Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  The service did not at once give perfect satisfaction. The cars were few and crowded, and crinolines occupied a disproportionate amount of space. Weary business men were aggrieved at being ejected from their seats by conductors “to make room for any female.” When the branch lines were opened, the mysteries of the transfer system led to confusions and heartburnings; and, even after weeks of experience, there were unadaptable persons who thought that they could stand on the curb and beckon cars to come up and take them in.

  After Congress adjourned, the city all but subsided into its summer languor. Trade was dull, and sutlers and dealers were preparing to follow in the wake of the Army of Virginia. Ladies from the regions of Virginia newly occupied by the Union forces came up to see their friends and do a little shopping. Room rates had been cut in half. The forts, said the New York Herald, had a sleepy look, as they sunned themselves on the hilltops. It would need Stonewall Jackson, with half a hundred thousand men, the Herald correspondent thought, to wake up Washington.

  In late July, all business was suspended in Washington as a mark of respect to the dead ex-President, Martin Van Buren. The capital had paid no tribute to the demise of the rebel, John Tyler; but guns boomed and flags drooped in honor of Little Van, a used up man, a souvenir of a quaintly united nation. Festooned in crape, the city was beginning to feel uneasy. The big war meeting at the Capitol was a disturbing sign. Three days later, there was news of a Federal defeat, not on the distant Peninsula, but just south of Culpeper Court-House. Lee, who had replaced Joe Johnston in command of the Confederate army, had sent Jackson to oppose the advancing Army of Virginia. Banks rashly attacked at Slaughter Mountain—also called Cedar Mountain—and God blessed Jackson’s force, which was overwhelmingly larger, with victory. War meetings broke out in Washington, posters and orators calling for volunteers in all the wards. So many of the waiters at Willard’s had enlisted that the dining-room was staffed with Negroes. A committee urgently solicited funds to aid the soldiers’ families. Department clerks were organizing home-guard regiments.

  The President’s order for a draft of State militia was a potent stimulus, not only to the capital, but to able-bodied men in all parts of the Union. There was so much migration for the purpose of dodging enrollment that travel was restricted. Foreign-born residents of Swampoodle fled north in numbers, before the guard at the Washington depot began turning them back.

  Washington was wide awake by mid-August. Newspaper correspondents at Fort Monroe had telegraphed that transports loaded with troops were moving down the James. The defeat at Slaughter Mountain suddenly seemed ominous. With the withdrawal of the Army of the Potomac from the Peninsula, Lee’s army was free to march north in force. Pope, after advancing to the Rapidan, fell back on the Rappahannock.

  The 107th New York arrived at the capital, led by two congressmen, Van Valkenburg and Diven. They had vacated their seats before the close of the session to raise soldiers among their constituents, and the regiment was the first to reach Washington under the President’s July call. It was the advance of fresh legions from New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey. In the despondency which followed the Seven Days, it had been hard to whip up patriotism. These were men who had not sprung eagerly to arms, who needed the inducement of cash bounties to serve the Union; men who sang a brave new song, “We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more.” Again soldiers streamed through the Washington depot. Familiarly, their slouching figures tramped the streets. Their officers took up the conventional positions in the hotel barrooms. They passed across the bridges, and others took their places, to be sent across the river in their turn—a steady procession of raw recruits marching into Virginia. It was all reminiscent of the early days of the war; yet it was not the same. The brash confidence had gone with the bright militia uniforms. There were no more military spectacles and concerts. Regimental bands had been abolished, leaving only the fife and drum corps, and the bands of the brigades. Convalescents replaced army cooks, stewards and messengers. The provost marshal announced that convalescents found at saloons or houses of ill fame would be considered fit for duty. The Secretary of War issued an order revoking all furloughs. The Union needed men. There was a grim urgency in the dispatch of the untrained regiments to Virginia.

  Among the thronging soldiers, a white-faced general moved unnoticed. He had a star on his shoulder straps, and his military erectness bespoke a West Point training; but no command awaited him. Charles P. Stone, after nine months in Federal prisons, had returned to the city he had defended. He had been abruptly released, without trial or explanation; and he had yet to see a copy of the charges brought against him. Into the excitement and preoccupation of Washington, he brought his passionate wish to clear his name, to fight once more for his country. But there was no one to listen to one small voice which cried for justice. The Adjutant General’s office knew nothing about his arrest. General Halleck had never heard of the case. The President put him off with an evasion that had the ring of a jest. There is no record that he tried to see Mr. Stanton.

  The capital was praying for the arrival of the Army of the Potomac. Its fears were not exaggerated. Pope’s small and recently organized army had been engaged in constant skirmishes with Jackson. Banks’s corps had been badly cut up at Slaughter Mountain, and Pope considered Sigel an unreliable officer. The cavalry of the Army of Virginia was almost useless, for the overworked and ill-fed horses had given out. Straggling had become a serious problem, with which it was impossible for Pope to deal in the field.

  Many regiments had been sent from the Washington defenses to reinforce Pope. Sturgis was ordered to the front, and General Barnard, chief engineer of the Army of the Potomac, was placed in command of the fortifications. Hastening back from the Peninsula, Barnard found that the garrisons consisted of less than six thousand men, of whom two thousand had been ordered to march with Sturgis, and two thousand more were nearly ready to be mustered out. Barnard could get plenty of raw recruits to fill their places, but none of them knew how to handle the guns.

  The divisions of the Army of the Potomac and of Burnside’s command began to land at Alexandria and Aquia Creek. Without wagons or artillery or sufficient ammunition, they were ordered by Halleck to join Pope. The corps commanders, Fitz-John Porter and Heintzelman, reported to Pope, as well as division commanders who had distinguished themselves on the Peninsula—Hooker, Kearny, Meade, and John F. Reynolds, the brave and skillful general who led the Pennsylvania Reserves. In leadership and fighting material, these reinforcements were of first-rate quality; but neither officers nor men had confidence in the bragging Westerner to whose army they abruptly found themselves attached. Pope had a conglomeration of soldiers. Lee’s advancing army was a force united by confidence and loyalty, and elated by victory.

  Pope was no military genius. He failed to outguess Jackson. His ears were not sharp enough to hear the tread of Longstreet’s army. But, for all his gasconade, he was courageous and energetic, and he did his best to carry out Halleck’s orders. As late as August 25, he believed that Halleck intended to command the army in person. In the fierce fighting that followed, Lee was in the field. Halleck remained at his desk in the War Department, smoking cigars and rubbing his elbows.

  “Old Brains” won no honors as a master of military science in August of 1862. His armchair in the War Department held only an irritable bureaucrat. Halleck detested Washington—it was a “political Hell,” he wrote his wife—and exhibited a petulant evasion of responsibility. He gave indefinite orders, and neglected to answer pressing dispatches. In vain, Pope appealed to him for information about his plans, about the reinforcements. “Just think of the immense amount of telegraphing I have to do,” he wired Pope on August 26, “and then say whether I can be expected to give you any details as to movements of others, even when I know them.” Through all the bloodshed and wasted heroism of the last days of August, Halleck devoted more than three-quarters of his time to the ra
ising of new troops and to matters in the West.

  In the reception of the incoming regiments, Washington showed that it had learned something of the business of running a war. At the large buildings near the depot, the Soldiers’ Rest and the Soldiers’ Retreat, the men were well fed and lodged, efficiently policed and forwarded. As the troop trains neared the capital, the Commissary Department was notified, and gangs set to work cutting meat, cooking, and laying the tables. Promptly on their arrival, the men sat down to a hot meal. If their orders were to leave at once for the field, a day’s ration for each was cut and cooked while they ate. Rutherford B. Hayes, lieutenant-colonel of the Twenty-third Ohio, found that all arrangements connected with army matters in Washington were perfect. His regiment, part of a division ordered from western Virginia to defend the capital, had spent months campaigning in the wilds, and Washington was a revelation to Colonel Hayes. In his regiment, there was a short, serious boy called William McKinley, a commissary sergeant for whom he was to secure promotion.

  Alexandria, swamped by troop ships from the Peninsula, presented a less attractive military picture. The streets were filled with loitering soldiers, and there was much drunkenness and disorder. A capable man sat at the little depot, the army’s chief of railways, Colonel Herman Haupt. His first duty, to send through the supplies for Pope’s army, was attended with many complications. While the animals of the Army of Virginia were dying in their harness for lack of forage, seventy-eight carloads of grain stood on the tracks on Maryland Avenue. The Alexandria tracks were cluttered with other carloads of supplies of every kind. They were too numerous for the quartermaster to unload. Many of the cars that went to the front were not sent back, and Haupt was faced with a shortage of transportation.

  General Sturgis interfered with the control of the trains, and held up the service for many hours. When Haupt told him that he would delay reinforcements for Pope, Sturgis snapped out, “I don’t care for John Pope a pinch of owl dung!” The generals of the Army of the Potomac argued, disputed, gave contradictory orders, each expecting his command to be given the preference. All wanted to go by rail, and remained in camp in preference to marching. There was no organization through which Haupt could be informed of the arrival of regiments, of the location of their camps, or the priority of their rights. Somehow, working night and day, he kept thousands moving to the front—or what he believed to be the front, for the exact whereabouts of Pope’s army was uncertain, and Halleck left to the railway chief the responsibility for the destination of the reinforcements.

  On August 26, the day that Hayes was looking about Washington with admiration, and Halleck was peevishly disclaiming responsibility, silence fell on the telegraph wires from Pope’s headquarters. Next day, the road from Manassas to Alexandria was dark with refugees. Wagonloads of women and children rolled into the small brick town. Sweating Negroes trudged through the dust. All brought stories of a raid of rebel cavalry who had captured the immense army stores at Manassas Junction. Behind them rose the smoke of burning storehouses and freight cars. Bridges were down, and the railroad was torn up.

  The severance of Pope’s line of communications caused alarm to intrude on Halleck’s preoccupation with recruiting and matters in the West. McClellan arrived that evening at Alexandria, and reported for orders next morning. Halleck thankfully shifted to his shoulders the burden of troublesome detail. McClellan was to direct reinforcements to march to Pope’s army, and to see that the fortifications on the south side of the Potomac were equipped and fully garrisoned. As many men as possible must be pushed toward Manassas. For, as the hours passed, it was becoming plain that no mere band of rebel cavalry stood between the forces of the Union and Washington. The enemy had flanked Pope’s army, and was in his rear. Those were Jackson’s ragged men who feasted on the Federal supplies beside the splintered bridges and twisted tracks.

  When McClellan made his camp in a field near the river at Alexandria, he was no longer the irrational man he had been at the end of the Seven Days. In a trying and anomalous position, he was calm and self-controlled. He had strenuously opposed the order to withdraw his army from the Peninsula, had begged to be allowed to move on Richmond from Harrison’s Landing. Halleck had repeatedly told him that he would have the command of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Virginia, and the rumor of this appointment still ran persistently in Washington; but McClellan could get no definite information about his status. The duties assigned him were those of a staff officer. Ironically, one of them was to send the troops of his own army to the command of another general—a general whom McClellan distrusted, whose communications were severed, whose situation was unknown.

  McClellan went diligently to work. Undoubtedly the defense of Washington was a more congenial task than that of sending reinforcements to Pope. In proposing two alternatives to the President, that of opening communications with Pope or protecting the capital, he used the revealing phrase, “leave Pope to get out of his scrape.” It was not hard to deduce the secret wish in McClellan’s heart, even if he was too virtuous to acknowledge it to himself. Moreover, the inclination of his nature was toward defensive fighting. He was in the vicinity of Washington, and he feared an attack on its ill-garrisoned fortifications. One corps of the Army of the Potomac had been left at Fort Monroe, but McClellan had two at Alexandria. Franklin’s had arrived before him. Sumner’s he had promptly ordered up from Aquia Creek. On August 28, the city was tremulous. Muffled reverberations of cannon could be heard from Virginia. Many people were fleeing to Maryland. All night, McClellan was deluged with telegrams from the War Department, disquieted by a rumor that Lee was advancing on the Chain Bridge with one hundred and fifty thousand men. Next day, Halleck willingly agreed to McClellan’s suggestion that Sumner should protect the fortifications, and particularly the Chain Bridge. The disposition of Franklin’s corps became a matter of dispute. Halleck had wanted to shrug off the whole business of sending the troops forward, telling McClellan to “direct as you deem best.” McClellan deemed best, on the ground that Franklin’s corps wanted wagons, cavalry and artillery, not to push it toward Manassas, where the enemy was in force. But from the capital unfriendly eyes were watching him. Franklin was known to be one of McClellan’s favorites, and the delay was regarded as proof of ill will toward Pope. The tone of Halleck’s orders changed. Complaints that Franklin was slow to march were murmured by the frightened people in the streets. On August 29, the day that his corps plodded nine miles to Anandale, the heavy cannonade from the direction of Manassas told Washington that Pope had fallen back to encounter Jackson.

  Late in the afternoon, the War Department received a dispatch from Pope—the first in four days. The next afternoon, another telegram, sent early in the morning, announced that the Federal forces still held the field. All during the sultry Saturday of August 30, the air was shaken by the thunder of artillery. The Star said that, when wind freshened from the southwest, it carried an acrid smell of gunpowder. At Alexandria, McClellan heard the noise of battle. All his troops were gone. Sumner’s corps had been belatedly ordered to the field by Halleck. McClellan had sent off even his cavalry escort and camp guard. In the field beside the river, the commander of the Army of the Potomac was left with his aides and less than a hundred men.

  McClellan had been publicly humiliated, but his enemies were not satisfied. They charged him with imbecility, cowardice and treason because he had been slow in moving from the Peninsula and had withheld support from Pope. Chase carried around a protest, addressed to the President, which he and Stanton had prepared for the signature of the other Cabinet members. It enumerated McClellan’s offenses, and demanded his immediate dismissal from the army; but Chase’s real opinion was that the general ought to be shot.

  In the afternoon, agitated crowds gathered around a bulletin on the Treasury, which announced a great victory. It stated that ten thousand Federal dead and wounded were lying on the old battlefield of Bull Run, and that surgeons and male nurses should gather at five o�
�clock to go to their assistance. Similar notices were posted by Stanton’s order in the hotels, and appeared in the afternoon newspapers, while the telegraph flashed the War Department’s appeal to the cities of the North. The medical department of the Army of the Potomac had been disrupted by the removal from the Peninsula, and in the confused movement to Pope’s assistance ambulances and almost all medical and surgical supplies had been left behind. At a late hour, it had been realized that there was no adequate preparation for attending or transporting an immense number of wounded.

  A throng gathered at five o’clock at the railroad depot on Maryland Avenue. Tracks and bridges had been hastily repaired, and trains were running as far as Fairfax; but they were sorely needed for military supplies and troops, and it was only over Colonel Haupt’s protest that cars were sent to Washington. They were freight cars, without seats. Packed to the doors, with some people riding on top, they could accommodate less than a thousand. A few women forced their way among the male nurses, but in the main it was a hard crowd. The nurses had been asked to bring stimulants for the wounded. By the time the cars reached Alexandria, half of them were drunk.

  Meantime, from the Surgeon General’s office at F and Fifteenth Streets to Willard’s, the streets were packed with volunteer attendants, laden with food and medicines, waiting to be conveyed in the ambulances which were to leave from the Treasury. Only a quarter of them could find room in the first train that belatedly rolled up. The rest impatiently waited. More ambulances appeared. The crowd surged forward, and fought for places, and in the crush the doctors and nurses were accompanied by many persons for whom transportation to the front was not intended. In the warm light of a fine sunset, curious citizens, women and children, congressmen who wanted to visit the battlefield, sight-seeing officers, and convalescents from the hospitals went clattering over the Long Bridge; and a number of well-known traitors seized this excellent opportunity to pass freely through the lines.