Authors: Adam Goodheart
Like the nation itself, the Capitol Building was a work in progress that spring. Several years earlier, a forward-thinking Southern statesman had directed an ambitious expansion project, spreading the marble wings across their hilltop, ready to encompass all the delegations and committees, offices and bureaus, that the rapidly growing federal union might require. To maintain proper scale, an architect was engaged to remove the old low-rise curve of the roof and replace
it with a soaring new
dome of cast iron, as serenely presumptuous in its grandiosity as a Natchez cotton planter’s mansion or a Newport railroad baron’s “cottage.” Then lawmakers busied themselves with deciding what kind of statue should crown the new structure. Taking a break from their debates over Kansas and slavery, they found a rare moment of bipartisan accord: the nation’s temple of democracy must be topped
with a heroic
statue of Freedom, that amiable and versatile goddess. But when the sculptor presented his plaster model, sectional strife erupted again. On her head, the figure wore a pileus, the Roman cap of liberty, a conventional bit of allegory. But the Southern politician who had taken such interest in the work, a man with a fine classical education, knew that the pileus had been used in ancient times to denote a slave who had been freed by his
master. The gentleman—Jefferson Davis,
then serving as secretary of war—protested lest such a blatant symbol of abolitionism crown the very pinnacle of the Republic.
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Now the statue, her objectionable liberty cap replaced by a politically innocuous, if allegorically dubious, Roman helmet, lay in pieces, yet to be assembled, at a
Maryland bronze foundry. (
Freedom
’s casting was being overseen there by an expert metalworker, a slave named
Philip Reid.) The Capitol dome itself rose half finished, wooden scaffolding and an enormous crane jutting up above
its open shell, which seemed to hang in the balance between creation and destruction. Sage minds reflected that it symbolized the incomplete—and imperiled—Union itself. The metaphor, if not the building, was satisfyingly perfect.
Walt Whitman, though he had little use for the statue of Freedom, deriding it as “an extensive female, cast in bronze, with much drapery, especially ruffles,” loved the incomplete Capitol and
suggested it be left perpetually as it was, with the derrick crane a more “poetical” emblem of the republic than Davis’s statue.
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What, though, was the meaning of the sight—to say nothing of the sounds and smells—that greeted visitors in May? No poetical explanations came immediately to mind. In corridors off the rotunda, statues of lawmakers and patriots trembled precariously on their pedestals as hordes of young rowdies raced past. The building reeked of urine (and worse) as men, tired of lining up for the overcrowded privies, availed themselves of any corner they could find. When
a sentry tried to block one group from entering an off-limits area, they rolled him down the Capitol steps. In the House of Representatives, they playacted a session of Congress, in the course of which they “elected a Speaker, Clerk, and other officers, went into full session, dissolved the Union and reconstructed it and then wound up the joke by going into executive session.”
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Others put their feet up, enjoying penny-ante card games on the desk of one South Carolina congressman, a fire-breathing states’ rights man, who had decamped when his state seceded.
In the Senate, the invaders quickly found the desk that until recently had been occupied by Senator Davis, still bearing a placard with his name neatly inked. A distraught custodian arrived to find the young men hacking it to pieces with their bayonets, and feebly protested that it was the property not of the Confederate traitor but of the federal government that they had just pledged their lives to defend. Ignoring him, the soldiers divvied up the wooden fragments as
souvenirs.
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These were the thousand soldiers of the
First New York Fire Zouaves, who, through the infinite wisdom of military authorities, had
been bivouacked in the Capitol upon their arrival in Washington, two days before.
They had landed in a city already teeming with soldiers—so many, one newspaperman reflected, that its customarily drab streets at last resembled, in at least one respect, the imperial capitals of Paris, Vienna, and St. Petersburg: every third man you passed wore some sort of gaudy uniform. Everywhere, too, particularly in the grandest public buildings, in fact, was the stench of unwashed bodies and fresh piss. Troops bunked on makeshift cots among filing cabinets
and display cases in the Patent Office; in the courtyard of the Treasury on Pennsylvania Avenue; even in the East Room of the White House, twenty feet directly below the president’s desk.
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Several different
regiments quartered in the Capitol. Soldiers slept under congressmen’s desks by night; by day drilled hourly before the east front; in the intervening hours stretched out on the young grass beneath the horse chestnut trees heavy with pink-white blossoms in the burgeoning spring. Sometimes they played baseball on the lawn where, weeks earlier, a crowd had gathered to see Mr. Lincoln give his inaugural address.
(How distant that seemed now!) At night, recalled one New York private, the crimson-and-gold House chamber reverberated with the rhythmic breathing of a thousand sleepers, until the drums beat reveille at dawn, when the din of rambunctious voices began again, unceasing until dusk. The irony of his location was not lost on this thoughtful recruit,
Theodore Winthrop, a poet and travel writer of some repute who had joined up with the New York Seventh,
and who was now hunched over a lamp in one corner of the hall, penning a dispatch to
The Atlantic Monthly.
“Our presence here was the inevitable sequel of past events,” he wrote. “We appeared with bayonets and bullets because of the bosh uttered on this floor; because of the bills—with treasonable stump-speeches in their bellies—passed here; because of the cowardice of the poltroons, the imbecility of the dodgers, and the arrogance of the
bullies, who had here cooperated to blind and corrupt the minds of the people. Talk had made a miserable mess of it.” He scoffed at the departed congressmen as belonging already to “that bygone epoch of our country when men shaved the moustache, dressed like parsons, said ‘Sir,’ and chewed tobacco”—supplanted now in their own inner sanctum by a bolder and more colorful generation.
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N
O CROWDS HAD GREETED
the Zouaves’ entry into the capital. The troop train from Annapolis rattled slowly and unceremoniously
through the fields of
Maryland amid the gathering dusk, through cow pastures and then past the garbage dumps, drainage pipes, and heaps of abandoned bricks that lined the approach to the city. At last the
dome of the Capitol
loomed up from out of nowhere, moments before it was blotted from sight by the low roof of the soot-blackened central depot.
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No one but the president himself seemed to have been notified of the regiment’s arrival—and in any case Washington was, by this point, jaded by the coming of troops—so only a few passersby were there to give the disembarking men
handshakes and wan cheers.
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Even the military authorities seemed less pleased to see them than irritated at the task of having to find somewhere to put them, before shrugging their shoulders and deciding to quarter the Zouaves in the Capitol.
None of this was exactly what Ellsworth had planned for his triumphant return at the head of his regiment. So, before letting his weary and hungry men find rest and food in their makeshift barracks, he insisted on marching them up Pennsylvania Avenue in the opposite direction, toward the
White House. Though it was now fully dark, an overcast and almost moonless night, he was still set on making the grand entrance he had lovingly
envisioned. By the time the regiment reached the presidential mansion, he could see a familiar stooping figure silhouetted against the north portico. The president, his family, and a few aides had gathered on the gravel drive to watch as the companies passed by for their impromptu nighttime review, and hundreds of throaty voices boomed, “Three cheers for Abraham Lincoln!” or “Hooray for Old Abe!”
As the marchers strode abreast past the streetlamps, circles of gaslight revealed their whiskered faces, flattened noses, and shining scalps. The firemen had, nearly to a man, shaved their heads in preparation for battle. “A jolly gay set of blackguards,” John Hay called them.
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These Zouaves were not the lithe gymnasts Ellsworth had paraded
here for President Buchanan the summer before, a summer that already seemed a century ago. Their uniforms may have been just as splendid—red caps and shirts, gray jackets, baggy pantaloons in authentic Franco-Algerian style—but from their belts hung unromantic implements of killing: large and wicked-looking bowie knives, omens of fraternal bloodshed not merely imminent but brutal and close range.
In New York, the war had seemed a somewhat remote adventure, a fanfare in the middle distance. Here in Washington, it was palpable in the ever-present drumbeat of men drilling for war, the measured tramp of boots, and the urgent click of
telegraph keys transmitting
mostly bad news. Virginia’s legislature had cast its lot with the Confederacy three weeks earlier;
Arkansas and
Tennessee were teetering on the brink. Resignations still arrived daily at the War Department from many of the most seasoned officers of the regular army. Amid the panic and disorder after Sumter’s fall, many residents had fled the city—
Union sympathizers jammed Seventeenth Street in carriages, wagons, and loaded carts, pressing northward toward the Maryland line, while Southerners slipped one by one across the Potomac.
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There had been good reason for those Unionists to panic. Washington was encircled by slave territory, and it looked as though Marylanders might be following the Virginians into rebellion. Baltimore
secessionists, who controlled the city’s telegraph office, severed communications between the nation’s capital and the rest of the loyal states. Railroad travel was interrupted; mail stopped. Just a handful of troops defended
the District, and when the Sixth Massachusetts tried to relieve the capital, it was attacked by a mob on its way through Baltimore. In the confused melee, four soldiers and twelve civilians were killed. These were the first combat deaths of the war; a Northern lithographer issued a print showing apelike street toughs hurling bricks at the brave boys in blue, and titled it
The Lexington of 1861.
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Southerners were calling for an immediate attack on the capital. “There is one wild shout of fierce resolve to capture Washington City, at all and every human hazard,” wrote the editors of the
Richmond Examiner.
“The filthy cage of unclean birds must and will be purified by fire. . . . Many indeed will be the carcasses of dogs and caitiffs that will blacken the air upon the gallows, before the great work is
accomplished.”
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But the birds, dogs, and caitiffs had managed to squeak through, at least for the time being. The Sixth Massachusetts, the Seventh New York, and other regiments eventually arrived, and soon more troops were pouring into Washington daily. They represented, if not a cross section of the North, then at least a vivid assortment of citizen-soldiers. Later in the war, Union enlisted men would nearly all be clad in identical navy blue tunics, factory made by the tens of
thousands—indeed, the concept of standard sizes in men’s clothing, eventually picked up for civilian attire, began with that wartime mass production. But there was nothing mass-produced about the war in early 1861. The volunteers who had converged upon the capital sported scarlet plumes and gold lace, turbans and tyroleans. (That is, those who had any uniforms at all: quite a few, awaiting shipments from home, were still in civilian garb.) Some belonged to prewar
militias, but there were many newly
formed regiments. As with the Fire Zouaves, these had customarily been organized in local communities by individual men of sufficient wealth or charisma to rally the troops together, arm them, and lead them off toward the front. Each of these colonels was a grandee of some sort—whether a metropolitan police commissioner or a country squire—and often the regiment bore his name.
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These fresh volunteers, with their spotless clothing and jaunty self-confidence, had done much to relieve the feeling of siege, and some Washington citizens were returning home, a bit sheepishly. Still, no one could forget that the enemy forces were massing just on the other side of the river. In
Alexandria—until recently part of the District of Columbia—a hotelkeeper had raised an enormous secession banner atop his
establishment, so large that on the clear spring afternoons it could be seen in downtown Washington. From the windows of the White House, Hay, Nicolay, and even the president and first lady stole glances at it through a spyglass.
For the New York fire boys, many of whom had never ventured farther from home than certain out-of-the-way sections of Brooklyn, the national capital was a disappointment. Even in wartime, the city seemed sleepy in comparison to Gotham, almost rustic. With the exception of a few gleaming federal temples, the buildings were mostly ramshackle wooden affairs set amid sprawling yards, where black men and women—the first slaves that most of the Yankees had ever
actually seen—looked up from their chores to watch with wary eyes the passing troops.
Pigs and goats foraged for scraps in the avenues laid out optimistically by L’Enfant at the end of the previous century: broad, empty thoroughfares that dead-ended suddenly in cornfields, and whose mud was so deep in springtime that you often had to walk several blocks before finding a safe place to cross the street. Not many years earlier, the Great
Compromiser himself, Senator
Henry Clay, had found himself attacked by a large billy goat in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, much to the delight of the newsboys and bootblacks who gathered to watch the contest between quadruped and statesman.
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