Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  Under the new dispensation, the Old Capitol bore an especially close relation to the War Department. Both Secretary Stanton and his stout, red-headed Scottish Assistant Secretary, Peter H. Watson, were lawyers practicing in Washington. In spite of the great pressure of national affairs, they were prone to busy themselves with local details. William P. Wood, the superintendent of the Old Capitol, was known to both of them. A native of Alexandria, Wood was a model-maker by trade, and in 1854 he had been an expert witness in the famous patent case, McCormick vs. Manny, in which both Stanton and Watson had acted as counsel for the defense—the same case in which Stanton had rudely edged out an obscure associate, Abraham Lincoln. Cyrus McCormick lost the case, which turned on an alleged infringement of patents for his reaping machine. When he was an old man, Wood made an affidavit that he had used trickery to aid the defense—altering the design of an early model of the McCormick reaper which was introduced in evidence. The court records do not show that his chicanery influenced the decision. Wood stated that Stanton never knew of the deception. The jailer, however, was reputed to have unusual influence with the War Secretary. Young Major William E. Doster, who became the Washington provost marshal when the Army of the Potomac took the field, said that Wood “was deeper in the War Office than any man at Washington, and it was commonly said that Stanton was at the head of the War Office and Wood at the head of Stanton.”

  Wood had been a private in the regular Army, and, as civilian administrator of the Old Capitol, seemed to take pleasure in contemptuously disregarding the orders of all military officers. His impudence was particularly galling to Andrew Porter, who had been captain of the company in which Wood served. Watson told Doster that Porter once came to the War Department in a rage, because his orders had been rescinded by “`that dog of a citizen Wood,’ whom he used to tie up by the thumbs in New Mexico.” After hearing Porter’s demand for Wood’s dismissal, Mr. Stanton gave the general “the alternative either of being insulted by Wood or resigning his commission.” Doster evoked this anecdote by visiting the War Department with a complaint of his own about the superintendent’s disobedience. He concluded “that it was dangerous to interfere with Wood.”

  Stanton later made the jailer a colonel of cavalry. Wood also served as an agent of the War Department, and was sent on several confidential missions to the South. In the fall of 1862, he was severely censured by army officers for his activities while accompanying prisoners to the Confederate post of exchange at City Point, Virginia. He exceeded his authority by entering into general negotiations for exchange, and persuaded the Confederate commissioner, Robert Ould, a native of Georgetown and former District Attorney and popular clubman in Washington, to send him to Richmond, under ostensible arrest. The storm of protest from the Federal commissioners forced the War Department to recall Wood. He refused to report to General Dix, then in command at Fort Monroe. Dix made such an indignant report that Mr. Stanton replied that Wood should have been sent to the guard-house. The War Secretary, however, continued to place great reliance on the jailer, who retained his wide authority at the Old Capitol until the close of the war.

  Though Wood was an undersized man of more than forty years, he had great physical strength. On one occasion, he shook a prisoner—a constable of the District marshal’s force—“almost out of his clothes,” because he had presumed to write the military governor about the secessionist proclivities of the gentlemen whose room he shared. As the inmates were well aware, the Old Capitol was riddled with paid informers. Detectives, in the guise of prisoners, were planted in the rooms, and joined the groups that gathered at mealtimes in the yard. The talebearing constable was a self-appointed spy, and had made the mistake of competing with Wood’s established system.

  In making up his reports for the Secretary of War, the superintendent also depended on winning the confidence of the prisoners. Though his manners were uncouth—he prided himself on his plebeian extraction—he was indulgent and obliging. When he chose, he could treat his prisoners with flattering respect; and he succeeded in convincing them that he was their friend, while higher authorities were responsible for their worst discomforts. He protected his charges from impertinent servants and insolent guards. He did his best to put through their letters, all subject to a rigid inspection. The fresh baker’s bread, which was the only praiseworthy item on the prison bill of fare, was ordered on Wood’s responsibility. At least, he told the prisoners this, and they believed him. All accounts of life in the Old Capitol—even Mrs. Greenhow’s—bear testimony to Wood’s good nature. He was crafty and hypocritical, but his kindness was genuine. When one of the prisoners was shot dead by a sentinel, this rough ex-soldier could not conceal his agitation and dismay. His face went white. His voice came hoarsely through his trembling lips.

  Nevertheless, Wood was regarded with anything but affection in the Old Capitol. His abolitionist views and his loyalty to the administration would have been enough to earn him the animosity of most of the inmates. They hated him, moreover, for his detective system; and were convinced that he accepted bribes and drew large profits from the swindling prison commissary, in which his nephew was a partner. Pious minds were shocked by the fact that the superintendent was an infidel. In a day when religious nonconformity was a scandal—Lincoln and his supporters had hushed up the President’s early adventures in skepticism—Wood, who had been reared in the Roman Catholic faith, was an acknowledged doubter. On one occasion, when he appeared as a witness in the criminal court of the District, his testimony was thrown out by the judge, because he would not avow a belief in a personal existence after death. Mrs. Greenhow said that “his desire to make proselytes to his own want of faith was the ruling passion of his soul“; and that, if anyone in the prison asked him for a book, he was sure to produce a scrapbook of his own anti-religious writings, or the works of Tom Paine.

  On a pleasant Sunday morning in August of 1862, Wood went bawling, like a town crier, through the Old Capitol corridors: “All ye who want to hear the Lord God preached according to Jeff Davis, go down to the yard; and all ye who want to hear the Lord God preached according to Abe Lincoln, go down to Number 16.” One prisoner astutely observed that this was the jailer’s way of holding up both the Gospel and the credulous to ridicule. The fact remained that, while an abolitionist preacher and his skinny wife discoursed in Number 16, the yard was treated to an attack on New England fanaticism by a Confederate chaplain who was among the prisoners. This performance was repeated on subsequent Sundays. There were no such broad-minded doings at Fort Lafayette or Fort Warren. Wood had a characteristic surprising in a jailer—a sense of humor. He could listen to violent arraignments of the administration “with a twinkle of amusement in his shrewd cynical eyes.” He replied to one of Mrs. Greenhow’s bombastic letters—he had offered to help her obtain her private papers, and wanted a power of attorney to receipt for them—with the request, “be kind enough to dispense with the God and Liberty style in your pronunciamento.” But the excellent criticism was wasted.

  Among the frequent visitors to the prison was a lean, muscular, taciturn man, with bright-brown hair and beard, and cold, searching gray eyes. This was a former mechanic, La Fayette C. Baker, a native of western New York who had done good service as a member of the San Francisco vigilantes. Early in the war, he had been sent as a spy to Richmond by General Scott, and had shown great ingenuity in performing his hazardous mission. After being arrested by the rebels and holding three conversations with Jefferson Davis, he had escaped and returned to Washington with a fund of information about the Confederate army and capital. On Scott’s recommendation, the State Department had employed Baker as a detective, and he was taken over by the War Department, after the February reorganization. He had made an excellent impression on Mr. Seward as a patriotic and zealous agent—truthful, though perhaps indiscreet—and both Stanton and Watson reposed great confidence in him. As chief of a large force of War Department detectives, organized under Watson’s supervision, Baker was to b
ecome a sinister figure whose extraordinary powers and oppressive acts would make him feared and execrated throughout the nation.

  Eventually, like Wood, Baker was given a colonel’s commission. His command was the First District Cavalry—an organization which, for want of Washington recruits, was chiefly composed of companies from Maine. Prior to winning rank and notoriety, he was an obscure agent, operating mainly in Washington, Alexandria, Baltimore and lower Maryland, central points for the clandestine trade and communication with the Confederacy. In Washington, Baker was immediately marked as a scoundrel. Among the prisoners in the Old Capitol, his venality was a byword. Watson himself admitted to Doster that the employment of Baker was a case of “set a rogue to catch a rogue.” Doster found that the Pinkerton detectives and the Washington police also had a bad opinion of Baker, and that Wood was of the same mind. Yet, in the superintendent’s office, Baker and Wood were already beginning those secret examinations of prisoners which, later in the war, were to become a notorious procedure in the solitary cells of the Old Capitol annex, Carroll Prison.

  Mrs. Greenhow was lodged in a back room on the second floor of the Old Capitol’s A Street wing, where, General Andrew Porter said, she was “quite retired.” This seclusion was prompted in part by fear that she would signal from her window to secessionist sympathizers. The ease with which she had outwitted the guard at the Sixteenth Street house had given her a reputation for superhuman ingenuity. Her only outlook was the prison yard, and she was forbidden to approach the barred window. Food was carried to her room, which she was not permitted to leave, even for exercise. Porter’s opinion that the room was “fixed up . . . . quite comfortable” was not shared by its occupant, who viewed with distaste the wooden chairs and table, the diminutive looking glass, and the straw bed which she shared with little Rose. Major Doster thought the furnishings suitable to a room in a second-class boardinghouse—praise never bestowed on any other quarters in the Old Capitol. Mrs. Greenhow had a sewing machine and a desk, books and writing materials. Lieutenant Sheldon had helped her “to rescue some few cherished memorials.” She also had her pistol, though the ammunition had been removed.

  From the Old Capitol, the lady sent out a stream of letters, complaining to everyone she knew about the military authorities. She tantalized the guards, made impossible demands, and resented every prison regulation. Her Southern blood boiled at her proximity to the contrabands. Like Marie Antoinette, she was an aristocrat persecuted by the rabble; and she addressed the Yankee officers with theatrical dignity, accenting her words with an unnatural distinctness of enunciation. “Greenhow enjoys herself amazingly,” wrote a fellow-prisoner, Mrs. Morris. Porter once exclaimed that he would prefer to resign, rather than continue the irksome duty of having Mrs. Greenhow in charge. With Major Doster, on the other hand, she always talked freely; and he spoke of her treating her keepers with flattery and coquetry. This young officer wasted no pity on the lady. He thought that the moment of her arrest had been the happiest of her life.

  Mrs. Greenhow’s chief aversion at the Old Capitol was Brigade-Surgeon Stewart, the portly prison physician whose ministrations she had managed to avoid at her own house. She described him as “a vulgar, uneducated man, bedizened with enough gold lace for three field marshals,” and said that his calls were prompted by an ambition to brag of having talked with her. The surgeon, whose pompous loyalty to the Union made him unpopular with secessionists, was under orders to visit all prisoners, but Mrs. Greenhow haughtily refused to permit him to attend either herself or Rose.

  Little Rose had been taken to the Old Capitol at her mother’s request; yet Mrs. Greenhow contrived to convey the impression that the child’s confinement was an added proof of the administration’s cruelty. “My little darling,” she said to Rose, soon after their arrival, “you must show yourself superior to these Yankees, and not pine.” “O mamma, never fear,” Rose replied; “I hate them too much.” But even a proud spirit cannot sustain an imprisoned child. Rose seldom left the small, dark room. Her chubby face grew thin and pale. She could not eat the prison meals of greasy beans and fat junk, and often cried herself to sleep from hunger. Though Mrs. Greenhow was reputed to be rich, and though after her release she engaged in cotton and tobacco speculations in Richmond, her means were apparently straitened at this time. It seems scarcely possible that she was too poor to purchase food; and, if she was, she could certainly have obtained it from the bountiful Washington secessionists. She said, however, that only the edibles sent her by Confederate officers in the Old Capitol kept her from starving; and under her eyes, as the weeks passed, little Rose continued to pine. She caught camp measles, which was epidemic in the prison. At length, she became so ill that her mother grew alarmed, and wrote the provost marshal to demand the services of a physician. A few hours later, Brigade-Surgeon Stewart burst into the room, burning with the injustice of the reprimand he had received for neglect of duty. It was one of Mrs. Greenhow’s most dramatic moments in the Old Capitol, and she described the scene with relish. Her insults drove the surgeon into an apoplectic rage. He insisted on examining the child, but Mrs. Greenhow pushed herself between him and the bed, where Rose lay bright-eyed with fever. “At your peril but touch my child,” she cried. “You are a coward and no gentleman, thus to insult a woman.” The unfortunate surgeon attempted to fight it out, but he was no match for “the Wild Rose.” When Mrs. Greenhow’s poundings on the door had brought the officer of the guard, Brigade-Surgeon Stewart “slunk out,” defeated. The authorities called in a doctor whose political views made the mother willing to have him attend the little girl.

  Soon after, Mrs. Greenhow was allowed to take little Rose for a half-hour’s daily exercise in the mud of the prison yard. She declined to associate with her fellow-prisoners, Mrs. Baxley and Mrs. Morris, and declared that their company was “but a shade less obnoxious” than that of the Negroes. The excitable Mrs. Baxley endured her detention with an ill grace. She was called “the most defiant and outrageous of all the female prisoners,” and once engaged in a fist fight with a guard. She tried to push past him. He cursed her. She gave him a bloody nose. He knocked her down and kicked her. To Mrs. Greenhow, the fracas was a personal humiliation.

  Mrs. Augusta Morris, a gay and pretty little woman, was equally detested by Mrs. Greenhow, and ascribed this hostility to jealousy and “mean ambition.” Though reticent about her birthplace, Mrs. Morris liked to encourage the impression that she was French. Major Doster, who found her “exceedingly fascinating,” said that she was the daughter of an Alexandria baker. She had been married in Paris to Dr. J. F. Mason, a native of Virginia. They had separated, and in the autumn of 1861 Mrs. Morris, having resumed her maiden name, had come with her two small sons from Richmond to Washington. She visited the State Department and offered to reveal the Confederate army signals for ten thousand dollars; and she discussed the same proposal with McClellan’s father-in-law and chief of staff, General Marcy. If she hoped, as she said, to disarm suspicion that she was a rebel agent, she was mistaken in her course. Pinkerton’s men were watching her closely. They discovered that she was in correspondence with Thomas John Rayford—Colonel Jordan’s pseudonym, by which Mrs. Greenhow, too, addressed him—and had even received a visit from him at Brown’s Hotel, where she was boarding “in style.” So vigilant were the detectives that they attended the burial of Mrs. Morris’s baby, who died early in February. The following morning, at four o’clock, she was arrested, by order of General McClellan, in her bed at the hotel. But she maintained that the general had acted too late. “I already had gotten his plans, as laid before the military committee, from one of the members,” she wrote her estranged husband, who was now a captain in the Confederate army.

  Mansfield T. Walworth, a clerk in the Adjutant General’s office, was arrested in company with the charming grass widow. He was the erratic son of a distinguished father, the Honorable Reuben H. Walworth, chancellor of New York State. Through his wife’s family, Mansfield Walworth had influ
ential connections in the South, and for months he had aspired to be a secret agent of the Federal Government. He had received some encouragement from Secretary Seward, who was his father’s friend; but he protested that his ambitions had been recently balked by General Marcy, because he had reported to Seward that Marcy had taken an undue interest in little Mrs. Morris. Walworth was a literary man, the author of a number of sensational novels which had a wide circulation. No evidence of disloyalty was found against him. Pinkerton reported that he seemed merely to have been “mixed up with Mrs. Morris socially to some extent, like several other parties.” But the acquaintance, possibly reinforced by the fact that a Confederate lieutenant’s uniform had been found in his trunk, cost Walworth two months’ imprisonment in the Old Capitol.