Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  Although the President had been criticized for continuing the work on the Capitol when men and money were needed for the war, he had been convinced that its moral effect was good. “If people see the Capitol going on,” he had told a caller, “it is a sign we intend the Union shall go on.” On the December day when the statue of Armed Freedom was raised to the top of the dome, there were no speeches or public ceremonies. A battery of artillery was stationed east of the Capitol, and thousands gathered on the desolate hill. The grounds had been disfigured by the tracks of the street railway to Georgetown, and the dazzling white wings rose from a waste of mud and litter, brick walks and workmen’s sheds. Through opera glasses, the crowd watched the tiny figures moving on the dome, and saw the tug on the wire cable as the pulley turned, hoisting the swinging bronze head, with its eagle’s crest. For a moment, it hung above the torso, then settled into place to the metallic tune of hammer taps. Majestically, Armed Freedom rose in the cage of the scaffolding, leaning on her shield and her sheathed sword. The Stars and Stripes waved over her head, and cheers split the keen air. The battery fired a salute of thirty-five guns, one for each State, and thirty-five resolute times the iron voices of the forts replied.

  The President had issued a proclamation, recommending that the last Thursday in November—long observed in New England and other Northern States—should be set apart as a national day of Thanksgiving. An abundant harvest had increased the prosperity induced by the boom in industry and trade. The country around Washington had a peculiar reason for fruitfulness that autumn. With the withdrawal of many encampments, farmers had returned to plow land enriched by the wastage of camps and corrals. Enormous deposits of manure in the city were, moreover, offered free to all who would haul it away. Fine houses were desolate, trees had been cut down and the litter of the abandoned camps marred the landscape; but the fields had never been so green.

  To complete its thankfulness, the Union wanted news that its armies were moving; and, before the last Thursday in November, there was action in Tennessee. Grant’s plans had been firmly made. When Sherman’s army joined him, he attacked the rebel forces besieging Chattanooga. Across the nation, the newsboys screamed success. The story grew, swelling to a paean of triumph—Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge. In Washington, on the unaccustomed holiday, people scanned the extras which proclaimed such timely reason for thanksgiving. The heroism of the Army of the Cumberland and the Army of the Tennessee brightened the faces in churches and theatres and streetcars. Sherman, Thomas and Hooker were names pronounced with pride; and, above all, like an echo from the hoarse throats of the armies at Chattanooga, sounded the name of Grant.

  Hard on this glorious news came word that the Army of the Potomac had advanced across the Rapidan. The nation looked for a crushing victory over Lee’s weakened forces, and the old rallying cry of Richmond went up like a challenge and a prayer. But this time the story faltered. While the gold market nervously fluctuated, there were rumors of a reverse. The press, familiarly, grew reassuring—insisted that Meade was merely delayed, that there could have been no disaster. In fact, there had not been a major engagement. The Federals had intended to storm the Confederate position at Mine Run. On discovering that the fortifications were formidable, Meade had with-drawn his troops to their former encampment on the south bank of the Rappahannock. It was not a disaster, but a fiasco.

  Not even the loyal Star tried to palliate this failure. The deep disappointment brought biting censure of Meade. Had he achieved even a partial success, his earlier delays would have been forgotten. Now they were all sharply recalled. Meade was denounced as another hesitating general, and rumors again circulated that he would be displaced from command.

  But on the pleasure-seeking capital, the news of Mine Run made little impression. The social season had a diversified extravagance that winter, as the official set, the Washington parvenus and the rich visitors made merry. There was so much wealth in the city that several affairs took place on the same night, with plenty of sumptuous toilettes left over to decorate the boxes of the theatres. Mr. Seward gave his small dinners and his grand receptions at his residence, the Old Clubhouse. Schuyler Colfax—the blond and genial little Speaker of the House, whose nickname was “Smiler“—had a series of delightful parties, and so did Congressman Fernando Wood, former mayor of New York City, who had become the leader of the Peace Democrats. Thin and elegant, with dyed hair and mustache, Wood was a new and conspicuous figure in Washington. Although he was openly allied with the secessionists, he attempted to maintain a clandestine relation with the administration, and lost no opportunity to ingratiate himself at the White House.

  One of the most important social events of the winter had preluded the brilliant season—the marriage of Miss Kate Chase to William Sprague, lately the Boy Governor of Rhode Island, now United States Senator. With her endowment of beauty and wit, Kate Chase would have shone in any society; but accident, too, had aided her to take an unrivaled place in the official gaieties of Washington. Since the semi-invalid Mrs. Seward seldom came to the capital, the Secretary of the Treasury’s daughter was the first lady of the Cabinet. Willie’s death had darkened the White House and there were no functions to contest the pre-eminence of the dinners, receptions and matinées dansantes at the Chase mansion. Kate’s marriage, like that of a young princess, cast a radiant reflection far beyond the circle of exalted personages who were invited to attend the ceremony. Her starry career lighted the rooms of tired workingwomen. Many who had never seen her or had briefly glimpsed her in the street thought of her marble-white skin, her proud eyebrows and her glittering auburn hair; knew that pink was her favorite color. Simple lives were enlarged by the description of the long white velvet train of her wedding gown, and the lace veil clasped to her brow by a parure of diamonds and pearls, the gift of the groom.

  Perhaps the groom seemed not quite worthy of this radiant girl. There was nothing very impressive in his insignificant figure, or his amiable face, marked by dissipation; but his patriotism was remembered in his favor. In his yellow-plumed hat, he had been among the first to come to the defense of the capital. He had gone with the Rhode Island troops to First Bull Run and the Peninsula. Above all, he drew importance from the bright stream that flowed from his grandfather’s cotton mills. “Few young men have such advantages as he,” old Gideon Welles had noted, “and Miss Kate has talents and ambition sufficient for both.” Under her loveliness, Kate’s core of purpose was as hard as her father’s. Her wedding would cost four thousand dollars, and Mr. Chase was in debt. Senator Sprague would buy the house at E and Sixth Streets, and his father-in-law would continue to live there, paying board.

  The Secretary of the Treasury’s inordinate ambition for the office of President was an open secret. The New York Herald had suggested the probability that Mrs. Lincoln, “with her usual good nature,” would permit Miss Chase to hold her wedding reception in the East Room, “in order that in view of a certain possible event she may have an opportunity of judging how its associations suit her.” Mrs. Lincoln did not even attend the wedding; it was said, because she was still in mourning. The President took his stovepipe hat and stepped into his carriage.

  Soon after dark, the people of Washington had gathered on either side of the roll of matting that ran from the carriage steps to the door of the Chase residence. It was an American crowd, patient, impudent, good-natured. On E Street, the long line of carriages moved slowly forward. The personages descended: the gentlemen of the Cabinet, the gold-laced diplomats; Generals Halleck, McDowell, Stoneman and Schenck, Senator Wilson, and the Honorable Simon Cameron. Laces and feathers swirled over the matting to the entrance, and jewels gleamed in the light of the carriage lamps. There were vivid beauties—young Miss McDowell and the daughter of the Brazilian minister. Still, the people in the street were not satisfied. They wanted to see the President. It was eight-thirty, the hour set for the marriage ceremony, when at last he came, solitary, without escort. Once in the streets of the capital,
scarcely a head had turned to mark the prairie lawyer who had made his awkward way into the highest office of his country. Now people pressed and scrambled for a sight of his good, ugly face. Between their ranks, he walked to the door of his jealous Cabinet minister: a tired man, racked by a thousand anxieties, sick at the price of a nation’s survival; a man with too much to do, too many people to see, who had to go up to Gettysburg the next week to make a speech.

  In the parlors, draped with the national colors, the marriage vows were spoken, and the guests surged jubilantly around the bride and groom. The scene was invisible to those who lingered in the street; the window frames had been fitted with large mirrors to reflect and enhance the festive show inside. But strains of dance music came from the house, as beside the vertical gentlemen the circular ladies began to revolve like planets. E Street heard the “Kate Chase Wedding March,” composed expressly for the occasion. The mansion trembled with a high-keyed explosion of laughter and tinkling glasses, toasting long happiness to the young couple; and Mrs. William Sprague, with a languid smile on her beautiful lips, swept confidently into a life whose misery not the poorest girl in the Printing Office, not the weariest of the superannuated trollops would have envied her.

  In December, Washington society was fluttered by the advent of the Russian naval officers. Russia had sent her fleet into American waters for the winter. Smarting under the enmity of England and France, the Union rejoiced to have a powerful friend in Europe, and the officers had been feted in every great port. Anchored near Alexandria, the vessels which visited Washington sent groups of bearded sailors, with queer lettering on their caps, wandering through the holiday streets, to the marvel of newsboys and soldiers and belles in spoon-shaped bonnets. In the windows of the shops, they saw the gaudy and expensive trifles which pleased the capital of a nation at war: marble and china ornaments, cigar cases, slippers and smoking caps, cloaks and opera hoods, military and mechanical toys, hobby horses and pearly-toothed dolls that spoke and sang and even walked. The markets in Washington had never been so well supplied with grouse, venison, luscious oysters, quail, swan, juicy reedbirds and tender four-dollar turkeys.

  The citizens of Washington had been mortified because the Board of Aldermen had refused to concur in the Common Council’s resolution, offering the hospitalities of the city to the Russian naval guests. The officers were entertained by Mr. Seward, by the Russian minister, Baron Stoeckl, and by Mr. Welles, who gave a large evening party, with all the legations represented, although it had been rumored that some would refuse to attend. The admiral and several officers attended a lecture by Bayard Taylor, and, with a throng of diplomats, occupied flag-draped boxes at Grover’s Theatre. Congressmen and their wives lunched with ceremony on one of the visiting frigates, and feasted on the choicest viands, washed down with champagne and Russian punch. Muskets served as candlesticks, and the banquet tables were adorned with pyramids of flowers furnished by the White House florist, John Watt. Every day a steamboat carried excursionists from the Seventh Street wharf on a sight-seeing tour of the fleet.

  It had been hoped that Mrs. Lincoln would give a grand ball for the Russian officers; but the only entertainment at the White House was a reception given on the eve of their departure. The President had been prevented by illness from attending any of the functions in honor of the strangers. He had returned from Gettysburg in poor health. At first, he was thought to be bilious; but, by the time he was ready to submit his congressional message to the Cabinet, he was aware that he was suffering from a mild form of smallpox. His advisers did not flinch from the summons to the White House, but their meeting was a proof of patriotism, for smallpox was epidemic in Washington, and not all the cases were light. The scare spread, while the capital celebrated the holidays with eggnogs and feasting, and thronged shops and theatres and parties. People fled in terror from the streetcars at the sign of a mottled complexion. Many of the sick were carried to Kalorama Hospital, but there was no systematic program of isolation. Delirious Negroes stumbled through the streets, and died on doorsteps and in police stations. Senator Bowden of West Virginia died of smallpox, and Congress grew alarmed. Whispers that one of the House reporters had paid a visit to the pesthouse caused such excitement in the press gallery that Speaker Colfax asked the man to leave. Physicians offered free vaccination to all who were unable or unwilling to pay for it. The smallpox hospital at the abandoned contraband camp on Twelfth Street was set on fire as a precautionary measure.

  Still, in the new year of 1864, the trains of Government wagons rumbled through the streets, pigs and cows meandered on the slushy sidewalks, and dead horses lay stinking in the winter sun. On hospital cots, men languished and died. Abandoned infants wailed in alleys. Recruiting agents ran off contrabands, and deserters stealthily paddled across the Potomac. Peculating contractors and quartermasters went to jail. There were robberies and murders on the Island. The grand jury brought fresh batches of indictments against the bawdy houses. The destitute starved and shivered, and the underpaid workers scrimped.

  But Washington society flocked more merrily than ever to balls, private theatricals, tableaus, dinners and levees. In the third year of the war, a new spirit was abroad in the land. The whole prosperous Union was en fête—drunk, some people said, in its crazy pursuit of pleasure. The Sanitary Fairs, which raised millions of dollars for war relief, were mammoth centers of amusement in the big Northern cities. Washington ladies split into two factions, and the Sanitary Fair was not a financial success. A grand fair at the Patent Office, however, netted twenty-five thousand dollars for the benefit of the Christian Commission and the families of District volunteers, and offered Washington a week of diversion on a grand scale. Mrs. William Sprague had returned from her wedding journey to entertain more lavishly than before. Many secession sympathizers were coming out of their seclusion to mingle in the new world of fashion that had replaced the old. Banker Riggs gave a magnificent party in his baronial mansion, which in other days had received the Southern aristocracy. “Gayety has become as epidemic in Washington this winter, as gloom was last winter,” wrote Frederick Seward. “. . . A year ago the Secretary of State was ‘heartless’ or ‘unpatriotic’ because he gave dinners; now the only complaint of him is, that he don’t have dancing.”

  For dancing was the rage, and in crimson velvet and purple moire antique, in pink and green silk and white tarletan, the ladies tossed their cataract curls in the mazes of the polka and the lancers. Besides the private parties, there were the great Patent Office Ball and the Enlistment Fund Ball and the monster hops at Willard’s and the National. The entire company was on the dance floor. No gentlemen lounged along the wainscoting, no spinsters sulked on settees. Young and old, plump and lean, pretty and plain, the ladies all found partners. Grave statesmen and stout generals capered as friskily as boyish lieutenants on leave, while the capital celebrated the third winter of civil strife with laughter and music and the soft bombardment of champagne corks.

  Faintly, through the rhythm of the orchestras sounded the President’s calls for troops. A second draft was ordered. On the summits of the Blue Ridge, the snow was growing thin and gray. The time was approaching when Meade must cease his dawdling before the capital, and march his army on Richmond and put an end to the war. Stretched in the mire along the Rappahannock, the Army of the Potomac had given Washington a welcome season of security. But a man cannot win a fight with his hands held before his breast. In Virginia, the Union needed a sword as well as a shield. The spring sun dried the mud with a portent of blood and death, as fashionable Washington laughed and flirted and danced, spinning like the colored, kaleidoscopic wheel in front of the Varieties.

  XIV. Madam President

  WITH THE NEW YEAR, Mrs. Lincoln laid off her heavy mourning. She wore diamonds and pearls, and garlanded her hair with white flowers; draped her handsome black lace shawl around new dresses of purple and lilac and white and silver-colored silk. At the big public receptions, people saw the same richly gowned and
artificially gracious little woman who had first appeared at the White House in the spring of 1861; but three years had worked a change in Mary Lincoln, no less than in the capital. She had reached the pinnacle of worldly success, only to find it rotten with pain and fear and hatred. Always of unstable temper, she had come to feel the jerk of panic, as well as anger, in her blood. A sudden noise made her turn pale, and put her hand to her heart. Her nights were startled by visions.

  Mary Lincoln had come to Washington in the flush of gratified ambition. Her husband’s election to the Presidency had justified her marriage to an uncouth and self-educated lawyer. It had never been a happy marriage. Mr. Lincoln had not been an eager or romantic lover, and he was an abstracted, if kind and patient husband. Against his unpossessable spirit, Mary Lincoln’s craving nature spent itself in rages, productive only of further gentle withdrawal on his part, “Jesus, what a home Lincoln’s was!” wrote his Springfield partner, Herndon. “What a wife!”

  As Madam President, Mary Lincoln had attained power of another kind; but even in the first enjoyment of her exalted place she also encountered a partial frustration. In Springfield, she had accepted gifts in return for her influence on behalf of office seekers; and there was a story that a fit of hysterics over a diamond brooch had induced Mr. Lincoln to give in on one appointment. She was credited with great political influence. Possibly she may have favored the bestowal of the office of Commissioner of Public Buildings on one W. S. Wood, who had acted as courier for the Presidential party on the journey from Springfield. Wood had originally been recommended to the President by Mr. Seward, but in the gossip of Washington society he was spoken of as a “person connected with the establishment.” Ladies tittered over the fact that he had been “dismissed because he would not put down the expense of a certain state dinner to the public account, and charge it under the head of Improvement to the Grounds'.” Wood accompanied Mrs. Lincoln on at least one trip to New York, and gave her carte blanche to order any quantity of expensive wallpaper for the White House. He was soon replaced by the solid old Washington Republican, Major French, who had already held the office during the Pierce administration. Mrs. Lincoln nagged her husband into giving minor posts to her family connections, but she was forced to learn that her wishes were not paramount in the distribution of appointments, from postmasters to Cabinet ministers. She detested both Seward and Chase, and was at loggerheads with Stanton.