Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  The regiment was soon installed in the old and new Halls of Representatives. In their gaudy fancy dress, the brawny firemen sat about the floor, smoking, reading, sleeping or playing cards. They swung themselves down on ropes from the cornice of the Rotunda, walked around the outside parapets and hung like monkeys from the edge of the dome. One day, some of the men contrived to have the fire bell rung, ran to the Franklin engine house on the Avenue opposite Willard’s, and “snaked out” the engine and hose reel which had been provided by Federal funds for the protection of the public buildings. After a gallop around town, they returned to their quarters, steaming hot and satisfied.

  The Fire Zouaves had great respect for their little colonel, but they were as wild as wharf rats. Some seized a wandering pig, cut its throat and ate it. One Zouave pushed another through thirty-five dollars’ worth of plate-glass window. They bought new shoes at a fashionable bootmaker’s, and asked that the bill be sent to Old Abe. Dinners and suppers, cigars and transportation were charged to Jeff Davis. The firemen chased secessionists, and frightened old ladies. There was a horrible story of seduction which terrified “the maiden antiques” of the town. The regiment was superbly able-bodied and pugnacious, and it had enlisted, not for a paltry three months, but for three years. The Star treated the Fire Zouaves with indulgence, called them the Pet Lambs and thought their antics very funny. Washington citizens were, however, not amused. No crime was believed too dreadful for “those awful New York Zouaves,” and a straw-stuffed effigy of Jeff Davis, playfully suspended from a buttonwood tree in the Capitol park, gave rise to a rumor that they had hanged one of their victims. Colonel Ellsworth sent the most recalcitrant soldiers home, put a few rascals in irons and dramatically adjured the rest to noble conduct. His speech was greeted with affectionate shouts of “Bully for you,” and he privately expressed the opinion that most of the criticisms of his command had originated in the inventive brains of the reporters.

  After the Fire Zouaves had spent a week at the Capitol, they had an opportunity to distinguish themselves. Early one morning, a fire broke out in a tailor shop next door to Willard’s. As the Washington fire companies were notorious for letting buildings burn to their foundations, Colonel Joseph Mansfield, commanding the Department of Washington, gave orders to call out a detachment of the New Yorkers. Colonel Ellsworth detailed ten men from each company, and led them on a run down the Avenue. They broke down the door of the Franklin engine house, and dashed across the street, followed by most of the remaining members of the regiment, who had knocked down the sentries at the doors and leapt from the windows of the Capitol at the cry of fire. A large crowd on the Avenue, including the guests of the hotel in varied wardrobes, watched the Zouaves expertly mounting lightning rods, and climbing into windows. They formed themselves into human ladders for passing up water buckets, and one man was suspended head first from the burning roof to reach the hose line. Suddenly, a Union flag on the roof quivered and fell. Secessionists in the crowd made mocking comments, but some Zouaves caught the flag and waved it, and Willard’s hastily ran up two flags in a roar of cheers. With an exhibition fire drill and a patriotic demonstration, a calamity was averted. The tailor shop was in ruins, but Willard’s was saved.

  By breakfast time, in spite of a smell of smoke and some water damage, the hotel was doing business as usual. Servants cleaned the floors and washed the windows, while in the dining-room the Zouave heroes breakfasted with the guests, on Mr. Joseph Willard’s invitation. Colonel Mansfield had complimented them. They had been profusely thanked by all hands. Intoxicated by applause, they amused themselves during the morning by pulling down the walls of the burned building “in the presence of a large assemblage of both sexes.” That day, the Pet Lambs had things their own way. They seized engines and hose reels and ran in all quarters of the city, followed by “the usual fire-engine crowd.” A purse of five hundred dollars was made up for them, and even Mayor Berret chipped in ten dollars. Nevertheless, the Zouaves had succeeded in clouding the admiration of Washington for the volunteers. War, it began to be realized, brought out not only the best, but the worst—the idle and vicious, as well as the gallant. Probably no one was sorry, and doubtless there were many who thought the camp site appropriately chosen, when the New York firemen were moved to the vicinity of the Government Insane Asylum.

  The newspapers of Washington, in recording the daily life of the city, were reporting matters of unprecedented interest to the nation. The National Intelligencer, lofty, conservative and, in the old-fashioned sense, Southern, had seldom condescended to local items. Its proprietor, Mr. W. W. Seaton, aged eighty, had acquired an interest in the newspaper shortly before the office was burned by the British. On the day that the Seventh New York arrived in Washington, the Intelligencer contained a rather petulant editorial on national insanity, and a long article about the disappearance of salmon fishing in England. It was a feeble voice of elderly moderation in the rising chorus of war; but it did its best to praise the volunteers. It observed that, so strict was the Seventh’s regard for propriety, that during the encampment on Meridian Hill the soldiers did not disturb a fence rail, nor even pull a flower. It described divine service at the Patent Office, and temperance and prayer meetings in Franklin Square; and printed a pious anecdote about some New Jersey volunteers’ presenting a handsome Bible to an old lady who had given vegetables to one of their sick comrades. Concerned for the reputation of the capital, the Intelligencer scoffed at reports that the best possible order did not prevail in Washington; and it was closely seconded by the National Republican, the rather undistinguished organ of the new party in power, in portraying Washington as a military Utopia.

  The Evening Star was a saltier sheet altogether. It was owned and edited by Mr. W. D. Wallach, a lively and keen-witted journalist, and it had the largest circulation of any local newspaper in the District. Wallach, in spite of Southern connections and ultra-Democratic sympathies, strongly supported the administration. But the Star printed the news; and its columns gave a picture, not of Utopia, but of a city which was gradually being driven to distraction.

  Washington’s prayers for soldiers had been answered with a vengeance. The country town had been turned into a great, confused garrison, and the entertaining novelty had soon begun to pall. Quiet residential neighborhoods were in an uproar. Soldiers were drilling and bugling and drumming all over the place. In spite of excellent discipline in the Twelfth New York, the encampment in Franklin Square and the surrounding regimental hospitals made the neighborhood so unpleasant that Mr. Stanton was obliged to move his family out of their house on K Street.

  As irresponsible as children, the soldiers fired their weapons in any direction, causing accidents in streets and even in houses. Ladies were frightened to cross the canal bridges or enter the Smithsonian grounds, which had been selected as suitable spots for target practice. Militiamen were accustomed to handling muskets or rifles, and country boys knew about squirrel guns. Almost none, however, had had any experience with pistols or revolvers. The volunteers regarded small arms as amusing toys, skylarked with them, dropped them and snapped caps on them to kill flies. The result was a long casualty list.

  Keyed to a pitch of high patriotic excitement, the Yankee boys suffered from anticlimax in Washington. The city itself was a disappointment. They had not expected it to be like Boston or New York or Philadelphia, but they were depressed at seeing that the national capital was a ramshackle town, dirty and unpaved. “Hardly worth defending, except for the éclat of the thing,” one volunteer remarked. Washington citizens, though they charged high prices for their milk and butter and strawberries, seemed slow-paced and indolent to the Northerners. The only energetic inhabitants appeared to be children—little white newsboys, shrilling the New York Herald, at twenty-five cents a copy, small darkies crying “Shine your boots for half a dime with the Union polish.” Even more astounding than the general slovenliness of dust and bad smells, lounging Negroes and marauding pigs, was the emotional le
thargy of the population. After the war fever of the North, the soldiers found the quiet of Washington bewildering. “It is as if we were here separated by a screen from the universal excitement,” wrote Carl Schurz, a German-American, who had taken an active part in campaigning for Lincoln’s election. For all its guards and barricades, the town did not appear to be in danger. The volunteers stared in amazement at the workmen fluting the columns and carving the cornices of the Capitol Extension.

  Many young crusaders reacted to boredom and discomfort by going on drunken sprees. While no other regiment was composed of such lawless elements as the Fire Zouaves, and it was admitted that most of the soldiers conducted themselves decently, the riotous minority was large enough to destroy the peace of Washington. Intoxicated playboys whooped it up in the streets, and fought with each other and with their officers. The city police had never been able to cope with the offenses of normal times, and public confidence in its efficiency was not encouraged by the widespread disaffection to the Government which existed in both the day and night forces. A provost guard was soon formed to patrol the town at night. The soldiers were ordered to be in their quarters at nine-thirty, and Mayor Berret closed the drinking places at the same hour; but the provost guard was still kept busy carrying delinquents to the station houses, where they were often subjected to the punishment of the shower bath, a stream of cold water played from a hose on their naked backs.

  Still more disturbing to the capital was the antagonism which some of the troops developed toward the residents. They brashly insulted many families, and brawled with civilians who incurred their displeasure. Sometimes, the soldiers may have been justified in their belligerence. There was the case of a private of the Twelfth New York whom a Washington man called a Northern son of a bitch. Outraged at discovering sympathy with secession in the capital they had come to defend, the volunteers arrested a number of citizens and hauled them off to prison. Most of the cases were discharged for want of evidence, or released on taking the oath of allegiance. Yankee patriots were confused to find that the arrests were frowned on as high-handed displays of military authority.

  For the most part, the soldiers were entirely unprepared for shifting for themselves. The best of the militia regiments had had no real experience of camp life. They were merely social clubs which made a hobby of drilling, and enjoyed parading in their fine uniforms on national holidays. Ben Butler admitted that even the handy boys of the Eighth Massachusetts did not know how to cook, because they had always taken caterers with them on the glorified picnics of their encampments. They looked with a laughable uncertainty at the salt beef and hard bread and cords of wood which were distributed to them. Every regiment was surrounded by sutlers, and the men made themselves sick on tainted pies and cakes and candy. Many of them, like small boys escaped from their mothers, neglected to change their underwear for weeks at a time, and some had no underwear to change.

  Certain regiments showed remarkable initiative in creating comfortable camps, with well-organized kitchens and bakeries, and tidy rows of tents, decked with green boughs. They were, however, entirely uninstructed in matters of hygiene, placed the tents too close together, did not provide drainage, and usually thought it unnecessary to dig latrines. In the city, the sanitary conditions were appalling. Washington, with its river flats, its defective sewage system and its many privies, had always been odorous in warm weather. In May of 1861, it was as sour as a medieval plague spot. The ill-ventilated buildings were stale. Squares festered. Alleys stank. The barracks of the Fourth and Fifth Pennsylvania Regiments, at the rear of the City Hall and at the Assembly Rooms, were public nuisances. “Are we to have pestilence among us?” asked the Evening Star, and the query was echoed by the worried citizens. The comatose Board of Health aroused itself to a protest, the Surgeon General made inquiries and the War Department conducted an investigation.

  The town was growing murmurous with complaints, directed not so much against the men as against the officers. It was evident that decent camps and orderly conduct were the rule in regiments whose officers were conscientious. Militia colonels owed their positions to their personal popularity, and the colonels of the newly formed regiments—usually appointed by the governors of their respective States—were chosen, not on the basis of military aptitude, but because of their influence, political services or ability to raise recruits. All other officers were elected by the soldiers themselves. Under this system, shoulder straps conferred no authority, and the officers had to win the respect of their commands by their qualities of decency, industry and intelligence.

  It required no small application to master the varied details of Army regulations, and to organize regimental commissary, quartermaster and medical departments, while boning up on unfamiliar manuals of drill and tactics. Out of the many random selections, some officers were stupid and incompetent, and a few were downright dishonest. Many were lazy and indifferent, and preferred lounging around the Washington bars to attending to the training and welfare of their men. There were regiments which were getting almost no rations at all, while others complained of measly pork and musty biscuits. The food provided by the Commissary Department was mainly sound enough, though coarse and without variety. The soldiers soon understood that their own officers were to blame if they fared worse than their fellows, and the disaffection in some camps mounted almost to mutiny.

  Even men who held their officers in high esteem had no intention of giving implicit obedience to comrades on whom they had conferred rank. Democratically resentful of the notion of a military caste, privates slapped their company officers on the back, called them by their first names and thought that saluting them was pure nonsense. These soldiers were independent Americans who had sprung to arms at their country’s call, and they were ready to fight, but not to submit to a lot of strait-laced discipline and irksome military formalities.

  The system of electing officers was acceptable, not only to the volunteers themselves, but to the American people. It was supposed that the technical side of war could be easily mastered, and that resourceful Yankees would soon develop into competent military leaders. Only Army men looked with contempt on the volunteer organizations. The election of untrained officers was encouraged by General Scott’s policy of retaining professional soldiers in command of regulars, on whom he depended for the brunt of the fighting. The three months’ men were enlisted for too short a period to be made into soldiers before the time came to muster them out. Since the fall of Sumter, Scott had faced the fact of war. He was counting on the blockade to close the Southern ports—for, as Gideon Welles remarked, Scott was always ready to put the burden on the Navy. Then, in time, when the regular Army had been enlarged and a large force of three years’ volunteers had been trained, Scott planned to send an expedition down the Mississippi to complete the strangulation of the Confederacy. He discouraged the organization of volunteer artillery and cavalry. Carl Schurz was full of enthusiasm for raising a cavalry regiment of New York German-Americans. He had been appointed minister to Spain as a reward for his campaign services, but he won consent to deferring his mission, although Scott frowned on his project. If there were to be any war at all, the General impatiently told Schurz, it would be over long before volunteer cavalry could be made fit for service in the field.

  Mr. Seward and a few others were saying that the war would be very short, and the President thought that they might be right; but he was not entirely sanguine. Virginia was in arms. North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas were going with the Confederacy. Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri were torn by internal dissension. On the question of the three months’ militia, the Government at least partly concurred with Scott. The War Department had refused to accept any more men for a short term of service, and the President had widely exceeded his powers by calling out volunteers for three years, and by adding ten regiments to the regular Army and eighteen thousand seamen to the Navy. In the absence of Congress, Mr. Lincoln had assumed the war powers of the Government. Appalled at th
eir own audacity, the gentlemen of the Cabinet had sanctioned acts which, in Mr. Seward’s opinion, might bring them all to the scaffold. One of these had been the proclamation of the blockade, now also applied to the coasts of Virginia and North Carolina. Mr. Lincoln had also authorized Scott to suspend the writ of habeas corpus along any military line between Washington and Philadelphia. This order would bring charges of military despotism against the administration, but Mr. Lincoln would not hesitate to extend it ruthlessly, as he felt the public safety should require.

  For nearly four weeks after troops had begun to arrive for the defense of Washington, the only change in its situation was the subsidence of secessionist agitation in Maryland. The most virulent disunionists went off to join the rebel forces at Harper’s Ferry and Richmond. Three weeks after the attack on the Sixth Massachusetts, some thirteen hundred regulars were transported across south Baltimore without disturbance.

  Ben Butler had been chafing for drastic action in Maryland. Shortly before the resumption of the usual train service between Washington and Philadelphia, he conceived a dramatic plan. To forestall an attack from Harper’s Ferry, he had been stationed by General Scott at the Relay House, the junction of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad with the Washington line. Taking the Sixth Massachusetts and a few other troops, Butler made a surprise movement on Baltimore, and planted his artillery on Federal Hill. As he had expected, he met with no opposition, and he was highly pleased with himself for having brought Baltimore into subjection.