Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  To guard the District, brigades were posted on the Bladensburg and Seventh Street Roads; and north of Georgetown—at the Chain Bridge, and at Tennallytown, where the roads from Rockville and Poolesville met. In Maryland, Stone’s brigade acted as a corps of observation and a guard on the upper Potomac. McClellan succeeded in breaking down the system of military departments favored by General Scott, and the Army of the Potomac included the force near Harper’s Ferry, which had been placed under the command of the Massachusetts politician, Banks, as well as the troops in Baltimore, under General John A. Dix.

  The soldiers in the vicinity of Washington had at once begun the arduous labor of building earthworks. On both sides of the river, the farmers were ruined. Not only were their orchards and vegetable gardens trampled and their fields filled with tents, but the very face of their land was changed, as its soil was shifted into high mounds and deep ditches. In his decision to surround the capital with fortifications, McClellan was motivated by a desire to free his army for action in the field; and he was undaunted by the fact that the circumference of the city, including the heights across the river, measured thirty-seven miles. With all the enthusiasm of his engineer’s training, he endorsed plans for a system of forty-eight works—forts, lunettes, redoubts and batteries, mounting three hundred guns. His chief engineer, who had served McDowell in the same capacity, was John G. Barnard, a quiet, middle-aged officer, extremely deaf and highly competent.

  Experienced staff officers were a rarity in an army which needed every trained soldier for the command of troops, and McClellan himself had few of them. His large and showy staff was headed by his father-in-law, Randolph B. Marcy, a steady old Army man of only moderate ability. For a brief time, Senator Wilson of Massachusetts was one of McClellan’s aides. He had been a brigadier-general of militia, and, after Congress adjourned, he raised a regiment and brought it to Washington. Probably Wilson thought of staff duty as an agreeable patriotic interlude between sessions at the Capitol. Nearly fifty, fat-bellied and unaccustomed to riding, he took to his bed after his first gallop around the defenses, and promptly resigned his position.

  Another volunteer aide was the rich New Yorker, John Jacob Astor, who lived luxuriously in a well-appointed house, with his own valet, steward and chef. McClellan also welcomed a number of foreign visitors, French, German and English. Two of the Frenchmen were distinguished additions to Washington society, for they were princes of the House of Orléans—the Comte de Paris and the Duc de Chartres. Exiled in the regime of Napoleon III, they had come to the States to offer their services to the Union cause. They were unassuming, cheerful young fellows whom everyone liked. Donning the blue uniform, they were known to their fellow officers as Captain Parry and Captain Chatters. The Comte de Paris, pretender to the throne of France, was tall, awkward and handsome. He had an Assyrian profile, and his dark hair curled thickly around his kepi. He took a keenly intelligent interest in the army and the democracy, and even grew a beard and mustache in the style favored by Americans. The Due de Chartres was a lanky, lively boy, who liked the war and enjoyed a trooper’s joke.

  The princes lived in a house in Washington, and were attended by their personal physician and a big captain of chasseurs à pied. They were vigilantly supervised by their uncle, the Prince de Joinville, whose young son had been placed in the Naval Academy, now removed from Annapolis to Newport. De Joinville became intimate with McClellan, and acted as an unofficial staff member. Like Barnard, he was very deaf. The changes in his fortunes he had met with resignation. It was natural for McClellan to speak of him as “the dear old Prince de Joinville,” though his age was only forty-three. A sadfaced, bearded, uncomplaining man, he amused himself by making clever little sketches of ludicrous things he observed.

  From the first, some people thought it strange that McClellan did not live in camp. He had established his headquarters on the Avenue, near the Old Clubhouse, the mansion which Mr. Seward occupied on the east side of Lafayette Square. In a house on H Street, diagonally across the little park, he was installed in bachelor comfort, while he waited for his wife and new baby girl to join him. His conspicuousness in Washington was due to the fact that he never stayed with his troops, but was always galloping to and from the camps.

  Of all his duties, McClellan most enjoyed his visits to the division of foreign regiments, mainly Germans, in command of which he had placed the adventurer, Louis Blenker. The depredations of the Europeans, who could not be restrained from looting the countryside, made Blenker’s name a byword, but in soldierly aspect they were McClellan’s show troops. When he rode into their camp, the ravaged Virginia landscape became the background of a scene from a romantic opera. With his scarlet-lined cloak wrapped around him, Blenker stood in the center of his polygot collection of officers, who wore uniforms of every color of the rainbow. His tent was made of double folds of bluish material, restful to the eye. He loved ceremony, and received the commanding general with the most formal courtesy. Soon he would shout, “Ordinanz numero eins!” It was the signal for the appearance of champagne. The foaming bottles were set on tables loaded with fruit and cake; and while the officers drank, the band played Italian music and sometimes they sang. The soldiers had an abundance of lager beer, and McClellan apparently had no objection to the relaxation of the rules against drink. He found the procedure in the other divisions matter-of-fact by contrast.

  In the crisp, cool days of autumn, McClellan began to stage the grand reviews of the Army of the Potomac. McDowell had been censured for assembling eight regiments before Bull Run, but week after week whole divisions paraded at McClellan’s command. Hundreds of sight-seers were drawn to the capital by the fame of these military spectacles. Ladies in wide crinolines and tiny bonnets sat marveling in their carriages, and little boys and girls stared popeyed at the white gloves and glistening bayonets, the flags, the polished brass, the cannon smoke. Driving back to Washington in heavy traffic one evening, a party of Bostonians beguiled the tedium by singing. “John Brown’s Body,” a favorite with the Massachusetts regiments, was among the songs. One of the party, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, was a writer, and she had vaguely wished to set some new words to the tune. At dawn next morning, she awoke in her room at Willard’s, with long lines of verse swinging through her brain. She jumped out of bed, and with an old stump of pencil scrawled in the semidarkness the stanzas of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

  The favorite parade ground was on the commons east of the Capitol; but on a raw November day of mud and wind, a monster review of fifty thousand men was held at Bailey’s Cross Roads in Virginia, eight miles from Washington. Since Bull Run, a stricter system of passes had regulated the casual traffic of civilians across the Potomac. For this occasion all restrictions were lifted, and early in the morning the Washington population began its exodus into Virginia. General McClellan arrived, attended by his staff and escorted by eighteen hundred regular cavalry. In his gallop along the columns, he was accompanied by the President and by Secretaries Seward and Cameron. The Comte de Paris thought it curious to see these civilians “boldly caracoling at the head of a brilliant military cortege.” To thousands of uncritical onlookers, the sight was imposing beyond anything they had ever imagined. The divisions extended for miles over the plain. Until twilight veiled the muddy fields, troops passed in review. Faintly, from the direction of Fairfax, came the sound of heavy, irregular firing; for the enemy, always accurately informed of Federal plans, was trying to create the impression of an attack, and throw the review into confusion.

  The enemy was the one blot on McClellan’s achievement. Three things had occurred to shake Washington’s wholehearted faith in the young Napoleon: the blockade of the Potomac, the withdrawal of the Confederates from the city’s front, and an engagement upriver in Virginia.

  The capital had been proud of its busy wharves, where twenty new storehouses had been built, and the schooners from New York and Philadelphia had awaited their turn in a splendid vertical confusion of masts. Trade ha
d begun to languish with the erection of the first rebel batteries on the lower Potomac. Navy men, in bitter humiliation, tried to deny the existence of the blockade. McClellan had refused to co-operate with them in demolishing the batteries. The Washington wharves grew dull. Many articles were highpriced, some things were not to be had at all. Sometimes bearing a strange freight of fugitive slaves, a ship would come in like a heroine. Only the little pungies arrived with regularity, and Harvey’s Oyster Saloon advertised that its boats ran the blockade daily.

  At first, there had been repeated alarms from the capital’s line of defense in Virginia. The sound of practice guns sent old ladies scuttling from the Center Market with half-filled baskets. The cannonade of a reconnaissance brought people to their roofs to watch the puffs of smoke rising above the treetops. As each report sounded, there was a confirmatory murmur, “There, do you hear that?” A decisive battle was believed to be taking place; and, prematurely elated, loyal citizens waved the Stars and Stripes, and rejoiced in a victory for the Union arms.

  The late summer days, however, had unfolded no action of any consequence. McClellan possessed little information about the Confederate forces. Professor Lowe’s new silk balloon, inflated at the gasometer in the First Ward, went reeling across the Aqueduct to ride majestically above the Virginia hills. Mr. John La Mountain made an ascent of nearly two miles, without moorings. In spite of observations and reconnaissances and prowling Union spies, the enemy remained mysterious. McClellan’s secret service bureau, headed by Allan Pinkerton, gave reports that Washington was menaced by immense numbers, and the general believed them. He had assumed command with the spirited intention of crushing the rebels in one campaign, but the passing weeks found him hesitant, absorbed in the perfection of elaborate plans and of his army’s organization.

  At the end of September, the disappearance of the enemy’s flag informed the capital that the Confederates had fallen back on Fairfax. The Union lines were advanced, and civilians journeyed out to examine Munson’s Hill. Surprise was felt, together with a little chill of doubt, on discovering that the Union forces had been defied by a few Quaker guns made of logs and pasteboard. Presently, there was news of a farther withdrawal, to Centreville and Manassas. Enveloped in awe-inspiring stories of masked batteries, Manassas had taken on a quality of legend; and before its strong defenses people envisioned the bloody battleground on which the Army of the Potomac would show its mettle. When there was news of an engagement, however, it came from the upper Potomac, where General Stone was in command. A detachment, sent across the river toward Leesburg under the command of Colonel E. D. Baker, met with disaster at Ball’s Bluff. Near sunset of a lovely autumn day, a newspaper correspondent heard the insistent clicking of the telegraph in the inner room at McClellan’s headquarters, and saw Mr. Lincoln stumble out, with tears rolling down his face. Baker, with that gallantry which effaces a want of discretion, had been killed at the head of his battalion.

  The eloquent senator from Oregon had become popular in Washington, and his funeral was a great occasion. As Mrs. Lincoln had turned the White House topsy turvy with upholsterers, the services took place in the H Street house of James Watson Webb, recently a newspaper proprietor in New York and soon to be minister to Brazil. Baker’s eminent friends gazed at his handsome face, which seemed—a triumph of embalming—to be that of a sleeping soldier. The flag-draped coffin, loaded with wreaths of white flowers and evergreens, was carried to the hearse by six colonels, and a large military procession escorted the bier through the streets.

  Retarded by the censorship, the details of Ball’s Bluff gradually reached the country. The Federals had been trapped between the cliff and the river, without enough boats to make good their return to the Maryland shore. A great part of the force had been captured, while some had been shot in the water, and others drowned. There were bodies on the flooding waters of the Potomac which roared down in early November to shake the infirm structure of the Long Bridge. A soldier in light blue lay on a near-by pile of driftwood. One nearly naked corpse was washed against the wharf at the foot of Sixth Street. Others were recovered at the Chain Bridge, and near the Georgetown wharves. Opposite Fort Washington, they found a private of the artillery, with a testament, a round looking glass and a lock of hair in his pocket.

  Something more senseless than the habitual use of war was seen in the fate of these drowned men. Ball’s Bluff had been a small engagement, but it spread dismay in the Union. Baker’s friends called his death a sacrifice to military bungling, and their fingers pointed at General Stone. Like McClellan, Stone was a Democrat. In relations other than military, he was tolerant and courteous, and, toward the slaveholding people of Maryland, he had shown no more disposition to be tyranical than toward the people of the District. Slavery-hating Republicans listened to stories about Stone, and found it hard to discriminate between tolerance and treason.

  In October, there were premonitory signals of the opening of Congress. Wade and Chandler and Trumbull were in Washington, calling on the President and conferring with McClellan. They demanded an advance, declaring that a defeat was no worse than a delay. McClellan assured them that General Scott was the principal barrier to action, and they promised to try to have him retired at once.

  From the first, McClellan had treated Scott with contemptuous neglect. Only four years before, the young commander had resigned from the Army with the rank of captain. He was now unable to endure the fact that the General-in-Chief was his superior officer. He considered Scott either “a dotard or a traitor,” and pushed him aside, in vexation at finding a clumsy obstacle in his path.

  After his first taste of his junior’s arrogance, Scott had sent in his resignation. The President had persuaded him to withdraw it; but his importance was gone.

  “Hard is the fate of those who serve republics,” wrote Mr. Russell in September. “The officers who met the old man in the street today passed him by without a salute or mark of recognition, although he wore his uniform coat, with yellow lapels and yellow sash; and one of a group, which came out of a restaurant close to the General’s house, exclaimed, almost in his hearing, ‘Old fuss-and-feathers don’t look first-rate today.“'

  While Scott limped home, supported by two aides, General McClellan dashed along the lines of his troops, in a roar of cheers almost as deafening as the salvos of artillery. When he rode back to the city in the hazy autumn twilight, his train streamed behind him—generals, adjutants, aides, orderlies, politicians, citizens, sight-seers. It was like the triumphal procession of a conquering hero. Crowds clustered about McClellan’s door, while, within, the leaders of the nation waited on him, and even President Lincoln often sat cooling his heels in the parlor. Never in the life of the republic had such adulation been paid to any man.

  At four o’clock one rainy November morning, the voices of orderlies and the stir and snuffle of horses sounded before the house. A squadron of cavalry came pounding up, to wait in the darkness. General McClellan and his staff, cloaked and hooded in black rubber, hurried down the steps, and rode away, with the cavalry at their heels. No guns roared on the Potomac, it was a matter of etiquette which called them from their beds. They were going to escort General Scott to the railroad station. The young aides chatted as they rode along, speculating about the fortunes of their commander. “It would have been easier,” wrote the Comte de Paris, “to pierce the night and fog which enveloped us.” In the dimly lighted depot McClellan and his staff gleamed like knights in black armor, their hidden swords clanking. General Scott took a courteous leave of the man who had made his last months of service as disagreeable as possible. He sent kind messages to Mrs. McClellan and the new baby; and said that his sensations were very peculiar on leaving Washington and active life. McClellan wrote his wife that the sight of this feeble old man was a lesson to him; and asked her, if ever he became vainglorious and ambitious, to remind him of it. Whatever served him for ambition had now been realized. While retaining the command of the Army of the Potomac, he
succeeded Scott as general-in-chief. The President ventured to suggest that the increased responsibilities might be too much for one man. “I can do it all,” McClellan told him quickly.

  In honor of McClellan’s promotion, the soldiers of Blenker’s division organized a grand torchlight parade. Many other soldiers, and a concourse of citizens, joined in the procession, as with torches held aloft it traversed a line of march marked by red, white and blue lights. Before McClellan’s house, the bands played a lively serenade, and he was loudly called for. He appeared for an instant, bowed and retired. Fireworks flared and crackled in the streets, rockets burst the national colors high in the moonlit sky, but McClellan did not see all of the display. He was obliged to attend “a pseudo Cabinet meeting.” The Cabinet “bored and annoyed” him—there were “some of the greatest geese” in it that he had ever seen. Only Simon Cameron, the Secretary of War, won his approval, for he “occupied himself solely with contracts and political affairs,” and left the war alone.

  The removal of Scott and his own elevation to the chief command had not satisfied McClellan. His inflated self-esteem required that he should not be crossed or even questioned by anyone. His nerves were flayed by the fact that he had to deal, not only with his cheering troops, but with men in power. A touchy vanity lay at the base of McClellan’s arrogance. He liked only subordinates and uncritical admirers, and could find comfort in the approval of his horse, writing that “he, at least, had full confidence in his master.”