Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  Mr. Stanton had had a furious quarrel with Finley over Dr. John Neill, a prominent Philadelphia physician whom the Surgeon General had placed in charge of the military hospitals in that city. The Secretary of War had received a letter attacking Neill, and referred it to Finley, who forwarded it to his friend. Neill instituted a libel suit against his detractor, and Stanton’s vengeance fell summarily on the Surgeon General. Packing Dr. Finley off to Boston, he kept him at a distance until the old gentleman asked to be retired.

  For some time, the Sanitary Commission had been urging the appointment of Dr. William Alexander Hammond, an assistant surgeon who had attracted attention by his successful work in organizing hospitals and sanitary stations. On Finley’s resignation, the President was bombarded with petitions from doctors in favor of Hammond, and in late April, 1862, he was made Surgeon General.

  Hammond was big and dark and powerful. A beard and mustache covered the lower part of his heavy, intelligent face. He had a vibrant, masculine voice. His manner was authoritative. With his strong physique and personality, he seemed to fill every room he entered. It was not hard to believe that he was able to hypnotize.

  He was only thirty-four years old, but he had every qualification for his post. His professional reputation was high; he had had ten years of Army experience; and he had made a special study of modern hospital construction and management. Into the stultified Medical Bureau, he brought vitality and imagination. His work, however, was embarrassed by the antagonism of the senior officers of the staff whom he had superseded. A still more serious obstacle to achievement was the enmity which speedily developed between him and Mr. Stanton. Dr. Hammond had been the choice of the Sanitary Commission, not the War Secretary. His positive nature clashed with Stanton’s, and the resultant controversies blocked many of Hammond’s projects. Though the Secretary hampered the Surgeon General, he did not find it easy to be rid of him. Hammond’s influence was such that he could not be sent off to cool his heels in Boston, and Stanton was obliged to bide his time.

  One of the reforms which Hammond was prevented from making was the creation of an ambulance corps controlled by the medical department of the army. The quartermasters’ authority over the ambulances had worked much hardship on the battlefield. The teamsters were unsuitable attendants for the wounded, and often refused to help them. The army had no trained corps of stretcher-bearers. Early in the war, this duty was performed by the members of the regimental bands, supplemented by shirking soldiers who made the assistance of their fallen comrades an excuse for moving to the rear. The Surgeon General’s plans for remedying these notorious abuses aroused no enthusiasm in Stanton. Hammond pressed the matter before Second Bull Run, but Halleck opposed any reorganization. Washington at that time was abundantly stocked with everything that hospitals needed—medicines, anesthetics, surgical supplies, good beds. The wards were cleared of convalescents, who were sent to Northern cities, each with a comfortable mattress. Thirty miles away, nearly two thousand wounded lay from Saturday until Wednesday on the field, and many died of starvation and neglect. The want of food was partly caused by the enemy’s capture of the first wagon train of provisions which Hammond sent out, and medical stores had also been cut off from the front by rebel raids. The village of Centreville was a scene of horror, most of its houses appropriated for hospitals, some surgeons operating in the streets. There was no chloroform at Centreville, and a shortage of stimulants, tourniquets, splints and dressings.

  Hammond could not control the mischances of war, but he was indignant that he was powerless to transport the wounded to Washington. Surgeons were in despair at the conduct of the drunken and insubordinate teamsters, who stole blankets and commissary stores, and loaded the ambulances with forage, camp kettles and personal baggage. Single trips had been made by hundreds of ambulances, omnibuses and hacks, loaded with “pallid passengers“; but there was no proper organization to return these vehicles to the field to bring in the men who remained. Hammond wrote the War Secretary a letter which burned with protest at the frightful disorder, and again urged the formation of an ambulance corps under the direction of the medical department. His letter was returned with a notation by Halleck, reiterating his disapproval on the ground that the army trains were already too large.

  Nevertheless, an order for just such an ambulance corps as Hammond desired had already been issued in the Army of the Potomac. Immediately after the Seven Days, Dr. Jonathan Letterman had taken up his duties as the new medical director of that army. He was a small, slight, taciturn man, with the earnest face of a student. Although he was charged with the medical department of a great army, his rank was only that of major; for, until very late in the war, surgeons did not rank as high as the heads of the other staff departments. With General McClellan’s backing, this quiet little man rehabilitated the service of the wounded in the Army of the Potomac. His work, barely instituted, was disastrously interrupted during Pope’s campaign. At Antietam, the ambulance corps began to demonstrate its value. The hospitals and dressing stations still remained inefficient, and medical and surgical supplies were deplorably lacking at the front. Surgeon Letterman immediately set to work to reorganize these branches of the medical service. In the following spring and summer, his program proved so effective that it was eventually adopted throughout the armies of the Union. The field medical service of the Russian army in 1870 was modeled on Letterman’s plan, which forms the basis of the systems used by all modern armies.

  At Antietam, the Sanitary Commission first developed its system of relief on the battlefield. The reforms in the army medical department never made civilian assistance superfluous in alleviating the sufferings of the wounded; and to the end of the war the Sanitary Commission continued to labor at the front, as well as in hospitals and camps. Another group, the United States Christian Commission, also went with supplies to Antietam. This organization was an outgrowth of the Y.M.C.A. It had been formed in New York City in the autumn of 1861 at the suggestion of Mr. Vincent Colyer, a pious artist who, as representative of the New York Y.M.C.A., had gone to Washington after First Bull Run to distribute Bibles, tracts and hymnbooks to the soldiers. The aims of the Christian Commission were religious and moral. The society worked in co-operation with army and navy chaplains, to whom Mr. Colyer subscribed himself “Your brother in the Lord.” The Christian delegates held services in the camps, and knelt in prayer beside the dying in the hospitals. In addition to their spiritual ministrations, however, they gave comfort to the body as well; and especially in the latter part of the war, when its relief organization was fully developed and large sums of money were raised by the women of the various religious denominations, the Christian Commission did notable work in supplying the Union forces with food, clothing and hospital stores.

  Before either of these large organizations had found means of reaching the front, they had been anticipated by a solitary little maiden lady—Miss Clara Barton, who had singlehanded succeeded in forcing her way through official red tape and military restrictions. The April evening of 1861, when she had sprung forward at the Washington depot to dress the wounds of the Sixth Massachusetts with handkerchiefs, had marked a turning point in a hitherto obscure and unrewarded life. The next day she had spread a feast before the Massachusetts soldiers in the Senate Chamber. Through her, they received many small necessities—thread, needles, buttons, towels, handkerchiefs and salves. Standing before them all at the Vice-President’s desk, Miss Barton read them the news from home, for somehow, in those days of the capital’s isolation, she had secured a copy of the Worcester Spy, only two days old. The soldiers saw a small, prim, nervous lady of forty, with brown eyes and hair, a prominent nose and a wide mouth. Miss Barton had many temperamental resemblances to Miss Dix. She, too, was timid, high-strung and willful; but, unlike the other spinster from Massachusetts, she had no national reputation and no background of public service. From school teaching, she had gone to the job of Patent Office clerk at a salary of fourteen hundred dollars a yea
r. It was unusual for a female to be employed by the Government, particularly at a wage which equalled that of a man, but Miss Barton was well qualified for the work by her fine, copperplate handwriting. Although she was morbidly sensitive and shy, suffered agonies of self-consciousness and was subject to nervous breakdowns, the soldiers in the Senate Chamber were only the first of many audiences she would address in a long career as an eloquent and dramatic public speaker.

  After First Bull Run, she advertised in the Spy for provisions for the wounded. As quantities of boxes were shipped to her from Massachusetts, she established her own distributing agency; but she was not satisfied with the role of dispensing supplies. In the hospitals and on the wharves, she heard heartbreaking stories of the neglect which had preceded the soldiers’ arrival in Washington. Miss Barton began to badger the Surgeon General’s office for permission to carry her supplies to the front. In some manner, she secured an authorization from Hammond, who asked the Assistant Quartermaster General, Colonel Daniel H. Rucker, to give her every facility for taking supplies to the sick. Her eloquent plea touched Rucker’s heart. He arranged for transportation by boat and train, and helped her with the complicated business of obtaining the various passes necessary to permit her to travel with her stores and a lady companion through the army lines between Washington and Fredericksburg. On a Sunday morning in early August of 1862, Miss Barton, in a plain black print skirt and jacket, climbed over the wheel of an army wagon in full view of the Washington churchgoers; plumped herself down beside the Negro driver, and drove off to take a Government transport for the camps near Aquia Creek. A few days later, she was ministering to the wounded of Banks’s corps on the battlefield of Slaughter Mountain.

  Clara Barton was a shining exception to the useless civilians who went out from the capital to tend the wounded of Second Bull Run. Few timid women have spent such a week end as that she passed near Fairfax Station. The disgruntled male nurses, drunken and otherwise, who reached that point on the Sunday morning after the battle, might have found plenty of opportunity to be of service on a hillside near the little depot. All day, wagonloads of wounded arrived from the battlefield. The men were laid among the trees on the ground, where hay had been scattered to make an immense bed. That night, in the mist and darkness, Miss Barton, with a little band of helpers, prepared to feed the crowd. She had almost no utensils but she had many boxes of preserves; and as jam jars and jelly tumblers were emptied, she filled them again and again with soup or coffee or bread soaked in wine. Monday brought many wounded who had lain three days without food. To insure that none should be loaded on the cars without receiving nourishment, Clara Barton personally fed that day’s arrivals in the wagons, climbing from wheel to brake. By evening, her supplies were almost gone. As the wounded still came in, she stirred the leftovers together; and, in the pouring rain, amid the uproar of the thunder and the artillery at Chantilly, the famished men greedily ate a concoction of hard crackers pounded into crumbs and mixed with wine, whisky, brown sugar and water.

  Informed by this experience, Miss Barton made thorough preparation for the next battle. An army wagon, drawn by a string of frisky mules, was assigned to her by the Quartermaster’s Department. Her own baggage was contained in a handkerchief, but the wagon bulged with stores. She had even had the forethought to bring lanterns, so that the surgeons could see to work at night. In the middle of September, a solitary woman in the wagon train of an advancing army, she journeyed over the hills of Maryland, slicing bread and passing it out to the stragglers along the road. Progress was slow; and, pushing on at night while the drivers of the other wagons slept, this indomitable lady reached the artillery by morning, and followed the cannon to Antietam Creek.

  The work she did on that field caused the Quartermaster’s Department to capitulate to her completely. When the Army of the Potomac advanced in Virginia, Clara Barton accompanied the Ninth Corps with her own train of four heavily laden wagons and an ambulance. She treated her rough teamsters like gentlemen, and they became her devoted servants. This shy little lady had overridden the regulations of the army and the conventions of society. Hardship and danger had cast out all her nervous fears; and, in the giddy elation of service and self-sacrifice, she bumped triumphantly to Warrenton and Fredericksburg.

  In November, as the news of General McClellan’s removal filtered into Washington and began to be believed, there was hot controversy in the streets and the halls of the hotels. One man thought that the change should have taken place long ago—they might now hope to finish the war “some time within the present century.” A bystander retorted that “the war would be ‘finished’ with a vengeance now, à la Pope“; and that McClellan should be kept within call, in case of a Bull Run Number 3. A third man declared that Burnside had caution, as well as energy, and the army would be safe in his hands. A fourth said that Burnside was not to be considered—Hooker was the coming man. Another gave the opinion that Hooker would do well, but he was silenced by an informed gentleman who vowed that Hooker was brave and able, but as vain as a peacock—in fact, he was Pope all over again in his “habit of self-laudation and unprofessional depreciation of his superiors.” A wager was laid that, with Hooker in command, the Confederate army would be in Washington within a month. A man wanted to bet on drastic results—the Confederates in the capital or the Federals in Richmond—for Hooker would either “make a spoon or spoil a horn.” There was a rumor that Frémont was to be drawn from a richly deserved obscurity, and placed in command of the Army of the Potomac. The Star remarked that the capital’s secesh were in high glee over this last report.

  The army, which had been advancing, was now halted stockstill near Warrenton. Hooker had recovered from his wound, and gone to the front; but the capital and the Chase interests soon learned that it was Burnside who was the coming man, after all. Presently, a presage of activity, the sick began to come up from Warrenton on the cars. The army was marching toward the Rappahannock. On November 18, the Star was confident that General Burnside had crossed the river and made his headquarters in Fredericksburg, and would take Richmond in less than ten days. On November 21, that newspaper admitted that the rebels still occupied Fredericksburg; Lee’s army was firmly entrenched on the heights around the city. On the twenty-fifth, the Star conceded that the rebels apparently designed making serious resistance to the Federal army’s crossing the Rappahannock.

  Washington was humming with talk of the fearful conditions in Camp Misery near Alexandria—the huge, filthy catchall for the odds and ends of the army. With the onset of cold weather, the mortality had become a scandal, and the Sanitary Commission went to the rescue with hospital tents and woolen shirts. The customary report of Stonewall Jackson’s proximity briefly agitated the more nervous inhabitants; but, for the most part, the shortening days found the capital going briskly about its business. Cargoes of hay, potatoes, lumber, coal and ice cumbered the docks and filled the multiplying storehouses. There was a constant arrival and departure of transports and freight boats, plying between Washington and the army base of supplies at Aquia Creek. The war was developing the settlement on the Island into a busy and prosperous section. Smiling faces appeared at every door and window on South Seventh Street, and boys ran shouting beside the cars, as the directors of the city railway formally opened the new line to the wharves.

  Wadsworth revoked his order closing the drinking places, and the rejoicing citizens proclaimed him “an agreeable and liberal gentleman,” instead of “a horrible ogre.” Gladness returned to the gloomy hotels, and Gautier, Wormley, Hammack and Klotz were jubilant. Ladies bustled to the hospitals with hampers of good things for the soldiers’ Thanksgiving dinners, and the wagons of the express companies were loaded with turkeys and chickens from the North. The wounded had been removed from the Capitol. The interior had been cleaned and renovated. The old central building shone with fresh white paint. Near the statue of Armed Freedom, surrounded with children squabbling over their mud pies, a derrick was erected to raise th
e immense columns into place on the wings. Up the rough wooden steps stamped the returning legislators, with perversity in their hearts.

  The officers of the Army of the Potomac had been peremptorily ordered to rejoin their commands, but the city was still filled with shoulder straps. There were the officers of the large force left for the protection of Washington under the command of General Heintzelman, who had succeeded General Banks in command of the defenses. Staff officers were legion, as were those of the Commissary and Quartermaster’s Departments. There were paroled prisoners and members of courts-martial, convalescents and a multitude of surgeons. Handsome Fitz-John Porter was there, to learn the verdict that would wreck his career. Irvin McDowell had come to hear his name traduced at the court of inquiry which he had demanded. Charles P. Stone, with his prison-bleached face, still went looking for justice.

  On Saturday, December 13, the rumbling rumors from Fredericksburg culminated in the report of a heavy engagement. The story unfolded slowly. At first, the Star again stated that the Federals had crossed the river and occupied the city. On Sunday, there was an extra, which told that there had been a close and desperate battle, in which forces under General Franklin had been opposed by superior numbers of the enemy. The War Department gave out nothing. The Secretary of the Navy heard only a rumor that the Federal troops had done well, and that Burnside and the other generals were in good spirits. The astute old Yankee was not satisfied by these vague reassurances. “When I get nothing clear and explicit at the War Department,” Welles wrote in his diary, “I have my apprehensions. . . . Adverse tidings are suppressed with a deal of fuss and mystery, a shuffling over of papers and maps, and a far-reaching vacant gaze.”