Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  The houses behind the Confederate skirmish line had been occupied by the enemy. Horses had been picketed in the orchards, and fences had been torn down for firewood. Soldiers had ransacked the wardrobes, leaving in exchange the tattered remnants of butternut uniforms. Books and letters and women’s clothing strewed the grounds. In one family’s mansion, the crockery was broken, and the furniture smashed; even the piano had been split up. Among the obscene drawings on the walls was scrawled a reminder of the devastation in the Valley. There had been destruction of property during Hunter’s campaign to Lynchburg. He had ordered the burning of the residence of Governor Letcher, as well as of the Virginia Military Institute. The Confederates made persistent retaliation for the former offense. They had destroyed the house of Governor Bradford of Maryland on their way to Washington. Only blackened walls remained of the country seat of Postmaster General Blair at Silver Spring. At the end of the month, when the Confederates raided Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, Early ordered the whole pretty town laid in ashes.

  The fine old house of the elder Blair, situated not far from his son’s, had been the headquarters of the Confederate army. On the lawn, where Mr. Lincoln had played with the Blair grandchildren, his coattails sailing out behind him as he ran, Early and Breckinridge had briefly lain to dream of the glittering prize of Washington. All the liquors had been consumed, the papers were ransacked and only the hems remained of old Mrs. Blair’s linen sheets; but the house had not been wantonly despoiled, and the shrubbery and the fields of fine corn were spared. Protection of the property was attributed to Breckinridge’s former friendship with the elder Blair. Washington, unimpressed by this gesture of sentiment, was bitter against John C. Breckinridge. Four months after the outbreak of war, he had been in his seat at the Capitol, paying lip service to the old flag. Jubal Early was merely a rebel name, one of the enemy’s generals; but, with the sourness of spoiled friendship, Washington held Breckinridge to be a traitor who had returned to assault a city where he had been held in honor.

  Both the War Office and the city’s secesh had changed their tune, the former lugubriously exaggerating the seriousness of the invasion, the latter minimizing Early’s numbers and tittering at the ease with which they had laid siege to the capital. The President, wanting the rebel force destroyed, remained firm in the decision he had formed on Grant’s appointment to the chief command, that he would take no hand in the direction of the army. In an aftermath of rage at the audacity of the raiders, Washington longed for vengeance. Wright, with his two divisions and the advance of the Nineteenth Corps, did not start until noon on Wednesday. With all their booty and their droves of stolen cattle, Early’s men escaped across the upper Potomac. There was no effective pursuit, though Hunter’s force, too, was back in the Valley. In a confusion of contradictory orders from Washington, the Union troops marched helplessly to and fro, and loyal citizens bowed in shame at the exhibition of Federal bungling.

  General Early had no reason to feel elated at the success of his expedition. He had lost his chance of plundering Washington. He had not been able to carry out his intention of releasing the Confederate prisoners at Point Lookout. Most important of all, his movement had not accomplished Lee’s main purpose of forcing Grant either to weaken his hold on Petersburg or to attempt a costly attack. Yet Early’s raid had the vastly important result of shaking the already unsteady confidence of the Union. Again, as often in the past, the Shenandoah had been, in the words of the Intelligencer, “the valley of our national humiliation.” Once more, under trusted leadership, after a ruthless expenditure of men, the old pattern of Federal impotence was repeated; and the country in bitter disgust cursed the administration and its generals. Even Grant fell from the pedestal on which his countrymen had placed him, and was reviled as no better than a bloody-handed butcher.

  Volunteering had virtually ceased. Over the protests of his friends, who feared that the step would ruin his chances of re-election, the President issued a call for five hundred thousand more men. Drearily across the land fell the shadow of the hated draft, which would be set in operation to complete the unfilled quotas.

  The Union camps no longer rang with “Cheer, Boys, Cheer,” and “The Battle-Cry of Freedom.” From the bivouacs came strains of weariness and death—“When This Cruel War Is Over,” “Just Before the Battle, Mother,” “The Vacant Chair,” and the nostalgic “Tenting Tonight,” written by a New Hampshire conscript.

  We are tired of war on the old camp ground,

  Many are dead and gone . . .

  Down in front of Richmond, skirmishing with the First Massachusetts Cavalry, was Andrew J. Clement, the Chelsea boy who had driven out beyond Centreville to find his brother on the morning of First Bull Run. Andrew had seen a lot of war since then. He was a hard-riding trooper, veteran of a dozen bloody fields. He had a curved Chicopee saber and a silver-bright carbine and a tight-buttoned blue jacket, piped in yellow, with the three chevrons of a sergeant on the sleeve. Sometimes, in the shattered Virginia woods, he thought of the hot July Sunday of 1861, when he had lingered with the soldiers at the front, innocently hopeful of an excursion to Richmond. After three years’ fighting, he hadn’t quite got there yet.

  XVII. Portents of a Second Term

  THE RAINY ELECTION DAY of 1864 found the White House nearly deserted. After the conferences and the hullabaloo of the canvass, Mr. Lincoln quietly awaited the news of the people’s choice. It lay between him and an old friend, recently estranged. Copperheads and pacifists had rallied to the standard of George B. McClellan, once the military idol of the Union, who had been nominated for the Presidency on a platform that the war had proved a failure and must cease.

  The loyal people of the nation were no longer united, but in Mr. Lincoln’s phrase, “divided and partially paralyzed by a political war among themselves.” While the Confederacy hopefully watched and intrigued, the Union had become embroiled in an internal feud. Its two contending clans, Republican and Democratic, were sub-divided by angry family quarrels.

  The discord in the household of the National Union party threatened to bring down the roof on the administration’s head. Dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war had been increasing during late July and August. False hopes held out by unofficial peace missions had unsettled the country. Early’s forces had again swooped up from the Valley to raid Maryland and Pennsylvania. Sherman’s army, engaged in severe fighting, appeared to be blocked before Atlanta. To deepen the gloom, August had brought news of a futile attack on Petersburg, where a mine, laid by the Federals, had been exploded with disastrous bungling and great loss of life.

  The widespread murmuring against the administration had emboldened the President’s enemies in the Republican party. The Wade-Davis Manifesto blazoned to the public the radicals’ opposition to their leader. There was a movement in New York to force Mr. Lincoln to withdraw in favor of a more promising candidate. Grant and Ben Butler were hailed as men who could save the Union party. Even Lincoln’s friends became infected with belief in a great popular reaction against him. The President himself, in August, despaired of re-election.

  In expectation of profiting by the delay, the Democrats had postponed their national convention until the end of August. It took place only a few days before the fall of Atlanta revived and inspirited the country. In early August, Farragut’s victory in Mobile Bay—a stirring story of an old admiral lashed to the mast of his flagship—had not been enough to offset the prevailing depression. After Atlanta, the two great successes were triumphantly bracketed together. The Union remembered its superior man power, and grew confident again.

  Before the Democratic convention, the Republicans had scarcely begun their campaign. With brighter prospects, they set to work in September. In opposition to McClellan and his party’s platform, the radical leaders ceased their machinations and sullenly fell into line to work for the President’s re-election. Even a group of malcontents, who had bolted the party and nominated Frémont, were pacified. Montgomery Blair,
target for radical detestation, resigned from the Cabinet at Mr. Lincoln’s request. Frémont withdrew from the race. The Republican party was, for campaign purposes, united.

  The opposition remained irreconcilably split into Copperhead and pro-war factions. The former had dictated the peace plank in the platform, while the latter had been appeased by the choice of McClellan, a military hero who had been persecuted by the administration. However, as McClellan’s popularity rested on his war record, the Copperhead sentiments of the platform placed him in an anomalous position; and, at the cost of antagonizing a section of his adherents, he promptly repudiated the peace plank. To his standard flocked a host of loyal Union men, alarmed by Federal centralization and incensed by the draft, the heavy taxation, the censorship and the arbitrary arrests.

  As the political canvass grew spirited in September, events in the Shenandoah Valley brought further aid to the Republicans, for whom a victory in the field spoke more eloquently than any campaign speech. In August, the blundering interference of the War Department had moved General Grant to make a drastic reorganization in the Valley. Hunter resigned, and the cavalry commander, Phil Sheridan, was placed at the head of a force, presently to be known as the Army of the Shenandoah, which included the Sixth and Nineteenth Corps and heavy cavalry reinforcements from the Army of the Potomac. With this fine army, Grant expected Sheridan not only to defeat Early, but to blast the fertile Valley so that it should no longer supply provisions for Lee’s forces and never again subsist an army of invasion.

  Grant had discovered that he could not depend on Halleck and Stanton to transmit his orders to troops in the vicinity of Washington. Without stopping in the capital, the general-in-chief went in mid-September to the Valley and personally directed Sheridan to attack. Soon the country vibrated with the news of great Federal victories at Winchester and Fisher’s Hill. Down the bountiful Valley, the Army of the Shenandoah swept like a blight, seizing and destroying the crops, driving the cattle before them. The young Irish general’s exploits fired the imagination of the Union. In derision of pacifist efforts, he was called Peace Commissioner Sheridan.

  Although citizens of the District were debarred from voting in the Presidential election, partisans of both sides carried on a demonstrative campaign in the capital. The zealous Washington Democrats were the first to organize, but by the middle of September Lincoln-and-Johnson clubs were sprouting in all the wards of the city. Immediately after McClellan’s nomination, a campaign flag bearing his name and that of Pendleton, his Copperhead running mate, was suspended across the Avenue at Seventh Street, outside Democratic headquarters at Parker’s Hall. Nearly two weeks elapsed before the Republicans hung out their Lincoln-and-Johnson banner from the Union League rooms at Ninth Street. Thereafter, the cheers of passing troops were eagerly noted, as an indication of the army’s political sentiments.

  In the clamorous animosities of the pre-election weeks, only the draft meetings found the Washington citizenry united, irrespective of party affiliations. After the new draft was in operation, the capital, eternally protesting the injustice of its quota, continued to make a frenzied effort to raise subscriptions for bounties. The President set a good example by paying the bounty for one soldier, credited to the Third Ward, out of his own pocket. Mr. Lincoln’s representative recruit, as he was called, was John Summerfield Staples, a twenty-year-old veteran of nine months’ service in the Pennsylvania militia. Before joining the Second District Regiment in early October, Staples went uniformed to the White House, where the President shook his hand, and told him that he was a good-looking, stout and healthy man, who, in Lincoln’s opinion, would do his duty.

  Even before the wheel had begun to turn in September, when substitutes had been plentiful and cheap, it had not been possible to raise a sizable exemption fund in the capital. Once the draft had started, substitutes suddenly disappeared, and black looks were turned on the brokers who now asked from eight to nine hundred dollars per man. Washington, fulminating and protesting, refused to pay the price of release from Federal oppression. The draft continued to function, arousing an amount of hostility out of all proportion to its effectiveness in producing man power.

  The October elections in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana were crucial in determining the drift of political sentiment. Soldiers from the first two States were enabled by law to vote in the field; and, in polls opened in the barracks and hospitals of the capital, ballots were gathered in boxes which had once held cigars and paper collars. These showed heavy majorities for the Union party, although Carver Hospital registered a substantial opposition vote.

  Some ten thousand Pennsylvania soldiers were also rushed home from Sheridan’s army to swell the Republican vote in that doubtful State. It was carried by only a small majority, but Republican gains in Ohio and Indiana were sufficiently impressive to give promise that Lincoln would be re-elected in November.

  Of close importance to Washington was the election in Maryland which adopted, by a slender majority, eked out by the soldiers’ vote, a new State constitution abolishing slavery. Loyal Marylanders marched to the White House to serenade the President, and the Washington colored people made ready for a grand jubilee at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church.

  In the midst of the October rejoicing, Chief Justice Taney appropriately breathed his last. He had long outlived his day, lingering on to the age of eighty-seven in a world of change and crisis. His long and honorable service to his country was stamped across with the name Dred Scott, and there was little pomp of official mourning as his coffin moved to the Washington station, on the way to a burying ground in the now free soil of Maryland.

  Guerrillas swarmed along the Manassas Gap Railroad, turning the eyes of the capital to a tiny theatre of war. Railroad employees were killed, and pickets of the Second District Regiment were captured by Mosby’s daring riders. Augur was at last permitted to take the field, under orders to clear the bushwhackers from the railroad line. Quartermaster’s employees were also dispatched to cut down the timber which afforded shelter near the tracks; but forty-seven of them refused to go, and were clapped into the Central Guard-house.

  Soon, there was action on a larger scale in the neighborhood of Washington. Before daybreak on October 19, Early’s forces made a surprise attack on the Army of the Shenandoah. Phil Sheridan was not with his command. On his way to rejoin it, after a conference at the War Office, he was sleeping that night at Winchester, twenty miles north of Cedar Creek, where the army was encamped.

  As Sheridan rode out of Winchester in the morning, he heard the sound of heavy firing. Blue-clad fugitives welled out of the south, panting the news that his army was routed. Sheridan put spurs to his horse, and, calling on the men to follow him, galloped to the front. He rallied his forces, and in the afternoon made a counter-attack which ended in a decisive Federal victory. In the speeding figure of the little Irishman on his big black horse, there was drama useful to the Union party. Before the end of the political campaign, the florid stanzas of “Sheridan’s Ride”—Sheridan twenty, fifteen, ten, five miles away!—were thrilling the country with patriotic fervor.

  Cedar Creek was a momentous victory for the capital. The pursuit and devastation which followed it drove the enemy forever from the Shenandoah. The final crushing battle would not be fought until spring, but alarms had vanished from the Cumberland Valley, and Maryland and Pennsylvania farmers slept peacefully in their beds. On the hills surrounding Washington, the game birds flocked near the fortifications and fed under the silent guns.

  All through the autumn, captured Confederate battle flags were borne to Washington from the Valley. With the eloquence of inanimate objects, the torn and dusty standards cried the defeat of their cause. Stanton received the flags at the War Department, and, with unwonted effusiveness, wrung the hands of prideful sergeants and privates and thanked them for their gallantry. After three months’ interruption, the Baltimore and Ohio trains again traversed the Valley; and, following the success at Cedar Creek, y
oung General George A. Custer—the former lieutenant of cavalry who had been made one of McClellan’s aides on the Peninsula—took the cars for Washington with ten rebel battle flags flying from the engine. A quantity of Confederate artillery was also sent by rail to the capital. Accompanied by a band, the guns were drawn through the streets to the grounds in front of the War Department. However, the discovery that the ammunition boxes were filled with powder proved too much for Mr. Stanton’s nerves, and during the night these alarming trophies were whisked away to the Arsenal.

  In an atmosphere of military excitement, the political campaign grew heated in Washington. The greatest demonstration was a Republican torchlight procession which took place two days after Cedar Creek. The night was weirdly lighted by the blue fire which burned in the streets and on the roof of the Patent Office. Through the city went the jubilant parade, horses, wagons, howitzers and marching men, with thousands of torches, lanterns and lighted transparencies. Soldiers, Metropolitan Police, quartermaster’s employees and delegations from the hospitals were in line with Lincoln-and-Johnson clubs from the Washington wards and from some of the States. Five ambulances were loaded with the maimed. The members of the Elephant Club of the Northern Liberties had a large transparency of their mascot mounted on a wagon. The New Jersey club carried a portrait of McClellan, labeled “Great Failure of the War.” As the procession passed the President’s House, Mr. Lincoln appeared with Tad at an upper window. Rockets flashed and torches waved. There were loud calls for a speech. Lincoln disliked making impromptu addresses, at which he was ineffective, and he responded only by asking for cheers for the Union’s commanders, soldiers and sailors.