The sight of Confederate prisoners awakened fierce resentment, for stories of atrocities to the Federal wounded had spread through the city, and were believed. Some were spattered with mud and cursed, as they marched from Mansfield’s headquarters to the Old Capitol on First Street, where it had been decided to confine them. Soldiers and citizens, gathered in front of the Treasury, assailed one party of prisoners with cries of “Kill them!” and the escort of marines had hard work to keep the crowd back with their bayonets. However, the Southerners presently discovered that they had friends in Washington. Mrs. Greenhow, who had been in New York over the week end, returned to visit them, and to raise a fund to supply them with food and clothing. In this work, she was assisted by Mrs. Philip Phillips, wife of a Washington attorney who had formerly been a member of Congress from Alabama; and, according to the Star, Senator Breckinridge of Kentucky also went to the Old Capitol to see the Confederate prisoners. A few days later, however, visitors were excluded. Mrs. Greenhow was especially named in the order.
The hotels were filled with anxious friends and relatives of soldiers who had been in action. The new drama of Eily O’Connor packed every nook and cranny of the Washington Theatre. Wyman, “the unrivalled necromancer and ventriloquist,” held audiences spell-bound at Odd Fellows’ Hall. The Board of Aldermen unanimously passed a resolution of regret at the repulse of the army. Naming no names, but arousing much resentment among persons in the walks of life specified, the Star declared that treason had been manifested by well-known jewelers, bankers, wood dealers, dry-goods merchants, criminal lawyers, magistrates, court criers and assistant market clerks; and that the very grocers who furnished the army stores were disloyal. The optician, M. I. Franklin, inserted a card in the newspapers to announce that the battle could never have been lost if every captain had been provided with one of his good field glasses. Mrs. Kady Brownell made her way back to Arlington Heights, after having been fired on six times while carrying her company’s colors, and worried about her husband until he turned up. Miss Annie Etheridge, a daughter of the Second Michigan, armed with two pistols, had also been under fire at the Bull Run fords and at Manassas. Miss Augusta Foster of the Second Maine had had a horse shot from under her, but was learned to be safe and well at Alexandria, where she was acting as a ministering angel to the wounded. People spoke in the past tense of Congressman Ely of Rochester, citing the achievements of his career. Ely, however, was not dead. Like Colonel Corcoran, he had been carried off to Richmond. He was the only one of the impatient politicians who reached that destination.
To the sanguine expectations of the North, the reverse had been a cruel disappointment. In spite of bitterness and angry criticism, the Union did not flag in its determination to carry on the war. Even as the militia hurried North, new regiments of three years’ volunteers tramped through the depot, to form and march in Washington. The hurrah of their arrival resounded amid the confusion and the defeat. Up the Avenue went their serious young faces, their dapper officers, rich flags and bleating bands. For a second time, the nation was rising in force to defend its capital and its cause.
On the banks of Bull Run, more had been lost than the battle, more than pride and honor. The tradition of Lexington had suffered an eclipse. The notion was spreading which for weeks had been voiced in Washington, that gallant hearts were not enough, that training, too, was needed to make an army. American volunteers had been whipped, and shamefully whipped, and the country’s blame fell heavily on their officers. Many of them had been among the first to run. Soldiers had been left leaderless on the field. Two hundred officers sent in their resignations after the battle. Others filled the Washington barrooms, drinking, defeated, sick of the war, indifferent to their orders and their men. “There you are, shoulder-straps!—” Walt Whitman wrote, “but where are your companies? where are your men? . . . . Sneak, blow, put on airs there in Willard’s sumptuous parlors and bar-rooms, or anywhere—no explanation shall save you. Bull Run is your work. . . .”
In the chorus of recrimination, the higher officers suffered as well. West Pointers were derided. A scapegoat was needed for the humiliating blunder of the battle, and General McDowell was proclaimed incompetent. The most unjust criticisms were made of him. He was accused of having been drunk, and the same charge, apparently with more justification, was leveled against Colonel Miles, commanding a division. Quiet and self-possessed, McDowell sat at his headquarters on Arlington Heights, trying to reorganize the broken army. He wrote John Bigelow that it was his chief consolation that his friends seemed warmer to him than ever. He had welcomed the opportunity of distinguishing himself. No one knew better than he how disastrously—and how fortuitously—he had failed.
General Patterson had weakly permitted Johnston’s army to join Beauregard. The old three months’ general from Pennsylvania had had too great a responsibility in the Valley. He was mustered out in a storm of obloquy. Even General Scott was suspected of being in part responsible for the mismanagement of the battle. He lost his temper and blamed the politicians, and called himself the greatest coward in America; and across his magnificent figure a shadow fell. It was cast by the stocky young major-general who was summoned from western Virginia to supersede McDowell and Mansfield in command of all the troops at Washington. The nation which hailed George B. McClellan had learned that no summer excursion of militia would end that war.
VII. All Quiet on the Potomac
IF HE CAME to the capital at a propitious season, when rash counsels had ended in disaster and were for the moment still, McClellan had also some advantages in his own right. He was youthful, vigorous and self-confident; and, crowned with the laurels of his recent victories, he was a hero for a crowd which sorely needed one. His appearance was stalwart. Under a thick Roman nose, a ragged, reddish mustache concealed his mouth. Rather short in stature, he had a sturdy, muscular figure, with broad shoulders and a massive throat; and the tilted French kepi suited his well-shaped head. There was a dramatic quality about him. He had imagination. With that audacity of conception which subdues or inspirits timid minds, he began at once to discuss his command in terms of three hundred thousand men.
The chaos of Washington inspired McClellan to an almost frenzied activity. Convinced that the city was about to be attacked by an overwhelming force, he spent twelve and fourteen hours a day on horseback, and worked at his desk until early morning. At a press conference which he called soon after his arrival, the Star reporter noticed that his blouse was so sweated through on his linen by a hot day’s work that it was hard telling whether his shirt were faded blue or stained white. He wore a plain blue wool uniform, without shoulder straps, and was not at first recognized by some of the correspondents as “the young Napoleon” of their dispatches. It was the only recorded occasion on which McClellan was inconspicuous in the capital. The shaken little world of Washington received him with flattering respect. The President and the Cabinet—General Scott himself—deferred to him. When he visited the Senate Chamber, gray-haired men gathered around this general who was not quite thirty-five years old. “I almost think,” he wrote his wife, “that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me—but nothing of that kind would please me,—therefore I won’t be dictator. Admirable self-denial!”
“For the first time since the armaments, I enjoyed a genuine military view,” Count Gurowski wrote in his diary. “McClellan, surrounded as a general ought to be, went to see the army. It looks martial. The city, likewise, has a more martial look. . . . It seems that a young, strong hand holds the ribbons.”
With McClellan’s arrival, the uniformed vagabonds disappeared from the thoroughfares. Beggars hovered in dusty byways, or rushed across Rock Creek to escape arrest. A Rhode Island volunteer, Professor Sweet, who walked a tightrope stretched across the Avenue from the roof of the National to the roof of the Clarendon, must have had the approval of his brigade commander tucked in his flesh-colored tights, for permits to visit Washington
were strictly regulated, and McClellan’s provost guard stopped every soldier to examine his papers. The guard was composed of regulars—about one thousand infantry, a battery and a squadron of cavalry—and the provost marshal was an experienced officer, Colonel Andrew Porter, who had commanded a brigade at Bull Run.
Congress also came to the aid of Washington by passing a bill creating the Metropolitan Police, to consist of a superintendent, ten sergeants and one hundred and fifty patrolmen. The unsatisfactory Federal night guard was abolished, and the city council immediately discontinued the day police. While the new force was being organized, the provost guard was the only agency for maintaining law and order in Washington. One of its hardest duties was the enforcement of the act of Congress prohibiting the sale of liquor to soldiers. In little fly-by-night shops, drink was sold without the formality of a license, and many respectable hotels and restaurants opened secret bars. Willard’s, the Metropolitan, Hammack’s and Gautier’s had their stocks confiscated and held, until they promised future compliance with the law. Vigilant sentries seized wine, brandy and bourbon at the Long Bridge. The soldiers, however, showed much ingenuity in smuggling their purchases. Whisky bottles were hidden in sacks of flour, cornmeal barrels, tea chests and cheeses. Medicine chests contained vials of brandy. Longnecked demijohns were fitted with two corks, one at the bottom and one at the top of the neck, which was filled with table syrup; and a similar deception was practiced with the spouts of milk cans.
Another act of Congress which was of importance to Washington was the appropriation for repairing the Long Bridge. Half earth embankments, half rotten timbers and broken planks, the bridge was incapable of supporting the heavy movement of men and guns and wagons. Furthermore, a railway connection with Alexandria was necessary for military transport, and the strengthened bridge would carry tracks, extended from the Baltimore and Ohio by way of Maryland Avenue, across the Potomac. A supplementary military route was made by shutting off the water from the Aqueduct of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, and converting the trough into a wagon road. The tracks laid over the Long Bridge did not prove a success, for the structure was too weak to bear the weight of the trains, and eventually a railroad bridge was built.
Before adjourning early in August, Congress also voted the men and money for carrying on the war; and, with some muttering about the increase in the regular Army and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, upheld the orders and proclamations of the President. It had been a brisk and businesslike session, which offered little fireworks for the galleries. On the first of August, however, there was a dramatic scene in the Senate. Breckinridge, opposed to all war measures, was making one of his obstructive speeches when Baker of Oregon entered in uniform. He was colonel of a regiment of Californians which he had raised in the East, and divided his time between the Capitol and the field. Laying his sword across his desk, he listened in silence; then, with his face glowing under his silver hair, he sprang to his feet to assail the sentiments of Breckinridge as “words of brilliant, polished treason.” Baker was a superb orator, and his eloquent attack fixed public attention on the position of the gentleman from Kentucky. To the end, he protested that he had “never uttered a word or cherished a thought that was false to the Constitution and Union“; but somehow he was able to reconcile this opinion with joining the Confederate forces in the autumn.
With the departure of the legislators, Washington entered on an era of military efficiency. McClellan had a brilliant aptitude for organization, and, as a member of a military commission sent to observe the operations in the Crimea, he had studied European armies at first hand. He was exact, methodical and interested in detail. In Washington, he saw that there were two things for him to do. He had to fortify a city. He had to forge a weapon—the Army of the Potomac.
McClellan was the man in the saddle—and even the saddle bore his name. No one looked at the President, walking through the streets or driving in his carriage in his gray suit and slouched hat. All eyes were on the young commander. He was as different from modest McDowell, walking alone on Pennsylvania Avenue, as from obese, magnificent Scott. Every street lounger knew his stocky, high-booted figure. His passing, in clouds of dust or fountains of mud, was an event, a clatter, a cavalcade. Round the corner, hell for leather, he posted on his favorite horse, Dan Webster, with his staff and escort of dragoons hard put to follow him. He delighted in wearing them out, and thought nothing of a dash from the Chain Bridge all the way to Alexandria, through the Virginia encampments which made a continuous military city, more populous than the capital. McClellan wanted his troops to know and trust him. The latest raw recruits were familiar with their general’s face, called him “Our George” and “Little Mac,” and joined lustily in the shouts which greeted him.
McClellan’s affection for his soldiers was tempered by stern parental discipline when they proved insubordinate. There were discontented regiments, which had volunteered for three years in the spring and wanted to go home with the three months’ men. In mid-August, McClellan had two mutinies on his hands, in the Second Maine and the Seventy-ninth New York. He put them down with firmness, ordering the ringleaders sent to the Dry Tortugas, off the southern tip of Florida, to serve out their term at hard labor. In the case of the New Yorkers—the late Colonel Cameron’s Scots—McClellan blamed the officers. He took away the regimental colors, and kept them in the hall at his headquarters, until the Highlanders, by subsequent good behavior, earned the right to have them restored.
The new three years’ volunteers, who were pouring into Washington under the President’s call for half a million men, showed more resolution than the three months’ men, but they were as evasive of discipline as children and as unprepared for the work of war. Examining boards weeded out the most incompetent regimental officers, while those who were serious and intelligent gradually learned their duties. Even the best of them seemed slipshod and undignified to West Pointers. It was hard for professional soldiers to feel much faith in an army, in which a colonel felt free to ride companionably down the Avenue with a private, both smoking cigars.
McClellan’s commanders of brigades and divisions were almost all men of military training, educated to Army standards of discipline and obedience in the days when the gold star on their shoulder straps had been only a dim aspiration. Notable exceptions were the impulsive congressman, Dan Sickles, who had raised the Excelsior Brigade of New Yorkers, and the landed gentleman, James S. Wadsworth, who was made a brigadier as a reward for good service as aide to McDowell at Bull Run. West Point officers had all been trembling over their part in the defeat. “By —— it’s all a lie!” Heintzelman had said in his nasal voice, when the list of promotions was brought to the big room which the officers used in the Lee mansion. “Every mother’s son of you will be cashiered.” But Heintzelman, Sherman, Franklin, Burnside, Keyes and Andrew Porter were among the new brigadiers. Several were detached from the Army of the Potomac. Sherman went to serve in the West, and so did Alex McCook, who was also promoted. Burnside was chosen to head an expedition to the coast of North Carolina. McClellan, however, received accessions of high quality. The names of Meade, Hooker, Buell, Sedgwick, Hancock, Reynolds, Kearny, Fitz-John Porter, Edwin Sumner and W. F. Smith would all stand in newspaper headlines before a year had passed. These capable West Point graduates enabled McClellan to make great progress in organizing the volunteers. Some, like Kearny and Sedgwick and Hancock, had personalities which won the love and loyalty of their troops. Others were as unpopular as McDowell, who now commanded a division. Charles P. Stone was too strict and formal in manner to find favor with his brigade. The severe discipline of W. F. Smith, known in the Army as Baldy, was resented by his soldiers.
It was in Smith’s brigade that a Vermont boy, William Scott, fell asleep on sentry duty at the Chain Bridge. He was tried by court-martial, and sentenced to be shot. The case awakened much sympathy, and Scott was pardoned by the President. The first execution in the Army of the Potomac took place in December,
when William H. Johnson, a private in the Lincoln Cavalry, was shot for desertion. The death penalty, however, was seldom carried out in the first years of the war. Soldiers were imprisoned, or, since flogging had been abolished in the Army, subjected to minor camp tortures. An offender was gagged and “bucked“—trussed in a sitting position, with his knees up and a gun or stick thrust beneath them—or loaded down with a knapsack of bricks and made to stand on a barrel. “Tying up” was a summer punishment, which pinioned a man bareheaded in the sun, with his arms and legs stretched apart. The icy stream of the Washington shower bath was a dreaded infliction in winter.
McClellan stationed his strongest brigades across the river, where the line of defense formed an arc extending from Alexandria to the Chain Bridge. Directly in front of the Federals lay the Confederate army. An enemy outpost was established behind earthworks on Munson’s Hill, and the stars and bars again waved in sight of the capital.
New regiments were formed into provisional brigades, and encamped in the Washington suburbs until they were equipped and sufficiently disciplined to be sent to Virginia. Troops enlisted for the artillery and the cavalry were placed in special instruction camps, respectively directed by General William F. Barry and General George Stoneman. A surprising fact was elicited by the belated call for these two branches of the service—in the East, the buggy had so far supplanted the saddle that men had forgotten how to ride. Cavalry recruits were awkward figures, bumping up and down, with their knees out, in a manner “terribly killing to their animals.” Out of ignorance or indifference, they treated their horses badly, laming and foundering them. The remarkable thing was not that many mounts were used up—for the wastage was enormous—but that large numbers were hardy enough to survive.
Reveille in Washington Page 18
