Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  A far more dangerous tendency, however, had also developed in McClellan’s thinking. In his political opinions, he was opposed to the party in power. With some vague benevolence toward Negroes, he cared nothing about abolishing slavery. His ultra-Democratic friends and supporters, by placing a grandiose construction on McClellan’s influence and power, had encouraged him to think of himself as a superman with a mission. He devoutly believed that God was on his side, and that he was the only patriot in Washington. It occurred to him that he might “cheerfully take the dictatorship,” as people were calling on him to do—not, of course, from selfish motives, but to save the country.

  The Democratic lawyer, Mr. Edwin Stanton, was very friendly with McClellan. Stanton had a gift for vituperation, and he lavished it freely on the Republican party, and on President Lincoln, in particular. His favorite joke was that du Chaillu was a fool to go to Africa in search of something that he could so easily have found at Springfield—'’the original gorilla.” McClellan said that Stanton shocked him by such talk; but he adopted the phrase in writing about the President to his wife. As a railroad executive in Illinois, McClellan had known Lincoln, and more than once in out-of-the-way towns he had spent the night in front of a stove, listening to the country lawyer’s anecdotes. The President, always informal in his manners, felt at ease with an old acquaintance, and often called on McClellan. Sometimes he would appear before breakfast. Frequently he came at night, to learn the latest news before he went to bed. His pockets bulging with papers—for he was trying to post himself all at once on military strategy and naval warfare—he would enter the parlor, where the officers sat smoking, writing and reading newspapers. Was George in? he would ask the aide. It was not necessary to send up, he would wait; he thought he would take supper with him.

  Lincoln deferred to McClellan, with a civilian’s respect for a military specialist. But the general, who disdained him for his ignorance, despised him for his deference. McClellan was something of a snob. The son of a Philadelphia doctor, he had enjoyed a liberal education. He had read widely in several languages, was interested in archaeology and collected old china. While he addressed the President with ceremonious deference as “your Excellency,” he privately derided his homely phrases and manners.

  One November evening, Lincoln called at the general’s house in company with Secretary Seward and John Hay. They were told that McClellan had gone to an officer’s wedding, and sat down in the parlor to wait. After nearly an hour, McClellan returned. Without heeding the orderly’s announcement that the President was there, he went upstairs. Thinking that there must be some mistake, Mr. Lincoln sent a servant to his room. The answer came that the general had gone to bed. John Hay thought that “this unparalleled insolence of epaulettes” was “a portent of evil to come.” Mr. Lincoln quietly passed it over; but he let McClellan come to him thereafter.

  McClellan’s military supremacy, to which Mr. Lincoln had quietly assented, was plainly threatened by the opening of Congress in December, but the general appeared oblivious of the fact. He could no longer plead the excuse that Scott was in his way, but he made no movement to advance. Drilling continued, recruits came in, and Thanksgiving Day was celebrated with drunkenness in the camps.

  It was true that McClellan’s troops were not completely disciplined or even equipped after four months’ exertions. Montgomery Meigs, a capable captain of engineers, who had organized the expedition to Fort Pickens, had been appointed Quartermaster General; but Secretary Cameron’s awards of contracts were scandalously inefficient. Late in the winter, McClellan’s inspectors condemned twenty-five thousand infantry coats, costing the Government $167,750, in a single day.

  A special correspondent of the New York Tribune might have been writing a brief for McClellan’s defense, when he described the military procession at Colonel Baker’s funeral. Standing on a horse rack for a better view, the correspondent found himself among a group of down-Easters. Along the line rode a tall man in civilian clothing, with black cloth pantaloons rumpling up halfway to his knees. He was wearing an army cap, and his saddle and trappings were military.

  First Down-Easter: Who’s that chap?

  Second Down-Easter: Guess he’s the colonel.

  First Down-Easter: What sort of a way is that for a colonel to rig himself?

  Second Down-Easter: Morphodite rig, I guess.

  Third Down-Easter: He ain’t no colonel; he’s one of the new brigadier-generals that hain’t got his uniform yet.

  First Down-Easter: Half general and half minister.

  Second Down-Easter: Well, I said he was a morphodite.

  In drill and training, the soldiers were far from precise. Infantrymen, standing at salute while Baker’s coffin was carried to the hearse, were looking over their shoulders, talking aloud, lounging on one leg, wriggling and scratching. Their guns were pointed in all directions, and some held them like fish poles. In the grand military procession which escorted the bier, some companies were all in a muddle, and at times ran to keep up with the men ahead. The troopers and their horses looked rough and uncouth. “No Cossack or Bashi Bazouk,” wrote the Tribune man, “was ever half so rude, raw, undisciplined and uncivilized in appearance as this cavalry selected for a purpose of ceremony.“

  Still, the Army of the Potomac was the greatest organization that the Union had ever seen. In November, McClellan had an aggregate of two hundred thousand men in the District and in Virginia. These troops were not expected to face the professional soldiers of Europe, but another volunteer army. They had unbounded confidence in their commanding general, and were ready to follow him anywhere. Even a small success would have appeased the politicians and delighted the country. There had been great joy because joint military and naval expeditions had taken Fort Hatteras and Port Royal in the Carolinas. If McClellan had silenced the rebel batteries on the Potomac, he would have been wildly acclaimed; but he felt no need for conciliating either the people or the politicians. The Republican radicals assembled in a dismal city, surrounded by a large and impotent army, commanded by a messianic Democrat.

  The senators and congressmen elbowed their way through a motley crowd. European soldiers of fortune had come running to war, like boys to a fire. McDowell had commented that a man need only “prove that he once saw Garibaldi to satisfy us in Washington that he is quite fit for the command of a regiment.” But foreigners had recently grown so numerous that there were not even staff appointments enough for all of them. Veterans of the Crimea jostled Garibaldians in the lobbies. Most of the former claimed to have been members of the Light Brigade, and someone said that their numbers were extraordinary, in view of the well-known high mortality in that organization. An English correspondent at Willard’s found himself constantly reminded of the Hotel Victoria in Naples in the Garibaldian days, not only by the military atmosphere and the babel of languages, but because he kept seeing many of the actual people he had known at the camp before Capua, and in the Neapolitan cafés.

  Washington was packed with the varied concourse of people attracted by the great army. Contractors, inventors and cranks infested the bureaus. Officers used their furloughs to seek promotion. There was a joke about a boy who threw a stone at a dog on Pennsylvania Avenue, and hit three brigadier-generals. Correspondents were there to scribble, and artists to sketch. Soldiers’ relatives mingled with sight-seeing tourists. A delegation of Creek, Seminole and Chickasaw Indians, after inspecting the camps and forts and witnessing two reviews, expressed unlimited confidence in the success of the Union cause. Counterfeiters and confidence men assembled from all sections of the country. Petty thieves and pickpockets, “from the genteel, fashionable ‘dip’ down to the vagabond handkerchief picker,” slid through the crowds and kept the Metropolitan Police on the run. Embalmers arrived—for, even when an army does not fight, some men sicken and die. To entertain the legions of the living came dancers and singers and comedians, prize fighters and gamblers, vendors of obscene literature and proprietors of “rum-jug shops.
” Apparent on every street was the secret invasion of the women of the town; gay light-o'-loves who swished into the music halls on the officers’ arms, whores who beckoned the drunken teamsters to shanties in the alleys. In the wake of the women, followed doctors, blatant in their promises. Dr. Schuman (all diseases of a private nature, permanent cure or no charge) had arrived early to set up his Southern Medical House in the Clarendon Hotel, but he was soon obliged to compete with “certain swindlers in the back streets.” Dr. La Bonta had two offices, open at all hours, with an assistant in each; and advertised a permanent cure for gonorrhea in three days, as well as syphilis in all its forms, without interference with business or the use of disgusting drugs.

  The first evening levee at the White House opened the winter social season in mid-December. There was a large company, brilliant with feathers and spangles and jewelry, with brass buttons and epaulettes and swords. General McClellan was the lion of the occasion. On his arm was his wife, Nell, recently come to Washington. She was delicate and hazel-eyed—“not what a sickly stripling fresh from college would call handsome,” wrote the Herald correspondent. Others found Mrs. McClellan a pretty and vivacious woman. She adored her young general, and was glad to be with him and sympathize with his vexatious troubles with the Republican politicians.

  The radicals had started in full cry after General McClellan. Senators and representatives asked angry questions about Ball’s Bluff, about the blockade of the Potomac, about the inactivity of the great army. They were scarcely less enraged at the President for interfering with their plan to turn the war into a crusade against slavery. Lincoln had revoked a proclamation of military emancipation which the flamboyant abolitionist, Frémont, had issued in Missouri. Frémont had shown such complete unfitness for command that the President had been obliged to remove him. He was in Washington in December, a storm center for the powerful anti-slavery faction. To assert the power of the legislative branch of the Government, Congress appointed a joint committee—the Committee on the Conduct of the War.

  The threat of war with England hung heavy over the city, like the winter fogs. Confederate commissioners to Great Britain and France—men well known in Washington, Senator Mason of Virginia and Senator Slidell of Louisiana—were imprisoned at Fort Warren in Boston harbor. Their forcible removal by the American naval commander, Captain Wilkes, from the British mail steamship Trent had been the occasion for great jubilation in the Union, angered by England’s recognition of the Confederacy as a belligerent power. Captain Wilkes returned to his residence on H Street in December, to be cheered and serenaded and hailed as “the hero of the Trent.” The diplomatic corps fluttered with disapproval, and some of the ministers, said the New York Herald, expressed “passion and prejudice.” Their sentiments were ascribed by that newspaper to “the poison of the last administration.” Just before Christmas, Lord Lyons presented to Mr. Seward the demand of his government, outraged at the insult to the British flag, for the liberation of the commissioners. Over the holiday, the Cabinet struggled with the question, and reached the conclusion that Wilkes’s rash and popular act must be disavowed.

  Work serenely progressed on the dome and the Extension; and on the wall of the staircase of the House a red-bearded painter named Leutze industriously limned a mammoth picture, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” The Honorable Alfred Ely, exchanged after five months in a Richmond prison, returned with gloomy stories of the misery of his fellow captives. After a quiet Christmas, New Year’s brought the President the traditional bout of handshaking. The Indian agent from New Mexico, in a full suit of buckskin, presented Mrs. Lincoln with a red, white and blue Navajo blanket; and the President’s old friend, Orville H. Browning, appointed to Douglas’s seat in the Senate, had his pocket picked at the White House reception.

  The President seemed weary and depressed. The Hutchinson family, popular abolitionist minstrels from New Hampshire, gave a concert for the guests at one of the receptions. While they sang, Mr. Lincoln twice closed his eyes and appeared to fall into a drowse. His heavy burden of anxiety was augmented by the ordeal of standing for hours, smiling automatically on the jostling visitors, enduring the painful pressure of hundreds of hands.

  Anthony Trollope, paying a visit to Washington, found it a melancholy place. The end of a prolonged Indian summer had discouraged all hope of an advance. People laughed sardonically at the bulletin which was telegraphed to the country each morning—“All quiet on the Potomac.” No orders to go into winter quarters had been issued to the army, but the men were making themselves as snug as possible in their chilly tents and huts; and the French princes were planning to leave on an excursion to Niagara Falls.

  The city was despondent, but it was also indifferent; and Trollope felt that the loss of faith was worse than the loss of hope. Belief in McClellan was slipping away. No one had any confidence in the administration. The President did nothing. A congressional committee had blazoned the War Department’s mismanagement of contracts. As the nation slid toward bankruptcy, the capital presented the spectacle of waste on an imperial scale. The peculations of the contractors and the frauds and thievery in the Commissary Department vied with the grotesque shiftlessness of foundered horses, spoiled rations, and broken bales of hay, on which along the railroad tracks the lean Swampoodle cattle were growing fat and sleek. The people of Washington shrugged their shoulders. Even in their hostility to England, Trollope thought that they were cynical rather than passionate. “We are splitting into pieces,” he fancied a Washington man as saying, “and of course that is gain to you. Take another cigar.”

  “I hardly dare tell you what cloud we are walking in here,” Mr. Seward wrote home. The carcasses of dead horses in the streets were a blight upon the city. The big droves purchased by the Government were served by civilian teamsters, rough, drunken and cruel. In the corrals which occupied the vacant lots near the Observatory, thousands of horses and mules were packed together, untended, diseased and covered with sores. One evening, a light in the sky brought people running to the flimsy pine stables. A fire had broken out, and rapidly spread. Soldiers and citizens pitched in to cut the halters of the terrified animals. Two hundred of them were burned to death. A thousand others rushed into the darkness, toward the common along Rock Creek, and into the Washington streets. The northern part of the city was filled with running horses. A herd galloped furiously down the dim length of Massachusetts Avenue. Many of them succeeded in passing over the canal bridges into the Seventh Ward. Some ran into holes or gullies, and were killed or broke their legs; others had been so badly burned that, in humanity, they were shot. The next morning, scorched and blackened horses were lying all about the streets. There was a dead horse in the southern enclosure of the Treasury.

  Early in January, Private Michael Lanahan of the Second Infantry, United States Army, was hanged for killing his sergeant. The scaffold was erected on the commons between O and P Streets, near Vermont Avenue. Detachments of regulars escorted the hack, with drawn curtains, in which Lanahan was driven to the place of execution. He was accompanied by two guards and a priest. On the box with the driver, a soldier sat holding the rope. The troops formed a hollow square on the commons. Snow lay on the ground, and from the lowering sky a few flakes were still falling. In the distance, soldiers could be seen standing in dark patches on the white slopes of Meridian Hill. Close at hand, mounted on sheds and outhouses for a better view, about a thousand spectators were gathered. One or two artists sketched the scene as Lanahan, his hands pinioned at his sides, walked firmly from the hack with the priest and the two guards. Before mounting the steps, he said in a loud voice, “Good-bye, soldiers, good-bye.” Curiosity hunters divided the rope, and chipped pieces from the scaffold.

  The dejection of the capital was matched by the dreariness of the winter scene. Day after day, the rain poured down. The streets were running channels of liquid mud. At the corners, to enforce an order against fast riding, sat shivering, spattered dragoons, with dirty woolen comf
orters around their ears. People tipped street sweepers to clear a path at the crossings. Ladies’ dresses were pulled up over heavy red or blue woolen petticoats by a patent arrangement of hooks and loops. Bootblacks abandoned their trade, and stood at the corners with pails and sponges, offering to wash the boots of the pedestrians. The roadbed of the Avenue was so treacherous that troopers took to riding on the brick pavements. Outside the city, the roads would have been considered impassable, had it not been imperative to use them for subsisting the army. Half-loaded wagons wallowed laboriously through the sloughs, and in the camps they told the story that, when a wagon sank near Arlington, the horses had been pierced through by the bayonets of a regiment that had gone under the day before. In ragged uniforms and blankets, the soldiers were bearing the exposure and the inactivity with spirit. “Under the organization of General McClellan we are an army now,” General Blenker told the Committee on the Conduct of the War; “we were not before. The patriotism was as much before, but there has been a great deal done in this time.”

  General McClellan had fallen sick in December. The newspapers called it a cold, but the fact leaked out that he had the symptoms of typhoid. At his headquarters, all work was at a standstill. He had not delegated his powers, and no one could act in his name. The radical leaders pressed the President hard. Even the fact that McClellan had called in a homeopathic doctor was instanced as proof of his bad judgment. Mr. Edwin Stanton went to the general’s sick-room to murmur, “They are counting on your death. . . .”

  Montgomery Meigs, the Quartermaster General, was getting settled in his new office in Winder’s Building, when the President visited him in great distress. He had been unable to gain admittance to McClellan’s sickroom. Sitting down in a chair before the open fire, Mr. Lincoln said, “General, what shall I do? The people are impatient; Chase has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?” Meigs advised him to consult with army officers, and Lincoln sent for McDowell and Franklin. They reached an agreement, in which Meigs concurred, that the army was now strong enough to make a movement on Manassas. This decision, imparted to McClellan by Mr. Stanton, hastened the general’s convalescence. Three days after it had been impossible for the President to see him, McClellan came to a White House conference attended by Seward, Chase, Blair and the officers whom Mr. Lincoln had consulted. The atmosphere was strained. McClellan bore no ill will to Franklin, who was his close friend, but he believed that McDowell was intriguing for his position, and plainly showed his antagonism. He resented the attitude of Mr. Chase, who blurted out a demand that McClellan explain his plans.