteen soldiers.” A student at the college, young Stephen Douglas Jr., wrote to his stepmother, Adele Cutts Douglas, who was with his father in Chicago, about “the troops that are quartered here” and the false rumor, typical of the time, that “Virginia troops had attacked Washington.”

  To defend against any such attack, federal soldiers soon surrounded the city, building impressive fortifications and setting up camp in every spare space. Massachusetts masons installed huge ovens in the basement of the Capitol that worked day and night baking up hundreds of loaves of bread. For meat, a herd of cows was set to graze on the unfamiliar grounds of the Washington Monument, where several of them fell into the nearby canal. Provisions of all types—food, clothes, guns, ammunition—appeared by the carload to supply the ill-prepared platoons as Montgomery Meigs took on the job of quartermaster, but the sheer size of the military presence was overwhelming. “There are 30,000 troops here. Think of it! They go about the avenue insulting women and taking property without paying for it,” Virginia Clay’s southern friend furiously related. “I heard these Blairs are at the bottom of all this war policy. Old Blair’s country place was threatened and his family, including the fanatical Mrs. Lee, had to fly into the city.” In Maryland, home to the Blairs’ country house, the legislature finally met and rejected secession. Union troops moved into rebellious Baltimore in mid-May, quelling any further uprisings there. Washington would still have to guard against Virginia but the city would not be surrounded by states pledged to the enemy.

  The Lincolns tried to restore some sense of normalcy to the city. Ann Green and her family went to the White House toward the end of May and found that “the music was fine and the scene gay. Mr. Lincoln leant against the pillar of the portico, apparently oblivious of the sight before him, talking and laughing with a young man. There was nothing to adorn his face except a very nice set of teeth which he showed very often.” The president might be smiling, but war was never far from anyone’s mind. Hostile Virginia sat right across the Potomac and a tavern in Alexandria proudly flew a Confederate flag large enough to be seen from Washington. “It is rumored that an attack on Alexandria is expected within the next few days,” Elizabeth Lomax fretted on May 1. Her family had been urging her to leave town because “as Southerners we would not be safe,” but she was determined to stay, insisting, “We have so many old friends in the army that I feel sure we would be in no danger.” As the daughter of a Revolutionary War hero and the widow of an officer who had fought in the Seminole Wars, Mrs. Lomax could not imagine that any member of the American armed forces would harm her.

  She tried to make the best of the tense situation, going to visit the New York Seventh Regiment camp: “They have a charming military band and are a wonderful looking body of men. We stayed to see them drill, but oh, to think they are drilling to kill—and to kill my own people.” As the pressure on her built to leave home, Mrs. Lomax was truly in distress: “The country riven with dissensions, obliged to forsake my home, to scatter my children, some here, some there, to know that my darling son is in constant danger, to endure poverty, to see armed men everywhere knowing that they are the enemies of my own people, and never knowing the outcome of this frightful war. I feel desolated.” Left to raise six small children on an army widow’s paltry pension, supplemented by taking in copying work for the government and giving piano lessons, Elizabeth Lomax had managed remarkably well for herself and her family over the years. She loved her “sweet home” and she opposed this “fratricidal conflict,” having declared herself only a few months before “definitely for the Union.” Now her son had signed with the Confederate army and she was forced to abandon the life she had put together with pluck and perseverance. She left Washington on May 13 “with a sad heart” and crossed the river to stay with relatives in Virginia. Ten days later a referendum ratified Virginia’s choice to join the Confederacy.

  In the middle of that night, Union troops crossed the Potomac River to strike against the newly d
eclared enemy. Louisa Meigs kept vigil into the night to see the soldiers pass: “It was a magnificent yet painful sight, and filled me with emotion. I never thought to behold such a spectacle in our peaceful happy Country. As column after column appeared in sight and passed away, the knowledge that many of them would never return in all human probability, young & active and vigorous as they were, depressed & saddened me, while the gleam of their arms and the rattling of their saber and the clang of their weapons stirred and excited me.” Men on foot and on horseback crossed the bridges and took Arlington, a high spot that could be used to launch balloons for tracking enemy troop movements. Young Elmer Ellsworth led his Fire Zouaves on boats that crossed over to Alexandria, with its offending Confederate flag flying atop the Marshall House hotel. Landing shortly before dawn, the Union forces demanded surrender of the town filled with women and children and the Rebel officer complied. But Ellsworth couldn’t resist the urge to tear down that flag, knowing he would win the praise of his patrons in the White House. He marched to the hotel, climbed to the roof, and yanked down the banner. As he started down the steps, the proud southern innkeeper—James Jackson—shot Ellsworth point blank and then one of the Zouaves shot Jackson.