Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  SICKLES, DANIEL EDGAR 1825–1914 The former New York congressman covered himself with military honors by his vigorous leadership at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. In spite of the loss of his leg, he remained in the service until 1868. As commander of the district of the Carolinas, he carried out reconstruction so drastically that he was recalled by President Johnson. He was placed on the retired list of the U.S. Army with the rank of major-general. In 1869, Grant appointed Sickles minister to Spain, where his conduct of diplomatic affairs was energetic rather than adroit. He later held various offices in New York, and from 1893 to 1895 again served in Congress. In 1912, he was removed from the chairmanship of the New York State monuments commission on a charge of mishandling funds.

  SPEED, JAMES 1812–1887 A native of Kentucky, he was the brother of Lincoln’s intimate friend, Joshua Speed, and was appointed Attorney General, after Bates’s resignation in 1864. He fell under Stanton’s influence, and after Lincoln’s assassination acted with the radical Republicans. He resigned from Johnson’s Cabinet in 1866.

  SPRAGUE, KATE CHASE 1840–1899 Her social endowments enhanced by the immense fortune of her husband, the senator from Rhode Island, she dazzled Washington society by her splendid entertainments and her beautiful gowns and jewels. Kate’s bond with her father, Chief Justice Chase, remained close, and she campaigned vigorously for his nomination for the Presidency at the Democratic convention of 1868. It had become evident that her marriage was unhappy. Senator Sprague was often drunk, and Kate’s many masculine admirers had started the gossips talking. Prominent among her friends was Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, whose wife did not accompany him to the capital. The year, 1873, saddened for Kate by her father’s death, held other tragedies. The financial panic of 1873 swept away the Sprague fortune at about the time that she gave birth to her fourth child, a little girl who was mentally defective. Kate separated from her husband, but later returned to his home. In 1879, Sprague’s jealous rages caused scandalous newspaper publicity. He attacked Roscoe Conkling with a gun, while the New York senator was a guest in his home. After securing a divorce in 1882, Kate went abroad with her three daughters, leaving her son in the father’s custody. Four years later, a faded and shabby woman, she returned to take up her residence at Edgewood, an estate which her father had purchased outside Washington. Her last years were spent in bitter poverty. She eked out a living by raising chickens and selling milk. Her son committed suicide in 1890.

  STANTON, EDWIN McMASTERS 1814–1869 Remaining at the post of War Secretary at Andrew Johnson’s request, he plotted with the Republican radicals in opposition to the President’s reconstruction policies. His inimical relation with Johnson reached a crisis in the summer of 1867, after the passage of the Tenure of Office Act, which prevented the President from removing a Cabinet officer. As Stanton refused to resign, Johnson suspended him, and appointed Grant Secretary of War ad interim. Stanton had made emphatic objections to the Tenure of Office Act, but resumed his place the following winter, after the Senate had declined to approve his removal. Johnson, nevertheless, dismissed him in February, 1868, appointing Adjutant-General Lorenzo Thomas. Stanton literally held his office by remaining, under guard, at the War Department day and night for several weeks. He resigned after the attempt to impeach the President failed. In broken health, he resumed the practice of law. His friends in December, 1869, succeeded in persuading President Grant to make him a justice of the Supreme Court, but his death occurred a few days after he received the appointment. An unfounded rumor that he had taken his own life was widely believed. It was said by his enemies that his suicide was prompted by remorse over the execution of Mrs. Surratt.

  STEVENS, THADDEUS 1792–1868 A well-known figure in Pennsylvania State politics, Stevens first took his seat in Congress at the age of fifty-seven as a Free-Soil Whig. After serving two terms, he retired to the practice of law in Lancaster, Pa. In 1858, he was returned as a Republican, and from that date until his death was the most brilliant and dominating figure in the House, the tireless proponent of emancipation and subsequently of full political rights for Negroes. Sharply antagonistic to Lincoln’s policies, he gave strong financial support to the administration as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. He was a leading advocate of confiscation of Confederate property, and, as chairman of the House Committee on Reconstruction, he opposed amnesty, and urged that the seceded States should be treated as “conquered provinces.” Bitterly set on Johnson’s removal from office, Stevens reported the impeachment resolution on the day after the President dismissed Stanton from his Cabinet. He was a member of the committee which reported the articles of impeachment, and was chosen as one of the seven managers of the trial. His failing health prevented him from bearing an active part. A dying man, deeply chagrined by Johnson’s acquittal, he lingered on in Congress until the end of the session in late July. His death occurred in Washington two weeks after the adjournment. It was said that his mulatto housekeeper, Lydia Smith, was his mistress.

  STONE, CHARLES POMEROY 1824–1887 Born Greenfield, Mass.; West Point, '45. In January, 1863, Hooker applied for Stone for his chief-of-staff, but the appointment was refused. In May, however, the disgraced brigadier-general was given an appointment under Banks in Louisiana, and suffered the additional misfortune of being associated with the disastrous Red River expedition. In April, 1864, for no given reason, he was mustered out of the volunteer service. He still retained his colonel’s commission in the regular Army, and was later assigned to the Army of the Potomac, but resigned in the autumn of 1864. He accepted an appointment in the Egyptian army in which he served from 1870 to 1883, attaining the grade of lieutenant-general and acting as chief-of-staff. In 1886, he was chief engineer of the construction of the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor.

  SUMNER, CHARLES 1811–1874 A fervent crusader for Negro suffrage, he was one of the strongest opponents of Johnson’s reconstruction plans, and urgently favored the President’s conviction and removal from office. In 1869, he was the leader of the Senate fight against the annexation of Santo Domingo, a project favored by President Grant. Two years later he was deposed from the chairmanship of the Committee on Foreign Relations. Long regarded as an inveterate bachelor, Sumner, at the age of fifty-six, married a young and pretty woman, Mrs. Alice Mason Hooper. The bride was soon observed to be receiving attentions from a young attaché of the Prussian legation. Within a year the marriage ended in a separation, and later in divorce. Sumner died suddenly of a heart attack in Washington after twenty-three consecutive years of service in the Senate.

  SURRATT, JOHN H. 1844–1916 After Lincoln’s assassination, he succeeded in eluding the Federal officers who were sent in search of him. Fleeing across the Canadian border, he was concealed for five months by a Roman Catholic priest. About three months after his mother was hanged, he sailed for England, and made his way to Rome, where he joined the Papal Zouaves under the name of John Watson. In the spring of 1866, he was recognized by a fellow soldier, Henri Ste.-Marie, who had been at school with him in Maryland. Ste.-Marie gave information against Surratt, without producing immediate action on the part of the United States authorities, who had been similarly lethargic in response to a report of Surratt’s identity, communicated by the surgeon of the ship on which he had crossed the Atlantic. By order of the Pope’s chancellor, Surratt was arrested in November, 1866, but broke away from his captors, and, leaping over a thirty-five foot ravine, landed on a ledge, and escaped. At Naples, he persuaded the British consul that he was a Canadian, and obtained permission to go to Egypt. He was arrested by the American consul-general in Alexandria, and sent back to the United States. His trial, held in 1867 in the civil courts of the District of Columbia, resulted in a hung jury, and the question of Surratt’s presence in Washington at the time of Lincoln’s assassination remains a matter of dispute. He was kept in prison until June, 1868, and three months later the charge against him was nolle-prossed. He settled in Maryland, where he took a humble clerksh
ip, and passed the rest of his life quietly and without adventure. He planned a course of lectures on the Booth conspiracy, but his first address, given at Rockville, Maryland, in 1870, did not prove a success, and he abandoned the project.

  THOMPSON, JACOB 1810–1885 In 1864, Buchanan’s Secretary of the Interior was sent to Canada as a secret agent of the Confederacy, and engaged in conspiracies to foment rebellion in the loyal States and free Confederate prisoners of war. He supported plots to burn several Northern cities. Thompson’s name figured after that of Jefferson Davis in the charge that Southern officials were implicated in Lincoln’s assassination, but he escaped arrest and lived in Canada and Europe for a number of years after the war. In 1876, when he was living in Memphis, Tennessee, an attempt was made to sue him for the moneys stolen from the Interior Department during his administration. It was, however, a political move; Thompson had already been exonerated by a congressional committee. At the time of his death, the Georgian, L. Q. C. Lamar, was Secretary of the Interior in Cleveland’s Cabinet, and caused the United States flag to be flown at half mast over the department buildings in Washington.

  TRUMBULL, LYMAN 1813–1896 At first allied with the radicals in their conflict with President Johnson, he was gradually alienated by the severity of the congressional reconstruction program. He opposed the trial of the President, and was one of the seven Republicans who voted against Johnson’s conviction. His conservative stand cost him his leadership in the Republican party.

  VILLARD, HENRY 1835–1900 Born Ferdinand Heinrich Gustav Hilgard, he assumed a new name when he emigrated from Germany after a quarrel with his father in 1853. He soon mastered the English language, and became a newspaper correspondent, reporting the war for the New York Herald, then for the New York Tribune, and finally for an agency which he himself established in Washington. In 1866, he married Fanny, daughter of the abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, and went to Europe as correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Villard’s career as a railway financier and organizer began in 1871. He was active in developing western railroads, and was president of the Northern Pacific and later chairman of the finance committee. In 1881, he purchased the New York Evening Post and the Nation. He was succeeded in the management of these publications by his son, Oswald Garrison Villard (1872–19—).

  WADE, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 1800–1878 Elected to the Senate from Ohio in 1851, he served continuously until 1869. Wade soon made his mark as an anti-slavery leader, participating with much force and belligerence in the debates of the era that preceded secession. He was one of the foremost of the Republican radicals who urged Lincoln to a drastic policy on confiscation, abolition and more vigorous military action. His antipathy to Lincoln’s conservatism was sharpened by the proclamation of amnesty of December, 1863. With the radical Marylander, Henry Winter Davis, he prepared a bill which embodied a severe program of reconstruction, under congressional control, and succeeded in having it passed by both houses. This move Lincoln checkmated by a pocket veto, inspiring in August, 1864, the publication of the Wade-Davis Manifesto which vituperatively assailed the President and denounced “executive usurpation.” At first delighted with Johnson’s accession to the Presidency, Wade reacted violently against his moderate reconstruction program, and became Johnson’s uncompromising enemy. In March, 1867, Wade was elected president protempore of the Senate, and would have become Chief Executive if Johnson had been convicted in the impeachment trial. During the proceedings, Wade began to select his Cabinet. In spite of his personal stake in the trial, he was permitted to cast his vote for conviction. He failed of re-election in 1869, and returned to Ohio.

  WALWORTH, MANSFIELD TRACY 1830–1873 After his release from the Old Capitol, he returned to his wife and children at Saratoga Springs. His father, Reuben Hyde Walworth, the learned and pious chancellor of New York, died in 1867. Mansfield Walworth had attained some reputation as the author of sensational novels, among them Mission of Death, Lulu and Hotspur. After his adventures in Washington, he published Stormcliff, Warwick, Delaplane, or the Sacrifice of Irene, and in the year of his death Beverly, or the White Mask. He was engaged in preparing the lives of the chancellors of New York, when he was shot by his son. The boy was acquitted on the ground of insanity, and placed in an asylum.

  WASHBURNE, ELIHU BENJAMIN 1816–1887 Entering Congress in 1853, he served for sixteen years in the House. He had long been Lincoln’s friend, and fostered the military advancement of Grant, whom he had known in his home town of Galena, Illinois. Washburne was one of Johnson’s most violent detractors. Grant rewarded his loyalty by making him Secretary of State in his Cabinet, a post which he resigned five days after assuming it, to accept the appointment of minister to France. He remained in Paris through the siege and the Commune, returning to the United States in 1877. Washburne’s friendship with Grant terminated in 1880, when a movement for his nomination for the Presidency at the Republican convention had an adverse effect on Grant’s hopes of a third term.

  WEICHMANN, LOUIS J. 1842–1902 After the conspiracy trial was ended, he went to Philadelphia, where his father was a merchant tailor, and at first took a job as a newspaper reporter. Through Stanton, he secured a position in the Philadelphia customhouse, and was employed there for seventeen years. He was obliged to return to Washington in 1867 to give testimony in the trial of his former intimate friend, John Surratt, whose mother he had been instrumental in sending to the gallows. Weichmann’s appearances in court brought him great notoriety. He received threatening letters, was fearful of bodily harm and at times was under the protection of Government detectives. In middle age he moved to Anderson, Indiana, where he had a brother, a Roman Catholic priest. There, living with his two sisters, he opened a business college. The fears which had haunted him since 1865 did not diminish, and at the age of sixty he died, a nervous, broken old man. On his deathbed, he dictated and signed a statement that the evidence he had given at the conspiracy trial was absolutely true.

  WELLES, GIDEON 1802–1878 At the beginning of Lincoln’s second term, only he and Seward remained from the original Cabinet chosen in 1861. Like Seward, Welles continued as a member of Johnson’s Cabinet throughout his administration. Always moderate and conservative, he detested the radicals’ postwar program, and vigorously defended Johnson’s policies, and supported him during his impeachment trial.

  WHITMAN, WALT 1819–1892 Over two years after the poet came to Washington, he at last secured a clerkship in the Department of the Interior, but in June, 1865, he was dismissed by Secretary Harlan, who was unwilling to give employment to the author of the indecent book, Leaves of Grass. Whitman soon obtained another appointment in the Attorney General’s office. He continued his association with the naturalist, John Burroughs, but his most intimate friend was Peter Doyle, a former Confederate soldier who was a conductor on the Washington horse cars. Whitman’s love letters to Doyle were later published under the title, Calamus. His writings had won recognition, especially in Europe, when in 1873 he had a stroke of paralysis and left Washington to make his home with his brother, George, in Camden, N. J. The death of Whitman’s mother, which occurred shortly after the onset of his illness, was an added shock from which he never completely recovered. His salary was paid by the Attorney General’s office for a year and a half after he was forced to leave his clerkship. The deep admiration for Lincoln, which Whitman expressed in his poems, created the impression that they had been friends, but Whitman never met the President, and knew him only as a passer-by in the Washington streets.

  WILSON, HENRY 1812–1875 Wilson, whose real name was Jeremiah Jones Colbath, was the son of a New Hampshire farm laborer, and was almost entirely self-educated. He settled in Massachusetts, where he supported himself by manufacturing shoes and was known on political platforms as the “Natick cobbler.” He was a Free-Soiler and abolitionist, and soon after taking his seat in the U.S. Senate in 1855 made a speech in favor of the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law and the emancipation of the slaves in the District. He was a pion
eer in the formation of the Republican party, and took a leading part in the debates in the Senate, serving for four years on the Committee on Military Affairs, before he was appointed to the chairmanship in 1861. He had a vigorous and prejudiced mind, had been identified with the Know-Nothing party, an antiforeign political organization, and in 1861 gave vent to anti-Semitic utterances on the Senate floor. Wilson introduced the bill for emancipation in the District, and was chiefly responsible for the preparation of the Enrollment Bill. During the reconstruction period, he advocated granting full political rights to Negroes, but was more conciliatory toward the Southern people than his radical confreres. He was nominated for Vice-President on the ticket with Grant in 1872, and took office the next spring, after eighteen years’ service on the floor of the Senate. He was soon disabled by a paralytic stroke, and remained infirm until his death. Wilson published many addresses and several books, including a three-volume work, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America.

  WOOD, WILLIAM P. 1820–1903 He assisted in the search for John Wilkes Booth, and took issue with Stanton and the Bureau of Military Justice on the question of the guilt of the accused conspirators, especially of Mrs. Surratt. In a series of articles, published in the Washington Sunday Gazette in 1883, Wood affirmed that he had been empowered by Stanton to promise Mrs. Surratt’s brother that she should not be executed. After she had been sentenced to death, he vainly tried to see Johnson on her behalf, and declared that he was informed by Colonel L. C. Baker that Stanton had particularly ordered Wood’s exclusion from audience with the President. Wood’s close association with the War Department terminated in 1865, when he became chief of the secret service division of the Treasury, and engaged in capturing counterfeiters and other malefactors. He contributed to the Stanton legend by describing the late War Secretary on the day before his death, as a man broken and haunted by remorse over Mrs. Surratt’s execution.