Such was the commanding general of the Army of the United States in December of 1860, but not so did his compatriots see him. His eye had lost its fire and he could no longer sit a horse, but in huge epaulettes and yellow sash he was still his country’s hero. Europe might celebrate the genius of Napoleon; the New World had its Winfield Scott. For nearly half a century the republic had taken pride in his achievements as soldier and pacificator; and, if he now lived in a glorious military past, so did his fellow-countrymen. He was the very figure to satisfy a peaceful people, fond of bragging of its bygone belligerence. The General was as magnificent as a monument, and no one was troubled by the circumstance that he was nearly as useless.
Smugly aloof from the dissensions of Europe, the young nation scorned the large standing armies of the Old World. It was wary of the political danger of a large military class; and, regarding high rank as perilous to democratic liberties, looked uneasily on West Point as a breeding ground for aristocrats. Save for George Washington, Winfield Scott alone had held the rank of lieutenant-general, and in his case Congress had conferred it only by brevet. To guard its far-flung borders and fight its Indian wars, the United States maintained an army of sixteen thousand soldiers, scattered for the most part over the Pacific coast, Utah and the Southwest.
This small establishment offered a limited opportunity for military preferment, and in the twenty years of Scott’s command he had shown a marked partiality for advancing Southern officers. To favor gentlemen from the slave States, with their martial spirit and their “habit of command,” had been as natural to the old Virginian as a daily perusal of the Richmond Enquirer. Of the six Army departments, only the Department of the East was commanded by a Northerner, General John E. Wool. The five Western departments, in which the mass of the Army was stationed, were all headed by officers of Southern birth. Scott found the “Southern rascals” not only meritorious, but congenial. The only Northern aide on his staff was his military secretary, Lieutenant-Colonel E. D. Keyes, and the appointment had first been offered to a Virginian, Colonel Robert E. Lee. Since the nation’s political destinies had long been controlled by the statesmen of the slave States, there had been no interference with the General’s predilections. For twelve years, the War Department patronage had been in Southern hands. A Southern clique ruled the Army, and many ambitious Northerners who had shown promise at West Point—Halleck, McClellan, Hooker, Burnside, Sherman, Rosecrans—had felt sufficiently discouraged to resign their commissions and return to civil life.
In spite of his sentiment for the South, General Scott was no believer in State sovereignty; he was strongly attached to the Union. In the Presidential election of 1852, he had been the last standard-bearer of the dying Whig party, overwhelmingly defeated by the Democratic candidate, Franklin Pierce, a New Englander of Southern sympathies. Scott had spent much time in the North, and, when Pierce took office, he moved his headquarters from Washington to New York. There, growing old and feeble, he had remained, while North and South, with increasing bitterness, disputed the question of the extension of slavery to the territories, and abolitionists vied with fire-eaters in a chorus of recrimination and hatred. In 1856, the anti-slavery Republican party entered the national lists, captained by the gallant adventurer, Frémont. Again a Democrat, James Buchanan, was elected President; but the North’s growing antipathy to slavery was written in the large Republican vote. The canvass of 1860 revealed a disastrous sectional division. The Democratic party split into two factions, each of which nominated a candidate, and the success of the Republicans in November appeared to be assured. After the October elections, the cotton States began to agitate for disunion. South Carolina threatened immediate secession, if the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, should be elected. In late October, General Scott wrote the President a letter containing his views. He advised Buchanan that the Southern forts should be strongly garrisoned to prevent a surprise attack. It was the advice that the General had given President Jackson during the nullification troubles in South Carolina, when Scott himself had gone to Charleston and executed his mission with firmness and diplomacy.
Scott was no longer the man he had been in 1832. His letter maundered off into arguments for peaceable disunion, and he presented the suggestion that the nation might solve its problems, not simply by splitting in half, but by dividing into four confederacies. A week after he had sent his letter, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States. Four days later, South Carolina called a convention with the view of seceding from the Union. There were wild political demonstrations in the cotton States; and, as Southern trade with the North fell off and markets fell and banks called in their loans, the free States, forgetful of their recent enthusiasm for the limitation of slavery, grew despondent. Northern merchants and manufacturers, chilled by the prospect of bankruptcy, were eager to make concessions. Some people thought that the only course was to permit the separation of the sections; but the great majority still refused to take the threats of disunion seriously. At every election for the past twenty years, the Southerners had been gasconading about secession. Few Northerners had any comprehension of the crisis, and almost none faced the possibility that it might end in civil war.
In December, the General was boosted into a railway car, and started on his journey to Washington. It was a hardship for him to travel, he had been ill in bed; but the President had sent for him, and like a good soldier he was ready to do his duty. The dirty, rattling cars wound slowly down through Maryland, and, leaning on the arm of his military secretary, the General entered the nation’s capital, a town of sedition and dismay.
The North might worry over tumbling markets; in Washington there was revolution, and men feared for democratic government. A very young man of the Adams family, who was attempting that winter what he called an education in treason, observed “the singular spectacle of a government trying to destroy itself.” The conspiracy for disunion was not confined to the States, but permeated the highest councils of the nation. It was unique among revolutions only in its impunity. Southern senators and representatives made no secret of their disloyalty to the Union. Three members of the President’s Cabinet had been deeply implicated: Howell Cobb of Georgia, Secretary of the Treasury; John B. Floyd of Virginia, Secretary of War; and Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, Secretary of the Interior. Clerks in the Government departments sported secession cockades on their coats, and loudly over their whisky at Willard’s bar vowed that Lincoln should never be inaugurated.
Uneasily in the Presidential chair sat James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, like a nervous gentleman on a runaway horse, longing for the ride to be over. A commonplace politician of nearly seventy, he was conscientious, evasive and irresolute. He was a staunch Democrat; Southerners were his friends and closest political associates. He had belatedly become aware that his allegiance might carry him into presiding over the disruption of his country. General Scott’s repeated advice to strengthen the Southern forts had no more effect on him than on his secessionist War Secretary, Mr. Floyd. Mr. Buchanan was not oblivious of the problem of the forts. In conference with his divided Cabinet, he was considering little else than the question of the policy to be pursued in Charleston harbor. Major Robert Anderson, stationed with a small garrison at Fort Moultrie, was appealing to the Government to take a stand; if it was intended to hold the forts, Anderson begged for reinforcements. Dreading a collision, the President felt obliged to follow a policy so noncommittal that it produced the impression of being no policy at all. However dull ears might be at the North, Mr. Buchanan had heard the roar of the deluge, and to the induction into office of his successor, Mr. Lincoln, he was looking forward with the keenest anticipation.
Washington was in a turmoil. Its very existence as the Federal City seemed threatened. Geographically the situation of the District of Columbia was precarious. If the slave States of Virginia and Maryland were both to secede, they would carry Washington with them. Sympathy with secession was strong in a large group of the
city’s residents, and it was feared that they would participate in any seditious enterprise. Men in public life found their mail heavy with threats and warnings, and General Scott’s ears were soon ringing with stories of conspiracy.
The General had made the journey to Washington for a consultation with the President. It was evident that he would be obliged to remain. Scott was no Republican, but, baffled by Mr. Buchanan, and cold-shouldered by Mr. Floyd, he wished to God that Mr. Lincoln were in office. For Army headquarters, space was presently found in Winder’s Building in Seventeenth Street, opposite the small brick structure of the War Department, and the General-in-Chief took up his duties at the divided and jeopardized seat of Federal Government.
It was as a symbol that the capital was valued; it had no other importance. Built to order at the dawn of the century, it gave after sixty years the impression of having been just begun. “As in 1800 and 1850, so in 1860,” wrote Henry Adams, “the same rude colony was camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads.” European travelers, doing their tour of the United States, looked superciliously on Washington. They were accustomed to capitals which were the rooted centers of the cultural and commercial life of their nations. Washington was merely a place for the Government. It was an idea set in a wilderness.
All too typical of the young republic, the town was pretentious and unfulfilled. It had been ambitiously laid out over an area extending from the Potomac and the Eastern Branch or Anacostia River as far as Rock Creek on the west and Boundary Street—later to be known as Florida Avenue—on the north. Vast sums, by the standards of the day, had been spent on the public buildings, but they were widely spaced, unrelated and, for the most part, incomplete. In sixty years, men may construct a compact city; not Rome. The very grandioseness of the capital’s conception called forth ridicule, and the often-quoted tribute, “a city of magnificent distances,” had become a favorite jibe.
The vaunted buildings of Washington were the Capitol, the General Post-Office, the Patent Office, the Treasury, the Executive Mansion and the Smithsonian Institution; and, despite the distances, the tour could be made in a forenoon. First in importance was the classic Capitol, with its historical paintings and statuary and its Library of Congress; above all, with its great marble Extension, progressing toward completion after nearly ten years of work. In the two new wings, only recently occupied by the legislators, visitors now might gaze on the splendid Senate Chamber and the ornate red and gold Hall of Representatives. There was no doubt that the interior decorations were gorgeous, though Americans thought them gaudy and foreign: but on the outside imagination was needed to envision an imposing architectural effect. The original dome had been removed, and only the base of the new cast-iron dome, topped by scaffolding and a towering crane, surmounted the old sandstone building in the center. At either end, the glittering marble wings stretched bare and unfinished, devoid even of steps. Of the hundred Corinthian columns needed for the completion of the porticoes, only three had been crowned by their capitals and set in place. Columns and capitals, blocks of marble, keystones, carvings, lumber and iron plates lay strewn about the grounds, which were further defaced by workmen’s sheds and depots for coal and wood. Visitors lingered on the east portico to admire the colossal statues, especially Persico’s Columbus, with his ball; and all paused to stare at the Greenough statue of Washington which sat, godlike amid the litter, in the eastern park. Modeled on the Roman conception of Jupiter Tonans, the figure of the Father of his Country was naked to the waist, with his limbs swathed in draperies; and even Philp’s guidebook was constrained to remark that Washington was “scarcely recognizable, in this garb, to his countrymen.”
Diagonally across from each other, at Seventh and F Streets, were the marble palaces of the Post-Office and the Patent Office. The latter, which was not quite finished, contained a display of models and curiosities, and provided space for the entire business of the Department of the Interior. On Fifteenth Street, the Treasury Department occupied an immense edifice, the Extension of which was still under construction. Next door, on the future site of the north end of the Treasury, was the little brick State Department. It attracted no more attention than did the Army and Navy Departments, which were installed in similar old-fashioned houses on the western side of the Executive Mansion, whose wooded lawn extended, without intervening streets, to the four department buildings.
By travelers from overseas, the mansion itself was dismissed as an ordinary country house, wanting in either taste or splendor; but it was an object of deep interest to Americans, who roved through the spacious public rooms, admiring the large mirrors, the flowered carpets and the sparkling chandeliers. At either end, the mansion straggled out into low sheds, which were used for household purposes, and the extension on the west was surmounted by a conservatory which communicated with the first floor. With its outbuildings, greenhouses, fruit trees, and flower and kitchen gardens, the place had an appearance of prosperous untidiness, like that of a Southern plantation house. In front of the mansion, there was an iron fence with large gateways, and another fence enclosed the grounds on the south; but the lawns were traversed by interior paths between the departments, and that which crossed the north side of the house was freely used by the public. In the circle before the north portico stood a statue of Thomas Jefferson in bronze, a material which was thought to have imparted a negroid appearance to the statesman’s features. On the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue, the bronze equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson embellished Lafayette Square. It was the work of Clark Mills, a talented young plasterer from South Carolina. There had been many criticisms of the prancing horse, with its lifted forefeet. Charles Sumner, the cultured senator from Massachusetts, found the Jackson statue grotesque, and was humiliated at having to conduct British visitors past it.
The great disadvantage of the President’s House was its unhealthy situation near the Potomac flats, which were held responsible for the prevalence of malaria in Washington during the summer and autumn months. At the foot of the President’s Park, as the unkempt tract south of the mansion was called, there was an unsavory marsh which had formerly been an outlet for sewage. This bordered on the opening of the town’s great nuisance, the old city canal, formerly an inland waterway between the Potomac and the Eastern Branch, but now fallen into disuse, save as a receptacle for sewage and offal. To reach the Mall and the southwest section of Washington, it was necessary to cross this unsightly and odorous channel, which was spanned at intervals by high iron bridges.
In the half-developed park of the Mall arose the red, fantastic towers of the Smithsonian Institution, surrounded by prettily planted grounds which, like those of the Capitol and the White House, had been planned by the famous horticulturist, Andrew J. Downing. Its large library and museum of natural history were considered well worth visiting. West of Fifteenth Street and directly south of the Executive Mansion, though separated from it by the wide mouth of the canal, stood a truncated shaft, intended to commemorate the Father of his Country. Here sentimental patriots might wander among the stone carvings which lay piled on the ground, and meditate on the ingratitude which had suffered the subscriptions to lapse. Another memorial of Washington, a rigid equestrian statue by Clark Mills, was solitarily situated in Washington Circle, at the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and Twenty-third Street.
These were the sights of the Federal Metropolis—six scattered buildings, a few dubious statues and one-third of an obelisk—and, barring an inspection of the Government greenhouses, or a drive to the Navy Yard, the Arsenal or the Observatory, there was nothing more to be seen within the city limits.
Northwest from Capitol Hill ran the city’s main thoroughfare, Pennsylvania Avenue—“the” Avenue. It had been conceived as a broad and imposing boulevard, along which the Capitol should confront the Executive Mansion, but the great bulk of the Treasury had necessitated a bend in the Avenue, and from the Capitol the vista now terminated, not
in the White House, but in the red-brick barn which President Buchanan had erected in the grounds. Devoid of fine buildings, the wide, neglected street wore an air of desolation. Its thin cobble pavement had been broken up by faulty drainage and the traffic of the heavy omnibuses which plied between the Capitol and Georgetown. In dry weather, the ruts and hollows were iron traps, covered with thick dust. Rain turned the roadbed into a channel of mud, underlaid by areas of treacherous gravel. The south or “wrong” side of the Avenue was lined with dingy buildings, and its only place of popular resort was the Center Market, an agglomeration of sheds and shacks which backed on the open sewer of the canal. The restaurants and the shops and the big hotels were all on the north side, where the brick sidewalk constituted the town’s promenade.
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