Louisa on the Front Lines

by Samantha Seiple

  John thought he knew someone nearby who could help, and soon Lu was standing in front of someone who knew about the free travel pass to Washington, DC. Lu thought her troubles were over, but she was wrong. She was told that she needed to obtain the order from someone over on Temple Place, a side street back near the Common. So she ran across the Common for a second time and finally got the order with carefully written directions outlining which trains she could take to the capital. She then ran back to Haymarket Square to present the paperwork to a young man. The young man took his time, looking out the window, eating peanuts, and gossiping with his colleagues. “I don’t imagine he knew the anguish he was inflicting,” Lu wrote. “For it was nearly three, the train left at five, and I had my ticket to get, my dinner to eat, my blessed sister to see, and the depot to reach, if I didn’t die of apoplexy.”

  Twenty minutes later, a boy of no more than sixteen gave her the stamped and verified documents with careful instructions to go to a steamboat office for the train tickets. Lu wasn’t sure why the train tickets would be at a steamboat office, but she didn’t bother to ask. She was waiting for the boy to tell her to look both ways before crossing the street and give her a pat on the head as if she were a child. Despite this, Lu finally had her hard-won documents. She hurried to the steamboat office.

  “A fat, easy gentleman gave me several bits of paper, with coupons attached, with a warning not to separate them, which instantly inspired me with a yearning to pluck them apart, and see what came of it,” Lu noted.

  But instead, she clutched her tickets protectively and had a quick bite to eat before being whisked away in the train.

  LU GAZED at the train ticket that she had pinned on the seat in front of her. She was finished with her snack and wanted to find comfort in a good conversation. But as a woman traveling alone, she wasn’t supposed to talk to any men on the journey, not even the seemingly respectable-looking one sitting next to her.

  Women were warned to be cautious when traveling by themselves. In the book A Manual of Etiquette with Hints of Politeness and Good Breeding, Daisy Eyebright, a pseudonym for Sophia Orne Johnson, who was well acquainted with the members of society in Washington, DC, explained:

  Appearances are proverbially deceitful, and we cannot think it desirable for young ladies while traveling alone in cars or steamboats, to permit gentlemen of even the most respectable outward seeming to enter into social conversation with them. White hairs and old age may be allowed such favors sometimes, but we must council a reticent demeanor in young lady travelers. Elderly ladies can suit themselves about such matters.

  Furthermore, if a man asked Lu any questions, she was to answer in monosyllables to discourage him from starting a conversation. But Lu wasn’t interested in following the rules. “Having heard complaints of the absurd way in which American women become images of petrified propriety, if addressed by strangers, when traveling alone, the inborn perversity of my nature causes me to assume an entirely opposite style of deportment,” Lu wrote. So she turned to the man sitting in the seat next to her. “I put my bashfulness in my pocket, and plunge[d] into a long conversation on the war, the weather, music, Carlyle, skating, genius, hoops, and the immortality of the soul,” Lu recalled.

  When the train reached New London, it was nearly eleven o’clock. Lu gathered her things, held onto her travel documents, and allowed the gentleman sitting next to her to walk her to the ferry called City of Boston, which was considered the fastest steamboat on Long Island Sound. Lu hadn’t been on a steamboat before, and she was painfully aware that she didn’t know how to proceed. But then she overheard a woman say, “We must secure our berths at once.” So Lu dashed into one in the ladies’ section and slipped off her winter coat with its pockets still filled with gingerbread. She climbed onto her bed and pulled the curtains closed before eventually peeping back out.

  Although the boat was new with elegant furnishings, Lu was concerned it would sink. “If it ever intends to blow up, spring a leak, catch afire, or be run into, it will do the deed tonight,” Louisa worried, “because I’m here to fulfill my destiny.”

  Lu had experienced a lot of disappointment in her life and thought bad luck might thwart her. But she pushed the thought aside and replaced it with her unwavering determination. She removed her bonnet, hung it on a peg, and placed her bag and umbrella on a little shelf, thinking that a hoop skirt might help her stay afloat. “I’ve no intention of folding my hands and bubbling to death without an energetic splashing first,” she wrote. Eventually, her fear gave way to a fitful sleep, and the next morning, at seven o’clock, she was sitting in another train, heading for Washington, DC. Everyone around her seemed to despise traveling, if the screaming children, fretting women, growling men, and swearing porters were any indication. The food Lu brought along from home didn’t give her as much comfort this time. “Think that my sandwiches would be more relishing without so strong a flavor of napkin, and my gingerbread more easy of consumption if it had not been pulverized by being sat upon,” Lu wrote.

  Several hours later the train passed through Baltimore, and Lu was now forty miles and two and a half hours from her destination. Looking out the window, she saw the spot where the Baltimore Riot took place. Shortly after the start of the war, when Lincoln desperately needed soldiers to protect the capital from falling into Confederate hands, seven hundred volunteer soldiers from the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteer Militia boarded a train for DC. When they arrived in Baltimore, they had to get off the train and walk through Baltimore to a different depot to board another train.

  As the Yankee soldiers walked through Baltimore, chaos erupted. Southern sympathizers threw bricks and stones, and the soldiers fired their weapons. Nine civilians and three soldiers were killed, and two dozen soldiers and an unknown number of civilians were wounded. It marked the first bitter bloodshed in the war, and, as Lu passed by, she felt as if she “should enjoy throwing a stone at somebody, hard.”

  Looking out the window, she saw evidence of the war everywhere. Soldiers routinely camped near the railroad tracks to guard against sabotage and to maintain access for the delivery of supplies. “A most interesting journey into a new world full of stirring sights and sounds, new adventures, and an evergrowing sense of the great task I had undertaken,” Lu recounted in her journal. “I said my prayers as I went rushing through the country white with tents, all alive with patriotism, and already red with blood.”

  Turning away from the window, she focused her attention on an elderly man and his wife. Although his wife was fussy and cross, the man said, “Yes, me dear,” trying to grant her every wish. “I quite warmed to the excellent man, and asked a question or two, as the only means of expressing my good will. He answered very civilly, but evidently hadn’t been used to being addressed by strange women in public conveyances,” Lu wrote. His red-nosed wife didn’t like it, and she “fixed her green eyes upon me, as if she thought me a forward hussy,” Lu wrote.

  Soon after, Lu turned her attention back to the window. She noticed the landscape outside wasn’t too different from home, just flatter and less wintery, but on the edges of the barren-looking fields, the Union soldiers, dressed in their blue uniforms, had set up camps. As the train rumbled past, the people waved their hats. Lu, who was accustomed to seeing free black leaders and people in the North, was surprised by the appearance of working slaves in Maryland.

  “We often passed colored people,” Lu noted. “Looking as if they had come out of a picture book, or off the stage, but not at all the sort of people I’d been accustomed to see at the North.”

  It was night by the time Lu arrived in Washington. She told the driver of the horse-drawn carriage parked outside the station that she was going to the Union Hotel Hospital, located on the corner of Bridge and Washington Streets. As they headed down Pennsylvania Avenue, she saw the White House lit up and carriages moving in and out of the gate. “Pennsylvania Avenue, with its bustle, lights, music, and military, made me feel as if I’d crossed the
water and landed somewhere in Carnival time,” Louisa wrote. She looked for the famous East Room where Lincoln met with all kinds of important and common people and where big social events were held. At the start of the war, it was also where Union soldiers slept, under the sparkling chandeliers and frescoed ceiling, while guarding the president, whose office was directly above them, from a possible invasion by Confederate soldiers.

  THE SOLDIERS’ boots had ruined the carpet, but it didn’t matter. Lincoln’s wife, Mary, was already busy with her plans to redecorate. She wanted the run-down White House, with its peeling wallpaper, torn curtains, threadbare carpets, and broken furniture, to be transformed into a showplace. When the press caught wind of Mary’s extravagance while the country was waging war with soldiers suffering and dying, she was severely criticized in the papers. And when the bill arrived for the renovations, Lincoln balked. “I’ll pay it out of my own pocket first—it would stink in the nostrils of the American people to have it said that the President of the United States had approved a bill over-running an appropriation of $20,000 for flub dubs [trinkets] for this damned old house, when the soldiers cannot have blankets,” Lincoln told Mary.

  Less than a year after Mary undertook redecorating the White House, a funeral was held in the East Room for the Lincolns’ beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, who died on February 20, 1862, from typhoid. The doctor had tried everything to save him, treating him with Peruvian bark (quinine) and beef tea. “My poor boy,” Lincoln said when he saw his dead son. “He was too good for this earth. God has called him home. I know that he is much better off in heaven, but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die!” Two white horses pulled the hearse, taking the small coffin to the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown.

  AS THE driver of the carriage announced that they had arrived at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, Lu felt her heart start beating faster. She realized that she was now far away from home. But Lu tried to look dignified and walk boldly up the steps to the entrance, which was flanked by two guards. They tipped their hats and moved aside, allowing Lu to enter the hospital. “A solemn time, but I’m glad to live in it,” Lu wrote in her journal. “And am sure it will do me good whether I come out alive or dead.”

  Chapter 6

  BURNSIDE’S BLUNDER

  December 13, 1862, Fredericksburg, Virginia

  ON THE VERY DAY THAT LU WAS ON THE TRAIN TO Washington, DC, Union soldier John Suhre was about to fight in his first battle of the Civil War. He didn’t know he was about to charge into a bloodbath.

  For the past six weeks, John had survived the ever-changing tempestuous weather—relentless rain, snow, freezing winds—all while being told to hurry up and wait. He had marched nearly one hundred miles with wet feet through thick mud with no hope of a dry tent, warm blanket, or fire. The conditions were so miserable that one of his comrades joked he would gladly pay five dollars for the comfort of sleeping in a hog’s pen.

  Today, while John and his comrades waited for their orders in the unseasonably hot, summerlike weather, across the river, newly appointed Union general Ambrose Burnside was commanding the Army of the Potomac from his headquarters, a two-story brick mansion with magnificent views of Fredericksburg. It was a job Burnside never wanted, and his plans were going desperately wrong.

  Burnside had been handpicked for the job after President Lincoln became frustrated with General George McClellan’s overcautious nature and his refusal to go after Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army at the Battle of Antietam. Lincoln wanted to end the war immediately. The war was nearing two years old, and he needed a military victory to silence his critics and bolster the Emancipation Proclamation, which he planned to sign at the start of the New Year. So Lincoln fired McClellan and replaced him with Ambrose Burnside.

  Burnside had previously refused Lincoln’s offer twice, aware of his own limitations. Nevertheless, his honesty impressed Lincoln, and on November 7 a courier showed up at Burnside’s headquarters. He had traveled through a fierce blizzard with an important dispatch from the War Department. Inside the message read, “By direction of the President of the United States, it is ordered that Major-General McClellan be relieved from the command of the Army of the Potomac, and that Major-General Burnside take command of that army.” It was an order, not an offer, and, when the startling news sunk in, Burnside wept. “The responsibility is so great,” Burnside wrote to a friend, “That at times I tremble at the thought of assuming so large a command.”

  Although his size was imposing—Burnside was six feet tall with a barrel chest and bushy sideburns that grew into his moustache—he was known for his easy charm, honesty, and kindness. He had been born and raised on a farm in Indiana and was taught by a tenderhearted Quaker in a one-room schoolhouse. But the hard choices of war would reveal Burnside’s darker side.

  Burnside didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming a soldier or general. As a young man, he was an apprentice to a tailor, eventually opening his own shop, until he realized that he didn’t like it. So, he went to West Point to further his education, his only option at the time. It was there he met and befriended George McClellan.

  After graduating, Burnside was a soldier in New Mexico, where he fought the Apaches, until an arrow pierced his neck. While recovering from his wound, he invented a carbine for guns that would help the cavalry load their weapons faster. The invention was so good, he received a patent and started a business. But shady dealings, which he was not privy to, ended up destroying it. McClellan offered him a place to stay and a job at the Illinois Railroad, where McClellan was president. It was while working at the Illinois Railroad that Burnside also became friends with the company’s lawyer, Abraham Lincoln.

  When the Civil War broke out, Burnside immediately offered his services, and he was appointed colonel in the Rhode Island militia. Following the First Battle of Bull Run, McClellan became commander of the Army of the Potomac, and Burnside was promoted to brigadier general. Burnside didn’t let his friend down. He led a daring expedition to the North Carolina coast, effectively blocking any Confederate shipping, and was promoted to major general. But, at the Battle of Antietam, McClellan criticized Burnside for delaying his attack by ordering his troops to cross a bridge, creating a bottleneck, instead of wading across the water.

  Nevertheless, Lincoln thought Burnside was the man for the job even though he was “the most distressed man in the army, openly saying he is not fit for the job.”

  McClellan tried to remain stoic when he heard the news that his friend was replacing him. “Poor Burn feels dreadfully, almost crazy—I am sorry for him, & he never showed himself a better man or truer friend than now,” McClellan wrote to his wife. “Of course I was much surprised—but as I read the order… I am sure that not a muscle quivered nor was the slightest expression visible on my face.… They have made a great mistake.… I have done the best I could for my country.… I have done my duty as I understand it. That I must have made many mistakes I cannot deny—I do not see any great blunders.… Our consolation must be that we have tried to do what was right.”

  Within days of replacing McClellan, Burnside came up with a bold plan to capture Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, and crush the Confederate army. But it hinged entirely on speed and surprise. His enemy, Robert E. Lee, had his troops divided, with a week’s march away from Fredericksburg, Virginia, a place that was best known as George Washington’s hometown. Burnside’s strategy was to march his troops nearly one hundred miles at a breakneck pace to Falmouth, Virginia, which was positioned along the bank of the Rappahannock River. Once there, they would build floating pontoon bridges to cross the river into Fredericksburg before Lee had any idea they were there. Unopposed, Burnside would lead his army into Richmond, which was thirty-five miles away.

  He shared his plan with Lincoln, who thought it had promise. “The President has just assented to your plan. He thinks it will succeed if you move rapidly; otherwise not,” General in Chief Henry Halleck telegrammed. Burnsid
e successfully marched his troops, 65,000 men strong and including John Suhre, to Falmouth. But, once they were there, his plan started to unravel. The boats and supplies needed to build the pontoon bridges weren’t there. Poor communication and bad weather caused a ten-day delay. The element of surprise had vanished. While Burnside waited, and waited, General Lee consolidated his troops and fortified their position on higher ground, gaining an advantage and successfully blocking the road to Richmond.

  Although the rebel soldiers were outnumbered, they waited patiently and with confidence. “A chicken could not live on the field when we open on it!” one exclaimed. Despite this, Burnside felt compelled to proceed with his flawed plan. The unyielding pressure and burden of ending the war was weighing heavily on him. When the supplies finally arrived, on December 11, he ordered his men to build the bridges. The rebel sharpshooters, who were strategically positioned in houses along the opposite side of the river, aimed and fired relentlessly, killing some of the men and delaying their effort even further. Burnside ordered the Union artillery to use their 150 cannons to bombard the city. “The bombardment was terrific and seemed ridiculously disproportionate to the enemy therein,” one Union soldier wrote. “Like an elephant attacking a mosquito.”

  Clouds of black smoke rose from the city where nearly every house was damaged or destroyed by fire. Burnside then authorized the soldiers to cross the river in the pontoon boats and clear out the snipers hiding in the city. While the rebel sharpshooters continued to fire, Union soldiers hurriedly crossed the river in the unwieldly pontoon boats, paddling with their rifle butts. As soon as their feet touched the other side of the riverbank, they charged the rebel soldiers who were still standing strong. Street fighting ensued, the first of its kind in the Civil War, and the Confederate soldiers finally made a hasty retreat.