Desks and gallery benches were allotted to the men. The leftovers occupied corners and lobbies. The staff used the committee rooms. The colonel took the Speaker’s parlor. Commenting favorably on the congressmen’s lavatories, the Seventh washed; and then, formed in companies, they marched down the hill to dine at the big hotels. This regiment was never obliged to put up with a ration of bacon and biscuit in the furnace room, but ate three times a day on the Avenue during the week it spent in the Capitol.
Early the next morning, soldiers from Massachusetts and Rhode Island came tramping into Washington. Troop ships were gathering in a cloud outside the port of Annapolis, whose tenuous little railroad now formed the connecting link between the capital and the North. Brigadier-General Ben Butler was assigned to the command of the newly formed Department of Annapolis. He vigorously expedited the forwarding of regiments to Washington, but his jealous quarrels with the colonel of the Seventh New York had been a factor in delaying the arrival of the first troops. Butler was a military amateur, puffed up with self-importance. His stout body was encased in a gorgeous, gold-embroidered militia uniform, his crossed eyes flashed authority and he gave his orders as curtly as a general on the stage. Although he claimed for the Eighth Massachusetts full credit for repairing the tracks, there were also skilled workmen on the job. At the request of Secretary Cameron, Mr. Thomas A. Scott, vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, had hastened to Annapolis with a corps of assistants. His former private secretary and personal telegrapher, a dapper little flaxen-haired Scotchman named Andrew Carnegie, had pitched in with the laborers and militia, and was the engineer of the first train which carried soldiers to Washington over the reconstructed line from Annapolis. On the way, he stopped the train to repair the telegraph line, which had been torn down and pinned to the ground. As he pulled up the stake, the released wires lashed his face, and Carnegie was bleeding profusely when he arrived at the capital.
The Eighth Massachusetts was quartered in the well-ventilated Rotunda of the Capitol, between their comrades of the Sixth and their new-found friends of the Seventh New York. Drums beat, feet tramped and guns clanked in the marble halls. In both wings, mock sessions of Congress were the favorite diversion. The uproar started every morning with the rattle of reveille. A self-appointed presiding officer rapped for order. The galleries shouted to the floor, and the floor bawled back. There were pompous speeches and burlesque debates, greeted by howls of applause and hoots of derision. In the midst of the racket, some men were always writing letters. The militia thought it comical to sit at the legislators’ desks and use the stationery of House and Senate; and their prolific correspondence did not even entail the expense of three cents’ postage, for the letters all were franked.
The Capitol park was a pleasant drill ground, fragrant with snowballs and horse-chestnut blossoms. Soldiers stretched on the grass in the shade to watch the evolutions of the other regiments. In ancient committee rooms in the basement, a huge bakery was being established, and, as the May days passed, smoke belched from queer little chimneys that dotted the west terrace. Soldiers lost themselves in the caves and crypts, with barrels of flour in every one of them. Even after taps had sounded, the basement of the Capitol was lively. Men in paper caps moved around the enormous troughs and ovens. Sentries stood at their posts, their guns gleaming in the gaslight, and the relief awaited its turn in the guardroom. Toward morning, the smell of fresh bread drifted warmly through the cellar damp. The wagons began to back up to receive their loads of brown loaves for the regiments.
The men of the First Rhode Island had spread their bunks beside the cabinets of curiosities in the Patent Office. They were likely troops in simple coarse uniforms—gray pants, dark-blue flannel shirts and Army hats, turned up at the side—and across their shoulders they slung the scarlet rolls of their blankets. The absence of smart trappings made the Rhode Island militia look fit and ready for business, though the regiment was noted for the social standing of some of its private soldiers. John Hay, who had attended Brown University, and knew Providence well, was impressed by the spectacle of men of wealth and breeding, quietly doing their duty amid the litter of Company C’s quarters in the Patent Office. “When men like these leave their horses, their women and their wine,” he wrote with that accent of youthful snobbery which oddly accords with his admiration for Lincoln, “harden their hands, eat crackers for dinner, wear a shirt for a week and never black their shoes,—all for a principle—it is hard to set any bounds to the possibilities of such an army.”
The First Rhode Island was commanded by a graduate of West Point, Colonel Ambrose E. Burnside, who had started out in life as a tailor in Indiana. He had resigned from the Army to go into business. Burnside was that rarity in the militia organizations, a professional soldier; and he was, in addition, a splendid military figure. His big, imposing presence, bright, dark eyes and honest, genial manners won everybody’s admiration; and he had a set of old-fashioned Army whiskers—forming the letter W on the upper lip and jowls—whose beauty and luxuriance would put his name in Webster’s Dictionary. William Sprague, the Boy Governor of Rhode Island, dwindled into insignificance beside the hearty colonel. His importance was derived from the family cotton mills—he had the reputation of being the richest man in New England. Small, thin and stooping, with an amiable, eyeglassed face, Sprague had accompanied the troops from his State, wearing military dress and a yellow-plumed hat. It was soon observed that the lovely Miss Kate Chase was frequently in his society, and appeared to be acting in the capacity of hostess at the Rhode Island quarters. Even General Scott took an interest in the gossip, and watched the young lady narrowly when the Boy Governor, during a military display, went to the Chases’ carriage to pay his respects.
The Rhode Islanders had brought four women with them—a laundress and three relatives, charming ladies, who, said the Star, “utterly refused to be left at home.” One of them was immediately married to a soldier. Her bridal dress was Turkish—a blouse of cherry-colored satin, blue pants and a felt hat with white plumes. Another was Kady Brownell, a stern-faced girl with long, flowing hair, who was the wife of a sergeant. Kady had a passion for military life, and she wore a modified uniform, with a skirt covering the trousers to the knee, a sash with big curtain tassels, and a sword. She was presently made color-bearer of her husband’s company.
The Fifth Massachusetts was encamped in the Treasury, cooking and eating in the courtyard. An open shed near by served as both barracks and stable for a company of United States dragoons. There were regiments sleeping in warehouses and in the Center Market, on the waxed floors of the Assembly Rooms on Louisiana Avenue, and in the white muslin Palace of Aladdin behind the City Hall. The Seventy-first New York was sent to the Navy Yard, and huts were built for the Twelfth New York in Franklin Square.
A high board fence was built at the depot to protect the troops from the welcoming crowds. Every day, the population turned out to see the parade on the Avenue. “It seemed,” wrote Theodore Winthrop, “as if all the able-bodied men in the country were moving, on the first of May, with all their property on their backs, to agreeable, but dusty lodgings on the Potomac.” Soldiers in gray and soldiers in blue, garish companies of Zouaves, chasseurs and firemen carried their presentation flags past the White House. The legions of the New Yorkers mingled with regiments from Pennsylvania, from Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey, and Michigan. The full brigade from New Jersey, thirty-two hundred strong, was the largest body of men that Washington had ever seen in line; but the record soon was broken by a single afternoon’s parade of four thousand men, their bayonets glittering all the way from Sixth to Fifteenth Streets. They comprised six regiments from three different States, arriving so close together that they formed a continuous procession.
Some of the regiments had made circuitous voyages, and others had been detained on guard duty along the railroad. In varying degrees, all had endured hunger and exposure. Their privations had been partially mitigated by the prompt action of Mr
. James S. Wadsworth of western New York, who had dispatched a steamer loaded with provisions to Annapolis. The War Office was not even organized to take efficient care of the troops when they reached the capital. Its bureaus were accustomed to the leisurely, red-tape formalities of a small peacetime establishment, and the post of Quartermaster General was still vacant. Every regiment was greeted like an unexpected guest, for whose entertainment no provision has been made. The Commissary Department laid in large quantities of food supplies, but had no organization for distributing them. Horses and wagons were lacking. Some days passed before cooking facilities were introduced into buildings where thousands of men were quartered. Tents, cots, mattresses, blankets, clothing, stoves and kitchen utensils were immediately needed on a scale beyond the wildest imagination of the functionaries. Orders were hurriedly placed by the Government and by State authorities, almost without regard to price or quality. The Medical Bureau had no means of caring for the many cases of accidents and illness, and did not devise any, beyond reserving forty beds at the Washington Infirmary on E Street. Later, the old Union Hotel at Georgetown was taken for a Government hospital, but most sick and injured men were cared for by their own regiments or by private charity.
The War Department was incapable of making the living arrangements necessary for a large convention; but the thousands arriving in Washington were soldiers, and, save for a few regiments who had rifles, they needed arms. The Northern arsenals contained a small number of improved weapons. In the main, however, they were stocked with old flintlock muskets of Revolutionary days, altered by the addition of the percussion cap and rifling. These rusty and clumsy guns, frequently defective, were handed out to the militia. The Ordnance Department, as hidebound as the other bureaus, planned for the future, not by ordering a large supply of breech-loading rifles, but by purchasing the antiquated arms of Europe, of various calibres and patterns.
As the well-equipped regiments received their baggage, they were sent to make their camps on the hills around the city. While in some new organizations the men did not possess even a change of underwear, the established militia regiments of the East had towering piles of tents, bags, haversacks, knapsacks, overcoats, blankets and hammocks. They staggered under loads of parting gifts—pipes, tobacco, pills, needlebooks, Bibles, books, magazines, patent knives, towels, soap, slippers, water filters and portable writing desks. The food and other luxuries which were sent to them at Washington swamped the post-office and the express company. In suitability for army life, it was difficult to choose between regiments that were destitute, and those which required from twenty-five to fifty wagons to transport their baggage.
The Irishmen of the Sixty-ninth New York marched out with emerald colors flying to the grounds of Georgetown College. They were loyal to a man to their narrow-faced commander, Colonel Michael Corcoran, who had refused to order them to parade in honor of the Prince of Wales during his visit to New York. Corcoran had been court-martialed for his disobedience, but the charges were dismissed to permit him to lead his command to the seat of war. The Southern students all were gone from Georgetown College, and others had been withdrawn by their parents in apprehension of disturbances in the District. About seventy, however, still remained, and the courses of instruction proceeded while the Sixty-ninth New York occupied the campus.
The New Jersey Brigade camped on Meridian Hill, in the neighborhood of the Seventh New York. The regular dragoons were sent out the Seventh Street Road. The First and Second Connecticut went to Glenwood, W. W. Corcoran’s fine estate two miles north of Washington. The Rhode Islanders occupied huts, roofed in felt, in the vicinity of Glenwood Cemetery. The entrances had curtains of red, white and blue, and several soldiers, with Yankee ingenuity, dug cellars underneath the floor, to keep their provisions cool. Some regret was expressed that they did not reach camp in time to get in a patch of vegetables.
By the middle of May, vast loads of freight were coming to Washington by rail and by the Potomac. The Navy Yard was filled with steamers, schooners, screw packets and tugs, carrying thousands of blankets and tons of coal, hard bread and groceries. A herd of cattle, ordered to provide fresh beef for the soldiers, was put to pasture in the grounds of the Washington Monument, and presently fell into the canal. It took a day and a half to drive them back ashore, and six fine beeves were drowned. Washington began to be familiar with the army of the profiteering contractors, who packed Secretary Cameron’s office to compete for a fat cut of the Government funds, in return for sleazy blankets, shoddy uniforms and shoes and knapsacks that fell to pieces. By degrees, through some superhuman exertion of the Quartermaster’s Department, enough camp equipage arrived to outfit most of the unprovided regiments, and a semicircle of encampments formed on the hills behind the city.
The apprehensions of the Washington population had been immediately dissipated by the arrival of troops. Confectioners, oystermen and barbers were delighted with their trade, and all but die-hard secessionists rejoiced to find that war, which had been heralded by such great alarms, had turned out to be a holiday outing of militia. Two days after the Seventh New York reached the city, its band played on the lawn south of the White House. A gaily dressed and carefree crowd strolled through the grounds, to the strains of “Yankee Doodle,” “Upidee,” “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” and “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” The Saturday afternoon concerts of the Marine Band were offered, just as in normal times, and there were many novel diversions—a variety of regimental concerts and serenades, drills, dress parades and flag raisings. There was a grand celebration at the Patent Office, where the President hoisted the big new flag contributed by the clerks of the Interior Department. The Rhode Island troops cheered manfully, and, after performing some military evolutions, marched into their quarters, singing “Our Flag Still Waves.” At the Navy Yard, the band of the Seventy-first New York gave a matinee concert, with singing, before a large and distinguished audience. One of the great cast-iron Dahlgren guns was fired at targets in the river, and the Seventy-first New York marched in dress parade.
Strangers began to come in to see the show [wrote Joseph Bradley Varnum], children were everywhere seen playing at soldiers in the streets—the ladies were delighted with the officer-beaux, and the strains of music from the numerous military bands. There seemed to be one continual drumbeat. People were awakened by the reveille, walked with measured tread during the day, and were lulled by the tattoo at night. All seemed more like a grand gala season than a serious work of war.
Patriotic citizens of Washington rallied to the aid of the soldiers. The Y.M.C.A. held services, and handed out Bibles and tracts. Ladies carried delicacies to the sick, and gathered to make havelocks, the headdresses which had been designed for troops in India by the British general, Sir Henry Havelock. They were made of heavy white drilling, and hung in long flaps over the soldiers’ necks. As havelocks were declared to be a perfect protection from sunstroke, they were made in enormous quantities by ladies who longed to be of service. All over the Union, bales of white drilling piled up in church sewing circles, and soon the volunteers, wearing a faintly Bedouin air, were enduring the heat of the havelocks, as well as the rays of the sun.
After the Seventh New York pitched its tents on a level clover field on Meridian Hill, the Fourteenth Street Road was lively every evening with carriages and horsemen on the way to the dress parade. Sometimes Cabinet ministers were among the spectators: smiling Mr. Seward, with “a head like a wise macaw“; or Mr. Welles, who looked like an exasperated Santa Claus; or Mr. Cameron, his thin face marked by “a thousand political bargains.” Major Robert Anderson, feted and serenaded in Washington, rode out one afternoon to review the famous Seventh. Hundreds of brightly bonneted ladies leaned on their escorts’ arms on the pretty terrace shaded by oak trees. Below them, warm in the evening light, lay Washington—“ambitious Washington, stretching itself along and along like the shackly files of an army of recruits.”
When the dress parade was over and the carria
ges went bumping back along the Fourteenth Street Road, when the last horseman had jounced away and the soft light had faded, then the Seventh relaxed and was at ease in its neat village of tents, with marquees, barbershops, offices and kitchens. Each tent became “a little illuminated pyramid,” and the cooking fires burned bright along the company streets, labeled with droll and fanciful names.
At last, when the songs have been sung and the hundred rumors of the day discussed [wrote Private Winthrop], at ten the intrusive drums and scolding fifes get together and stir up a concert, always premature, called tattoo. The Seventh Regiment begins to peel for bed. . . . At taps—half-past ten—out go the lights. . . . Then, and until the dawn of another day, a cordon of snorers inside a cordon of sentries surrounds our national capital. The outer cordon sounds its “All’s well“; and the inner cordon, slumbering, echoes it.
Another regiment of New Yorkers attracted quite as much attention as the Seventh, though for totally different reasons. Elmer Ellsworth, discouraged in his aspirations to a War Department post by the jealous antagonism of Army officers, had hurried up to New York to recruit a regiment from the volunteer fire departments. He returned early in May with a gang of roughs, dressed in gray, scarlet and blue Zouave costumes, armed with rifles and huge bowie knives, and encumbered with handsome presentation flags.
Heavy-shouldered, hard-faced, spoiling for a fight, the Fire Zouaves were a new type of hero. They tumbled off the cars, asking for Jeff Davis and growling over the fact that they had been brought by way of Annapolis. “We would have gone through Baltimore like a dose of salts,” one of them told the Star reporter. As they marched up the Avenue, the Franklin Hose Company reel dashed past them on the way to a fire, and the Zouaves hailed the apparatus with a yell of recognition. Ellsworth was indignant that no preparations had been made for the regiment. Sitting in Hammack’s restaurant with John Hay, he could not enjoy his tea because his Zouaves had not been fed. Like them, he wore his hair shorn to the scalp under a little red cap, and carried a knife a foot long. His face was thin, his voice was hoarse, but he was in command of men, and he was happy.
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