Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  While the gambling hells were a scandal to the good people of Washington, they did not as a rule create disturbance in their neighborhoods. There was a hush of secrecy about the large establishments. At the door, the applicant for admission was scrutinized through a grated window before he was permitted to enter “the carpeted, elegant jungles of the modern ‘tiger.“’ The rooms were dazzlingly lighted, richly curtained and hung with “voluptuous paintings.” A buffet held decanters and cigars, and champagne and sherry and claret flowed freely. There was a supper of boned turkey, ham, chicken salad and other delicacies. As all refreshment was free, a careful gentleman might enjoy the worth of a few greenbacks lost at play in the evening’s entertainment. Some volunteer officers, however, saw large sums—not always their own money—disappear under the long, white, bediamonded fingers of the faro dealers. Recurrent irregularities in the accounts of paymasters and quartermasters caused the military authorities to notify Colonel Baker that the gambling hells must be closed.

  Baker, however, was no more successful than the police and the provost guard in cleaning up Washington. Gentlemen continued to fight the tiger in luxurious surroundings, and drown the disappointment of their losses in glasses of Veuve Cliquot. The brothels, the city’s chief abomination, seemed to flourish under the raids of three separate forces.

  In the autumn of 1863, the District supreme court joined in the campaign against the bawdy houses, and the grand jury began to take evidence against the proprietors. They had seldom been indicted in the District. An outstanding exception was Mrs. Wolf, the landlady of the Wolf’s Den, who in the preceding spring had sat in the courtroom, closely veiled, with downcast eyes, “looking the very picture of a modest and disconsolate widow.” Although Mrs. Wolf was found guilty, she had continued to operate successfully at her new house, the Band-box. At her second trial, her penalty—a year in prison or a fine of a thousand dollars—was the heaviest given to any of the madams brought to justice.

  The grand jury spread a wide dragnet over the houses of ill fame, and a tremor ran through the Washington underworld. Keepers of prosperous resorts were threatened with arrest and trial, with heavy fines and possible imprisonment. Superintendent Webb gave damning information against them. Mortified witnesses reluctantly made an appearance at the City Hall. An employee of the Quartermaster’s Department, who had patronized a Negro resort in Bates’ Alley, testified in green goggles “to defy recognition.” The evidence accumulated. Twenty indictments were found in a single day. The police were called on to aid Marshal Lamon and his deputies in serving the warrants. Vice was by no means suppressed in Washington, but the business of prostitution was transacted with less flagrant offense to the community thereafter.

  Only one of the ensuing trials received sensational publicity—that of H. C. Burtenett and Maude Roberts, jointly indicted for keeping a bawdy house on D Street, a block away from the President’s Park. Burtenett reduced the antics of the shoulder straps to the final depths of degradation and absurdity, for he himself had been a volunteer officer. Although his name was variously spelled and the record is not clear, he had apparently served for a brief time as lieutenant-colonel of a New York regiment. After being discharged, he had obtained an appointment as major on Frémont’s staff, and was subsequently dismissed for a second time. He was still often called Major Burtenett. In the dock, he wore an undress uniform, with staff buttons on coat and vest.

  Maude Roberts was a young and smart brunette, and the courtroom was well filled with men, whose eyes rested with interest on her headgear—“rather an inflamed bonnet of red.” Otherwise, with her “sober, virtuous-looking dress of black,” her pure white sleeve cuffs and modestly checked shawl, Maude was a picture of discretion. The glances of her beautiful dark eyes awakened the sympathy of the masculine onlookers, and Maude was pitied rather than condemned.

  Her paramour, Burtenett, did not fare so well. He looked elegant and complaisant, even rather distinguished. His face was intelligent, and a slight baldness and a pair of black-rimmed eyeglasses lent dignity to his appearance. He was, in short, a man of the world, a mature and fascinating villain, who could worm his way into the affections of an innocent girl and seduce her to a life of shame. The newspapers, raking up stories of Burtenett’s dismissals from the service and charging that he had robbed the Government, had deeply prejudiced Washington against him before the trial was well started.

  The drabs filed up to the witness stand to bear testimony. They painted, in part, a cosy picture of Burtenett’s helpfulness in laying down oilcloth and putting up shades, helping out with the cooking, and serving “the family” at meals from his place at the head of the table. He had been zealous, too, for Maude’s financial interests; had sold gin cocktails to the patrons at eight cents apiece; rowed with the four female boarders over payments of bed money, and found fault because they asked for second helpings of meat. Other testimony of a less domestic character firmly established the ex-major’s connection with the management of the house. The counsel for the defense was Thomas H. Ford, lieutenant-governor of Ohio during Chase’s gubernatorial term. He wasted no pains on attempting to exonerate either of his clients. He made a few indecent jokes about Burtenett, and pleaded Maude’s youth and the discreditable character of the witnesses who had aspersed her. Burtenett addressed to the court a protest that the press had been his judge and jury.

  The District Attorney, Edward C. Carrington, Virginian, Mexican War veteran and brigadier-general of militia during the Buchanan administration, had been chosen by Mr. Bates in the spring of 1861. At that time, the claims of the rival candidate, Mr. Edwin Stanton, had been strongly urged by Seward; and, save for Bates’s strong feeling that he could work more freely with Carrington, who was a courteous gentleman and his friend, Stanton might have been making the speech for the prosecution of Burtenett and Roberts, instead of exercising a tyrannical rule in the War Office. Carrington developed to the full an opportunity for an oratorical arraignment of vice. Fixing his eye on Burtenett, “he photographed the character of the fornicator and the paramour of a prostitute.” At times, the former major’s composure was shaken, and he winced. The crowd in the courtroom was quite overcome by the District Attorney’s eloquence. Handkerchiefs appeared in the jury box, as Burtenett’s peers snuffled over the tale of his iniquity. It took them only ten minutes to bring in a verdict of guilty, with a recommendation of clemency for Maude. The judge let her off with a fine of fifty dollars, expressing the hope that she might mend her ways. The ex-major was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment and a fine of five hundred dollars, in default of which he was to suffer a further imprisonment of five months. Burtenett was unable to pay the fine, but he was pardoned by the President some four months later.

  In his charge to the jury, Judge Olin administered a rebuke to the city newspapers which had given publicity to the proceedings. Mr. Forney’s Daily Chronicle, just celebrating its first birthday, was gratified. The Chronicle had refused to pander to “morbid and impure readers” for the sake of gaining circulation. The Star and the National Republican, on the other hand, had reported the case with what one citizen described as “reprehensible gusto.” Their sales must have been very heavy to make the Chronicle so bitter over their “polluted columns.” The stately old National Intelligencer had, of course, been oblivious of the whole thing. It seldom stooped to notice even the respectable news of Washington; and was preoccupied, that first week of November, 1863, with the siege of Charleston, military interference in the Maryland elections, and the situation of the Army of the Cumberland, still beleaguered at Chattanooga.

  The scene of war had shifted to a safe distance from the earthworks that ringed the capital. Since Gettysburg, Washington had enjoyed a surcease from apprehension, if not from annoyance. Virginia was infested with bands of guerrillas who attacked isolated pickets, stole horses, threw trains off tracks and captured Government and sutlers’ wagons. During the preceding spring, their leader, Major John S. Mosby, had performed the not
able feat of creeping through the Federal lines at Fairfax Court-House and seizing a brigadier-general, as well as a hundred other prisoners and many horses. Mosby was a skinny, caustic, taciturn trooper who had served as a scout for General Jeb Stuart, and still reported to him. His hard-riding band was principally composed of Virginia citizens and Confederate deserters, some of them dressed in gray uniforms, some in the Union blue. Between their raids, they scattered, assembling at a signal, and their professedly innocent character when out of uniform combined with their dashing horsemanship to make their capture difficult. From the viewpoint of Washington and the Federal soldiers, the guerrillas were no better than highway robbers, a character that was substantiated by the fact that they were permitted to retain their spoils. They were, however, recognized by the Confederate government as Partisan Rangers, and received the same pay as cavalry. Mosby’s horsemen appeared to be as plentiful in Fairfax County as Union troops, and much more active. Stories of raids at Bailey’s Crossroads, Munson’s Hill and Falls Church kept Washington in a state of perpetual vexation at the audacity of the rangers.

  After Gettysburg, General Lee had retired behind the Rapidan. For three quiet months the two armies had confronted each other south of Washington. Late in September, after the defeat at Chickamauga, the War Department had taken the unprecedented step of depleting the Army of the Potomac to strengthen an army distant from the capital. The Eleventh and Twelfth Corps had been sent, under General Hooker, to the Army of the Cumberland. Hooker’s impulsive request to be relieved of high command on the eve of battle had been prompted by resentment against Halleck. He still wanted active service; and, on receiving no reply to his report for orders, he had gone to Washington, where he was placed under arrest for visiting the capital without leave. In spite of this ungracious treatment, Hooker persisted in applying for subordinate duty with the Army of the Potomac, but his appointment was opposed by Meade, with whom he was on bad terms. The detachment of the Eleventh and Twelfth Corps offered an opportunity of giving Hooker a suitable command. This force of sixteen thousand men was rushed by rail to the danger point in Tennessee—a victory for Stanton’s energy and decisiveness over the apathy of General Halleck. No mention of the movement was permitted to appear in the newspapers; but Washington, watching the passing of large bodies of troops, hearing the constant rumble of trains and screaming of whistles, understood what was happening, and was strengthened in the opinion that Tennessee was to be the scene of important action.

  In mid-October, Washington heard of sharp skirmishes on its immediate front, as General Lee began a flanking movement, and Meade’s army retreated all the way to Centreville. The rear guard was the Second Corps, which had fought gallantly at Gettysburg, under the command of General Winfield Scott Hancock. Hancock was a Pennsylvanian, handsome and magnetic, one of the ablest generals in the army. He had been dangerously wounded at Gettysburg, and the Second Corps had been temporarily assigned to General Gouverneur K. Warren of New York State, a topographical engineer, who had done his country great service by seizing Little Round Top, the key to the Federal position at Gettysburg. At Bristoe Station the soldiers who wore the cloverleaf now inflicted a signal defeat on Lee’s advancing column. Lee fell back on the line of the Rappahannock. The gratification over the Confederate retreat was threaded with criticism of Meade’s cautiousness in withdrawing the army to Centreville. The rumor circulated in Washington that Sedgwick would succeed him in command.

  The popular impression that the Army of the Potomac was doomed to inactivity for the winter was increased by the passing of New York troops, furloughed to vote in the State elections. At the end of the first week of November, however, there was news of a successful Federal attack under Sedgwick at Rappahannock Station. Twice within a month, the Federal arms had met and mastered the enemy in Virginia, and the Star proudly called Rappahannock Station one of the most signal victories of the war. The capital cheered the prowess of the Army of the Potomac, but its movements caused scarcely more excitement in the city than the raids of the marauding guerrillas. Washington comfortably accepted the protection of the great army which formed a buffer between the enemy and the fortifications, where the regiments of the preceding summer were becoming expert artillerists. People in the capital, as elsewhere in the Union, turned first to the news from Tennessee in their morning newspapers. In command of the Army of the Cumberland, General Rosecrans had been succeeded by General George H. Thomas, the able Virginian who had remained loyal to the Union; and late in October General Grant had ridden into Chattanooga. Washington was like a tiny concert hall, vacated by a great orchestra. The music could still be heard; but it was no longer deafening.

  In its respite from distraction, the capital had many concerns besides the bawdy houses and the crime wave which war had brought to the city. The provost guard was busy intercepting the female smugglers who carried liquor to the army. A female detective employed at the Seventh Street ferryhouse searched Mary Welsh and Catherine Hartnett, and found canteens fastened to their legs after a manner which the Star was not prepared to describe. “The unusual size of Mary’s lacteal fountains” had already inspired the guard to draw two large bottles from her bodice. Soldiers had become expert in scrutinizing any departure from the normal in the female figure. An “extensive and unseemly bustle” had led to the discovery of a tin contrivance on one woman’s posterior—a vessel composed of four sections, each holding one and a quarter gallons of “rot-gut whiskey.”

  The subject most seriously discussed in Washington was conscription. A gentleman who made a daily trip to and from Georgetown on the streetcars observed that it had almost replaced dollars and contracts in the conversation of his fellow-travelers. Early in August, in the courtroom at the City Hall, a blind man had drawn the names from the wheel. One-third of the drafted men were Negroes. William Johnson, barber and bootblack to the President, was among them, and so was George Washington, “the gorgeous headwaiter” at Willard’s, and another “good-natured shiny-faced darkey” who was John Hay’s special favorite. Southern sympathizers found themselves among the conscripts, and some Government employees were drawn; a clerk in the War Department committed suicide on hearing he was drafted. It was a farcically ineffective business. The District’s quota was 3863 soldiers. By October the draft had procured 960, of whom 675 were substitutes, paid by well-to-do men to go to war in their stead. The white conscripts were sent to the camp on Analostan Island, while the Negroes went to the colored encampment at the contraband farms across the river.

  Conscription, in general, raised but a small number of men for the armies. Its principal value was in stimulating enlistments, all volunteers being credited to the draft quotas. The Government bounty had been raised to three and four hundred dollars, and States, counties and cities frequently offered more than double additional premiums. A Washington committee, frantically seeking to fend off another draft in the District, solicited funds for bounties during the winter, but the citizens showed no liberality in contributing. In the autumn and again in the winter, the President called for volunteers, but on February 1, 1864, the District had been assigned no quota, and Mayor Wallach wrote Provost Marshal General James B. Fry to inquire the reason. Fry answered that it was because of the unsettled state of the population and the division of feeling on the subject of the war. The explanation, giving Washington a similar status to that long held by the border slave States of Kentucky and Missouri, rankled in the minds of loyal residents. The entire District quota, including deficiencies under former calls, was presently set at more than twelve thousand men. Reduced by credits for volunteering and conscription, nearly five thousand were still to be furnished by March 1, and soon after Lincoln called for two hundred thousand more men. Wallach, persistently assailing the District enrollment as excessive, succeeded in having it based on the census of 1860, instead of the greatly increased population of Washington in wartime.

  During the winter, the annoyance of the capital was vented on recruiting agents and s
ubstitute brokers who quietly made their way into town, and, in spite of the vigilance of the provost marshal’s detectives at the depot, carried off a number of contrabands to fill the quotas of Northern States. The Negroes, attracted by large bounties, were willing to go. The indignant District called it kidnaping. A Washington citizen might be averse to educating Negroes or sitting next to them in the streetcar; but his heart yearned toward his black brother as a man who could shoulder a gun.

  An enormous increase in desertion was one of the notable results of conscription. Substitutes, when not professional bounty jumpers, were mercenary soldiers with no heart for a poor man’s war. From the Army of the Potomac, they began to flee across the river below Washington in boats and canoes and on rafts. Many of them escaped, but there were arrests of soldiers, black and white, from New York, Pennsylvania, Maine, Michigan, Maryland, the District. In most cases, they were sent back to their regiments, but at Forrest Hall in Georgetown a prison had been established especially for deserters. Stone Hospital on Fourteenth Street was reserved for the sick and wounded among them. Washington began to hear the dismal detonations of the firing squad on execution days. The District provost marshal received an anonymous letter, threatening him with harm if he arrested any more deserters. An attempt was made to burn his house, and the stable was actually set on fire.

  During the third autumn and winter of the war, there was much anxiety over the growing labor unrest among Government employees, as well as in private industry. The high cost of living in Washington—estimated at $1333 per year for a family of five—caused clerks to form a society to promote a plan of emigrating to Baltimore, and making a contract with the railway for a special train, with commutation tickets. The increased wages in private industry had not been matched by the Government, and there were protests over the ten-hour day at the Navy Yard and the Arsenal. Labor suddenly loomed as a factor in national affairs, not only because its supply had been reduced by the army, but because it had become self-conscious and exigent. Mechanics and laborers employed on the Treasury Extension were threatened by the chief architect with a decrease in pay unless they complied with a new regulation cutting their lunch hour in half. Nearly a thousand men laid down their tools, held a meeting in Temperance Hall and appointed a committee to wait on Mr. Chase with a memorial of their grievances. The Secretary of the Treasury urbanely heard them out, and then informed them that this was an unusual mode to adopt in obtaining the opinion of a department head. He requested the committee to advise the laborers and mechanics to go back to work, and trust to him that justice would be done. In the afternoon, the men returned to the Extension, and were on hand next morning at seven; but, on learning that the half-hour lunch period was still in force, they again stopped work. Although Mr. Chase deprecated the strike as a coercion of the department and informed the workers’ committee that he could not treat with them as strikers, about three-quarters of the men voted to go back to work, taking an hour at noon, while they awaited his decision. About two weeks later, the Secretary rescinded the chief architect’s rule. He later made an announcement that all strikers would in future be discharged.