Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  In June, the exasperation against the irresponsible officers was flaming high in Washington. “Of soldiers the country is full,” said the Star. “Give us organizers and commanders. We have men, let us have leaders. We have confusion, let us have order. . . .” There were black sheep in the fine-appearing Eighth New York and the Garibaldi Guard. Late in the month, when the troops received their pay, drunken pandemonium broke out in the capital. Fire Zouaves raced up and down the Avenue, brandishing pistols and exchanging their red caps for the hats they snatched from the heads of the passers-by. Boys from New York and New Jersey went on the rampage, and broke up bars and restaurants. Some volunteers wrecked a bawdy house on the Island, carrying off china and alabaster ornaments. Others, refused admittance to Julia Deane’s brothel in Marble Alley, fired pistols at one of the inmates, Nelly Mathews, who pluckily returned their fire. Nelly, however, was not a good shot, and the ball entered the thigh of a colored woman. The Star tried to excuse the inadequacy of the police on the ground that they were in bad odor with the soldiers. The force was, in any case, too small to control the vast disorder.

  Early in June, a smart cavalry skirmish at Fairfax Court-House had killed and wounded a few men. Washington had seen its first prisoners of war—Virginia boys, who were taken to the Navy Yard. They did not seem to realize their position, observed the Star, but were entirely unconcerned, having a jolly time with cards. The country had grown wildly impatient for news of a decisive battle. Richmond had been made the capital of the Confederate States, and the rebel congress was to meet there on July 20. Horace Greeley’s influential newspaper, the New York Tribune, had sent the cry of “On to Richmond” ringing through the North. Confederate forces were concentrated at Manassas, less than thirty miles west of Alexandria, on a line due north from the new Confederate capital. The magnificent Federal army must rout and scatter them, and march in triumph on Richmond, to end the rebellion for good and all.

  Beyond the Alleghenies, Virginia unionists were welcoming troops from Ohio, who had defeated a small rebel force in that district; but from eastern Virginia came only reports of skirmishes mainly disadvantageous to the Federal arms. Toward the middle of June, distressing news had come from Big Bethel, on the road between Hampton and Yorktown. There, under the command of Prince John Magruder, the Confederates had made an entrenched camp, with a masked battery. An expedition had set out from Fort Monroe to capture it. From the start it was badly managed. The attack was blundering and irresolute, and presently, with some losses, the Federal forces retreated.

  Near the close of the engagement, so near the battery that the Confederates could distinguish his slender, gallant figure, a Union officer tried to rally the wavering lines. In the hand that was formed for a pen, he held a sword. Theodore Winthrop was on his great adventure. He had forgotten, in the exaltation of battle, the critical introspection that paralyzes action. Mounting a log, he raised his sword and called to the men to come on. A Carolina sharpshooter took careful aim, and Theodore Winthrop fell—a meaningless casualty of a day already lost.

  VI. Excursion in Virginia

  AS SOON AS the Washington train pulled out of Baltimore, the traveler began to see the pickets guarding the railroad tracks, and the pale blotches of the camps, growing ever larger and denser as the cars moved south. The waste land around the capital seemed to have flowered in a profuse and gigantic crop of tents, guns, caissons and white-covered wagons. Passing through the Washington depot in late June, a man felt the war like a blast of furnace heat. The embattled North was filled with flags and bands, drilling soldiers and ladies’ sewing circles. In the garrisoned capital, there was a grimmer reality. The main Confederate army, General Beauregard commanding, was entrenched a day’s march from Washington.

  The gentlemen of the Thirty-seventh Congress were assembling for the special session convened by the President’s proclamation. The withdrawal of the delegations of the seceded States had diminished their numbers, placing the ambitious Republican leaders in control of both Houses. Not disaffection, but death had vacated one Democratic senator’s seat. The sudden passing of Stephen A. Douglas early in June had deprived the administration of the support of the powerful little demagogue from Illinois. Among the handful from the border slave States, two senators were outstanding—Andrew Johnson of Tennessee and John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. Tennessee had seceded, but no one doubted Johnson’s staunch adherence to the Government. Kentucky had not seceded, but there was wide distrust of Breckinridge’s patriotic professions. He had not come to Washington to uphold the war measures of the administration. Many doubted whether he had come for any good reason at all. His graceful presence and winning manners seemed oddly out of place in the capital from which his friends had departed.

  New Englanders would head the four powerful Senate committees which shaped wartime legislation. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was chairman of Foreign Relations, and his colleague, Henry Wilson, would preside over Military Affairs. Hale of New Hampshire would rule Naval Affairs, and Fessenden of Maine, Finance. These men and others like them—Wade of Ohio, and Chandler of Michigan—were the radicals of their party, to whom war offered an opportunity to punish the hated South and put an end to slavery. Equally vindictive was the crippled old leader of the House, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, a brilliant and bitter antagonist of the region below the Mason and Dixon line, and of its peculiar institution. Stevens would hold the purse strings of the nation as chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means, which included jurisdiction over appropriations.

  At dawn on Independence Day, the small fusillades in the Washington streets mimicked the rumble of artillery from the entrenchments across the river and the Rhode Island battery north of the city. Major-General Sandford had ordered a parade of the New York regiments which remained on the District side of the river. Over twenty thousand soldiers marched the broiling length of the Avenue that morning. It was the first grand army that Washington had ever seen. The twenty-odd regiments from New York were but a fraction of the man power in the immediate vicinity of Washington, where sixty-four regiments were concentrated, in addition to twelve hundred regulars.

  Holidaymakers filled Lafayette Square and the President’s grounds, and were massed along the Avenue. On a platform, canopied with flags, in front of the White House, the President and the General-in-Chief were stationed with Cabinet members and staff officers to receive the marching salute of the regiments. As the Garibaldi Guard passed by, each man tossed a spray of flowers or evergreens toward the platform, while a bouquet was thrown from the head of each company. A pretty carpet was spread before the dignitaries, and the old General was garlanded with blossoms. The graceful ceremony, with its foreign flavor, evoked the admiration of all but the owners of the ravaged gardens in the neighborhood of the Garibaldians’ encampment.

  For the capital’s residents, Independence Day had always been the occasion for excursions and picnic parties. This year, all the groves and springs had been preempted by the encampments. Columbia Spring, a favorite picnic place at the Virginia end of the Long Bridge, was now Fort Runyon, with horses stabled in the ten-pin alley and a commissary in the dancing pavilion. People were reduced to the far from novel entertainment of listening to the military bands, which blared to the deafening accompaniment of the fireworks. Many gathered to watch the animated scene in Franklin Square, where the men of the Twelfth New York, off duty for the day, were idling in their municipal encampment, and devouring pies and cakes around the sutlers’ booths. Chinese lanterns hung in trees and on poles, and were suspended between the huts. In the warm dusk, Franklin Square glowed with colored lights, and paper balloons, brilliantly illuminated, rose in the dark-blue sky. The band played tirelessly. There were speeches and singing and, finally, a dance. Colonel Daniel Butterfield, a handsome little businessman, with chiseled Greek features and jet-black hair and mustache, had a taste for military life. He had his regiment well in hand, and, although he had given the men freedom for the day, only fourteen w
ere missing at tattoo. The holiday, on the whole, was celebrated in an orderly fashion. The restaurants and bars were cautious in dispensing liquors. There were few casualties, and the provost guard vigilantly cleared the streets of drunken soldiers who exceeded their leave of absence. The explosions and the shouting subsided and the capital settled into a repose invaded only by the odors of its drains and the whine of its myriad mosquitoes.

  To the Republican lawmakers, assembling in the scoured Capitol, the grand army of the New Yorkers had been a dazzling exhibition of numbers, fine physique, drill, unparalleled equipment. Army men might not share their enthusiasm, but there was little sympathy with West Point at the Capitol. From its foundation, the republic had looked with aversion on the standing armies of paid mercenaries which supported the despotic governments of the Old World. The volunteers were the embodiment of an article of the American faith. In the varied uniforms on Pennsylvania Avenue, the politicians had seen marching the tradition of the stockade, Lexington, the prairie wagon.

  The spectacle had acted as a spur to an already restless impatience. Instead of parading and throwing flowers at General Scott and imbibing spirituous liquors, this magnificent army should sweep to Richmond and stamp out the rebellion. The movement must be made without delay, for the time of the three months’ men was running out, and the Union forces would soon be depleted by many thousands.

  “They think,” wrote Mr. Russell, the correspondent of the London Times, “that an army is like a round of canister which can be fired off whenever the match is applied.”

  Russell had returned from a tour of the South to the turbulence of a city almost incredibly altered since his departure in April. Looking about Washington with his prominent, light-blue eyes, he observed much military activity and not a little disorder. Next door to the lodgings he had taken on the Avenue was a wine and spirits store, noisily frequented by privates and officers. Uniformed men wandered about the streets, begging for money to buy whisky. Russell began to feel doubts about the Federal army. When he had asked certain specialized questions about artillery and cavalry and transport, his doubts grew increasingly serious. He was quickly made aware of the low estimation in which the regular Army officers held “this horde of battalion companies—unofficered, clad in all kinds of different uniform, diversely equipped, perfectly ignorant of the principles of military obedience and concerted action. . . .” General McDowell spoke openly of his difficulties. He had formed an unfavorable impression of volunteer soldiers in Mexico, and said at breakfast at Mr. John Bigelow’s that some of the officers were “more than suspected” of lining their own pockets by selling rations and taking money from the sutlers.

  McDowell was about to advance. The urgency of the country had induced the Government to anticipate the convening of Congress by giving the order. Originally, it had been General Scott’s intention to send a large expedition to Harper’s Ferry, but that point had already been recaptured with surprising ease by the Federals. Scott had ordered the head of the Pennsylvania militia, Major-General Robert Patterson, to threaten Harper’s Ferry with a force from his State, augmented by troops from Washington. In the face of Patterson’s cautious approach, the Confederate commander, General Joseph E. Johnston, late Quartermaster General of the United States, had retreated up the Shenandoah Valley to Winchester. Patterson was one of the antique major-generals of militia whose rank the Union had perforce accepted with the largest State contingents. He was not, however, without military experience, for he had commanded troops in the War of 1812 and in Mexico, and Scott was satisfied that Patterson had the situation in the lower Valley well in hand.

  Viewing the war as a soldier, not as a politician, Scott was still looking toward a grand campaign of encircling the Confederacy in the autumn. An immediate invasion of Virginia would be “a little war by piecemeal,” which would settle nothing conclusively. In vexation at the turbulent clamor of the public and the press, and the interference of President Lincoln and Secretary Cameron in military affairs, he had nevertheless been forced to yield, and he had requested McDowell to prepare a plan for a movement toward Manassas. Late in June, at a military council composed of the President and the Cabinet and a number of Army officers, McDowell had spread his map on the table and demonstrated his project with clearness and precision.

  The Confederate position had been well chosen strategically. It guarded the junction of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad with the branch line running to the Shenandoah Valley, and the forces at Manassas and Winchester could thus be speedily concentrated at either point. An essential condition of McDowell’s plan was that this combination should be prevented, and General Scott gave assurances that Patterson would detain Johnston in the Valley, and sent him sufficient reinforcements to enable him to fight.

  One day in June, a thin, redheaded soldier had turned up in Washington to get his colonel’s commission. William T. Sherman had not been easy in his job with a St. Louis street railway company. Even his best friends had begun to wonder about his loyalty, and he had written the Secretary of War that he was ready to serve his country, if he could be given a command for three years. He had been appointed colonel of one of the new regiments of regulars, and, while it was being recruited, he was ordered on inspection duty with General Scott. At the end of the month, when McDowell received permission to put his regiments into brigades, Sherman was placed in command of one of them.

  The inexperienced officers of the regular Army were Napoleons in comparison with the politicians who were being given high rank. One of McDowell’s brigadiers was Robert C. Schenck of Ohio, prepared for military life by a career as congressman, minister to Brazil and Republican campaigner. Another Republican, Nathaniel P. Banks, former Speaker of the House and governor of Massachusetts, was made a major-general of volunteers. The party’s first Presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, was commissioned major-general in the regular Army and placed in command of the important Department of the West. The Democrat, John A. Dix, lately a member of Buchanan’s Cabinet, was rewarded by the rank of major-general of volunteers for his active co-operation in raising New York regiments.

  General Scott, overburdened by his duties and suffering severely from his gout, had failed in the last few months. At his headquarters, he lay on a lounge drawn into the center of the room, and pointed with a long reed to the military maps on the wall. After dinner, under the tropical blaze of a six-burner gas chandelier, he dozed in his chair in his shirt sleeves, with a servant at his back, brushing off the flies. Two aides supported him as he hobbled to and from his carriage, but the secretary, Keyes, was no longer on his staff. Eager for an active part in the war, Keyes had incurred Scott’s displeasure by working on the plan for the relief of Fort Pickens. McDowell, who badly needed officers, placed him at the head of a brigade.

  Scott’s manifest infirmity did not disturb the popular faith in his leadership. There was a rumor that he had gone up in Professor Lowe’s balloon, and discovered Jeff Davis, Lee and Beauregard breakfasting together, with eighty thousand men encamped around them. Many believed that he would command the army in person. It was said that a light carriage was kept always ready for a swift journey to Virginia. Scott himself gave Colonel Sherman the impression that he intended to take the field when he had organized a grand army, of which the regulars would constitute the “iron column.” Meanwhile, he had grown reconciled to the idea of the piecemeal war in Virginia, and was confident that the movement would succeed.

  At his headquarters at Lee’s abandoned mansion, McDowell was troubled by deep misgivings. Since assuming the command in Virginia, he had met with a hundred obstacles. He was expected to weld a mass of raw regiments, belatedly straggling across the Long Bridge, into an army. Many of them were not sufficiently organized to obtain their own rations. At night, every wind that stirred the trees was taken for an advance of the enemy, and the nervous pickets aroused the camps with false alarms of attack. The Federals showed no respect for the rights of Virginia civilians, arrested them
and broke into their houses; and in some regiments there was a wanton tendency to loot and plunder. Near the Aqueduct, there were farmhouses that had been completely sacked. McDowell had begged Mr. Cameron and Mr. Chase not to force him to organize and discipline and march and fight all at the same time. He felt that it was too much for any person to do. In the Mexican War, he had been acting adjutant general of Wool’s column. Now he was going to command an aggressive movement of thirty thousand men. McDowell had seen large bodies of soldiers abroad, in reviews and marches, but he had never handled them himself—no officer in the Army had. He wanted time. “You are green,” he was told, “it is true; but they are green, also; you are all green alike.”

  McDowell’s thirteen brigades were organized into five divisions, one of which was designed to guard the roads in the rear of the army. The four divisions which would take the field were headed by Colonel Samuel Heintzelman, Colonel David Hunter, Colonel Dixon S. Miles, who had been called from duty in Kansas, and Colonel Daniel Tyler of the First Connecticut, an elderly West Point graduate who had resigned from the Army in 1834 with the rank of first lieutenant.

  When McDowell had one body of eight regiments reviewed together General Scott censured him, as if he “was trying to make some show.” Some of his troops had not yet crossed the river. The Garibaldi Guard marched over, carrying their rations of bread on their bayonets in the French style. Out went the Third Maine, singing “I wish I was in Dixie.” Some regiments were eager to see action, but others were thinking of going home, and rejoiced that their time was nearly up, and that they had protected Washington “without a fight.” There were cases of dissatisfaction because of the disparity between the time when regiments had enrolled and the date of their muster-in at the capital. The New York Sixty-ninth, part of Colonel Sherman’s brigade, had been one of the first to enlist, but before reaching Washington it had been detained on guard duty in Maryland. Colonel Corcoran and the other officers wanted to engage in the coming battle, but the men grumbled over the decision that their enlistment period had not expired.