by Larry Tagg
That evening, Baltimore militiamen destroyed all the railroad bridges and cut the telegraph lines from the north. Washington, now ringed by rebellion in Maryland and Virginia, was completely cut off from communication with the rest of the loyal states.
Word of the Baltimore uprising electrified the South. Southerners had predicted a war made short by a quick capture of the national capital, believing that such a coup would give the Confederacy a halo of prestige that would bring immediate recognition by foreign powers. The Richmond Examiner sounded a bugle:
There is one wild shout of fierce resolve to capture Washington City, at all and every human hazard. The filthy cage of unclean birds must and will be purified by fire… . Our people can take it, and Scott the arch-traitor, and Lincoln the Beast, combined, cannot prevent it. The just indignation of an outraged and deeply injured people will teach the Illinois Ape to retrace his journey across the borders of the Free negro States still more rapidly than he came.
The Richmond Whig predicted Jefferson Davis would soon dine in the White House, warning Lincoln he could save himself some trouble if he were “in readiness to dislodge at a moment’s notice!” The New Orleans Picayune prophesied “the removal of Lincoln and his Cabinet, and whatever he can carry away, to the safer neighborhood of Harrisburg or Cincinnati—perhaps to Buffalo or Cleveland.”
A Southern railroad superintendent wrote to inform the Confederate Secretary of War that railroads could carry 5000 to 7000 men daily at the rate of 350 miles per day, and urged instant action: “Lincoln is in a trap… . One dash, and Lincoln is taken, the country saved, and the leader who does it will be immortalized.” Visible Southern sympathy among the residents of Washington, hundreds of whom wore secessionist badges pinned to their lapels even while they worked in the Federal offices, increased the certainty that the capital was in imminent danger of capture. Edwin Stanton wrote to Buchanan, “The impression here is held by many that in less than thirty days Davis will be in possession of Washington.”
It was no secret that Virginia had close to 15,000 active militiamen organized, uniformed, equipped, and drilled. And now militiamen all over Maryland were flocking to Baltimore to reinforce the rebels there. Washington, surrounded on all sides, had no one to defend it. Townspeople had little faith in the new-minted District of Columbia militia, a few hundred locals who agreed to patrol the public buildings on the condition that they be home for supper. William Russell of the London Times, who was in Washington, sketched them as “starved, washed-out creatures, most of them, interpolated with Irish and stumpy Germans.”
And there were no reinforcements. The day of Lincoln’s proclamation had passed without a single soldier from the North arriving. The next day had passed, and another, and still no troops had appeared. On April 17 came the alarm that the rebels had seized the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, a short march up the Potomac. On the heels of that came word that the rebels had taken the United States Navy Yard at Norfolk, Virginia, and that $30 million in guns, ships, and munitions had gone up in flames.
On Thursday, April 18, two swashbuckling types—Cassius Clay of Kentucky and Senator Jim Lane of Kansas—strode into Willard’s Hotel and divided the boarders loyal to the North into two groups, while Southerners stood aside and looked on. Clay was soon drilling his so-called “Clay Battalion” in the ballroom, while Jim Lane marched his new “Frontier Guards” two blocks to the White House and passed out muskets. That evening, under the glow of the chandeliers in the East Room, the men who had been hotel guests a few hours earlier opened ammunition boxes, distributed cartridges, and went to sleep on the velvet carpets clutching their weapons, with Lincoln and his family upstairs.
The Lincolns were instructed that, when the rebels came rushing into the city, they were to run across the lawn to the sturdy Treasury building, which was being fortified by General Scott as a citadel for a last-ditch defense. Every window there was being barricaded, every door fitted with iron bars, every portico filled with sandbags. Its basement was stocked with a supply of water and two thousand barrels of flour in preparation for a siege, and troops occupied the State Department building and the Riggs Bank building on its flanks. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the Capitol was also made ready to repulse an assault. Its doors and windows were boarded up and blocked by stones and casks of cement, and the iron plating intended for the construction of the new dome was hauled onto the porticoes to make breastworks.
On Friday, April 19, the evening of the Sixth Massachusetts Baltimore massacre, Lincoln was shaken by word that stretcher-bearers were meeting their train, and that dozens of soldiers with handkerchiefs pressed to their wounds were being taken to the E Street Infirmary, while the dirty, exhausted remainder bedded down in the Senate chamber of the Capitol. Over the coming hours, as the Baltimore bridges were burned and telegraph lines went dead, Washington citizens realized they were cut off from the North, and the growing anxiety for the safety of the Federal City gave way to terror such as it had not known since the British burned it in 1814.
That weekend, northbound trains were packed, as thousands of hotel guests—most of whom had been office seekers only days before—scurried for safety. They jostled for places with thousands of women and children piling on board to flee the capital. The price of vehicles skyrocketed as families seized every conveyance—carriages, wagons, carts, even wheelbarrows and baby buggies—and loaded them with children and belongings. They pushed and shoved their way in long lines of traffic along the streets pointing out of town to the north. Stanton wrote to Buchanan “no description could convey … the panic that prevailed here for several days after the Baltimore riot … .”
More thousands fled south over the bridges across the Potomac to join the rebellion, including scores of army and navy officers, and hundreds of government clerks and their families. They spread tales of helplessness and panic in the White House that soon reached the ears of gleeful Southern editors. The Richmond Whig on April 20 had “reliable information” that “Old Abe had been beastly intoxicated for the previous thirty-six consecutive hours, and that eighty Border Ruffians, from Kansas, occupied the East Room to guard His Majesty’s slumbers. It is broadly hinted in a Washington paper, that his guard exerts a despotic control over the Presidential inmate—that all his decrees are of its inspiration.” This news was soon followed by another report:
A gentleman arrived here this morning, who, with several others, was arrested while passing through Washington, for being Southerners, and taken into the presence of the august Baboon. He declares that Lincoln was so drunk that he could scarcely maintain his seat in the chair; and it was notorious in Washington that he had been in a state of intoxication for more than thirty-six hours. The man is scared nearly to death and few people in that city are in any better condition.
The Whig story that the cowardly Lincoln was a prisoner of his White House guards took on a life of its own. The New Orleans Delta printed a letter from a Southern woman in Washington that revealed “Old Lincoln sleeps with a hundred men in the east room to protect him from the Southern army. He is expecting them to attack the city every night; he keeps a sentinel walking in front of his bed-room all night, and often gets so frightened that he leaves the White House, and sleeps out, no one knows where. These are facts.” Later, in the Petersburg Express, a story ran that “He has not passed a night in the White House for two weeks, but goes into the barracks to sleep with his armed hirelings all around him. He does not so much as take off his boots, that he may be ready to run on a second’s warning.” One story had it that Lincoln locked himself up in an iron cage out of fear of assassination, and another that he woke up every night screaming “Jeff Davis is after me! Jeff Davis is after me!”
With no mail and no word—not so much as a newspaper—coming from the North, loyal Washingtonians heard the same rumors. “[The panic in Washington] was increased by reports of the trepidation of Lincoln that were circulated through the streets,” Stanton informed Buchanan. The townspeop
le fell prey to their imaginations. “The town is full tonight of feverish rumours about a meditated assault upon this town,” wrote John Hay in his room in the White House. Locals refused to fill desks left empty by the exodus of the Southern clerks out of fear that the coming Confederate regime would take reprisals. There was word that rebel scouts were already at the bridges, and that a rebel mortar battery was on the Arlington Heights. Confederates ships were reported on their way up from Norfolk to bombard the city. Another rumor had it that forty thousand Virginia volunteers armed with bowie knives would attack across the Long Bridge. Mobs were feared to be converging to sack the capital from Richmond, from Baltimore, and from Harper’s Ferry. The Prussian embassy hung a sign in German script over its entrance in hopes that it would be spared by the coming Southern horde. Word passed that secessionists would start fires all over Washington to aid the invasion, and that mines were being laid under the Treasury building, where Scott’s workers were busy preparing for a last stand.
Along with panic came the conviction that the weak hand of the countrified Railsplitter—so unqualified, so new in office, so unequal to the emergency— was to blame. That conviction increased after a visit to the White House on Sunday, April 21, by Mayor Brown and three prominent citizens from Baltimore, where the secessionist mob still held sway. Mayor Brown told Lincoln that Baltimore citizens protested his proclamation calling for 75,000 troops and considered it a declaration of war and a violation of their constitutional rights. Lincoln’s response demonstrated that, six weeks after his inauguration, he was still playing the part of the Untutored Westerner. According to Brown, he leaped up and protested with great feeling, “Mr. Brown, I am not a learned man! I am not a learned man!” telling Brown that his proclamation had been misunderstood, that he had no intention of bringing on war, but that he only wanted to defend the capital. Lincoln concluded the meeting by promising Mayor Brown that, rather than disturb their city, he would march Northern troops around it.
Lincoln’s truckling to the Baltimoreans was magnified in the lens of the national emergency. Now, added to the spectacle of a Commander-in-Chief unable to protect his own capital, here he was capitulating to the Mayor of Baltimore. Anger among the Cabinet was immediate. A few minutes later, in fact, when Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles arrived and heard of Lincoln’s weak show, he “Jumped up, swung his hat under his arm and hastily walked out, telling them that if that was their policy he would have no responsibility in the matter,” according to a friend. Edward Bates burned with shame in his diary:
They think and in fact find it perfectly safe to defy the Government, And why? Because we hurt nobody; we frighten nobody; and do our utmost to offend nobody. They cut off our mails; we furnish theirs gratis. They block our communications, We are careful to preserve theirs—They assail and obstruct our troops in their lawful and honest march to the defense of this Capitol [sic] while we as yet have done nothing to resist or retort the outrage.
They every day are winding their toils around us, while we make no bold effort to cut the cord that is soon to bind us in pitiable impotence. They warm up their friends and allies, by bold daring, and by the prestige of continued success—While we freeze the spirits of our friends every where, by our inaction and the gloomy prestage [sic] of defeat.
Secretary of the Treasury Chase complained that Lincoln had no policy besides “merely the general notion of drifting, the Micawber policy of waiting for something to turn up.” He sent Lincoln a letter scolding that “the disunionists have anticipated us in everything, and that as yet we have accomplished nothing but the destruction of our own property… . What next? Do not, I pray you, let this new success of treason be inaugurated in the presence of American troops. Save us from this new humiliation.”
News of the episode with Mayor Brown reached the North, portraying Lincoln as paralyzed and helpless. The New York Tribune dripped sarcasm, saying, “If good Uncle Abe wants to read the secessionists another essay proving that he never meant them any harm, or Gov. Seward has another oration to deliver to them on the glories and blessing of the Union, let the performances come off by all means, but this will have to be before Jeff. Davis and Wise capture Washington.”
* * *
The city was a desert. Wind blew dust onto shuttered shops and vacated houses. Offices and all theaters and saloons were closed. There was silence in the empty halls of the large hotels. At Willard’s, a thousand guests had dwindled to forty. Lincoln’s secretaries later remembered, “An indescribable gloom … hung over Washington … , paralyzing its traffic and crushing out its life.” Henry Villard said he could count the people on Pennsylvania Avenue on his fingers. “Business was at a standstill,” wrote Frederick Seward. “The railway station was silent, the wharves deserted. Groups of people gathered at street corners exchanging, in low tones, their forebodings of disaster, or their hopes of relief.” Nothing was in motion besides carts loaded with flour barrels, tottering toward the basements of Scott’s forts at the Treasury and the Capitol. Townspeople trickled into the train depot to wait for the soldiers, but none came.
Lincoln himself—stepping over the Frontier Guards in the East Room, hearing the hammers pounding at the Treasury Building across the yard, and seeing the District militia drilling awkwardly under his windows—was in an agony of doubt. Henry Villard recalled the “impatience, gloom, and depression” that settled over the capital in that week, and added: “No one felt it more than the President. I saw him repeatedly, and he fairly groaned at the inexplicable delay in the advent of help from the loyal States.” John Hay overheard Lincoln mutter to himself as he looked out his window, “Why don’t they come? Why don’t they come?” On his desk were warnings, such as the Southern newspaper clipping that offered $100,000 for his “miserable traitorous head,” and this letter:
To Abe Lincon Esqr
Dear Friend I take this method of informing you that you better prepair yourself for an asailing mob that is organizing in Baltimore as far as I can inform myself is about 12000 m. strong they intend to seize the Capitol and yourself and as they say that they will tar & put cotton on your head and ride you and Gen Scot on a rail this secret organization is about 70000 members in Maryland and Virgina and thay can be all brought to gether in five days, the person that rits this was a member and is bound by a strong oath which if they now who I was I wold not be suffer to live but justis to you and my country make me do this.
According to Alexander McClure, Lincoln knew that Beauregard’s Charleston army could be transported to Washington by rail within three or four days, and McClure heard the President say to General Scott, “It does seem to me, General, that if I were Beauregard I would take Washington.”
In the eerie, trancelike mood of the empty capital city, under the immense pressure of expecting momentary capture, Lincoln’s imagination began to play tricks on him. He later told Carl Schurz that, one afternoon alone in his room,
a feeling came over him as if he were utterly deserted and helpless. He thought any moderately strong body of secessionist troops, if there were any in the neighborhood, might come over the ‘long bridge’ across the Potomac, and just take him and the members of the Cabinet—the whole lot of them. Then he suddenly heard a sound like the boom of a cannon. “There they are!” he said to himself. He expected every moment somebody would rush in with the report of an attack. But nobody came, and all remained still.
Then he thought he would look after the thing himself. So he walked out, and walked, and walked, until he got to the Arsenal [two and a half miles to the southeast, a 45-minute walk]. There he found the doors all open, and not a soul to guard them. Anybody might have gone in and helped himself to the arms. There was perfect solitude and stillness all around. Then he walked back to the White House without noticing the slightest sign of disturbance. He met a few persons on the way, some of whom he asked whether they had not heard something like the boom of a cannon. Nobody had heard anything, and so he supposed it must have been a freak of his imag
ination.
April 24, a day wounded soldiers of the Sixth Massachusetts regiment visited him at the White House, was, according to Hay’s diary, “a day of gloom and doubt. Everybody seems filled with a vague distrust and recklessness.” Lincoln told the soldiers, “I don’t believe there is any North. The Seventh Regiment [New York militia, reported approaching] is a myth. Rhode Island [also reported sending a regiment] is not known in our geography any longer. You are the only Northern realities.”
The silent terror and anguished watching and waiting continued for six days. On April 25, spirits were at lowest ebb. Winfield Scott was composing his “General Order No. 4,” which began, “From the known assemblage near this city of numerous hostile bodies of troops it is evident that an attack upon it may be expected at any moment.” Then, at noon, the Sixth Massachusetts men on Capitol Hill were set cheering by the sight of a train approaching from the north, covered with soldiers. Crowds of citizens came running pell-mell to the depot, where the shriek of the locomotive whistle heralded the arrival of the Seventh New York Militia regiment, whose mechanics and tracklayers had repaired a railroad route around Baltimore by way of Annapolis. The wild shouts of the townspeople were heard all the way to the Executive Mansion. In the bright sunlight, the New York militiamen in their spotless gray uniforms climbed off the train and formed ranks. According to Lincoln’s secretaries,
The Seventh marched up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. As they passed up the magnificent street, with their well-formed ranks, their exact military step, their soldierly bearing, their gaily floating flags, and the inspiring music of their splendid regimental band, they seemed to sweep all thought of danger and all taint of treason out of that great national thoroughfare and out of every human heart in the Federal City. The presence of this single regiment seemed to turn the scales of fate. Cheer upon cheer greeted them; windows were thrown up; houses opened; the population came forth upon the streets as for a holiday. It was an epoch in American history. For the first time, the combined spirit and power of liberty entered the nation’s Capital.
