by Bruce Catton
The next troops reached Baltimore on April 19; the 6th Massachusetts, a full-strength militia regiment which arrived on a special train, reaching the President Street station of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore railroad a little before noon. There was, to repeat, no through rail connection with the Baltimore & Ohio line to Washington; as a makeshift, cars were hauled cross-town, one at a time, by teams of horses, along a street railway line that led to the Baltimore & Ohio’s Camden Street station, and as these cars went trundling along the streets, the unlawful combinations of the misguided swung into action.
Moving as rapidly as possible—which was not, after all, much faster than a brisk walk—nine cars made the trip without serious trouble. The way was lined with hostile crowds, which quickly got larger and more unruly; there were jeers and hisses, stones were thrown, and emotional temperatures grew hotter and hotter, and at last people dumped sand on the track, piled anchors on top of the sand, and effectively blocked the right of way. Stranded at the President Street station were four companies of the regiment and the regimental band, perhaps 220 men in all. With them was an extremely unhappy body of embryonic soldiers from Pennsylvania; 800 men belonging to various military companies in Philadelphia, unarmed and lacking uniforms, not belonging to the state’s organized militia, led by officers who had never been formally commissioned—a patriotic but utterly ineffective outfit, of no conceivable use in this crisis, hoping to get to Washington and to be of some service there. The band and the Philadelphians stayed at the railroad station, awaiting developments; the four companies of the 6th Massachusetts shouldered muskets and set out for the Camden Street station on foot.
The march began badly and ended in catastrophe. There were hostile crowds all along President Street, throwing stones, cheering for Jefferson Davis, uttering throaty groans for Abraham Lincoln, and denouncing uniformed Yankees. Someone in the crowd unfurled a Confederate flag, and the shower of stones increased. Mayor Brown got to the scene, placed himself at the head of the column, and appealed to the crowd to keep the peace.
He was heeded only briefly. Then the stone-throwing was resumed, citizens jostled the soldiers and tried to wrest their muskets away from them, and some officer shouted an order to double-quick in the hope that the soldiers could get out of there before the business grew serious. This seemed to make matters worse instead of better, for the running Yankees looked like chicken-hearted fugitives who dared not fight, and in no time at all there was a full-scale riot and men who had merely been trying to hurt began to try to kill each other. Shots were fired, from the ranks and from the sidewalks—in all of the tumult no one was ever certain just who fired first—and Mayor Brown, sensibly concluding that his presence protected neither the soldiers nor the citizens, stepped out of the column.
A detachment of police arrived at last. (It would have been there from the beginning if Secretary Cameron’s people had bothered to tell the governor or the mayor when the 6th Massachusetts was going to arrive.) Enough order was restored to enable the battered companies to reach the Camden Street station and board the cars for Washington. As the troop train at last steamed out, there was one final incident, which the people of Baltimore would remember for a long time. A group of men near the track voiced a cheer for Jefferson Davis, and some soldier or soldiers fired through the car windows in reply, killing an eminently respectable merchant named Robert W. Davis, who had had no part whatever in the rioting. Back at the President Street station the unlucky companies from Pennsylvania were badly beaten before the police could take charge; not knowing what else to do, the police at last sent the men back to Philadelphia—profoundly unhappy men, who had shed blood but had acquired no glory, suffering the final ignominy of being sent home by the police.
The Massachusetts regiment had had casualties: 4 men killed and 36 wounded, not to mention about 130 who had disappeared in all the excitement but who, presumably, would eventually reappear. (This of course would include the members of the band, which had received contusions at the railroad station along with the Pennsylvanians.) The citizens of Baltimore had an even worse casualty list—12 men dead and an undetermined number injured. The first fatalities of the war had been recorded.6
Some time that evening the 6th Massachusetts got to Washington. It left behind it a Baltimore that was all but on fire with indignation, and many of those who were angry were not secessionists at all. There were men who argued that the troops were as much to blame for the fighting as the sidewalk crowds, the War Department’s handling of the business had been inexcusably inept, and Mayor Brown believed that the killing of Davis, the cheering but non-violent merchant, kept many citizens from feeling “a keener sense of blame attaching to themselves as the aggressors.” The Baltimore Police Board met that evening and agreed that there would be an even worse riot if any more troops came through the city; to prevent it, the bridges connecting Baltimore by rail with the East must be burned, and Governor Hicks reluctantly concurred. A special committee was sent off to Washington to tell Lincoln about it.
Lincoln would accept what had to be accepted, and he would go out of his way to support men like Governor Hicks and Mayor Brown, who were doing their best in an extraordinarily difficult situation; he wrote to them, thanking them for their efforts to keep the peace and promising that to the extent possible, troops coming to Washington would be ordered to bypass Baltimore. Thus the immediate effect of all of this was that the Baltimore secessionists had won; they had isolated the capital of the United States, and the Federal government had lost the first battle of the war. Acutely conscious of this fact, Lincoln insisted that his underlying policy must be understood. The Federal government would do what it had to do to insure its survival, and if need be it would be very tough about it. When a committee of leading citizens came to the White House to protest that it was an insult and a provocation to bring Federal troops across Maryland, Lincoln returned a blunt answer. Washington had to have soldiers, he said, and the soldiers were neither moles that could tunnel under the ground nor birds that could fly through the air; they had to go on foot, and to reach Washington they had to march across Maryland, which they would do no matter who did not like it. “Keep your rowdies in Baltimore,” said the President, “and there will be no bloodshed. Go home and tell your people that if they will not attack us we will not attack them; but if they do attack us we will return it, and that severely.”7 Over the long pull this policy would be made effective, but for the immediate present the administration was almost completely helpless. It was cut off, receiving no troops and suddenly discovering that it could send out no orders—secessionists in Baltimore, encouraged by the destruction of the railroad bridges, had seized the telegraph offices. Below the Potomac, Virginia seemed bent on making war with energy and dash, and it was perfectly possible that Virginia troops might at any moment march into Washington, capturing President and cabinet and paralyzing the central nervous system of the whole Federal government. Lincoln had at his immediate command very little to prevent a stroke of this kind—a bare handful of regulars, a few District of Columbia home-guard regiments that might or might not prove to be Unionist at heart, the battered 6th Massachusetts, and the incomplete Pennsylvania regiment that had preceded it. Until reinforcements arrived, the capital was all but defenseless. With telegraphic communication broken, the administration could not know what the rest of the country was doing. It could only trust that help was on the way. Journalist Bayard Taylor, casting about in Washington at this time, found that every conversation ended with the anxious question: “Why don’t the troops come on?”
Taylor talked with Lincoln, and was encouraged to see in him “that solemn, earnest composure which is the sign of a soul not easily perturbed”; but Lincoln in fact was profoundly perturbed, as genuinely worried perhaps as at any time in all the war. His presidency seemed to exist in a vacuum. Troops from New York and Rhode Island were supposed to be on their way, but they had vanished into a silent mist that enfolded all of the North. Rev
iewing the 6th Massachusetts, he put his aching bewilderment into words: “I begin to believe there is no North. The 7th New York regiment is a myth. The Rhode Island troops are another. You are the only real thing.”8
Winfield Scott had told a War Department functionary, just before the Baltimore riot, that if Washington’s railroad connections with the North were broken for as much as ten days, the capital would be brought to the edge of starvation and would probably fall into the hands of the secessionists. The city seemed to be entering a state of siege; hundreds of barrels of flour, pork, beans, and sugar were stacked up in the General Post Office and in the basement of the Treasury Building, and strange bands of volunteer rangers stumped about Capitol and White House to protect government from treason. Some of these were residents of Kansas, brought together by the lanky frontier orator James H. Lane, given the collective title of “Frontier Guards” and quartered for a time in the White House itself. Even more improbable was the “Strangers’ Guard,” transients from the principal hotels, rounded up, armed, and put to work by the redoubtable Cassius M. Clay, of Kentucky, the stalwart duelist who by sheer toughness had managed to survive an extended career as active abolitionist in a slave state. Clay showed up at the White House wearing three revolvers and a bowie knife. He had his men stalking the downtown streets after dark; Washington was at bottom a southern city, containing many citizens who would gladly co-operate with an invading force from Virginia, and there was quite literally no telling what might happen. John Hay reported that the President spent much time staring from the White House windows at the Potomac. It was supposed that some of the northern regiments that could not reach Washington by rail might come in, roundabout, by water.9
Lincoln saw steamers at last on April 23, when the U.S.S. Pawnee and a transport came up the river and docked at the Washington Navy Yard, but instead of bringing help they brought tidings of a new disaster. The Gosport Navy Yard, near Norfolk, then as now the country’s most important naval base, and usually referred to simply as the Norfolk Navy Yard, had been seized by armed Virginians, along with several warships, a first-rate dry dock, and much useful machinery, and an immense quantity of guns and ammunition. The loss was not only expensive but humiliating. The yard had simply been fumbled away.
Commandant at Norfolk was Commodore Charles S. McCauley, a brittle shell-back of sixty-eight—he had been born during the presidency of George Washington, and had gone to sea before either Lincoln or Davis was born—and although he was brave and loyal, the outbreak of civil war was just too much for him. He wanted to do the right thing, but nothing in naval tradition told him what the right thing was in a time like this. In substance, the old commodore never knew what hit him.
He had at his command 800 sailors and marines, along with a collection of warships that were mostly either museum pieces or cripples. There were the huge line-of-battle ship Pennsylvania, once mounting 120 guns, unarmed now, serving as a receiving ship, and three smaller ships of the line—Columbus and Delaware, three-deckers built to the standards of Trafalgar, and New York, which was still on the stocks. (The navy had been leisurely dawdling away at her construction for twenty years and more.) These ships were completely useless. There were also two sailing frigates, Columbia and Raritan, out of order but fairly serviceable if repaired, and there were the 22-gun sloops Plymouth and Germantown, and the little dispatch boat Dolphin. Most important of all, there was the big steam frigate Merrimack, one of the most powerful warships afloat, laid up waiting for extensive engine-room repairs.
Early in April, Secretary Welles had begun to worry about all of this property, and he sent the navy’s chief engineer, Benjamin F. Isherwood, down to make temporary repairs on Merrimack’s engines; and on April 11 he ordered Commander James Alden to take command of Merrimack and bring her up to Philadelphia. Isherwood got the engines fixed, Alden went aboard and raised steam, and then Commodore McCauley—under the influence, said Isherwood, of “liquor and bad men”—gave way to nervous doubts. He had been told, over and over, that aggressive action by the Federal power might drive Virginia into secession (a condition that Virginia was just about to enter anyway), and he countermanded Welles’s orders and refused to let Merrimack sail. Alden and Isherwood came back to Washington to report.10
Then things began to get complicated. Virginia’s convention passed the ordinance of secession, and the people of Norfolk sank old hulks in the Elizabeth River to keep the Yankee warships from getting out; they did it inexpertly and the channel remained open, but it showed what was in the wind. Governor Letcher sent state troops to Norfolk under Major General William B. Taliaferro, and Washington dispatched U.S.S. Pawnee, a regiment of Massachusetts infantry from Fort Monroe, Captain Horatio G. Wright, of the Corps of Engineers, and two commodores, Hiram Paulding and G. J. Pendergast, with somewhat vague orders to get the ships out, see to the security of the yard, and in general present a solid front to the menace of secession.
All of this was too much for Commodore McCauley. A number of his officers had resigned to go off and join the Confederacy; the watchmen at the navy-yard gates, similarly motivated, had also quit; the whole city was bristling with aggressive hostility; and Taliaferro’s men were putting up batteries in preparation for a bombardment. The old man believed that the navy yard could not be defended, and on the evening of April 19 he ordered every warship in the place scuttled. (The smoke from the burning arsenal at Harper’s Ferry was still in the air, wounded men still lay on the streets in Baltimore, and now this: the revolution was moving fast this week.) Just as the ships settled toward the bottom, the relief expedition arrived, Pawnee towing the sailing frigate Cumberland, which carried the troops. The officers in charge could do nothing now but acquiesce in McCauley’s decision; it was agreed that the job of destruction should be completed on the evening of April 20, and the navy yard should then be evacuated.
The moon came out to give light for the work. Captain Wright laid a mine to destroy the dry dock. The scuttled ships, which had touched bottom with their upper works still above water, were set on fire. Detachments were put to work throwing shell and solid shot into the water—a completely fruitless task, since the Confederates fished them all out as soon as the Federals went away—and all of the shops and other buildings in the place were set on fire. Smoke went up to hide the moonlight, the black clouds streaked with red from the mounting fires; a correspondent for the New York Times remarked that the burning of the Pennsylvania made a spectacular sight, with flames twining masts and rigging and issuing from 120 gun ports. Poor old McCauley, moved by heaven knows what remnant of the tradition that a captain ought to go down with his ship, wanted to destroy himself, perishing in the conflagration that was destroying his command, but was talked out of it. Naval officer in charge of setting fire to things was a Captain Charles Wilkes—a lanky, thwarted genius, brilliant, opinionated, erratic and unlucky: a man who would in due time make his own strange contribution to this war. To Wilkes, as he moved through the smoky night, came a group of Marines asking him to refrain from burning the Marine barracks; the sergeant of the guard had a hen setting on twelve eggs in the guardroom and he hoped that the brooding fowl might not be disturbed. This was a homemade war, and all ranks of the professionals tended to be a bit confused.11
The Federals got away at last, leaving fire and embers behind them, and Pawnee and Cumberland moved down to Hampton Roads and anchored under the guns of Fort Monroe. As the Confederates moved into the smoldering navy yard, General Taliaferro complained bitterly that the burning of the buildings and the warships was “one of the most cowardly and disgraceful acts which ever disgraced the Government of a civilized people.” (One of the characteristic aspects of this utterly confusing war was the general feeling, among active secessionists, that it was somehow perfidious and unnaturally evil for the Federal government to resist when warlike measures were taken against it.) He grew less wrathful, presumably, when he learned that the act of destruction, although base, was incomplete. The mine tha
t Captain Wright had planted had failed to explode, and the dry dock was intact. So was most of the important machinery and equipment elsewhere about the premises, and nothing that was really needed seemed to be hurt beyond repair. Nearly 1200 heavy-duty cannon had been captured; the Federals had tried to spike them but had worked in too much haste, and the weapons could easily be restored to usefulness; they would arm Confederate forts all over the South, from Roanoke Island to Vicksburg. And Merrimack could be refloated and rebuilt; a matter that would presently be attended to.12
2: Arrests and Arrests Alone
During four years of war, Washington came to know many hours of despondency, but it never again seemed quite as lost and as helpless as it felt between April 19 and April 25. In retrospect it is clear that the situation was not really as bad as it looked, but at the time the Federal government appeared to be face to face with final disaster. Edwin M. Stanton, temperamentally fitted to see things at their worst, assured his good friend James Buchanan that he simply could not give him an adequate description of the panic—which, he added, “was increased by reports of the trepidation of Lincoln that were circulated through the streets.” Families were packing their goods and preparing to leave, women and children were being sent away, and the price of food stuffs (said Stanton, who liked to pick up his basket and do the family marketing) had risen to famine levels. Willard’s Hotel looked deserted, and the desolate calm of an out-of-season holiday descended on the capital. If this time of trial brought Lincoln little help, it at least gave him temporary relief from the swarm of hungry Republicans looking for government jobs.1
