Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  The Army of the Potomac had fought magnificently. In the fires of Fair Oaks and Gaines’s Mill, McClellan had forged his weapon. Never inspirited by great success, as the Federal armies in the West had been, the Eastern soldiers had remained resolute in defeat; and, at the end of the searing week of their retreat, they had driven back the enemy from the slopes of Malvern Hill. They were not the sturdy, spandy boys who had sailed from Washington at the end of March. Before the toll of the Seven Days, the brigades had been decimated, not only by fighting, but by disease. On the other hand, McClellan had often been reinforced during his campaign, and was still receiving fresh troops. He had formed two new army corps, the Fifth and Sixth, and had won consent to appointing to their command his friends, Fitz-John Porter and Franklin. After all his losses, McClellan still had over eighty-six thousand men present for duty. He was crying for one hundred thousand more. His large force was penned in a hostile and unhealthy country, huddled beside the James in the shelter of the Union gunboats; and like another enemy the July sun blazed down on the crowded camp at Harrison’s Landing.

  While barrooms and hotel lobbies buzzed with rumors of Cabinet disputes over the army, major-generals congregated in the capital. There seemed something portentous in their presence. “They are not here on a mere visit of recreation,” remarked the Star.

  Washington had seen two Western generals, Franz Sigel and Lew Wallace. Sigel, the hero of Pea Ridge, had been received with acclaim. He was a German émigré, a neat, morose-looking man with a sparse mustache and beard. Among the large German population in the North, “I fights mit Sigel” had become a rallying cry, and his countrymen were thick in the crowd that serenaded him at Willard’s. Indianians turned out to serenade Lew Wallace, lawyer, politician and Mexican War veteran of their State, who had commanded troops at Fort Donelson and Shiloh. In a vigorous speech, Wallace called for a draft, Negro soldiers, and confiscation of rebel property by the army.

  General Dan Sickles arrived to tell the correspondents that the Excelsior Brigade of New Yorkers had been badly cut up in the battles on the Peninsula. Marcy and Andrew Porter both declared that the Seven Days had been a succession of Union victories. Handsome Joe Hooker told a different story. So did Phil Kearny, who came to Washington wearing the “Kearny patch“—the scarlet badge of his division—in his slanted kepi. At Wadsworth’s headquarters, the correspondents of the great dailies heard Hooker and Kearny telling the tale of the disasters on the Peninsula. A frequent visitor was the Polish exile, Count Gurowski, who scribbled in his diary his detestation of the moderate Republicans, Seward among them, although Gurowski was employed as a translator in the State Department. Shabby and spiteful, the count would sidle in, his one eye leering behind green goggles. He admired Hooker and Kearny, Heintzelman and Edwin Sumner—thought that they and other officers would have fought and won, had it not been for the incompetence of “McNapoleon.” Washington, like the rest of the Union, was divided into two disputing factions—one upholding Stanton and the other, McClellan. Wadsworth’s office in the old Gwin mansion was a little center for Stanton sympathizers. In June, however, the War Secretary had deprived Wadsworth of the greater part of his command. The troops in the fortifications had been placed under a West Pointer, General S. D. Sturgis, who had been called from the West. Wadsworth retained the post of military governor, but his command was reduced to a brigade comprising the provost guard and numbering about three thousand men.

  Major-General Burnside’s strapping figure and beautiful whiskers appeared again on Pennsylvania Avenue. After the Seven Days, he had been ordered to bring a large part of his troops to reinforce McClellan. Burnside had gained great popularity from the success of his expedition, which had given the Union control of the interior coasts of North Carolina; and his repeated visits to the War Office were the subject of keen speculation. He was, in fact, offered the command of the Army of the Potomac, and flatly refused it. He was a man of simple virtues, honest, modest and loyal. The intrigues of Washington distressed him. McClellan was his old and good friend. “. . . I do know, my dear Mac, that you have lots of enemies,” he ruefully wrote in a letter to Harrison’s Landing.

  Outstanding among the generals in Washington was a youngish Westerner, with a vain, slender face, an upturned nose and a stiff rectangle of beard. This was Major-General John Pope, renowned for his victories on the Mississippi. Late in June he had been summoned to take command of the newly created Army of Virginia, formed by a consolidation of the armies of Frémont, Banks and McDowell, and also including the force under Sturgis at Washington. Frémont refused to serve under Pope, who was his junior. He had won no honors in western Virginia or in the Valley, and few regrets attended the termination of his military career. Franz Sigel was appointed to the command of Frémont’s corps in the Army of Virginia, and was enthusiastically received by the German-American troops. McClellan’s former show regiments were in a pitiable state—depleted in numbers, exhausted by long marches, ragged and ill-equipped, demoralized by plundering the Virginia country. Most of them were included in two small brigades, which were commanded by Carl Schurz, who had hurried home from Spain to receive a brigadier’s commission.

  Pope had immediately proceeded to concentrate the greater part of his forces between the Blue Ridge and Manassas, where they were in position to meet an advance from Richmond, as well as in close proximity to the Valley. There were other disorganized brigades besides the Germans, and the cavalry and artillery horses were badly broken down. By mid-July, however, the Army of Virginia was in fair condition to move, and Pope issued orders pushing his lines farther to the south. In Washington, it was anticipated that their gradual advance would detach a considerable rebel force from the neighborhood of Richmond, weakening the army opposed to McClellan.

  While his army advanced, General Pope tarried in Washington, at the President’s request. He was often in attendance at the White House. Besides the weight of his recent successes, he had a background of friendliness with Lincoln, who had been well acquainted with his father in Illinois, and had enjoyed the younger man’s company on the journey from Springfield to Washington. John Pope told stories, and Lincoln liked stories. Reticence and modesty formed no part of the character of the hero of Island Number 10. To his brother officers in the regular Army, he was known as a “bag of wind.” Montgomery Blair was later to remark to Lincoln that Pope was “a blower and a liar,” and should never have been entrusted with the command of the Army of Virginia. His father, Judge Pope, as Gideon Welles heard Blair laboring the point, “was a flatterer, a deceiver, a liar, and a trickster; all the Popes are so.” The President “admitted Pope’s infirmity, but said a liar might be brave and have skill as an officer.” Lincoln also credited Pope with “great cunning“—a quality which the events connected with Jackson’s raid must have taught the President to value in military management.

  The loquacious Westerner gave satisfaction to the Republican radicals. Slavery must perish, he told Mr. Chase at dinner, and he added that there should be a change in the command of the Army of the Potomac. He freely disparaged McClellan’s operations on the Peninsula, and spoke in favor of a vigorous prosecution of the war. From the capital, he issued orders which bore harshly on the noncombatant population of Virginia. Pope was applauded in Washington, but he had scarcely become acquainted with his command. The Army of Virginia needed to be united, inspired, infused with fresh enthusiasm. The only common bond of its three corps was the exhaustion of fruitless campaigning. The troops felt that they had been hardly used and neglected in the Valley, and their failure had made them sensitive to criticism. They were quick to resent comparison with the Western soldiers, whom everyone was praising, and only by the exercise of the most delicate tact could a Western general have won their confidence. Pope, still in Washington, issued an address to his command, eulogizing the soldiers of the West, “where we have always seen the backs of our enemies.” Success and glory, he fatuously declared, were in the advance, while disaster and sham
e lurked in the rear. With the egoist’s want of imagination about other people’s feelings, Pope expected that his address would create “a cheerful spirit” in his men. Its effect was to make him an object of dislike and ridicule, not only to the Army of Virginia, but to all the soldiers of the East. The Army of the Potomac despised him for a sneering outsider, and gibed at the boast, attributed to Pope, that his headquarters were in the saddle.

  Late in June, the President had surprised the country by making a flying trip to West Point, where General Scott was living in retirement. The object of this visit was kept secret, Lincoln, with a humorous reference to Stanton’s “tight rein,” merely stating that it had nothing to do with “making or unmaking any general in the country.” The curiosity of the country was scarcely satisfied. Whatever had passed between the President and General Scott, it became clear in July that Mr. Lincoln was dissatisfied with the civilian direction of the war. In Virginia, the problem was desperate. The Union had two armies, McClellan’s and Pope’s, but they could not form a junction, for the entire force of the enemy lay between them. A solution had to be found; brains were needed, expert military judgment. Out of the West, where, far from the capital, heroes were made, the President called still another general—Henry W. Halleck, commander of the Department of the Mississippi. Grant was appointed to replace him in the West, and Halleck was named general-in-chief of the armies of the Union.

  Halleck came to Washington in an aura of great prestige. He had been highly respected in the regular Army as a master of military science. Scott had favored him for the chief command, before McClellan’s appointment. In civil life, Halleck had proved his ability as a successful lawyer and businessman in San Francisco. His command in the West was a starry record of success.

  There was nothing about Halleck’s appearance which suggested a hero. His figure and dress lacked military dash. It was the fashion for American generals to leave one or two of their coat buttons carelessly unfastened on the chest—out of six buttonholes above the waistline, four of Frémont’s were empty, when he sat for his photograph. Halleck was buttoned up tight, from his double chin to his fat paunch, but he appeared slouchy, rather than neat. He had a stooping posture, and walked with his hands held behind his back, or thrust into the pockets of his trousers. No initiative lurked behind his surly face, with big, bulging, “busy” eyes. Halleck’s bald brow was haloed by the victories his subordinate generals had won. “Old Brains,” his soldiers had sarcastically called him on the one occasion when he took active command—a snail-like advance on Corinth, Mississippi. Halleck had no capacity for leadership. He was a scholar and bureaucrat, who marshaled files of papers and commanded ranks of facts.

  On August 6, a great war meeting was held at the east front of the Capitol. At five o’clock, the park held an expectant throng, facing the portico filled with ladies and the flag-draped platform occupied by the President, the Cabinet, the Washington city councils and other dignitaries. Above their heads, an arch of gas jets, surmounted by a burning star, blazed in futile competition with the daylight. Mayor Richard Wallach, brother of the proprietor of the Star, was in the chair, and the President was greeted with uproarious enthusiasm. Lincoln, in a short and informal speech, made light of the widely bruited quarrel between Stanton and McClellan. It was a politician’s speech, which painted a veneer of concord and co-operation over the management of the war. The President said that “in the very selfishness of his nature” McClellan must wish to succeed, and added, “I hope he will. . . .”

  After visiting the Army of the Potomac, Halleck had advised that it was a military necessity to concentrate McClellan’s forces with those of Pope at some point where they could cover Washington while operating against Richmond. Three days before Lincoln publicly uttered his wishes for McClellan’s success, he knew that the last stamp of failure had been set on the Peninsula campaign, and that the trail of blood and fever which led from Yorktown to Malvern Hill had been marked to no purpose at all.

  X. Lost Leaders

  AMID TOCSINS AND TUMULT, Washington clung to its life as a community. Even during Jackson’s raid, many people had gone quietly about their business. The panic, said the Star, was almost entirely confined to the abolitionists. Major French, whom the President had appointed Commissioner of Public Buildings, passed the time pleasantly, playing euchre of an evening, or watching the fountain in his garden. It was no surprise to him that Jackson got away scot-free from the Federal forces in the Valley. Like other Washingtonians, French had grown skeptical of good report and evil. He had hardly believed, he wrote, that the Merrimac was blown up, until he received “a certified splinter from her“—and then he had doubted whether it hadn’t come from his own wood box.

  While the Army of the Potomac was engaged on the Peninsula, Washington had felt the war in other ways than the alarm of Jackson’s raid. The price of shad was an irritating reminder—fifty and seventy-five cents a pair, because the rebel batteries had frightened off the fishermen and damaged their seines. Speculation had driven gold and silver from circulation, and people went shopping with queer light money that did not jingle in their pockets—Secretary Chase’s greenbacks and almost anybody’s shinplasters. The small paper notes from Northern cities were of uncertain value, and caused much inconvenience and even distress. For the very best notes, it was hard to get change except at a heavy discount, or when most of the note had been expended. The markets refused to give change on purchases amounting to less than sixty cents. Congress, legislating against the nuisance of the shinplasters, created a worse medium of exchange, the gummy, frail postage stamp, for which Chase promptly substituted a postage currency—facsimiles of stamps, printed on small notes of thick paper, without mucilage. Pending the issue of this scrip, Washington disdained the postage stamps, and made the best of the shinplasters.

  In comparison with the preceding summer, the city was free of soldiers, but they were still far too numerous for quiet and serenity. Children went straying after bands and regiments, and there were many accidents to little boys, whom careless officers asked to hold their horses. The wounded from the Peninsula were painfully borne to the wharves, and captured bands from Jackson’s army, in clothing of every shade of butternut dye, coffee-brown, yellow and dust-color, marched to the Old Capitol. Congress had interfered with the District by emancipating its slaves. War disturbed the city’s peace with horse thieves and confidence men and harlots. It set brother against brother in the arguments of divided loyalties; but few were more dangerously engaged. The casualty lists in the newspapers were not scanned with agony in Washington, as in other cities of the Union. The First and Second District Regiments were on duty in the vicinity of the capital, and they did not number many men. It was a grievance of soldiers enlisted in the District that, neither privately nor by legislative enactment, did they receive the local pecuniary rewards which were usual elsewhere; while contributions for the relief of their families were equally deficient. The difficulty of filling the regiments was ascribed to this want of patriotic generosity, as well as to the demand for labor in the wartime capital and the employment of many able-bodied men as Government clerks.

  Around the Capitol, the atmosphere was sulphurous with the rage of the radical Republicans. The support which the President had given to McClellan had combined with his conservative course on the slavery question to produce a crisis within his party. Like men evacuating a condemned city, the legislators took their departure in July. Ben Wade said that the country was going to hell. Many believed that Congress had met for the last time in Washington. But the outward signs were those of permanence and progress. Work had been resumed on the aqueduct for the city’s water supply. Congress had made large appropriations for local improvements: for completing the west wing of the Treasury, five hundred thousand dollars; for adding a new story to the War Department and to the Navy Department, twenty thousand each; for grading and improving Judiciary Square, four thousand; for painting the outside of the old portion of the Capito
l, eight thousand; for removing the army bakery from the basement and repairing damage done by said bakery, eight thousand. The Capitol was swarming with stonecutters, bricklayers, painters and laborers. At the east front, the statuary for the pediment of the northern portico was being assembled—the hunter, the Indian, the wheat sheaf, the anchor of hope. Clark Mills had completed the casting of the great bronze figure of Armed Freedom, and piece by piece the sections were carried to the grounds, and set up on a temporary platform until the dome should be ready.

  The citizens’ pride was puffed by the construction of a street railway. An apparent act of supererogation, workmen had busied themselves in tearing up Pennsylvania Avenue, and gleaming tracks now bisected the rutted street. Two elegant cars had been delivered. One was a large open summer or excursion car, painted in white and cream. The regular passenger car, in a still richer taste, had silk velvet upholstery, windows which combined plain and stained glass, and handsome damask curtains; while the red glass lamp was hung in such a manner that it showed on the outside. Even members of Congress had been pleased to avail themselves of an experimental ride, and the townsfolk rushed to enjoy the free introductory trips which the railway company offered. One mid-July night, at eleven o’clock, a number of gentlemen careened noisily to Willard’s, while on the sidewalks the few persons abroad at that hour lustily cheered their progress. The tracks were to be laid all the way to Georgetown, and there were to be branches to the depot and the Navy Yard. When the line was opened, however, it extended only from the Capitol to the State Department. The first car that ran up the Avenue was crowded almost to suffocation, and an extra horse had to be put on before it could proceed around the curve at the Treasury.