Reveille in Washington
Page 1
MARGARET LEECH (1893–1974) was an American novelist, biographer, and historian. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for History and one of only two people to win it twice, first in 1942 for Reveille in Washington and again in 1960 for In the Days of McKinley (for which she also won the Bancroft Prize). Leech was born in Newburgh, New York, and graduated from Vassar College in 1915. She then moved to New York City, where she found work in the advertising and publicity departments of Condé Nast. Following World War I, she served on the American Committee for Devastated France and took up journalism and fiction, eventually publishing three novels, The Back of the Book (1924), Tin Wedding (1926), and The Feathered Nest (1928), before turning to history. A member of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table, where she was known for her sharp tongue, she collaborated with Heywood Broun on a biography of Anthony Comstock (1927) and with Beatrice Kaufman on a play, Divided by Three (1934). In 1928 Leech married Ralph Pulitzer, editor and publisher of The New York World. At the time of her death Leech had begun work on a new history, The Garfield Orbit. Completed by Harry J. Brown, the book appeared in 1978.
JAMES M. McPHERSON was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Among his other books are For Cause and Comrades, Drawn with the Sword, What They Fought For, Gettysburg, and Fields of Fury. A professor at Princeton University, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
REVEILLE IN WASHINGTON
1860–1865
MARGARET LEECH
Introduction by
JAMES M. McPHERSON
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1941 by Margaret Leech Pulitzer
Introduction copyright © by James M. McPherson
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Leech, Margaret, 1893–1974.
Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865/by Margaret Leech ; introduction by
James McPherson.
p. cm.—(New York Review Books classics)
Originally published: New York : Harper, c 1941.
Includes index.
1. Washington (D.C.)—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. I. Title.
E501.L4 2011
975.3'02—dc22
2011011713
Cover photograph: The Office of the U.S. Christian Commission, Washington, D.C., April 1865 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
Cover design: Katy Homans
ISBN 978-1-59017-467-8
v2.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
Contents
Cover
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Introduction
REVEILLE IN WASHINGTON
Dedication
I. The General Is Older than the Capital
II. “The Union, Sir, Is Dissolved”
III. Arrival of a Westerner
IV. Deserted Village
V. Home of the Brave
VI. Excursion in Virginia
VII. All Quiet on the Potomac
VIII. Ladies in Durance
IX. Two Civilians and General Halleck
X. Lost Leaders
XI. “The Great Army of the Wounded”
XII. Black, Copper and Bright
XIII. Winter of Security
XIV. Madam President
XV. Bloodshed in the Spring
XVI. Siege in the Suburbs
XVII. Portents of a Second Term
XVIII. Star-Spangled Capital
XIX. Victory, with Harshness
Appendix
Lincoln’s Bills
Chronology of the Main Events
Some Biographical Notes
Bibliography
Index
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
IN HIS BOOK Washington Goes to War, David Brinkley describes how World War II changed the American capital from a rather provincial city preoccupied with the New Deal and emptied by the annual summer exodus to the nerve center of an unprecedented war effort and headquarters of the postwar non-Communist world. In the process Washington became, in John F. Kennedy’s phrase, a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency.
Other wars have also had a major impact on Washington; during the War of 1812, for example, the British burned the infant capital. But no event, not even World War II, more profoundly affected the capital than the Civil War. This is the central theme of Reveille in Washington. The conflict of 1861–1865 transformed a sleepy Southern village from the seat of government for a decentralized confederation of states into the powerful capital of a reunited nation purified of slavery and state sovereignty by blood and fire.
Published, by ironic coincidence, on the eve of American entry into World War II, Reveille in Washington chronicles that earlier all-out war effort directed by embattled habitants of the White House and Capitol Hill. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1942, Margaret Leech’s book has become a classic in the rich field of Civil War studies. And for good reason. Like all classics, it is a book that can be read and appreciated at several levels. It is, first and foremost, a beautifully written story–with a plot full of crises, surprises, twists and turns, comedy and tragedy, and the bitter-sweet climax of Union victory followed immediately by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It is a story with a heroic and tragic figure in Lincoln, a genuine villain in John Wilkes Booth, a would-be messiah in George B. McClellan, the beguiling rebel spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow, Mary Lincoln, who evokes pathos, and giants of American culture who play bit parts here: poet Walt Whitman and novelist Louisa May Alcott nursing wounded soldiers in army hospitals; Patent Office clerk Clara Barton creating a one-woman medical corps and sallying forth to succor the wounded on battlefields near Washington; Andrew Carnegie working to organize transportation and telegraph services into the capital.
The “reveille” of the title has multiple meanings that suggest some of the levels of the book. Reveille is first an awakening from peace to war. Not only did the dusty, somnolent offices of the War Department come alive as the bureaucratic headquarters of a large military machine, but vast multitudes of soldiers crowded into Washington itself and poured into the surrounding hills and valleys, which became training camps and staging areas for the numerous “On to Richmond” campaigns. The awakening of Washington to the realities of war also came in the form of alarums and panics caused by enemy threats and supposed threats to the capital. This martial activity parades in all its splendor and confusing disorder through these pages.
Another meaning of “reveille” centers on the emergence of the capital from the symbol to the true substance of sovereignty. America’s awakening as a modern nation came during the Civil War. Before 1861 many Americans looked upon their Union as a voluntary association of states that could assert their separate sovereignty whenever they wanted to. But the events of 1861–1865 upended this notion and made Washington the sovereign capital in fact as well as name. Before the war the words “United States” were generally understood as a plural noun: The United States are a republic. After 1865 “United States” became a singular noun. The North went to war to preserve the Union; it ended by creating a nation. In Lincoln’s first inaugural address he used the word “Union” twenty times and never said the word “nation.” In his first message to Congress, on July 4, 1861, he referred to the Union thirty-two
times and to the nation three times. But more than two years later, at Gettysburg, Lincoln did not refer to the Union at all but spoke of the nation five times as he invoked a new birth of freedom to forge a new American nationalism. And in his second inaugural address, looking back over four years of war, Lincoln described one side as seeking to dissolve the Union in 1861 and the other as accepting the challenge of war to sustain the nation. During the war the old federal republic in which the government in Washington rarely touched the average citizen except through the Post Office gave way to a national state that taxed its people directly, created an internal revenue bureau to collect these taxes, drafted men into the army, expanded the jurisdiction of federal courts, created a national greenback currency, and launched a national banking system.
In this book Margaret Leech deftly molds the expansion and refurbishing of the Capitol into a master symbol for the awakening of American nationalism. In 1861 the new Capitol dome was unfinished, with its gaping roof open to the sky. In 1865, as the Union neared victory, the dome neared completion. By the end of the war the new dome was in place, surmounted by the triumphant statue of Armed Freedom standing at rest, her sword sheathed.
In another sense “reveille” marks the awakening of Washington from Southern to Northern domination, from sectionalism to nationalism, from slavery to freedom. Washington in 1861 was a Southern community. The District of Columbia was surrounded by slave states, and slavery existed in the capital itself. Although the city’s flourishing slave market had been forced across the river to Alexandria by legislation that was part of the Compromise of 1850, the buying and selling of human beings was still going on in Washington when Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861. But that inauguration was an augury of change. In this first administration of the exclusively Northern Republican party, Yankee officeholders invaded Washington. And as these Republicans entered the capital on trains from the north, Southerners left on trains headed south, joining their home states in secession. Washington became a city of Northern charm and, for a time at least, Northern efficiency. One of the first acts of the new Republican majority was the abolition of slavery in the District. In this as in many other respects, Washington was the nation in microcosm. Abolition of slavery in the capital was followed three and a half years later by the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing it throughout the United States.
The Northern invasion and Southern exodus foreshadowed a long-term transition in control of all branches of government. In 1861 the United States had lived under the Constitution for seventy-two years. During forty-nine of those years—two thirds of the time—a Southern slaveholder had served as President. After the Civil War a century passed before another Southerner was elected President. Until 1861 twenty-three of the thirty-six Speakers of the house and twenty-four of the thirty-six Presidents pro tem of the Senate represented Southern states. For half a century after the Civil War none of the Speakers or Presidents pro tem came from the South. Before the war twenty of the thirty-five Supreme Court justices had been Southerners, but for a half century after the war only five of the twenty-six new justices appointed were from the South. The Civil War destroyed many facets of the Old South, dooming Southern culture to regionalism and establishing Northern institutions and values as the national norm. In this way, too, the war represented a reveille in Washington.
Finally, the struggle of 1861–1865 witnessed Washington’s physical awakening from an unkempt country town to a modern city. Contemporaries described this transition as it occurred before their eyes. Convalescing in the capital from a wound received at the Battle of Fredericksburg, a Massachusetts soldier wrote in March 1863:
In the course of a few years Washington will be very much changed from its present condition of filth and uncleanliness; pavements will be added to the streets and the stimulus of a population free and increasing, and of enlarging business interests, will work such a revolution as slavery never dreamed of. The immense trade in army and navy supplies, which has been carried on through Washington since the commencement of the war, is doing much for its outward improvement.
In 1861 Washington was known as the city of magnificent distances. These were sarcastic words, for with the exception of a few public buildings—the Capitol, the White House, the Treasury, the Patent Office, and the Post Office—and a few large hotels like Willard’s, the vista down to the Potomac appeared to be an unbroken swamp. Indeed, Washington was built on a swamp, with open drainage canals carrying putrid offal to the river within sight (and smell) of the White House. Pigs rooted for garbage in the mostly unpaved streets that were, according to season, shin-deep in mud or dust. Unsightly groups of shacks and backyard privies clustered along many of the streets. Washington was “a hydrocephalous hamlet,” wrote the caustic correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, a “great, scrambling, slack-baked embryo of a city basking in the December sun like an alligator on the mud-bank of a bayou in July.”
All of this began to change during the Civil War. In some respects, though, things got worse before they got better. The massive influx of soldiers brought with it an unsavory task force of prostitutes, gamblers, and liquor vendors from near and far; not until 1863 did an aroused citizenry and military police mount a counterattack against this irruption of vice. The huge expansion of the civil service necessary to mobilize the war effort brought a housing crisis that initially multiplied the jerry-built, ramshackle residential districts. The advance of Union armies into slave territory thrust a backwash of “contrabands” (escaped slaves) into Washington’s already overcrowded black neighborhoods. Bloody battles near the capital in 1862 sent thousands of wounded soldiers to unprepared army hospitals where many died for want of adequate care and facilities.
But by the last year or two of the war the government, the army, and voluntary associations like the United States Sanitary Commission and various freedmen’s relief associations brought some order. General hospitals, contraband camps, and additional housing mushroomed out of the marshes. The sound of nearby hammers and saws competed with the rumble of guns on distant battlefields. Carpenters and masons built a new city even as the government and army built a new Union. Neither process was complete by 1865, to be sure, but both of them were well begun. And this book is the story of that beginning—that reveille in Washington.
Margaret Leech’s luminous prose allows the reader to see and hear the sights and sounds of Washington—even to smell its odors—during this critical era of American history. Like a fine novelist, she brings alive the characters in this drama, from President to prostitutes. But this is not a novel—although it did serve as an important source for Gore Vidal’s and William Safire’s fictional recountings of the Washington scene in their novels Lincoln and Freedom. Reveille in Washington is good, sound history—accurate as well as entertaining—rooted in careful and thorough research. In only one important respect has subsequent scholarship modified the findings of this book. Historians no longer portray the radical Republicans in so hostile a light as they did in the 1940s, nor do they find such a large gulf between the radicals and Lincoln on issues connected with the South and slavery. Though factions existed within the Republican party, as they do in all political parties, cooperation on large issues was more significant than conflict. And the chief characteristic of the radicals was not malevolence, nor was their chief motive revenge; they favored a relentless prosecution of the war and the destruction of slavery in order to assure the nation that “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln called forth at Gettysburg.
Despite the three-dimensional richness of the human beings who march through these pages, the main protagonist is Washington itself. The city is the vantage point from which all the awesome events of the war are viewed. We learn of terrible battles as close as Bull Run or as far away as Vicksburg—but only as rumors and news of them filter into Washington. Generals, soldiers, governors, senators, diplomats, spies, and prisoners come and go, but the focus of their activity is always Washington, whether they are present or
absent. The book not only recounts the Civil War as it was shaped in Washington and seen from Washington, but it also breathes life into the city and makes it an animate, sentient being, not merely a place. History is the story of change over time; this is the story of the transformation of Washington during the most crucial four years of its history.
—JAMES M. McPHERSON
REVEILLE IN WASHINGTON
For Susan Pulitzer
I. The General Is Older than the Capital
THAT WINTER, the old General moved from the rooms he had rented from the free mulatto, Wormley, in I Street to Cruchet’s at Sixth and D Streets. His new quarters, situated on the ground floor—a spacious bedroom, with a private dining-room adjoining—were convenient for a man who walked slowly and with pain; and Cruchet, a French caterer, was one of the best cooks in Washington.
In spite of his nearly seventy-five years and his increasing infirmities, the General was addicted to the pleasures of the table. Before his six o’clock dinner, his black body servant brought out the wines and the liqueurs, setting the bottles of claret to warm before the fire. The old man had refined his palate in the best restaurants in Paris; and woodcock, English snipe, poulard, capon, and tête de veau en tortue were among the dishes he fancied. He liked, too, canvasback duck, and the hams of his native Virginia. Yet nothing, to his taste, equaled the delicacy he called “tarrapin.” He would hold forth on the correct method of preparing it: “No flour, sir—not a grain.” His military secretary could saturninely foresee that moment, when, leaning his left elbow on the table and holding six inches above his plate a fork laden with the succulent tortoise, he would announce, “The best food vouchsafed by Providence to man,” before hurrying the fork to his lips.
From his splendid prime, the General had retained, not only a discriminating palate, but the defects suitable to a proud and ambitious nature. He had always been vain, pompous, exacting, jealous and high-tempered. Now that his sick old body could no longer support the racking of its wounds, his irascibility had dwindled to irritation, and his imperiousness to petulance. His love of flattery had grown, and he often declared that at his age compliments had become a necessity. While taking a footbath, he would call on his military secretary to remark the fairness of his limbs. In company, he spoke of the great commanders of history, and matched with theirs his own exploits at Chippewa and Lundy’s Lane, at Cerro Gordo and Chapultepec. Near his desk stood his bust in marble, with shoulders bared; classical, serene and idealized. The walls were brilliant with his portraits at various ages, from the young General Winfield Scott who had been victorious over the British in 1814 to the already aging General-in-Chief who had defeated the Mexicans in 1848. They were arresting figures, those generals on the walls; handsome, slender, heroic, with haughty eye and small, imperious mouth. Gold gleamed in spurs, in buttons and embroidery and huge epaulettes, in the handle of the sword which had been the gift of Virginia; and one portrait showed the superb cocked hat, profusely plumed, that had earned for Scott the sobriquet of “Fuss and Feathers.” He stood six feet, four and a quarter inches in height, and had been wont to insist on the fraction. But, swollen and dropsical, he spoke no longer of his size. He pointed instead to the bust, to the portraits, to show what he had been.