Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  Belle reigned at the Old Capitol for a month, before she, too, was sent to Dixie. She screamed with joy when Wood brought her the news. Concealing on her person two gold saber knots, for Jackson and Joe Johnston, she bade tender farewells to her admirers. “. . . There was not a gentleman in the Old Capitol,” wrote old Mr. Mahony, “whose emotions did not overcome him as he saw her leave. . . .” A fund was raised to buy her a gift; and presently in a Richmond boardinghouse a Confederate officer handed Belle a gold and enamel watch and chatelaine, richly set with diamonds, as a token of the affection and esteem of her fellow-prisoners.

  Washington had not seen the last of Belle, who would return to Carroll Prison the following year. Meantime, a pretty girl from Fauquier County, Virginia, was the only female prisoner who attracted attention at the Old Capitol. The incarceration of Miss Louisa P. Buckner was brief and uneventful. It was notable because she was the niece of the Postmaster General.

  With her mother and a minister, known as Buck Bailey, Miss Buckner drove up from Virginia on a shopping trip. Montgomery Blair loaned his relatives five hundred dollars to purchase groceries and other necessaries in Washington. The little party was well vouched for, with a packet of passes and recommendations, including a note from the President; but Stanton’s chief detective, La Fayette C. Baker, was no respecter of persons and he ordered a careful watch kept on Blair’s sister-in-law and niece. The information that they had visited three drugstores and purchased six hundred ounces of quinine was followed by a report from a Negro servant that Miss Buckner was making herself a skirt, formed of long pockets lined with oiled silk.

  Baker waited until the party had started on the return journey. Then he called on Montgomery Blair, who listened impatiently to his accusations, and declared his relatives to be as loyal as the detective himself. They were overhauled near Chantilly, and Baker went out to Fairfax Court-House to make a personal examination of Miss Buckner’s skirt. It was packed with quinine, and a quantity of contraband drugs was also found in a false body of the wagon. Major Doster’s name was signed on the military governor’s pass, and at one o’clock he was called from bed to answer to Stanton for passing quinine through the army lines. With a dishonorable dismissal hanging over his head, the young provost marshal spent the rest of the night searching the pigeonholes in his office. At last, the memorandum of Blair’s recommendation turned up, and Doster was cleared. On Stanton’s order, the quinine, the horse and wagon and the groceries were confiscated by the Government.

  Miss Buckner was quietly released, after a short stay in prison, leaving Buck Bailey to pay a longer penalty. But the legend of the Quinine Lady was not quickly forgotten in Washington. The iron hand of Mr. Stanton was turned against all enemies of the Union. It closed even on a pretty girl who had an uncle in the Cabinet.

  IX. Two Civilians and General Halleck

  EVERY MORNING, in the reception room of the War Department, Mr. Stanton gave an hour to the public. With a quick step, he came through the door and took his stand behind a high writing desk which reached to his shoulders. There, like an irritable schoolmaster, he darted his eyes, large and piercing behind steel-rimmed spectacles, over the waiting petitioners. He had an hour to give—no more. He estimated the number of the crowd, and allotted the time he would be able to spend on each case. “He would lean his left arm on the desk, settle his spectacles, and wait for people to come and state their business—a peppery little man who looked as though he had not slept well, and as if it would not give him much pain to refuse your most urgent request.”

  The room was silent. People conversed only in hurried whispers. Clerks and orderlies moved on tiptoe. By the door stood a redheaded cavalryman of the provost guard, who well knew that most of the applicants were wasting their time. Politicians, contractors, job seekers and army officers were obliged to present their requests in brief, direct terms, audible to the entire room. The procedure was a novelty in Washington. There was no opportunity for suavity, persuasion, influence. Mr. Stanton was acquainted with no one whose claims of friendship or of favor he felt bound to recognize at the Government’s expense. To each, in his low, soft voice, he brusquely gave his decision, and the line moved on.

  All sorts of people stood waiting for their moment with the Secretary of War. The greedy and the ambitious mingled with sick and wounded soldiers, cashiered officers, friends of persons accused of disloyalty, chaplains, prostitutes, weeping wives and faltering old fathers. They were not invariably received in the order of their coming. Now and then, sometimes from caprice, Mr. Stanton would call an individual from his place. But, rich or poor, old or young, no one was permitted to delay the march of the procession. Across the stammered entreaties, Stanton’s arbitrary answer dropped like a sledge hammer. At the end of the hour, the reception room was empty.

  The Secretary of War had become the most hated man in Washington. Aggressive and pugnacious, he gloried in the enmity he aroused. To the eyes of his petitioners each morning, he must have seemed the incarnation of grim and implacable authority. His figure, with its round body and short legs, looked like that of a powerful gnome. He had a dark, mottled complexion; and a tendency to asthma intensified the irascibility of his face. His naked upper lip lay exposed in a thick, rubbery Cupid’s bow above the profuse chin whiskers, which seemed to have been tied, like a false beard, to his large ears. To the chaos of the War Department—unpaid bills, swindling contracts, idle army officers, leakage of official information, and deficient armaments, equipment and supplies—Stanton brought a driving energy. For days on end, he scarcely left his desk, getting to work on important papers at midnight, falling asleep over them at dawn. In the morning hours, his wife would come to take him home, but often he would not go. Twice a week, a War Department messenger shaved his upper lip in his office. He rarely answered personal letters. He never took a vacation, cared little for social life, did not enjoy the theatre. The only outing he permitted himself was a visit to the Center Market, to purchase the provisions for his own table. The cash, on each occasion, was handed him by his confidential secretary and former law clerk, Major A. E. H. Johnson, who drew Stanton’s salary. The War Secretary carried no money on his person, and had no watch. Neither time nor money existed for a man whose life had been turned into a crusade against the twin abominations of treason and corruption.

  In his tremendous efficiency, Stanton had steeled himself not only against peculation and malingering, but against appeals to human pity. Arrogance and despotic oppression were the food on which he subsisted. Yet such food, however sustaining, leaves its own bitter aftertaste. Stanton was not actually so impervious as he appeared. When he returned to his office, after his public reception, he often washed his face and perfumed his whiskers with cologne, in a fastidious disgust with the emanations of the crowd. Once, when the hour was over, he had a nosebleed so severe that a doctor was called to stop it with cracked ice. There was a troubled melancholy in his sharp eyes. They “always conveyed to me,” wrote Congressman Riddle of Ohio, “some mysterious message that I could never quite understand.” A friend, returning unexpectedly after a private interview with the War Secretary in his office, found him with his head on the desk, sobbing.

  Stanton was a man of violent emotions. They had not always found a stern expression. As a young lawyer in Steubenville, Ohio, he had been desperately in love with his wife, Mary. Their first baby died, and after a year Stanton had the little remains exhumed, and placed the ashes in a metal box, which he kept in his own room. Later, when Mary, too, died, he became hysterical with grief. He insisted that in her coffin she should resemble his bride of seven years before, and the seamstress was obliged to alter the grave clothes several times. In transports of sorrow, he flung into the coffin Mary’s wedding rings and other trinkets he had given her. These were removed, but the little box which contained the baby’s ashes was buried with the mother. Crying and moaning, Stanton walked the floor by day, and at night lay sobbing in bed, with Mary’s nightcap and gown on his
pillow.

  In time, Stanton took another wife, Ellen, a handsome woman, with shining hair dressed wide over the ears, and brows that lifted like wings above dark, brooding, heavy-lidded eyes; “a pretty wife,” wrote John Hay, “as white and cold and motionless as marble, whose rare smiles seemed to pain her.” The second Mrs. Stanton wore a fine lace collar on her silk dress, which was fastened down the front with braided and tasseled bowknots; and her breast pin and earrings had delicate sprays of mosaic flowers. But, when little James died in the summer of 1862, there is no story that the father cherished a box of ashes in his room. By then, Stanton was burning with that passion which has great power as its object; and an abhorrence of all traitors, the excitement of harsh authority, and a fanatical hatred of General McClellan had replaced in his bosom the tender excesses of sentiment.

  Soon after assuming office, Stanton took over the military telegraph, which had been centered at the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac. While McClellan was briefly absent from Washington, the outfit and the records were unceremoniously removed to the War Department, and the operators were installed in the library on the second floor. McClellan’s aide in charge of the telegraph, Captain Thomas T. Eckert, was retained at the head of the office, and became one of Stanton’s most trusted assistants.

  Government censorship of the telegraph, recently controlled by the State Department, was also shifted to the War Department. The surveillance of dispatches, instituted a few days after the outbreak of war, had been irritating, but ineffective. The wires to the North, in a hum of rumors, alarms and inaccuracies, had carried information advantageous to the enemy. The House Judiciary Committee, directed to make an investigation of the telegraph censorship, reported that “the censor has manifested want of both care and judgment in the exercise of his duties.” While important news slipped through, there was often complete suppression of dispatches made up of paragraphs clipped from Washington newspapers, already in circulation. To the indignation of the correspondents, their stories were often slashed into a jumble of nonsense. In a small room, high up a flight of badly lighted stairs at the National Hotel, the censor sat importantly surrounded by soft lead pencils, heavy pens, black ink, scissors and mucilage pots. Frequently the correspondents were obliged to hunt up this potentate at whisky shops or at the Canterbury music hall in order to get his signature of approval on telegrams for the afternoon newspapers.

  Stanton appointed the president of the American Telegraph Company, Colonel E. S. Sanford, military supervisor of telegrams, and provided penalties of arrest and imprisonment for careless administration of the censorship. Washington newspapers received sharp notice of the War Secretary’s severity, when he ordered the arrest of the editor of the Sunday Morning Chronicle—a first-class Washington weekly newspaper, soon to develop into one of the important dailies of the country—for printing information of army operations. On the editor’s expressing regret and explaining that the paper had gone to press at a late hour without his supervision, the order of arrest was suspended. The publisher of the Chronicle was a prominent Democratic supporter of the administration, Colonel John W. Forney, proprietor of the Philadelphia Press, formerly clerk of the House, and recently elected secretary of the Senate.

  Under the new dispensation, the censorship was more drastic, but no more intelligent than under the State Department. Stanton’s suppression, distortion and delay of war news was the despair of the correspondents. The latest military reports were feverishly awaited in all parts of the Union. The war had enormously developed the sale and distribution of newspapers, to the reading of which, as all foreign observers had noted, Americans had always been inordinately addicted. The New York Herald alone had sixty-three war correspondents. Newspapers also had a large circulation in the camps, for the Union produced armies of readers. The Washington city post-office was nearly swamped, during the encampment of the Army of the Potomac in its vicinity, by the tons of newspapers and letters which the troops received. Newsboys visited even the battlefield, and, after one engagement on the Virginia Peninsula, the Prince de Joinville was startled to observe wounded soldiers raising themselves up to buy the latest New York papers.

  Military information was issued at Stanton’s pleasure to Government officials and major-generals, as well as to the public. Only the President had access to the dispatches. There was no telegraph at the Executive Mansion, and Lincoln formed the habit of going to the War Department for the news. Day and night, he crossed the wooded lawn, passed through the turnstile, and followed the path to the side door of the small brick building on Seventeenth Street. All dispatches, including the President’s own, were copied in carbon on yellow tissue paper. One set was handed direct to Stanton. Major Johnson filed these tissues by date, fastening them with the spring clips then used for clothespins, and kept them in open boxes. Another set of the latest telegrams was laid in the drawer of the cipher desk in a room directly adjoining Stanton’s, where the messages were decoded. Here Lincoln examined the telegrams, sometimes lingering with the young cipher operators, telling stories, or looking over their shoulders while they worked. There were other nights when he lay silent on the couch in Stanton’s office. Out of shared responsibilities and anguish of spirit, an intimacy developed from an acquaintance that had inauspiciously begun between the two lawyers. The President admired Stanton, and depended on him. The War Secretary, in his own perfidious and intractable way, yielded loyalty and respect to Lincoln.

  After the Army of the Potomac made its promenade to Manassas, the President issued a war order which won the approval of Stanton and his new allies, the Republican radicals. Lincoln’s patience had been exhausted by McClellan’s failure to anticipate the withdrawal of the Confederates, and the ease with which the Federals were able to march forward on an expedition without profit. He removed McClellan from the chief command of the armies. No successor was named. The commanders of the military departments were ordered to report to Stanton, who at once seized the papers in the War Office rooms which had been McClellan’s headquarters in his capacity of general-in-chief.

  The war order was printed in the National Intelligencer on the morning after it was issued. At Fairfax, McClellan learned the news, not through official channels, but from one of his aides, who read the published item and telegraphed him. Although he was indignant at “the rascals” for “persecuting” him behind his back, he wrote the President a letter which was a model of patriotic self-abnegation. His attitude was such as a high-minded man might assume in a personal feud. To remove himself and his army from “that sink of iniquity,” Washington, to carry his campaign to the inaccurately mapped reaches of the peninsula between the York and the James Rivers, was the enterprise on which he was stubbornly set; and he gave no sensible consideration to the fact that his elaborate strategy had been made subject to a supervision which was not only inexperienced, but hostile.

  The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had resolved on a visit to Manassas. The Virginia countryside was disfigured by shattered trees, blackened ruins and rudely marked graves. The litter of the retreating Confederates strewed the roads. Fences had been demolished; and the wheat fields were trampled plains of earth, covered with rebel soldiers’ huts. Yet the excursion was not without its pleasurable aspect. It proved to be far more agreeable than the outing which two of the committee members, Ben Wade and Zach Chandler, had made the preceding summer. As the carriages rolled along in the pale March sunlight, the white tents of McClellan’s army gleamed through the pine trees. Troops of cavalry were in motion. To the sound of martial music, soldiers were drilling in the open spaces, while others were amusing themselves by running races or playing ball. Congressman Julian of Indiana said that it was “delightfully exhilarating,” especially to men who had been confined all winter at the long hearings in the basement of the Capitol. Centreville and Manassas must have been more exhilarating still, for they afforded the committee members that high moral pleasure which is to be found in the justification of a s
trong animosity. An inspection of the Quaker guns confirmed their suspicions of General McClellan’s good faith. “They were certain, at all events,” as Julian euphemistically phrased it, “that his heart was not in the work.”

  The gentlemen of the Joint Committee were not the only ones who were curious to visit the battlefield, now that it was restored to Federal occupation. Washington livery-stable keepers and hackmen were reaping a harvest from the trippers. A Saturday excursion train was inaugurated, while two stages made the run on three days of the week, in charge of drivers who had been taken prisoner by the rebels and were therefore qualified to act as guides. The collection of souvenirs was a craze. A commercial motive animated some of the tourists, for war curiosities found a ready market. At Fairfax, where the courthouse stood neglected, with open doors and ancient papers scattered over the floor, the excursionists carried off documents, some of which dated from the reign of George III. On the field of battle, trophies were hard to find, for everything had been picked over by the Union soldiers. Near Bull Run, the Confederates had erected a marble tablet to the memory of General Bartow, who had fallen in the battle; and Northern vandals busied themselves in chipping off pieces of the slab as mementoes. Cartridge boxes and haversacks, Bibles, horseshoes, rifle bullets and scraps of iron were eagerly salvaged. Now and then, industrious searchers were rewarded by a scabbard, a crooked saber or a bent gun barrel; and, stowing the treasure under the carriage seat, they drove back to Washington in triumph. Often their elation was short-lived. Government property was liable to seizure, and daily at the depot the provost guard removed from citizens between ten and a hundred pieces of swords, muskets and side arms. At the end of April, visits to Manassas were brought to a close by a report that three civilians on horseback had been captured by rebel cavalry. Guerrilla parties were said to be still hovering around that vicinity, and tourist travel was prohibited.