Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  The Star was no prude. There was a sophisticated wink in its reporting. It was far too worldly-wise ever to have supposed that a great army could exist without women. Camp followers were a part of the military show, and so were the traipsing girls in soldiers’ uniforms. The Star chuckled over a “handsome, fat little Zouave,” with burnt cork imperial and mustache. The damsels of the District were bound to walk out with the volunteers. McClellan’s army had fathered many an infant before it left for the Peninsula. Some of the mammas had wedding rings, but some, of course, had not. A number of them had left their squalling encumbrances on the doorsteps of the city. When the Seventy-first New York revisited its old encampment at the Navy Yard, the Star had its little joke about the wise babies who knew their own fathers; and it quoted an old pauper’s jibe that the abandoned infants at the poorhouse were “the natural consequences of the rebellion.”

  In those pious but practical days, allowance was made for the weakness of sinful flesh, and prostitution, under proper restraints, was accepted as a necessary evil. The Star was wont to treat the wenches with a roguish masculine indulgence; called them by euphemistic names—Cyprians, fallen angels, daughters of Eve, the g’hals, gay young ducks. When it used harsher epithets, it had been provoked, like the rest of Washington, to righteous anger by the irresponsible volunteer officers who lost all sense of decency in their freedom from family restrictions. The spectacle of their concupiscence was not only subversive of military discipline, it was an affront to the chaste womanhood of the community. Tolerance of vice was strictly a masculine attitude. Ladies, hermetically sealed in their own virtue, might not even recognize its existence, and were permitted only a glacial unawareness of their fallen sisters. But, by 1862, if they ventured on Pennsylvania Avenue, they met on every hand the gaudy courtesans, promenading with the officers or lolling in their carriages. Painted equestriennes, in riding dresses and gaily feathered hats, galloped beside their spurred and booted cavaliers. In satin and pinchbeck, the women of the town staggered boisterously into the restaurants; and the attendance of respectable citizens at the theatre was disturbed by scenes of bawdry in the audience. One officer attended the Campbell Minstrel Show at the Odd Fellows’ Hall with a harlot on each arm. The Star remarked that it would astonish the good wives, sisters, daughters, mothers and sweethearts of many volunteer officers, if they could see the female companionship they unblushingly indulged in at the capital.

  Washington, with its population of unattached males, had always been noted for its prostitutes; but the Star estimated that, before the war, there had been not more than five hundred in the entire District of Columbia. The fallen angels of wartime had been recruited, like the soldiers, from the States. In New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, and even in Chicago and St. Louis, ambitious madams had closed their houses; and, shepherding a choice selection of their misses, had entrained for the Washington market. The invasion was so sensational that it was easy to exaggerate its numbers. Major Doster, who as provost marshal kept a list of the houses and had them under surveillance, said that in 1862 there were four hundred and fifty registered houses in the capital. In 1863 the Star, after an investigation, made the considered statement that the city had about five thousand prostitutes, while there were half as many more in Georgetown and Alexandria. This estimate included streetwalkers, who were said to comprise at least one-third of the number, but did not account for the concubines, often demure little women, who were set up in their own establishments by officers and men, and sometimes passed as their wives.

  On scrofulous hillsides in the Northern Liberties and in a scramble of mean passages on the Island, whites and blacks had opened a multitude of resorts. Nigger Hill and Fighting and Tincup Alleys welcomed teamsters and laborers and the riffraff of the volunteers to hovels where pleasure was dispensed in bare and dirty rooms, sometimes the abode of families with small children. Soldiers were often robbed of their pay, or pawned their uniforms and blankets to pay for drink. The poisonous tanglefoot whisky, illicitly dispensed, led to brawls, shootings, stabbings and riots. Most of the crimes for which soldiers were arraigned were committed in the dives of Washington.

  Police Superintendent Webb openly stated that the principal obstacle to the control of crime was found in the courts of the District. His report was made in late September of 1863, when the judicial system had been reformed, and the District supreme court had been sitting for over five months. Bail was easily procured, and the cases were postponed from term to term. Moreover, the District had no adequate prisons. The county jail was in such a state of decay that enterprising malefactors easily bored their way out of “the iron cage” in which serious offenders were confined, and, wrapping their chains in rags, ran off to freedom. The so-called workhouse was a part of the poorhouse, a charitable institution, where prisoners loafed at ease. The District Penitentiary, situated near the Arsenal on the Island, had been taken over by the Government as a storehouse for ordnance and ammunition. After the outbreak of war, criminals convicted in the District courts served their terms in the penitentiary at Albany, New York. Juvenile offenders were sentenced to the House of Refuge in Baltimore. Pending their trial, Washington had no suitable place in which to lodge the members of its own youthful gang of robbers, the Forty Thieves, or the runaway boys and delinquent girls who came trailing after the soldiers.

  On the formation of the Metropolitan Police in 1861, vice and crime were so prevalent in Washington that there was no possibility of restraining the disorder with a force of one hundred and fifty patrolmen. The provost guard, which had acted as city police while the force was being organized, continued to combine military and civil duties. At first, there was some friction between the police and the guard. In the autumn of 1861, under the headline, “The Provost Guard Hitch Their Horses at Madame Duprez’s” the Star grew satirical over the onerous duties of the soldiers in the brothels of Marble Alley. A police sergeant had reported that he had found an officer of the guard in bed at the Duprez house, while his squad was “cutting up high” in the neighborhood. The delinquents must have been promptly purged, for no subsequent irregularities were publicized, and the provost guard became the terror of the lawbreakers. Washington welcomed military protection, and arbitrary methods of handling crime were accepted as a necessary part of the wartime emergency. In 1863, the guard began a system of summary roundups of criminals and vagrants who showed their faces in the capital. Handcuffed and labeled with large red placards, bearing the words, “Pickpocket and Thief,” they were paraded on the Avenue. Behind them followed a fife and drum corps, playing “The Rogue’s March,” and a jeering troop of men and boys. The undesirable visitors were then hustled on board the cars. This medieval procedure attracted much attention from the Washington populace; but it failed to reduce crime. The capital continued to swarm with underworld characters from all parts of the Union. A gang of robbers made their headquarters in the Smithsonian grounds, and pickpockets flourished in every public gathering; while gambling hells, illicit liquor houses and brothels were declared by Superintendent Webb to be “fearfully on the increase.”

  Night after night, among the thieves, the bullies and the roistering soldiers, the drabs bedizened the police courts. The charge of prostitution was lightly treated. Many cases were dismissed, others were let off with a small fine. Sometimes the girls were locked up for the night; and, if they were drunk and made trouble, they were sent to the workhouse for a short term. Rarely, the magistrate ordered women to leave town, and a few were sent to New York by the provost marshal. As the houses multiplied, the police and soldiers began to raid and close them. That the system did not act as a deterrent was illustrated in the annals of the Lights, a family indigenous to the District. There were five Lights, father, mother and three daughters, and they had made themselves notorious in every unsavory section of the capital; an alley on English Hill, in the Northern Liberties, was named for them. Early in the war, the father enlisted, and, after several carousals with his family, his na
me disappeared from the police records. The mother ran the “house,” where Kate and Anna and Matilda purveyed their charms to the soldiers. Life for the Lights was a kind of squalid lark. Once, they engaged an organ-grinder and monkey, and danced their clothes off to the rhythm of mechanical melodies, until the racket brought the police, and they were carried, monkey and all, before the magistrate. Noisy, quarrelsome and outrageously profane, the sisters were repeatedly sent to the workhouse. They were chased from the Island, from English Hill, from an empty barracks on North Seventh Street. Then they crossed the boundary line to occupy a shanty near Cliffburne Hospital. There was a fracas between two groups of visitors—some boys of the Second District Regiment and a party of Pennsylvania Bucktails—and they were again evicted. In early July of 1863, while the guns roared over Gettysburg, Kate, Anna and Matilda were reluctantly torn from a free-for-all fight with eighteen soldiers. They were arrested, as usual. In the autumn, they were back on the Island, incorrigibly open for business in new quarters in Pear Tree Alley.

  If the Lights and their various neighbors had made up the whole tale of Washington’s vice, respectable people might still have slept in peace. But the ambitious madams of the Union had no intention of setting up their establishments in sordid surroundings. They liked fine mansions with gardens, and discreet little brick residences which fronted on tree-shaded streets. In addition to high rents, they were willing to pay the large premiums demanded in Washington during the war, and agents and landlords winked at their “boarding-houses,” which soon spread through all parts of the city. Entire blocks on the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue were devoted to the business. Marble Alley, where Sal Austin and Julia Deane had their high-class resorts, lay between Pennsylvania Avenue and Missouri Avenue, a good residential section. Brothels were numerous in the First and Second Wards, to the east and west of the White House and Lafayette Square. Twelfth and Thirteenth Streets had a large quota, and so had D and E Streets. One whole section of the Second Ward was christened Hooker’s Division. A large establishment known as the Club House immediately adjoined the First Baptist Church on Thirteenth Street. In this godly vicinity, the hacks of the sporting men were thickly ranked, and saucy women flounced in and out in full view of the horrified churchgoers on Sundays.

  The outrage of the capital’s citizens was vented on the volunteer officers. All night, before the fancy houses stood long rows of saddled horses. Even when the gas lamps paled in the daylight and honest persons began to be abroad, the tired orderlies were still waiting. In one locality, the residents threatened to make up a list of officers who frequented “notorious places of infamy,” and report them to the commanding general, and to their families at home. Brazen misconduct in public places was bad enough; it was intolerable to find it rampant at the very doors of decent folk. Shrieks and revelry rent the midnight air; and respectable ladies suffered the extreme mortification of having their homes entered by a rabble of men who had mistaken the address.

  In the expensive resorts, there were luxurious furnishings, and the pretty young hostesses were dressed in silk. One fashionable establishment maintained a summer place at Great Falls, twelve miles up the Potomac, as a retreat for the personnel when business was dull.

  Yet the red-plush houses had many resemblances to the cheap and barren dives. The privy at Sal Austin’s, like many another in the Northern Liberties and on the Island, gave up the body of a newborn infant. Whisky was illicitly sold. Drunken men grew rough and excited. Pistol shots rang on the midnight air, and frightened girls bawled from the windows for the police. A roundsman was stabbed in Marble Alley.

  By the spring of 1862, the columns of the Star were lively with the “descents” of police and provost guard on the town’s bordellos. The soldiers knew the names: the Ironclad (also known as the Monitor and the Post-Office), Fort Sumter, Headquarters U.S.A., the Devil’s Own, the Wolf’s Den (kept by Mrs. Wolf), the Haystack (kept by Mrs. Hay), the Cottage by the Sea, the Blue Goose, Madam Wilton’s Private Residence for Ladies, Madam Russell’s Bake Oven. Fanatical in his devotion to his work was Lieutenant W. G. Raymond of the provost guard. In civil life, he had been a clergyman. He was not strong, but he spent many arduous nights before he was forced to take up the less exacting duties of hospital chaplain. Men in army blue—and a few in broadcloth, as well—scurried before the tramp of Raymond’s squad in the street below. There were often eagles and oak leaves on the shoulders of the coats they hastily donned. Sometimes they escaped. Otherwise officers and men were taken to the police station. The madams met the guard with prompt co-operation, ordered every room to be thrown open. “They made it a kind of point of honor,” wrote Major Doster, “to obey with alacrity what they could not help.” The girls from the high-class houses were never detained. From fat purses the madams slapped down the money for their fines. The brothels were locked and declared to have been “broken up.” As the provost marshal and the superintendent of police well knew, they had merely been moved on. The same method was employed in “breaking up” gambling houses, and liquor shops which were either unlicensed or failed to observe the early closing hour. In these cases, however, the system was somewhat more effective, for raiders confiscated the gambling paraphernalia, and poured the whisky into the gutter. The stock in trade of the madams packed their tinsel belongings and fluttered unimpaired to a new address.

  Equally unavailing in reducing the social evil was the provost marshal’s order which prohibited the employment of “pretty waiter girls” in lager beer and concert saloons. These well-known places of assignation were cleaned up; but the girls took to the Avenue, to swell the throng of street-walkers who greeted the routed Federals after Second Bull Run. “Quinine may be the need of the Confederate army,” wrote the Star, “but copavia [i.e., copaiva, a balsam then used in treating affections of the mucous membranes] is certainly the necessity of ours.”

  Occasionally, the Washington prostitutes made excursions in the wake of the advancing army, notably at the time of Antietam; but their places were quickly filled. Only one exodus made any impression on the community—the departure early in 1863 of certain females, notorious not only for their want of chastity but for their Southern sympathies. Like the Episcopalians, the gentlefolk and the Irish denizens of Swampoodle, the Washington bawds had a strong secessionist element. In hilarious mood, they were wont to drive about the streets, tipsily cheering for Jeff Davis, singing “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” and shouting that Stonewall Jackson was coming to blow the city to hell. When the Government arranged to send Southern ladies from the capital to their friends in Richmond, seventy of the six hundred applicants were prostitutes. A large party was loaded on a steamer which left the Sixth Street wharf on a cold January day. All night, the officers had been examining baggage, taking out dry goods, shoes, medicines, pins, needles and thread sorely needed in the blockaded Confederacy. Among the stiff-necked dames of the capital moved the painted daughters of Eve, as warm for Dixie as the best of them. Fort Sumter, the Monitor, Headquarters U.S.A., Gentle Annie Lyle’s, Mary Hall’s, The Cottage by the Sea and Number 10, Marble Alley, all had their representatives. A French Creole girl from Sal Austin’s tearfully begged an officer to let her keep the articles in her trunk, saying that she would befriend him if he came to Richmond. The officer was not to be bribed. Mademoiselle was obliged to leave without many small possessions which were difficult to obtain in the Confederate capital. The whistle sounded. An exasperated squad of the Tenth New Jersey shooed off the visitors, trying to smuggle letters to the South. Handkerchiefs waved. There were calls of farewell. The assembled admirers of the fancy girls saluted them with a burst of applause. “It is better to give than to receive,” remarked the Star, “and Washington sends the party greeting to Richmond. . . .”

  There is no record of the reception of the fair but frail seventy on their arrival in Virginia. Presumably, they were met by their friends and went about their business. They were not prisoners, and were probably never seen by the Confederate exchan
ge agent, Robert Ould. For, a few months later, the arrival at City Point of a mere pair of unseemly women in a group of exchanged civilians, sent the former Washington attorney into a state of chivalric apoplexy. In a letter beginning, “Sir: I send back to you two strumpets,” he assailed the Federal exchange agent with reproaches justified by “holy feelings,” “the sanctity of a pure woman’s character,” and even “the purity of a flag of truce.” There was a solemn reminder of the Southerner’s code of honor: “If I did not believe you were imposed upon I would be justified in taking this matter as a personal affront.” The Federal agent was far too overwhelmed with shame to make the point that a woman might be light in morals and still adhere to Dixie. He meekly sent the secesh strumpets back to Washington, where they were confined in the Old Capitol.

  When the party of Southern ladies embarked for Fort Monroe, they were not accompanied by soldiers, but by Colonel La Fayette C. Baker and his detectives. Baker had had his finger in a wide variety of pies since his appointment. People called him a cheat and a liar and a tyrant, but no one had ever been able to lay against him a charge of inactivity. With his large force of agents—popularly said to number two thousand men—he was hot on the trail of traitors, war speculators, counterfeiters, fraudulent contractors, and bounty jumpers in all parts of the country. In addition, Baker had time to spare for police duty in Washington. He seized contraband supplies of medicines, morphine and quinine, and arrested stewards and nurses who were robbing soldiers in the hospitals. The dirty gutters behind the Capitol ran with liquor spilled by his detectives. He charged into gambling hells and bawdy houses, ruthless in arresting guests as well as inmates. Washington was grateful. Baker’s methods were highhanded, but the citizens of the capital, weary of lawbreakers, had nothing but praise for his energy.