Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  At last, he got his army across the Potomac. Moving east of the Blue Ridge, it marched slowly down to Warrenton. Lee was at Winchester. The road to Richmond was open to the Federals. A committee of patriotic ladies, who paid a visit to the President, were shocked by “his introverted look and his half-staggering gait.” He shook their hands mechanically. He could give them no encouragement, he told them. There was agony ahead for the people, and they were not prepared for it. The army did not realize that they were in a terrible war that had to be fought out.

  General Lee brought his army through the passes of the Blue Ridge, and occupied Culpeper Court-House, between the Army of the Potomac and Richmond. For Mr. Lincoln, it was the deciding factor. On November 7, General Catharinus P. Buckingham, Stanton’s confidential Assistant Adjutant General, took a journey by special train on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad. He did not go direct to McClellan’s headquarters, but made his way through a heavy snowstorm to Burnside’s camp. After all, Burnside was the only jewel that the War Department was able to dig up. For the third time, the command of the Army of the Potomac was offered to him—it was in the form of an order from Halleck. In agitation, Burnside hesitated. Outside his quarters, the November gale whirled the snowflakes. In the thick white twilight, he made his reluctant decision to obey, and rode with Buckingham to McClellan’s tent. The two officers stood watching while McClellan read the order which relieved him of command. He made no sign while they were there. “Alas for my poor country!” he wrote his wife when they were gone.

  In all that stricken and saddened army, the most unhappy man was its new commander. McClellan pitied him. He thought—or so he later said—that his old friend was not competent to command more than a regiment. Of his own incapacity, Burnside had no doubt. He was an honest man, and he went about telling the other officers that he was not fit for the position.

  McClellan declared that there were hotheads in the army who were in favor of his refusing to obey the order, who wanted to march on Washington to take possession of the Government. But, if revolution might have broken out at a word from him, he never spoke that word. For a few days he remained at his headquarters, helping Burnside with his arrangements. Then he bade farewell to his troops, and quietly took his departure. He had been directed to go to Trenton to await orders. There had been no military operations around Trenton since that icy December morning of 1776 when General Washington had marched from the Delaware to capture a thousand Hessians there. Stanton was not a man much given to smiling, but surely his Cupid’s bow upper lip must have widened over his abundant whiskers when he contemplated that order.

  XI. “The Great Army of the Wounded”

  ON A MORNING of late September, the three handsomest people in Washington were gathered in a room in the Insane Asylum. Mr. Salmon P. Chase, the majestic figure of a statesman, had come on an errand of mercy nicely allied with his itching political ambition, and with him on his drive across the Eastern Branch he had brought the belle of Washington, his beautiful daughter, Kate. This girl of twenty-two loved the intrigue of political life, and shared her father’s dreams of succeeding the awkward Lincolns in the White House. Her small, golden-bronze head, her elegant toilettes and her imperious manners were more suited to parlors and ballrooms than to the bedsides of the afflicted. But on this September morning, suitably armed with a basket of peaches and grapes, she was paying a visit to an invalid worthy of her attention—Major-General Hooker, who many believed would soon succeed McClellan in the command of the Army of the Potomac.

  Hooker, before resigning his regular Army commission, had served with distinction in Mexico; but in the spring of 1861, he had not been received with much warmth at the capital. After First Bull Run, he had called on the President, and told him that he was a better general than any Union commander on that field. Lincoln was sufficiently impressed by Hooker’s claims to make him a brigadier. He had borne a gallant part in all the battles of the Army of the Potomac since Williamsburg, where he had won his nickname of “Fighting Joe,” which he regretfully thought made him sound like a bandit. He was tall and statuesque, with a noble blonde head—“fit for a model of a war-god,” one newspaper correspondent wrote. To be sure, he had the reputation of being excitable, and indiscreet in speech; and it was whispered that he was too fond of whisky to be entrusted with the responsibility of an army. Yet his bravery and his frank and engaging manners won him many admirers. His complexion was ruddy. His lively eyes were blue. He had a charming way of persuading others to share his enthusiastic opinion of himself. To these important callers, the Secretary of the Treasury and his daughter, Hooker talked freely, making the most of a good opportunity to disparage General McClellan. If he himself had commanded on the Peninsula, he assured them, he would have taken Richmond. In the Maryland campaign, he had led the First Corps, and he expressed the sorrowful conviction that his premature removal from the field at Antietam had prevented a sweeping victory for the Union arms. Perhaps he overplayed his charm that morning. The Secretary of the Treasury, solemnly appraising General Hooker as he lay on his couch in the Insane Asylum, was aware of a qualm of doubt. Nevertheless, on the whole, Hooker was a good choice for the command of the army. He looked like a great general, and he had no political ambitions. The Chase interests would support Hooker.

  The general’s mentality was not impaired, he had been shot in the foot at Antietam. In the autumn of 1862, there seemed nothing incongruous in the lodging he had selected. It was shared by many lesser soldiers. Washington, which had been a camp, had been transformed into a hospital—the vast base hospital of the Army of the Potomac. Clusters of white buildings and tents had changed the aspect of the city and its surrounding hills. The E Street Infirmary, destroyed by fire in the autumn of 1861, had been replaced by the rectangular pavilions of the new Judiciary Square Hospital. Stanton Hospital, at New Jersey Avenue and I Street, was another modern institution, and opposite it on Minnesota Row the former mansions of Douglas, Breckinridge and Rice now constituted Douglas Hospital. Lincoln and Emory Hospitals were being constructed on the plain to the east of the Capitol. Near the Smithsonian, beside the open sewer of the canal, lay the clean, parallel sheds of the great Armory Square Hospital, conveniently accessible from the Maryland Avenue depot and the wharves. On the distant heights, long one-story buildings, lavishly whitewashed and encircled by huts and tents, seemed to bloom like monstrous flowers in the soft Washington light. Several of these big hospital colonies on the Seventh and Fourteenth Street Roads were transformed barracks. Contagious diseases were isolated in a pest-house at Kalorama. Harewood Hospital was situated on the Corcoran farm, not far from the Soldiers’ Home. Columbian Hospital, on Meridian Hill, took its name from the college which once had occupied its central building. On the summit of the hill where the New York Seventh had encamped, sprawled the new pavilions of Mount Pleasant.

  A stranger, wandering about the city, might find his way by using the low, pale masses of the hospitals as landmarks. But there were many more which could be recognized only on a closer inspection. In Washington, as well as in Georgetown and Alexandria, sick and wounded men lay in hotels and warehouses, in private houses, schools and seminaries, and the lodges of fraternal orders. On Independence Day of 1862, it had been observed that the church bells could not be rung, because of the suffering that lay beneath them. The seizure of the churches had begun in June, when an officer of General Wadsworth waited on the rectors of Trinity, the Ascension and the Epiphany—three edifices which, the Star felt, could be occupied with the least inconvenience to loyal worshipers. Soon, congregations of Union sympathizers were vying with one another in offering their buildings to the War Department. Carpets, cushions and hymnbooks were packed away. Carpenters covered the pews with scantling on which floors were laid, and the pulpits and other furniture were stowed underneath. The mains were tapped to supply water for kitchens established in the basements, or in hastily constructed outbuildings. Presently appeared wagonloads of furniture, drugs and ut
ensils. The flag of the Union was run up. Wardmasters, nurses, orderlies, cooks and stewards arrived. Ambulances began to stop at the church doors. Last of all came the surgeons, with their knives and saws and dirty little sponges.

  Since the preceding year, the Patent Office had been used as a hospital. One thousand more beds were placed on the second floor and on the gallery which ran around the lofty hall. At night, in the glare of the gaslight, it was a curious scene. Like some new exhibit of ghastliness, waxy faces lay in rows between the shining glass cabinets, filled with curiosities, foreign presents and the models of inventions. The nurses’ heels clicked on the marble floor, and over all lay the heavy smell of putrefaction and death.

  Yet, as the wounded came in from Pope’s campaign, there was still not room enough. Georgetown College was turned into a hospital; so was the H Street mansion of the rebel sympathizer, Mr. Corcoran. At last, it was found necessary to make a temporary requisition of the Capitol, and two thousand cots were placed in the halls of the House and Senate, in the corridors and the Rotunda.

  From the first, many inhabitants of Washington had shown themselves sympathetic to the suffering strangers in their city. Relief associations had sprung up to work for the soldiers and to raise money to purchase comforts for them. The sick of the early regiments and the beaten stragglers of First Bull Run had been charitably treated. Ladies whose hearts were with the Southern cause joined their Northern sisters in sewing and picking lint for the wounded. As the hospitals multiplied in the capital, so did the visitors who came to tend the soldiers and to bring them presents. These ministrations were not invariably welcome. The hospital doors were wide open, not only to relatives and friends and the agents of relief organizations, but to any strangers who chose to call. Some fed improper food to the sick. Others wearied them with impertinent questions. Even desperately ill men were not protected from the intrusions of the tactless and the curious. The haphazard distribution of gifts resulted in much inequality. Some would give only to those from a favorite State. Others selected pets, whom they gorged with delicacies, leaving their neighbors quite neglected. When wounded prisoners began to be sent to Washington from the Peninsula, the more virulent secessionist ladies made themselves a nuisance. To the irritation of doctors and attendants, they strolled through the wards, casting freezing looks at the Union cots, while they showered the rebels with flowers, fruits and clothing.

  The constant civilian inspection served the purpose of advertising the defects of the institutions. The shortcomings of old hotels and schoolhouses, of churches and public buildings were glaringly apparent to the most casual caller. The renovated barracks were dark and badly ventilated, and usually lacked municipal conveniences; while their grounds, particularly those of the cavalry barracks, were filthy. Moreover, the administration of the hospitals left much to be desired. There was no trained personnel on which to draw. Where institutions were hastily improvised, it was inevitable that some surgeons should be careless and incompetent, many cooks and stewards corrupt, almost all nurses inexpert. The patients were not supplied with proper clothing. The diet was coarse and not infrequently meager. The dead received scant ceremony. Their thin plank coffins were loaded on a cart and rattled off to the cemetery at the Soldiers’ Home, where they were hurriedly dumped into the ground. At the Judiciary Square Hospital, whose management had promptly earned an unenviable notoriety, the naked bodies of the dead were stretched on a vacant lot, and prepared for burial in full view of the populous neighborhood. Almost as soon as the Washington hospitals opened their doors, their abuses became a scandal, to be exposed and deplored by public-spirited citizens. By the autumn of 1862, a local relief society had been formed to investigate them. The chaplains, too, gathered in the Y.M.C.A. rooms to protest against the manner of burial. Its casualness was explained by the fact that the Government had contracted with the undertaker to furnish shroud, coffin, vehicle, team and driver, and to have the grave dug and filled, all for the sum of $4.99 per dead soldier.

  Although the scientifically planned pavilions were to expert eyes only partially successful experiments, and although at least two of them, on Judiciary and Armory Squares, were badly situated, these clean and airy buildings were popularly admired. It could not have occurred to anyone that a generation later their fine operating rooms would be considered abominable places. They were scrubbed and odorless. There was running water. Large mahogany boxes held the instruments; and the heavy center table was covered with a freshly wiped rubber cloth. But asepsis was not understood. The surgeon rolled up his sleeves, gave his knife a last flick on the sole of his boot, and the operation began. His exploring hands wore no gloves. The probe carried the infection deep into the torn tissues. If one of the sponges, employed to mop out the wound, happened to drop on the floor, it was squeezed in water and used at once; and, in any case, only a cursory washing had cleansed it of the blood and pus of the last operation. In threading the needle for the stitches, it was customary to point the silk by wetting it with saliva and rolling it with the fingers. Cold water was the sovereign dressing; bad wounds were repeatedly drenched to relieve the burning pain. Sometimes the wound was covered with wax; or ointments were applied on lint which had been scraped from cotton cloth by the patriotic but unsterile hands of women and children. Poultices of flaxseed meal or moistened bread were valued for promoting an abundant flow of pus, for all wounds were expected to suppurate. Blood poisoning, tetanus, secondary hemorrhage and gangrene were familiar visitors in the finest of the shining, whitewashed new pavilions of which Washington was so proud, and helped to fill the pine coffins which went jouncing in the dead carts to the cemetery.

  Yet, to the wounded soldier, as to the vast fellowship of the sick, the hospitals of Washington seemed havens of comfort to which he had attained after a long delirium of agony and neglect. In his flesh, he bore the gashes of canister or grape, the rent of the splinter of shell, or the neat hole which marked the entrance of the shattering Minié ball. Frequently, he had undergone a crude amputation at the front; for, during the first years of the war, the field surgeons were ruthless in lopping off arms and legs, which piled in heaps, man-high, about their bloody tables. Before the soldier ever reached a hospital, infection was often far advanced.

  Hungry, thirsty and untended, the wounded man at last reached a place where he was fed and washed and cared for. He could lie still on a bed, instead of the floor of a freight car, the deck of a ship, or a shelf in a jarring ambulance. In Washington, he found the stupor of morphine and laudanum, the deep oblivion of chloroform and ether.

  The journey by road was the most painful mode of transportation. Yet ambulances in the armies of the United States were a humane innovation; they had never been used before this war. Two years before the outbreak, the Medical Bureau, in an uncharacteristic moment of expansiveness, had decided to fall in with the modern European idea of providing wagons expressly planned for carrying the sick and wounded. The design which met with the greatest favor, because it was light and intended for only one horse, consisted of a square box mounted on the axle of a single pair of wheels. This absurdly tilting rig made an acceptable pleasure carriage for junketing officers, but for more practical purposes it was useless. As frail as gigs, the two-wheeled ambulances cracked at the first strain, and their rocking motion was unbearable to suffering men. Everyone condemned them; but so many had been ordered that it was some time before they were entirely supplanted. The cumbrous four-wheeled ambulances, which required four horses to draw them, were the most comfortable that could be devised. When the wounded traveled by road, only the worst cases could find a place in them. For men with fresh amputations, with faces shot away, or with lead in breast or belly, was reserved the poor luxury of being bumped and jolted, dashed against each other and against the sides of the vehicle, as they hurtled over the rutted Virginia roads.

  The journey by rail was mercifully shorter, if the cars were not side-tracked or delayed. When such accidents occurred, the men suffered bitter
ly. They were closely packed on the floor of the cars, sometimes on mattresses, sometimes on straw, sometimes on the bare boards. The boxcars were dark and noisome. On the open platforms of the flat cars, the sick and wounded were exposed to the blazing sun, or to wind and rain. Often there was a tedious wait for ambulances at the Maryland Avenue depot, the terminus of the trains which crossed the Long Bridge from Virginia. On a Saturday night in June of 1862, four hundred men arrived unexpectedly from Front Royal, where they had already endured much misery because of the disorganized medical service in the Valley. No ambulances came to meet them, and no hospital official appeared. After a fruitless effort to find the Surgeon General, the doctor in charge deserted them, and went off to eat and sleep. Aroused from their beds by the news of the soldiers’ predicament, near-by residents of the Island hurried to the depot with hot drinks, food, stimulants and fresh bandages. Grace Church, Ryland Chapel and Potomac Hall were opened, and the wounded were carried in and cared for. Next morning, the congregation of Grace Church, coming to worship, took one look at the figures on the pew cushions, and dispersed to bring a fresh supply of food and drink. This was an exceptional case of neglect, and resulted in the doctor’s dismissal from the service; but delays and maladjustments were unending. The citizens of the Seventh Ward repeatedly came to the rescue at the Maryland Avenue depot, and won high reputation for generosity and compassion.