This gala occasion was marred by an unfortunate incident. As the torchbearers marched past Parker’s Hall, the Democratic banner above the Avenue somehow caught fire, and the names of McClellan and Pendleton were consumed before the infuriated Democrats could pull it in. In consternation, the local Republicans met to express regret for this occurrence, and to arrange to pay for a new flag. Their generosity did not silence the charges of vandalism made by their opponents. Democrats loudly jeered at Republicans, not only as “dirty niggers,” but as “damned flag-burners.” Lincoln-and-Johnson men responded to the challenge. A Democratic street meeting was broken up by the racket of the fist fights, and McClellan’s supporters were showered with bricks and stones. Large details of police were on hand at all political demonstrations after the torchlight procession. They succeeded in keeping order when the new McClellan flag was raised above the Avenue, though the Democrats flaunted a transparency inscribed “Burnt by negro abolition traitors.” Lincoln, who commented sadly on the rancorous character of the campaign, must have seen plentiful evidence of its bitterness in Washington.
The power of the War Department had been turned into the service of the President’s re-election. Officers looked in vain for promotion, if it came to Stanton’s ears that they were admirers of McClellan. Republican soldiers were furloughed by thousands, to return to doubtful districts. On the War Secretary’s order, three Democratic commissioners from New York, headed by a prominent citizen, Colonel Samuel North, were cast into Carroll Prison and held incommunicado. The commission had been appointed by Governor Horatio Seymour, an outstanding critic of the administration, to aid the Democratic soldiers around Washington in casting their votes. Stanton treated the New Yorkers as prisoners of state, aired charges of fraud against them, but made none to the unfortunate gentlemen themselves. Emissaries, sent by Seymour to investigate, denounced the War Department’s methods. There was difficulty in finding military officers who dared to administer the oath to soldiers who wished to vote the Democratic ticket. Democratic ballots were seized and prevented from reaching New York in time to be counted. North and his associates, after a long and disagreeable confinement, were found not guilty by one of Stanton’s military commissions.
A week before Election Day, the exodus from the armies began. The Washington depot milled with Republican soldiers, pushing their way aboard the northbound trains. They rushed the gate and fought for standing room in the aisles and on the platforms of the cars. It was observed that no important action could be expected before Petersburg, because of the depletion of Grant’s army. Government clerks and other employees were so freely granted leaves that the business of the departments was crippled. The last of them went on Monday night, and Tuesday found Washington, in a sudden lull, waiting for evening to bring the telegrams to the War Department.
The dull November rain beat down on the White House grounds. Mr. Lincoln, in the restlessness of suspense, seemed unable to settle down to work. On Tad’s insistence, he stood at a south window, to watch his guard of Bucktails lining up in the wet to cast a unanimous vote for him. Most of the afternoon he spent chatting with Noah Brooks, who had called at midday. It was seven o’clock when, in company with John Hay and a policeman, he splashed to the side door of the War Department.
Almost before the gaslights gleamed through the fog, men with rolled-up trousers had begun plowing along the muddy streets in search of news. By eight o’clock, there was a furious bobbing of umbrellas around the political clubrooms and the hotels. On the ground that no man could fight under a spread umbrella, the Star gave the weather credit for abating the excesses of Election Night.
Both Parker’s Hall and the Union League rooms were packed with partisans, early on hand to hear the first returns. The storm had delayed the reception of telegrams, and for a time there were only reports of the anticipated Union majorities in the barracks and hospitals. The announcement that Bladensburg had gone overwhelmingly for McClellan was received with cheers by the Democrats, and with howls of derisive laughter by the Republicans. Soon, however, telegrams began to come in from New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore. By ten o’clock, the returns were so favorable to the President that bands of Union party adherents began trooping through the streets, singing “The Battle-Cry of Freedom.” At Parker’s Hall, it was suggested that no confidence should be put in the dispatches, as they came from Republican sources. Someone raised the cry of “fight.” McClellan men went tumbling down the stairs, shouting “Democrats to the rescue!” Spread umbrellas were forgotten, and there was a free-for-all scuffle at the Metropolitan Hotel.
Colonel Eckert, the superintendent of military telegraphs, had provided a little supper at the War Department, and late at night Mr. Lincoln “went awkwardly and hospitably to work shovelling out the fried oysters.” Though the returns were incomplete, his election seemed assured. He acknowledged, without exultation, the congratulations of the company. Still in the rain-swept streets, his supporters called on the boys to rally ’round the flag. In the early morning hours, the President was serenaded by a crowd of Pennsylvanians, jubilant over Republican majorities in their State. He responded with a felicitous little speech. “If I know my heart,” he told them, “my gratitude is free from any taint of personal triumph.”
General Grant sent his congratulations to Lincoln, with the message that the orderly passing of Election Day was a victory worth more to the country than a battle won. In two or three days, it was known that the Republicans had carried every State but Delaware, New Jersey and Kentucky. Clubs, replete with bands and noisy howitzers, went serenading the President and the Cabinet members. The resignation of George B. McClellan as major-general in the United States Army was accepted.
Between the election excitement and Christmas, Washington was in the doldrums which held the whole country. There was uneasiness over the conspiracies of the Confederate agents in Canada, headed by Jacob Thompson, formerly Buchanan’s Secretary of the Interior. During the summer and autumn, they had worked with disloyal secret societies in the North, tried to foment revolt in the West, plotted for the forcible liberation of Southern prisoners of war, and laid plans for incendiary attempts on a number of cities. On the night after Thanksgiving, several New York hotels were set on fire by rebel agents, in an effort to start a general conflagration. Washington, in alarm, increased the guards at Government warehouses and shops, and called out the department volunteers for patrol duty.
The desperate intrigues of the failing Confederacy were, however, overshadowed by military affairs. In late November, the attention of the Union was fixed, not on Petersburg, where Grant still stubbornly hammered, but on Georgia. An unprecedented thing had happened. An army—Sherman’s army of sixty thousand hardy veterans—had cut its communications, and disappeared into the deep South, leaving the opposing Confederate army in its rear. For thirty-two days, the Government received its only news of Sherman from the Southern press. Richmond and Savannah newspapers, with an overtone of panic, carried rumors of a countryside laid waste; but the Union waited in suspense for word of the whereabouts of the army, of its progress and its fate.
December came, with still no definite news. Like a cold blast from the North, Congress assembled. Old Judge Bates, disgruntled with proceedings in the capital, resigned from the Cabinet, and took his precise lawyer’s mind and his old-fashioned Whig principles to the scarcely less turbulent scenes of Missouri. Lord Lyons, in impaired health, sailed for England. His horses, carriages, wines and brandies were sold at auction, the mulatto caterer, Wormley, securing some of the best sherries. Salmon P. Chase, nominated by the President for the office of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, took his seat on the bench with his usual majestic air of rectitude. Washington grumbled over the muddy abyss of F Street, where a new street railway was being constructed. Harvey’s served Rappahannock oysters, the first received since the outbreak of war. Holiday boxes for the soldiers in the field began to pile up on the Sixth Street wharf.
Over all
, like a miasma of anxiety, hung the fears for Sherman’s army. In the silence, rumors spread that it would be starved out, surrounded, forced to surrender. By the middle of the month, the suspense was relieved by news that Sherman had, at long last, reached the sea, and was in communication with the navy at Savannah. Meantime, the Confederate army, which Sherman had left in his rear, had invaded Tennessee. Late at night, Colonel Eckert, on duty at the military telegraph office, received messages that General Thomas had attacked the enemy with success at Nashville. With two telegrams in his hand, Eckert ran downstairs, and jumped into the ambulance which was always kept at the door of the War Department. His shout of good news at the War Secretary’s house on K Street brought hurrahs from Mr. and Mrs. Stanton and the children. Stanton and Eckert drove to the White House, to call the happy tidings to the President, standing tall and ghostly in his nightshirt at the stairhead, with a lighted candle in his hand.
Thomas had won a smashing victory. The Confederate army was routed, and fleeing to the mountains. Headlines proclaimed the close siege of Savannah, as Washington did its Christmas shopping. The only cloud on a joyous holiday season was a new call for three hundred thousand volunteers, the prospect that the pestiferous draft would never come to an end.
On the evening of Sunday, December 25, the President received Sherman’s dispatch, “I beg to present to you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah. . . .” Guns boomed next day in Franklin Square, flags and bunting blossomed in a cold drizzle of rain, and there were patriotic celebrations at all the hospitals. Almost without opposition, Sherman had slashed and burned a track through Georgia. Loyal Washington waded, rejoicing, in the mud, sure at last that the power of the Confederacy was broken.
With high hearts, the New Year’s Eve merrymakers went singing, “When This Cruel War Is Over.” The New Year’s reception at the White House—held on Monday, January 2—was a surging crush of people. Ladies and children were lifted in the arms of their escorts to escape the suffocating pressure of the crowd. One lady reached the door of the Blue Room with her bonnet so smashed and her shawl so torn that she was ashamed to enter. When the ordeal of the handshaking was over, the weary President rallied his forces to welcome a crowd of colored folk who had lingered around the mansion in the hope of being admitted. For a little time, the trampled reception room knew laughter and tears and cries of “God bless Abraham Lincoln!”
A constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, repeatedly urged on Congress by the President, had already passed the Senate, and in January Washington echoed with the debate in the House. Floor and galleries were filled with tense spectators, and Copperheads were sour of face, as the “ayes” rang out in response to the roll call. With cheers and mutual embracings, the Republicans hailed their victory; and the batteries of the Union saluted the end of slavery.
Within the ranks of the Republicans, however, there were signs that complete harmony did not prevail. Criticisms of the arbitrary arrests flared up on the floor of the House, when a resolution was adopted that the Committee on Military Affairs should be directed to inquire into the detention without trial of persons in the Old Capitol and Carroll Prisons. In the preceding session, Congress, after prolonged wrangling, had passed a bill requiring that lists of political prisoners should be furnished to the judges of civil courts within whose jurisdiction they came; and that, if the lists were not promptly furnished, the prisoners should have legal redress. This act of Congress had been ignored by the War Department, and the Washington prisons, in particular, were filled with the languishing victims of Colonel Baker’s summary arrests. The resolution to investigate took unconditional supporters of the administration by surprise, and Thad Stevens was soon on his feet with a motion to reconsider it. He was opposed by a young Republican member of the Military Committee—James A. Garfield of Ohio, who after winning the rank of major-general for gallantry on the lost field of Chickamauga, had taken his seat in the House at the request of the President and Mr. Stanton. Another Republican, Henry Winter Davis, Maryland radical, also broke through party discipline to speak on behalf of civil rights. The House sustained Davis and Garfield, and the inquiry proceeded, resulting in a sweeping clearance of the military prisons, though not in the termination of Stanton’s favorite form of court, the military commission.
On the policy of reconstruction, the Republican party had been sharply divided since the President’s amnesty proclamation of 1863. The radicals were fiercely at odds with Lincoln’s attitude toward the rebellious States which had come under Federal control. In war, as in politics, his watchword was, “We must not sully victory with harshness.” Looking to a future of union and peace, he wanted to see the nation gradually rebuilt during the progress of hostilities. In July of 1864, he had enraged the radicals by pocketing a rigorous reconstruction bill.
Under the President’s direction, provisional State governments had been set up in Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas and Virginia, but they had been excluded by Congress from the electoral count, with Lincoln’s reluctant assent. To Louisiana he had given especial interest and support, and in the debate over the recognition of the new State government the radicals found an opportunity to retaliate for the President’s disposal of their harsh reconstruction bill. The loyal minority of citizens, required by Lincoln’s plan, had adopted a constitution which provided for the abolition of slavery. The radicals, however, were no longer satisfied by emancipation. In a determination to crush and humiliate the South, they were demanding suffrage for Negroes. The measure for the recognition of Louisiana failed in the House; and Sumner, by a threatened filibuster, succeeded in defeating it in the Senate.
This deadlock between the President and Congress foreshadowed the conflict over reconstruction which the end of the war would shortly bring. In January, there had been a smell of peace negotiations in the air. Old Mr. Blair aroused great curiosity by making two trips to Richmond. Then Mr. Seward journeyed to Hampton Roads to confer with commissioners from Jefferson Davis. When the President followed the Secretary of State, the radicals were angrily prepared for the worst. In any negotiations undertaken by these two moderate men, they fearfully foresaw the sacrifice of all the fruits of victory. The alarm, however, blew over. In response to the demands of Congress, Mr. Lincoln gave an account of his doings at Hampton Roads. The stern silence of the House, as his reply was read, gradually yielded to smiles of relief and approbation, and at length to applause. The President had listed, as terms indispensable to peace negotiations, the restoration of the national authority, the disbandment of the rebel forces, and the abolition of slavery. The conference had ended without result.
Though the Confederacy had been merely seeking an armistice and was not yet ready to capitulate, its downfall by force of arms was drawing nearer every week. The thin gray line at Petersburg was weakening. In January, there had been rejoicing over the fall of Fort Fisher, guardian of Wilmington, North Carolina, the last open port of the South. February prolonged the celebration, as Sherman came smashing up through South Carolina. Columbia fell. Charleston was evacuated. Washington’s Birthday found the capital en fête, red, white and blue by day, sparkling with lights by night. The vessels in the river were gay with bunting. People crowded the roof tops to view the pretty scene, while from the hills the guns welcomed the return of Fort Sumter to the Union. That same day, Federal troops entered the city of Wilmington.
Prisoners of war came into Washington in a steady procession. For the most part, they were familiar figures in shabby butternut, but Washington had stared at natty officers from the captured rebel pirate, Florida, sporting gold watch chains and diamond rings, “the proceeds,” sneered the Star, “of their piratical career.” Among the prisoners, too, had been a figure once well known at the Capitol and on the Avenue, Roger A. Pryor, former United States Representative from Virginia. Those were dark days for a man who had fired on Fort Sumter, a man whose home was at Petersburg; but the Star found him little changed. The hotspur of 1861 was a hotspur still, as uniformed i
n defiance as in Confederate gray, his long hair hanging under his stiff-brimmed hat. After some weeks’ imprisonment in Fort Lafayette, he was released in February by the President. The secretary of the Senate, Colonel Forney, cherished a grudge against the Southern leaders, his enemies in ancient quarrels within the Democratic party. Having been induced to put in a good word for Pryor’s release, he was dismayed to find that Mr. Lincoln had saddled him with the Confederate. Pryor had been ordered, pending his exchange, to report to Forney’s lodgings on Capitol Hill, where for over a week the gentleman from Petersburg held court for the Washington chivalry. Lincoln enjoyed the joke; and Thad Stevens daily tantalized the unwilling host with his greeting, “How’s your Democratic friend and brother this morning?”
Gray uniforms, rather than blue, now predominated in the capital. There were increasing numbers of Confederate deserters. Twilight was settling over Richmond. Lee’s losses of starving and disheartened men could be counted by brigades. Two or three times a day, the ragged bands were encountered on their way through the streets. Twelve hundred and thirty-nine of them came to Washington alone in February. In March, twenty-eight hundred and sixty arrived in the capital. Men lost to a losing cause, they flocked around Augur’s headquarters on Lafayette Square, eager to take the oath of allegiance to the Union.
With the imminent victory of the Union, the vindictive spirit of the radicals was a portent of trouble in the second term on which the President would enter in March. At the White House, there were other portents, small changes to which people gave little heed, not comprehending their significance.
The depredations of the sight-seers in the public rooms were aired in the press in the autumn of 1864. Paper had been pulled from the walls, and large pieces of brocade and damask slashed from draperies, sofas and chairs. In the East and Green Rooms, the heavy cords and tassels had been snatched from the draperies. The gilded ornamental shields in the East Room had almost all been stolen; an entire lace curtain was gone, and others hung in rags. Designs of flowers had been clipped out for the purpose, it was supposed, of covering pincushions. The Star said that ladies and gentlemen of high standing had been caught in the act of collecting souvenirs, and that one lady had fainted when discovered.
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