Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  When all the ambulances were gone, some of those left behind appropriated carriages and horses, while a few hardy individuals started off on foot. Still, there were clamors for conveyances. The Surgeon General produced another group of “excited nurses.” At the same time, the Quartermaster’s Department began to call for wagons. It is not clear what had happened to all the wagons in Washington. Neither Franklin nor Sumner had been able to get any. Some had gone to carry supplies and ammunition to Pope, during the interruption of the railroad service. McClellan said that most of them were being used for the current supplies of the Washington garrisons. Perhaps the breakdown in the organization of the wagon trains was simply another aspect of the prevailing confusion. The provost marshal was called on to supply transportation, and on this mission a regiment of cavalry and two regiments of infantry scattered through Washington and Georgetown. Charging with drawn sabers on the hack drivers, the cavalry forced their passengers to alight. Strangers, who had just arrived in town, found themselves in the streets with their baggage; and ladies in evening toilette desolately trailed their laces and ribbons through the dirt of Pennsylvania Avenue.

  By nine o’clock in the evening, the approaches to the provost marshal’s office in the Gwin mansion were “jammed with a variety of vehicles and drivers in every shade of rage and indignation.” Not only had the hackmen been deprived of their fares, but they were being impressed for a long night’s drive, on uncertain roads, with every probability of accidents. Soldiers carried out the army supplies and piled them on the seats, and the caravans moved off with a detachment of cavalry to keep them in order. Some of the drivers contrived to upset on the way, and “the back of the sabre was used to straighten them.”

  At midnight, Provost Marshal Doster received a peremptory order to furnish a train for quartermaster’s stores by six o’clock in the morning. It was then that the guard began to take the horses from the street-railway cars, and harness them to the discarded omnibuses. At the Western Market, on the Avenue at Twentieth Street, hucksters angrily trundled off their pots and kettles and unsold merchandise in wheelbarrows, while their wagons and drivers departed under military escort. The guard invaded livery stables, private stables and cab depots. At dawn on Sunday morning, the air of Washington was noisy with the curses of reluctant patriots, driving “omnibuses, cabs, market wagons, old family coaches, hay wagons, dog-carts, rockaways, sulkies, coupés, and gigs,” to be loaded at the quartermaster’s.

  With early morning came the shocking news that the report of victory at Bull Run had been false. The capital awakened to rumors of disaster. Some said that the army had fallen back on Centreville, others that the Confederates were at Munson’s Hill, preparing to shell the city. A little after seven o’clock, an ambulance with a cavalry escort crossed the Long Bridge, and rattled up to Willard’s. It was instantly surrounded. The politician and diplomat, General Schenck, who commanded a division of Sigel’s corps, lay inside. He raised himself, and a peering gentleman exclaimed, “Why, General, is it you?” “Yes,” said Schenck, uncovering his rudely bandaged arm, “and they have shattered me, too.” His words came indistinctly to the bystanders, who flew to repeat their version; and soon it was all over Washington that General Schenck had said that “our army was scattered to the winds.” Hundreds of people hastened to vacate the city. At the Old Capitol, the inmates joyfully listened to the stories of a few prisoners who had been captured on the preceding day, and the Fredericksburg hostages were “almost in ecstasies.” The President called John Hay from his bedroom—“Well, John, we are whipped again, I am afraid.”

  With soldiers and civilians milling in the streets, it did not look like Sunday in Washington. Weary, unarmed stragglers and Negro fugitives from Virginia thickened the crowds of pedestrians. The clouds hung heavy. There was a tense silence in the damp air. The only clatter of traffic came from ambulances and hacks, carrying wounded men from Centreville. After all the commotion about the casualties, some of these early arrivals could not obtain admission to the hospitals, and were taken to the City Hall, where they were provided with cots and blankets.

  On Saturday night, Pope had sent Halleck a telegram, reporting that the army had withdrawn to Centreville, but adding that the troops were in good heart, their conduct had been very fine, and everything would go well. This was the only knowledge that Halleck possessed on Sunday morning, but McClellan was better informed. Unable to endure the suspense, he had sent to the front one of his German aides—“a cool-headed old soldier,” named Hammerstein. Before daylight, Hammerstein had returned with the news that the Federals were beaten—“McDowell’s and Sigel’s corps broken,” Heintzelman’s and Fitz-John Porter’s “badly cut up, but in perfect order.” McClellan was a man of imagination. He must have been able to see it all: the defeated brigades, the abandoned guns, the shamed and weary stragglers; the dead and wounded on the lost field. When he telegraphed Washington that there were twenty thousand stragglers from Pope’s army on the road between Centreville and Alexandria, Chase said that it was “infamously false and sent out for infamous purposes.”

  McClellan hoped that, reinforced by Sumner and Franklin, the army would be able to hold its own; but, in the light of Hammerstein’s report, he did not regard Washington as safe against the rebels. “If I can slip quietly over there,” he wrote his wife, “I will send your silver off.” Passes were once more strictly regulated at the bridges, and he did not care to ask the War Department for so slight a favor as permission to go to the capital. In his “pain and mortification” he had requested permission to be with his troops on the battlefield, even if he were not allowed to command them; but Halleck had telegraphed that it would be necessary to consult the President. Inaction had become torture to McClellan, for Hammerstein had told him that his soldiers wanted him. On Sunday evening, he saw an order, published by Stanton’s direction, stating that his command consisted of that portion of the Army of the Potomac which had not been sent to Pope. Save for the troops left at Fort Monroe, all had now been sent. McClellan’s anomalous position had at last been defined. He was in command of nothing.

  After all, McClellan was not obliged to steal secretly to Washington on a domestic errand. Another telegram from Pope was laid on Halleck’s desk on Sunday afternoon. “I should like to know,” it inquired, “whether you feel secure about Washington should this army be destroyed?” Halleck had nothing to say. He had crumbled. His nerve was gone; and to the other disasters of Washington was added the disintegration of a bureaucrat. That night, “utterly tired out,” he telegraphed to beg McClellan for help.

  Next morning McClellan posted to the capital. He said that Halleck asked him to take charge of the Washington defenses and garrisons, actually under the command of Barnard. McClellan urged Halleck to go to the front, and finally succeeded in persuading him to send a staff officer to investigate. Meantime, he strongly recommended that the Army of Virginia should fall back on the Washington fortifications. It was the course which Pope himself advised, and Halleck sent the order. Pope’s dispatches no longer mentioned the good heart of his troops, but made sinister allusion to the want of it among the officers. Later, he reported that the enemy was between him and Washington. The fight would be desperate, and he hoped that Halleck would make all preparations for a vigorous defense of the entrenchments.

  On that cloudy Monday morning, the early train brought an eager crowd to Washington. Bright, expectant and dedicated, there descended from the cars the country practitioners, professors, undergraduates and nurses whose hearts had been touched by the War Department’s call for volunteers to succor the wounded. No one had given another thought to them—no one, in the growing consternation, was prepared to think of them now. The nurses who had gone in the ambulance trains had been unfortunate. They had been set down on a battlefield which was in the possession of the victorious Confederates; and, interrupted in their attentions to the wounded by a body of rebel cavalry, fifty-nine ministering angels from Washington had been taken pris
oner. Those who had gone by train had never reached the battlefield at all. After standing all night in the unventilated freight cars, they had been deposited on Sunday morning in the mud of Fairfax Station. There the commanding officer had orders to arrest all who had partaken too freely of whisky. The patriots from the North found that volunteer nurses were not only superfluous, but in bad repute. The War Department had ordered General Wadsworth to place guards at the bridges and wharves to turn back “drunken and other nurses.”

  Out at Upton’s Hill, where the Twenty-third Ohio was on guard duty, Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes wrote his wife an enthusiastic letter. He could see four forts, a number of camps and many fine residences. From the higher elevations, the white dome of the Capitol was visible. Artillery sounded in the distance, troops and army wagons and ambulances were pouring past, and couriers galloped to and fro. It was a relief to get away from the petty skirmishes of western Virginia to “the pride and pomp of glorious war.” The soldiers were in ignorance of the results of the fighting. Hayes had seen many wounded, some prisoners, a few paroled men. “Some think we got the best of it, some otherwise. As yet I call it a tie.”

  But, while there was still hope in the entrenchments, the city was in desperation. A number of male nurses, bewildered and frightened by their experience, had returned with terrifying stories. The Army of the Potomac had refused to fight. McClellan and his officers—Fitz-John Porter and Franklin, in particular—had deliberately caused the defeat of General Pope. McDowell was guilty of treason, one wild rumor ran, and Sigel had shot him on the battlefield. The army was cut to pieces. The routed survivors were fleeing to Washington in panic. They had not eaten for days, and hunger was driving them faster than the great Confederate army which came thundering behind them. The fall of the capital was a certainty.

  Hatless, shoeless and ragged, stragglers limped across the Long Bridge. Hysteria mounted in the capital. The solace of whisky was so freely sought that Wadsworth closed down all drinking places. The excitement was not allayed by the provost guard, galloping up and down the Avenue as though Lee’s divisions were already at the fortifications. The hacks which had returned from the front were rounded up, and transformed into provision trains. Omnibuses were rushed to wharves and depots to carry the wounded to the hospitals.

  Near sunset on Monday, a loud uproar of artillery—from Chantilly, near Fairfax Court-House—seemed to threaten Washington with imminent invasion. It mingled with the roll of thunder, as lightning split the sky and rain came down in torrents. Sidewalks and crossings were flooded. Pedestrians—in other words, practically all who were abroad—waded up to their knees in muddy water. After a stormy night, Tuesday dawned clear and cool. McClellan was at an early breakfast when the President and Halleck came along the wind-swept square to his house on H Street. Halleck’s aide had brought back the same story as Hammerstein. The army was badly whipped, and the roads to Washington were clogged with stragglers. Lincoln had come to an important decision. He asked McClellan to take command of the city and of the troops falling back on it from the front.

  The President was among those who believed that McClellan had wanted Pope to be defeated. He was influenced by the delay in sending forward Franklin’s corps, and the phrase, “leave Pope to get out of his scrape,” rankled in his mind. John Hay had the impression that Lincoln thought that McClellan was “a little crazy.” In deciding to restore him to command, the President had his political ear to the ground. The general’s cause had been espoused by factious and discontented Democrats. He was in close alliance with leading opponents of the administration, and was beginning to be regarded as the leader of the opposition party, on whose support Lincoln depended for recruiting and other war measures. Moreover, in the great emergency, there was no one else to choose. Halleck had gone to pieces. Pope’s gasconade was over. It was McClellan, or chaos. “There is no man in the Army,” Lincoln said, “who can man these fortifications and lick these troops of ours into shape half as well as he.”

  The Secretary of War was busy with nervous preparations for the fall of Washington. To prevent arms and ammunition from falling into the hands of the enemy, he had given orders to ship the Arsenal stores to New York. In Stanton’s office, the important papers had been gathered into bundles which could be carried by men on foot or on horseback. On Tuesday morning, gunboats were anchored in the Potomac. The steamer Wachusett was making her way to the Navy Yard—ready, said McClellan, to take the President and Cabinet to a place of safety. Neither then nor in any other crisis did Lincoln act like a man about to flee in terror. He directed that the department clerks and the employees on the public buildings be organized into companies, armed and supplied with ammunition; and he went to face a great ordeal—the meeting of his Cabinet.

  Seward was out of town. It was surmised that he wished to avoid any connection with the scheduled dismissal of McClellan, in which, although he had long sustained the general, he had been induced to acquiesce. The Cabinet members were, for once, in agreement; and on their unanimity there fell like a bombshell Stanton’s trembling announcement that the President had placed McClellan in command. Stanton fumed and lowered—he had been looking forward to a courtmartial. Chase cried that restoring McClellan was “equivalent to giving Washington to the rebels.” The President’s manner toward these two was kind, even affectionate. He said that, as a fighting general, McClellan was a failure, but that he had the confidence of the soldiers. The army was “tumbling into Washington,” something had to be done. Calmly, but emphatically, he told Stanton that the order was his own, and that he would be responsible for it to the country. Montgomery Blair said that Stanton and Chase would have preferred the fall of the capital to the reinstatement of McClellan.

  In the midst of his hasty preparations to go to the front, the general received a message that he should not assume command until the troops were close to the fortifications. It was afternoon when, with a few aides and a small cavalry escort, he rode out to Munson’s Hill. Some infantry of McDowell’s corps was beginning to come in, and McClellan halted the soldiers and ordered them into position. Soon, a regiment of cavalry appeared, with Pope and McDowell and their staff officers “sandwiched in the midst,” as McClellan sarcastically described it. “I never,” he wrote, “saw a more helpless-looking headquarters.” Haughtily, by McClellan’s own account, he gave the two generals permission to return to Washington, remarking that he himself would go to the artillery firing, which could be heard in the distance. As night fell, the guns ceased. Still, McClellan rode on, far beyond the fortifications where the officers slept in boots and spurs, and the lights of the signal corps flashed from all the heights. On a dark road under the stars, he met the first troops of Fitz-John Porter’s corps, which had seen hard fighting and suffered heavy losses. Their cheers aroused the men behind them, and through the lines rang the cry that Little Mac was there. Far down the road, regiments, brigades, divisions roared with a tumult of cheering; and men crowded around McClellan’s horse, shouting, crying, thanking God, and begging him to lead them into battle.

  The soldiers of the East had not yet seen the backs of their enemies. They had stubbornly waged a long and losing fight—a fight that had been predestined to defeat. In the positions assigned them in the Washington entrenchments, they waited in black resentment, eager to fight again under a general they could trust. There was indignation among the fresh troops of Sumner’s and Franklin’s commands, who had marched too late to participate in the battle—twenty thousand men, the veterans of the splendid Second and Sixth Corps of the Army of the Potomac. The good old soldier, Edwin Sumner, was enraged when he heard that McClellan had said that his corps had not been in condition for fighting. If he had been ordered to advance right on, he later told Ben Wade’s committee, he would have been in that Second Bull Run battle with his whole force. Some of Franklin’s soldiers had stood on the Warrenton Turnpike, taunting the retreating Army of Virginia, jeering at the new route to Richmond. Nevertheless, the Sixth Corps had w
anted to get into the fighting, had been bewildered by the delay in its advance. In a single evening, these troops had returned from Centreville to Alexandria—a march which had taken them two full days and part of another, when they were going to Pope’s assistance.

  From Centreville to Washington, the roads and bridges were choked with the ambulances and carriages which bore the wounded and the dying. Strewn across the miles of rain-soaked battlefield lay the host of the Union dead. The officers who wore the scarlet Kearny patch put a black band on their coat sleeves, and mourning draped their colors and their drums. Under a flag of truce, men in gray had carried to the Union lines the body of their lean and daring general, shot in the buttock as he galloped out of a nest of rebel skirmishers. One-armed Phil Kearny would ride no more into the thick of the fighting, with his reins held in his teeth; but his fame was secure, and on the field of Second Bull Run more than one good name had been tarnished.

  Pope’s brief career in the East was ended, and the hero of Island Number 10 was a hero no longer. No one remembered that he had fought bravely, but only that he had boasted and failed. He was sidetracked in a department of the frontier, and went off very angry, charging his defeat to McClellan and his sneering officers.

  Fitz-John Porter, handsome, able and autocratic, was the scapegoat of this campaign. On him Pope’s accusations bore most heavily, and he was to serve in September with the shadow of a court-martial and a dishonorable discharge from the army hanging over him. Many years would pass before the passions of that day subsided, and Porter’s name was cleared. “Porter was the most magnificent soldier in the Army of the Potomac,” John Hay wrote, “ruined by his devotion to McClellan.”