Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  Meantime, Colonel Joseph K. Barnes was the acting head of the Medical Bureau. He was Mr. Stanton’s choice for the place, the man whom he would make Surgeon General, as soon as the formalities of ousting Hammond were over. Stanton was far too upright and patriotic to put a worthless favorite in office. Barnes was a man of ability. In the light of his subsequent record, his incapacity in the spring of 1864 might be explained by the fact that, although he had been in charge of the Medical Bureau for nine months, he had not yet received his appointment.

  The extraordinary hardships of the wounded did not end when they were removed from Fredericksburg. Between the town and the Belle Plain landing lay nearly ten miles of narrow, roughly made road, cluttered with the ceaseless, southbound movement of reinforcements and supplies. For want of sufficient ambulances, springless wagons were used for transportation. Behind the trees, rebel guerrillas carried on desultory attacks on the slow-moving trains. Mules took fright, reared and plunged in wild confusion. Sometimes, wagons overturned, spilling bandaged men on the roadside.

  During the week of heavy rains which interrupted Grant’s offensive, the road to Belle Plain became a strip of bottomless swamp. The wagons went jolting across fields and stumps. Often men were bruised so severely that they died on the way. Around the landing, the clay soil was a mass of soft, pink mud, in which the heavy vehicles sank to the hub, and stuck fast. One of the first tasks assigned to the Christian Commission delegates was to carry fresh bread to Belle Plain. The workers kindled fires and boiled coffee; rolled up their trousers, and waded among the ambulances to feed the famishing men inside. The Sanitary Commission established a refreshment station at the landing, and three others along the route to Fredericksburg.

  With the improved administration of the Washington hospitals and the increasing efficiency of the two relief commissions, Clara Barton had begun to feel that her usefulness was ended. Stanton had refused to give her passes to move at her discretion among the troops. With the news of the casualties in the Wilderness, however, Miss Barton received her passes. From Belle Plain, with its bogged ambulances, she went on to Fredericksburg. She rushed back to Washington, and told Senator Henry Wilson what she had seen. Wilson went to the War Department at ten o’clock in the evening. Clara Barton understood he said that either they would send someone that night to correct the abuses, or the Senate would send someone the next day. Wilson got action. In the small hours, Quartermaster General Meigs and his staff galloped to the Sixth Street wharf. The next morning, there was a reorganization in Fredericksburg. Meigs ordered the houses of the citizens opened to the wounded, and arranged for them to receive food from the supplies in the town. Soon after, the water route to Fredericksburg and the railroad to Aquia Creek were both opened, and the distressful transportation to Belle Plain was at an end.

  Late in May, all judged able to endure the journey had been sent to the Washington hospitals. Those who remained behind were the men with amputations and breast and belly wounds. As Grant advanced south, his base was removed from Belle Plain. Fredericksburg was to be abandoned to the guerrillas, and it became necessary to evacuate all the wounded. It was then that Washington received boatloads that surpassed, in multiplied dreadfulness of suffering, all that had gone before. Crowds gathered at the Sixth Street wharf to meet the steamers. Even the gangways were lined with people. Women wept aloud, as the litters passed. Two by two, bearers went through the streets, carrying men too far gone to be placed in the ambulances. The death rate in the hospitals began a fearful ascent.

  Although the numbers of Grant’s casualties had not been minimized, the Washington press had depreciated the severity of the wounds. Serious cases were said to be unusually few, because little use had been made of artillery in the campaign. There must have been War Department authority behind the repeated statements that a large proportion of the patients in the hospitals would be ready to return to the field within thirty days. The invasion of prostrate men was not, it was emphasized, made up entirely of Federal casualties. There were many wounded prisoners among them. Moreover, there were the usual cases of sickness. Finally, there were always malingerers and deserters. They were well known to mingle with the wounded, especially the first arrivals after a battle. Some went hobbling along, with sound limbs swathed in bandages. Others pleaded sunstroke. Examining officers turned them over to the provost guard to be sent back to their regiments. Washington grew ready to look with suspicious eyes on any soldier who was able to drag himself about, even though he went on crutches, had a broken head, or carried his arm in a sling. Sarcastically, the newspapers declared that wounds were slight indeed, if they permitted a man to lounge about the hotels or promenade on the Avenue.

  Yet all the palliation of the casualties could not persuade a population which, by day and by night, witnessed the passing, not only of agony, but of death. Boxed in rosewood and in pine, officers and men of the Army of the Potomac mutely answered the statement that their wounds were trivial. The coffin-loads from the hospitals traveled a new route. The cemetery at the Soldiers’ Home was full, and at Arlington fresh graves began to blot the green acres which surrounded the mansion of Robert E. Lee. While death rattled across the Long Bridge, every incoming steamer carried its consignment of corpses. Fatalities among officers were heavy. All ranks were represented in the sheeted forms in the bows. Even major-generals fell in Grant’s campaign. For a day, John Sedgwick, late commander of the Sixth Corps, lay in Dr. Holmes’s embalming establishment on the Avenue, to receive the last tribute of respect and curiosity. His body had been brought to Washington the second night after he was killed, and the embalmers were proud of their work. Many soldiers wept, as they stood beside his bier, for Sedgwick had been beloved by his men. A lady, pertinacious in her desire for souvenirs, was with difficulty prevented from clipping two buttons from his uniform.

  James Wadsworth’s hearse moved with ceremony to the depot, accompanied by a military guard and a delegation of New York congressmen; but no man looked again on his handsome face. His body did not reach Washington for almost two weeks after he fell in the Wilderness. It was found and disinterred on the battlefield, where it had been given rude burial by a Virginian who lived in the vicinity. He was a former prisoner in the Old Capitol, to whom Wadsworth had shown kindness when he was military governor.

  Like the living, the dead were usually long delayed in transportation. The weather grew hot. Filled with shipments of corpses, Washington stank like a charnel house. The people, who could not accuse the dead, vented their horror on the embalmers. On every hand, flaunting signs advertised their prosperous business. The mortuaries were situated next door to private houses, restaurants and markets. “It insults the meanest animals,” said the Chronicle, “to have their dead and food in juxtaposition.” Washington cried that the embalmers were purveyors of pestilence, and must be cleared out of town. Dr. Holmes, the proprietor of the leading establishment, was arrested for creating a nuisance on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  It was the murmuring of people whose faith was beginning to be shaken. Faint hints of adversity had trickled through the news. Sigel had been defeated at New Market in the Valley by a smaller force under John C. Breckinridge. The capital had not been alarmed, but enraged at Sigel as “a chronic lagger.” The accounts of Ben Butler’s movements south of the James had lost their first elation. Plenty of people on the Avenue were eager to take bets that Fort Darling, below Richmond, had fallen. Pessimists were denounced as bulls in gold, and secession sympathizers. There were days of uncertainty and depression, as the country waited for Grant’s decisive victory north of Richmond, and heard only of sharp cavalry clashes and heavy skirmishing—costly in casualties, but inconclusive. Yet Grant was still advancing, and hope rang valiantly in loyal hearts, when June came in with a racket of guns ten miles northeast of Richmond. The Union read accounts of a severe battle at Cold Harbor. The optimistically worded bulletin carried no hint of defeat, but there was ill omen in the very neighborhood. Cold Harbor brought back mem
ories of the Peninsula campaign. It was near Mechanicsville and Gaines’s Mill. Grant’s base of supplies was at White House on the Pamunkey. Once more, the reports stated that only the Chickahominy lay between the Army of the Potomac and Richmond. There was a rumor that Grant was retreating to Harrison’s Landing.

  Cold Harbor had been a disaster. It shook the morale of the Army of the Potomac. These were superbly disciplined soldiers, but they were human. There had to be an end to dashing them against Lee’s breastworks. Grant had intended to fight it out on that line, if it took all summer; but the suns of mid-June found his troops sidling down to the south of the James River. When his obstinacy yielded, the Army of the Potomac had lost over fifty thousand men: more than half the force that had crossed the Rapidan in early May; nearly as many effectives as Lee’s whole army had then comprised.

  In the middle of June, the news that the campaign north of Richmond had ended in a stalemate was officially endorsed, and could no longer be labeled an invention of the timid and disloyal. Petersburg occupied the headlines, reported in the old way, a success story in reverse. First, the Federal forces gloriously captured the city. Next, the outworks were taken, with heavy losses. Finally, a gradual approach and regular siege would be necessary before the army took possession of Petersburg.

  It was a moment of sickening anticlimax. The nation, expecting the end of war, was offered the siege of Petersburg. In staunch and sensible editorials, the Washington press strove to mitigate the disappointment. There had been excessive hopefulness, the vice of the American people. Grant would in time get Richmond. “We need,” said the Chronicle, “something more of the old Roman temper that grimly welcomed a triumph, and in the darkest hour never despaired of the Republic.” All signs were plain that the Union, with its vastly superior resources and man power, needed only good heart and patience to defeat the Confederacy. In June of 1864, it had little left of either.

  Shortly before the defeat at Cold Harbor was understood, the National Union Convention had gathered in Baltimore, and renominated Abraham Lincoln for the Presidency. For his running mate, they chose a Democrat and a Southerner, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, who for over two years had been military governor of that reclaimed State. The White House was the center of visiting delegations, there were serenades and congratulatory speeches. A grand ratification meeting was held on the south portico of the Patent Office, just as the tide of the country’s confidence was turning. Decked in evergreens, huge transparencies celebrated Lincoln and Johnson and Grant, and the name of Stephen A. Douglas was resurrected to stimulate the adherence of the War Democrats. In the soft darkness of the June night, the Patent Office blazed like a many-faceted beacon, and the Post-Office glittered brightly across the way. Rockets streamed and burst across a sky hung with the constellations of illuminated balloons. Military music and sonorous oratory stirred the crowd of loyal citizens in F Street. From the fortifications, the guns saluted, not the victories of the Union arms, but the discomfiture of the Republican radicals.

  XVI. Siege in the Suburbs

  THERE HAD BEEN an impatient expectation that Grant might signalize Independence Day by making a successful sortie, but no news came from Petersburg. Instead, Washington heard that Sigel had again been defeated in the Valley, and was retreating to Harper’s Ferry. Sigel appeared to be played out. The War Department began casting around for able major-generals who were not on active service. Stanton spoke of sending for Alex McCook, of the famous Ohio family of “Fighting McCooks.” His brave record as a corps commander in the West had been blurred in the recriminations which followed the Union disaster at Chickamauga, but a court of inquiry had exonerated him. Halleck’s thoughts turned toward Quincy A. Gillmore, a capable young engineer who had succeeded in reducing Fort Sumter, though not in taking Charleston. Lately commanding in the Army of the James, Gillmore had been relieved, with angry accusations, by General Ben Butler.

  The capital’s streets were cluttered with crowds of destitute contrabands, sent back from Virginia by the army. Depression over the military situation was deepened by doubts of the national solvency, stirred by the abrupt announcement that Mr. Chase had resigned from the Cabinet. An explosion in the cartridge department of the Arsenal had killed seventeen District girls, and mutilated many others. Washington, smothered in hot yellow dust, showed scant enthusiasm for the celebration of July 4, 1864. A new school building was dedicated. The Peace Democrats held a meeting. Congress adjourned.

  Only in the White House grounds was a spirit of carnival evident. Washington colored folk had been given permission to hold a grand Sunday-school picnic on the lawn between the mansion and the War Department. Congress had at last provided revenues for their education, and the gate receipts were to be applied to constructing a school. In hacks drawn by brightly caparisoned horses, prosperous Negroes drove through the White House gates. It was a well-dressed crowd, plentifully besprinkled with fair skins and blue eyes. Men sported ivory-headed canes, and women carried gay parasols. With irreproachable decorum, barbers and waiters and house servants promenaded on the walks, clustered around the speakers’ platform to hear the fervid periods of the orators, and enjoyed the motion of the swings which had been suspended from the shade trees. White passers-by paused to stare at the unprecedented scene, some with laughter, some with curses, some with shrugs of resignation to the processes of revolution. One observer was reminded of the palace gardens of Haiti. “The blacks are right,” he noted in his diary. “They and they alone, freed by accident, have lost nothing and gained everything.” Along the curb, outside the grounds, sat a dejected row of figures—contrabands in butternut, aliens and inferiors.

  The next day, the Navy Department hung out its big flag in honor of a victory at sea. The rebel pirate, Alabama, had been sunk off the coast of France by the Yankee steamer, Kearsage. Loyal Washington stirred in the heat to applaud the news, slipped back into the lassitude of July. The legislators, the lobbyists and the hangers-on had all taken their departure. Many families had left for the seashore and the mountains. Quiet rested on the halls of the hotels and the sunscorched pavements. There were empty seats in the streetcars. Hack drivers nodded on their boxes.

  Rumors of a rebel raid penetrated the city’s siesta like a disturbing dream. It had already occurred to a number of people that General Lee might make a movement to the north, with the view of loosening Grant’s hold on Petersburg. The Army of the Potomac, south of the James River, no longer shielded Washington. Moreover, the Shenandoah Valley, the broad route to the back door of the capital, now lay open wide to the invader.

  Sigel, operating with a small force in the lower Valley had since May held only a subordinate command in the Department of West Virginia. After his defeat at New Market, he had been superseded by General David Hunter. With the main body of the troops in the department, Hunter had made a vigorous campaign to the south, investing Lynchburg in mid-June. To drive him away, Lee had dispatched the Second Corps of his army—Stonewall Jackson’s former command—under a stout, round-shouldered old war horse, General Jubal Early. Hunter had been forced out of the Valley, and obliged to retreat by a westerly route that carried him all the way across West Virginia to the Ohio River. Soon after the withdrawal of his army from the Shenandoah, alarms had begun to rumble beyond the Blue Ridge. Out of a cloud of contradictory reports, the facts emerged that Confederate troops were advancing down the Valley, and that Sigel’s force—the only Federals in their path, save for a small number at Harper’s Ferry—had been routed.

  There was panic in the fertile Cumberland Valley. Excited refugees from the western counties of Maryland poured into Baltimore with frightening stories. Washington, however, remained calm. Invasion had become an old story to the capital. Every summer of the war, the Confederates had approached the city in force. Mosby’s rangers and other marauding detachments of rebel cavalry had sounded a hundred alarms. Habit had dulled the edge of apprehension. The Star contemptuously referred to the first rumor of an attack on Hagersto
wn, Maryland, as “a scary Harrisburg report.” The Confederate force was variously estimated at from five thousand to forty thousand. Washington, used to war and its alarms, inclined to a conservative view. Even when it was definitely established that the enemy had crossed the upper Potomac, most people in the capital believed that this was merely an incursion of swooping roughriders, who would vanish as suddenly as they had appeared.

  As early as July 2, the telegraph at the War Department had begun to sound signals of distress from worried generals and railroad officials in the Valley. There were warnings of torn-up tracks, burned bridges and severed telegraph wires. The War Office could not dismiss the enemy’s advance as a mere cavalry raid. It was informed that the Confederates were moving in force, with artillery. Halleck complained that he could get no reliable estimate of the numbers of the invaders. In the first days of July, he was repeatedly advised that the enemy had between twenty and thirty thousand men. The lower figure was approximately correct.

  On July 4, Washington was cut off from telegraphic communication with Harper’s Ferry. From the railroad company, the War Office learned that the Ferry had been evacuated by the Federals stationed there. Together with Sigel’s force, they had shut themselves up in entrenchments on Maryland Heights across the river. Halleck hustled off a scrambled collection of Ohio militia, dismounted cavalry and light artillery, armed as infantry, under command of General Albion P. Howe, who was in charge of the artillery depot in Washington. Though the railroad was interrupted, Howe managed to get through to Maryland Heights. He replaced Sigel, now finally relieved of command, at Harper’s Ferry, which was reoccupied by the Federals, after the enemy had crossed into Maryland. The break in the telegraph also inspired a scouting expedition. A detachment of the Eighth Illinois cavalry, a veteran regiment which was on patrol duty in Washington, was sent up the Potomac to Point of Rocks. Moving two bodies of troops away from Washington exhausted General Halleck’s capacity for action. In a crisis which called for decision, he appeared to be “in a perfect maze.” For once, Mr. Stanton, too, showed no initiative. As a rule, the threat of danger sent him into a furor of nervous energy; but on this occasion, subdued and casual, he was inclined to pooh-pooh all alarming reports. Like a secret cult, the War Office was wrapped in impenetrable mystery. It had no information to give to anyone about the invasion, and seemed to find the subject faintly distasteful.