Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  This reticence did not cover a resolute plan. Though aware that the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was badly damaged, both Stanton and Halleck relied on the hope that General Hunter would be able to move his forces all the way from the Ohio River in time to confront the invaders. Meantime, Stanton made the spacious, if wasted gesture of asking the governors of Pennsylvania and New York to call out their militia. On July 5, Grant suggested sending up an army corps from Petersburg, in case the enemy should cross the upper Potomac. Halleck telegraphed that he thought this unnecessary. He had “no apprehensions,” though he conceded that he might make use of the dismounted cavalry of the Army of the Potomac. That same day, however, Grant became rather tardily convinced that a Confederate army corps was gone from his front. In spite of Halleck’s reassurances, he ordered to the relief of Washington not only three thousand dismounted cavalry, but the third division of the Sixth Corps, under General James B. Ricketts. These troops landed at Baltimore on July 8.

  In the autumn of 1862, Stanton had sought expert advice on the Washington fortifications. A commission of distinguished army engineers had spent two months in examining them. The defenses, then still being enlarged and strengthened, formed a complete circuit of thirty-seven miles. Over fifty forts occupied commanding positions north and south of the Potomac, with emplacements for field guns and connecting lines of trenches between them. The commission had reported that they required garrisons of thirty-four thousand men—twenty-five thousand infantry and nine thousand artillerists—in addition to a force of three thousand cavalry for outpost duty. The figure for the garrisons was over twice as high as that set by McClellan’s corps commanders in the spring of 1862. On the point of a covering army for the field, in case the capital were threatened, the Army engineers agreed with the earlier estimate of twenty-five thousand men.

  Early in 1863, a Department of Washington had been re-created, absorbing the military entity of the District, and reducing the office of military governor to little more than an honorary position. In command of the department, the troops of which were designated the Twenty-second Corps, Heintzelman had been replaced by General Christopher C. Augur, who had seen service both in Virginia and Louisiana. Augur, in July of 1864, reported an aggregate of thirty-one thousand men in the department. General Barnard, who had been made chief engineer on Grant’s staff, was in Washington in early July. He stated that a little over twenty thousand men of the Twenty-second Corps were in the vicinity of the capital; but that a large number of them—dismounted troopers, guards at the bridges and buildings, and novices at the artillery camp—were unavailable for defense. The garrisons, according to Barnard, the acknowledged expert on the subject of the Washington fortifications, numbered not thirty-four thousand, but ninety-six hundred soldiers.

  Even this figure gives no conception of the military impoverishment of Washington. In May and June, the troops defending the capital had been reduced in quality, as well as in numbers. Nearly all able-bodied and disciplined soldiers had been sent to reinforce the Army of the Potomac. The infantry on guard duty in the city was composed of the semi-invalid Veteran Reserves. The Army engineers had advised Stanton that heavy artillery regiments, once trained, should remain permanently in the forts. This counsel had been followed until the losses of Grant’s campaign were realized. Then most of the experienced gunners were ordered to the front as infantry. A number of dismounted batteries of field artillery, brought in to man the ordnance, had also been sent away to Petersburg and, more recently, to Harper’s Ferry. Their places had been taken by the Ohio National Guard. In late April, the governors of several western States had offered to raise seventy-five thousand volunteers for one hundred days’ service on guard and garrison duty during the campaign season. The Ohio regiments in the Washington fortifications were militia, corresponding in want of training and length of service to the first troops which had come to the capital at the outbreak of war. They were, however, far less numerous. The dispatch of one regiment to Harper’s Ferry reduced by one third the infantry on duty in the northern defenses of Washington.

  The lethargy of the War Office was based on no illusions about the caliber of these soldiers. Halleck was well aware that the Ohio militia could “scarcely fire a gun.” By July 6, this fact was beginning to worry General Augur, and, on his prompting, Halleck suggested to Grant that one regiment of heavy artillery should be returned to Washington. The infantry around the capital, he later assured Grant, could do nothing in the field, as one half of the men could not march at all.

  At this time, it occurred to General Halleck to inquire about conditions at the bridges across the Potomac. He received a prompt report from Colonel B. S. Alexander, a brusque and corpulent officer who had been Barnard’s assistant in Washington in the early days, and had recently been appointed chief engineer of the defenses. All three bridges were guarded by insufficient detachments of Veteran Reserves, Alexander stated. At the Washington end of the Long Bridge, there was no artillery at all; while, at the Virginia end, Fort Jackson had fallen into dilapidation as a result of being traversed by the rail-road tracks. The Aqueduct was protected on the Virginia side by three blockhouses and a stockade, with gates at the approach. The block-houses were unoccupied. The captain of the guard declared that he would close the gates, in case of attack. He had, however, never tried to close them, and did not know if the bars fitted, or indeed if there were any bars at all. The batteries at the District end of the Chain Bridge were in charge of an Ohio militia sergeant, who knew nothing about ordnance. He merely cleaned the guns, aired the ammunition and swept the platforms. No one at the bridge knew how the guns were loaded. The officer of the guard believed that the bridge was mined, and could be blown up in an emergency; but Colonel Alexander remarked that this was not the case.

  The character of the troops which had been left in the capital would have permitted a raid from any direction. This was not understood by the people of Washington. They knew that many regiments had been sent away, and viewed with some consternation the departure of Halleck’s reinforcements for Harper’s Ferry; but they were convinced of the excellence of the city’s defenses, which for the preceding year and a half had been so strongly garrisoned that they had induced a comfortable tradition of security.

  On July 6, the day that Alexander made his report, boatmen were coming down the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal to Georgetown, with news that the rebels were crossing the Potomac at nearly every fordable point between Harper’s Ferry and Muddy Branch, less than twenty miles above the Washington suburb. The boatmen were too frightened to return upriver, and their empty barges lay huddled around the Aqueduct.

  Even the most skeptical persons were obliged to admit that the raiders were extraordinarily bold. They were plundering and stealing horses in the border counties of Pennsylvania. Fifty miles of Baltimore and Ohio tracks had been torn up. Their forces levied requisitions of money on Hagerstown and Frederick.

  Commanding at Baltimore was General Lew Wallace, the Indiana officer who would one day write a novel called Ben Hur. He had a small body of troops, as weedy as those in Washington. He had no more accurate information than Halleck or Augur. An army, apparently of twenty thousand men, had crossed the upper Potomac, and was moving toward the gaps of South Mountain. Wallace promptly moved out to meet the enemy. On the Monocacy River, where the railroad and the pikes to Washington and Baltimore converged, he concentrated his command of twenty-five hundred men. There he was providentially joined by Ricketts’s division of the Sixth Corps, which, on landing at Baltimore, made haste to follow him on the cars. Wallace had little hope of defeating the Confederates, but he suspected that they meant to march on Washington, and he thought that he might delay them. With the reinforcements that reached him, he had about six thousand men on Saturday, July 9, when he fought a sharp engagement. The defeated Federals fell back to the east on the Baltimore road. General Early did not pursue them. At dawn on Sunday morning, the gray-clad troops—Early’s corps and another division under Gen
eral John C. Breckinridge—were marching south along the Georgetown Pike. They camped that night above Rockville, a town within ten miles of the District line.

  In the northern defenses of Washington, the regulations had been tightened. No man was permitted to leave his post. Four hours a day were given over to artillery practice. The garrisons were busily employed in chopping down the brush, which was growing high on the approaches. The spirit of the Ohio soldiers was good. They were prepared to fight for the capital. But the Confederates, if they had not been held up on the Monocacy, could have walked past them on Sunday. In the northern works, the infantry consisted of two regiments of raw militia, spaced out in earth-banked forts, between which the rifle pits were unoccupied. Early’s was an army of veterans.

  Strong reinforcements, as the War Office knew, were starting for the capital. On Saturday evening, Halleck had received permission from Grant to order up the Nineteenth Corps from Fort Monroe, where it was expected by ship from the Gulf of Mexico. Late that night, mulling over Washington’s predicament, the old bureaucrat aroused himself to send off another telegram, asking Grant for the rest of the Sixth Corps. Fortunately, Grant had already given the order, and the two remaining divisions embarked at City Point on Sunday.

  None of these troops could arrive before Monday. Meantime, the additions to the defense of Washington were negligible. Sheridan’s force of dismounted cavalry, forwarded from Baltimore, proved to include twenty-five hundred sick, and yielded but five hundred serviceable men, mainly the residue of the Twenty-fifth New York Cavalry. The Ninth New York Artillery had also been expected, but only one battalion turned up on Sunday afternoon. The rest of the regiment, with its colonel, William Henry Seward, Junior, had gone to the Monocacy.

  Halleck and Augur kept the wires busy, rounding up every available man in the department. Orders clicked to outlying forts and camps in Virginia. Augur’s eye fell hopefully on the broken-down inmates of the stragglers’ camp at Alexandria.

  Cavalry was desperately needed for outpost duty. Eight hundred troopers, including some regulars, had been hastily organized at Falls Church, and sent out on the Rockville Road to meet the enemy. On Sunday, they skirmished briskly with Early’s advance, and did their best to impede its progress. The detachment of the Eighth Illinois which Halleck had sent to Point of Rocks had been engaged on the Monocacy. Six other companies of this regiment were scattered in front of the line of the northern defenses. The commanding officer at Camp Stoneman, the rendezvous for dismounted at Giesboro’ Point, was assembling equipment and drawing horses from the Cavalry Bureau on Sunday, but the men could not be made ready for service that day. Some, however, were ordered into the defenses as infantry.

  Inside the District line, the strong earthworks of Fort Reno guarded the Rockville Road. The battalion of the Ninth New York Artillery was encamped at Tennallytown on Sunday afternoon. In this exposed section of the line, a new brigadier, General Martin D. Hardin, who had graduated from West Point only two years before the outbreak of the war, took command late on Sunday evening. Hardin did not leave Washington until eleven o’clock, and reinforcements of Veteran Reserves reached Fort Reno still later in the night.

  General Alex McCook was assigned to the command of a reserve camp on Piney Branch Creek, midway between the city and Fort Stevens, the northernmost point of the defenses, which guarded the great thoroughfare of the Seventh Street Road. The dearth of infantry was shown by the fact that the 150th Ohio garrisoned and picketed the entire line from Rock Creek east to Bladensburg. One company of this regiment occupied Fort Stevens, supplemented by a battery of artillerymen and a few convalescents—two hundred and nine men in all. On Sunday night, the Second District Regiment, a regiment of Veteran Reserves and two batteries reported to McCook’s camp. The general had made a hasty survey of the northern defenses, which he had never before set eyes on. He took command of them next day.

  Quartermaster General Meigs had been ordered by Mr. Stanton to report for field service. The clerks of his office and the various quartermaster’s employees in the District and in Alexandria formed a sizable body of men, and Meigs was champing to lead them on active service. His ardor was dashed by General Halleck, who directed him merely to relieve the guards at the depots and corrals. This paltry duty could be performed by a battalion of two hundred and fifty clerks. Meigs was also counting on leaving a number of teamsters in the city for the accommodation of Grant’s reinforcements, who would arrive without wagon trains. Even with these deductions, the Quartermaster General could still command a movable force of nearly two thousand men, and he spent a busy Sunday, organizing them and procuring arms from the Arsenal. He offered their services to General Augur, who gladly accepted them.

  The news of the defeat on the Monocacy startled Washington out of its complacency. The rumors rivaled those which had preceded Gettysburg. It was said that Lee’s whole army was again invading the North. People could not fail to be impressed by the sudden bustle of activity at the hitherto somnolent War Office. The movement of soldiers was of small military significance, but invalids and dismounted artillerists and troopers raised the dust, as they tramped to the northern works. Long trains of horses were being led in all directions. In some of the vacant lots, squads were drilling in linen coats. It was a noisy and excited Sunday.

  Whatever the private emotions of the War Office, it remained uncommunicative. Gideon Welles was disgusted. To the Navy Department on Sunday came a well-authenticated report that rebel pickets had been seen near Georgetown. It was disdainfully dismissed at the War Office as a mere street rumor. That night, however, Mr. Stanton sent a carriage out to the Soldiers’ Home, with positive orders that the President and his family should return to the White House. It was after midnight when John Hay was awakened by Bob Lincoln’s coming into his room and getting into bed.

  On Monday morning, the Federal cavalry again skirmished with the Confederates on the Rockville Road. From the signal station at Fort Reno, it was presently observed that clouds of dust were moving to the right. Out beyond Silver Spring, a courier of the Eighth Illinois threw himself on his horse, and galloped back to McCook’s reserve camp behind Fort Stevens. The enemy was advancing on the Seventh Street Road.

  McCook abandoned the reserve camp and pushed his meager command into Fort Stevens and the adjacent rifle pits. He was joined by a third National Guard regiment and a few invalids and dismounted during the morning. Some of the dismounted he threw out with Ohio militiamen in a skirmish line before the fort.

  In the meantime, news of invasion had burst on Washington with the arrival of a horde of refugees from Tennallytown in the District and from Rockville and Silver Spring and other Maryland towns. Down the roads they came flying before the rebels, with their household goods stacked crazily on their wagons. This was no cavalry raid, they told the city. The country to the north was swarming with gray uniforms.

  Washington, with its pelting couriers and marching squads and trains of army wagons, wore quite a military aspect. It was entirely illusory. The authorities were at the end of their resources. Convalescents had been called from the hospitals. Three companies of useless stragglers had been sent to Tennallytown. Even the President’s guard of Bucktails was ordered to the fortifications, where they smelled gun-powder for the only time in their service. As a last forlorn expedient, the District militia and volunteers were called out on Monday morning. The militia now consisted of three-year-old lists of names, and loyal citizens were urged to fill up the companies. Republican clubs, the recently formed Union Leagues, stepped forward, but they had no military organization. The only existing volunteer companies were those in the Government departments, and they had to be armed and equipped and mustered in, before their services were available. While Washington resounded with frenzied calls to arms, and military orders rattled like hailstones, the dust of Early’s advance arose before Fort Stevens.

  The Confederates were within sight of the gleaming dome of the Capitol. Behind the firm, but ill-garr
isoned fortifications lay the Treasury and the Arsenal and the rich manifold storehouses. The raiders were not in sufficient force to hold the place, once reinforcements from Petersburg should arrive; but the sack of the capital would bow the Union’s head in humiliation before the world, and General Early, hunched in his saddle before Fort Stevens, knew a flash of hope more dazzling than the noonday sun.

  Early had won the race to the Washington defenses. He saw that the forts were “feebly manned,” and he gave orders to attack. As a strong fan-shaped line of Confederate skirmishers moved into the valley before the fort, McCook ordered his picket line to fall back slowly, fighting, while a fresh force of six hundred men, made up of the Twenty-fifth New York Cavalry, some of the 150th Ohio National Guard and a company of the Second District, made ready to go out and drive the skirmishers back. The New Yorkers were a skeleton command of unhorsed troopers, but they were veterans, and looked the part. The sight of them made Early change his mind. He feared that reinforcements from Petersburg were already in the defenses, and gave orders to reconnoiter before attacking.