Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War - Rilegato

Ernest B. “Pat” Furgurson, formerly a correspondent and columnist for the Baltimore Sun, has spent most of his life in the nation’s capital. A native of Virginia, he is also the author of Chancellorsville 1863, Ashes of Glory, and Not War but Murder. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Chapter One
God Alone Can Avert the Storm

Burn the building! Burn it down!"

Hiding on the roof of the ransacked Tremont House, three blocks from the United States Capitol, a handful of scared young Lincolnites peeked down at the shouting mob in the street, sure that they were in mortal danger.

All that fall of 1860, boisterous Republicans who called themselves "Wide-Awakes" had marched along the avenues of other northern cities in black oilcloth capes and caps, waving torches and carrying fence rails to show their enthusiasm for their candidate, the Great Rail-Splitter. But in Washington, surrounded by Southern partisans, they had kept quiet until the last weeks of the presidential campaign, when Abraham Lincoln's victory seemed more and more likely. Then, sure that history was with them, some 500 paraded openly, with a few blacks tagging along behind. As they strode along Pennsylvania Avenue, they defied showers of rocks and taunts from proslavery ruffians shouting "Damn niggers! They oughtn't to be allowed on the streets." Late on November 6, the Wide-Awakes gathered to greet the election returns at the Tremont House, at Second Street and Indiana Avenue, the former office of the National Era, which had serialized Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin eight years earlier. Now the building was headquarters for local Republicans, who called it their "wigwam," after the Chicago hall where Lincoln had been nominated the previous May.

Loud as some Washingtonians were, they had no legal voice in what was coming; they could not vote for president, so all their excitement was focused on the returns from elsewhere. Pennsylvania Avenue, Seventh Street and C Street were alive that night with people streaming from one hotel to another, one political club to another, looking for news and free whiskey. An anxious crowd surrounded the telegraph office on Fourteenth Street, awaiting the figures from crucial New York, and another watched results posted on the bulletin board outside the National Hotel. At the theater on E Street, in the city where he had made his stage debut at the age of four with a blackface comedian called Jim Crow, the wildly popular Joe Jefferson was playing to a full house. He repeatedly interrupted his performance to announce the latest election returns; the audience cheered each Democratic upswing and hissed at Republican successes. At the Democratic Jackson Association (derided by opponents as the "Dem. Jack. Ass."), misleading early bulletins encouraged officers to send for a brass band to lead a triumphant parade. But after tuning up, the musicians slumped away when the hard truth set in. Disappointed losers then milled around Brown's Hotel, the traditional base of Southern legislators, where one young gladiator dared anybody to admit being "a damned black Republican," thus setting off a mass scrimmage that left noses bloody. When police broke up the melee, the crowd surged toward the Republican wigwam.

By that time, half an hour after midnight, the news that Pennsylvania had gone Republican spread up and down the Avenue: Abe Lincoln would become the sixteenth president of the United States. The jubilant Wide-Awakes were celebrating with songs and speeches when one of their members rushed in shouting that the gang of frustrated Democratic toughs, many of them from the secessionist National Volunteers militia company, were on their way to tear down the Republican clubhouse. The Lincoln boosters quickly scattered, leaving behind only a handful of their officers, who turned out the gaslights and locked the doors.

When the fighting-drunk mob arrived, it let go three loud cheers, then started firing pistols and throwing rocks, smashing windows and breaking in doors. The few remaining Republicans retreated to the second floor, then the third, then the roof, where they armed themselves with bricks from the chimney to hold off the intruders. But the mob was busy wrecking the building's interior, pitching furniture out the windows, ripping up banners, ransacking club records, smashing statuettes of Lincoln and his vice presidential running mate, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine. When police arrived, rioters leaped down stairwells and out windows to escape, but once outside they re-formed and began chanting "Burn the building! Burn it down!" The Wide-Awakes trapped on the roof were finally saved when the police arrested a batch of the wreckers and drove the rest away. Even then the mob marched off defiantly, filling the street from curb to curb, shouting allegiance to the National Volunteers, until at last its energy flickered out in the approaching dawn.

In the most momentous election in the nation's history, Lincoln had won only 39.9 percent of the popular ballots but 59.4 percent of the electoral vote, against a divided field: the Northern Democrat, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois; the Southern Democrat, Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky; and the Constitutional Unionist, former Senator John Bell of Tennessee. The result inspired more political turbulence than celebration in a capital dominated by Marylanders, Virginians and the Southern Democrats who had held power for most of the previous decade. The day after the vote was confirmed, a North Carolinian in the capital wrote to friends back home that the election of the "Black Republican" Lincoln was "the greatest calamity that has ever befallen the United States. The sun that rose on Tuesday morning cast its bright rays upon a powerful & noble Republic, in the evening it went down on a ruined, tattered Union, for such I believe will be the result."

Both Virginia and Maryland, the two states that enclose the capital on the Potomac, had rejected Lincoln by overwhelming margins. Hotheaded politicians farther south immediately started moves toward secession; some of the ultras among them had spoken secretly of mounting a coup to prevent the president-elect from taking office. The National Volunteers, whose rioting members had tried to burn down Republican headquarters, would be heard from again and again. Extremists on both sides took spirit from the emergency; the roar from Southern militants antagonized radical abolitionists up north. But Washingtonians, most of them, epitomized the millions of conservative Americans in between, who were more alarmed than exhilarated by the clamor.

At the Capitol, surrounded by construction sheds, scaffolding, iron girders and scattered columns of marble, Thomas Ustick Walter was near despair. "Our country is in the midst of a terrible partisan conflict," he told his son-in-law, "and we are in the vortex of it."

Walter was a tall, imposing Philadelphian, his German-American roots deep in the North. But he was torn. He had been appointed architect of the Capitol by a Whig president and kept in his prestigious job by two Democrats. As tension rose, he wrote that "the North looks to me to be insane. [It is] mere stinking pride of opinion that is this moment moving on to allow the country to be deluged in blood."

"I have no idea that there will be any appropriation this winter for public works," he wrote-and so the climactic mission of his distinguished career, building the new dome that he had just redesigned, might stop before it was well started. Vendors could still hawk fruit, beer and souvenirs within the hallways of the Capitol, and members of Congress could still trade votes in their hideaway watering holes. But Walter feared that work on the new House and Senate wings would halt and the Capitol would stand as it was, seeming decapitated, leaking around the edges of new construction, some of its brick walls without their marble facings, its niches without their statues.

If war came, Walter wrote, he might even leave the country, to "try how it goes to live under an autocrat; Russia is the place." Perhaps he was remembering how the Italian architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli had conceived so many of the masterpieces of Peter the Great's capital. "If I knew the language, I believe I would make straight for St. Petersburg the moment our politicians 'break the machine.' . . .

"God alone can avert the storm," Walter wrote. "We must trust in Him."

But on the Senate floor, Benjamin Franklin Wade, an irrepressible antislavery senator from Ohio, backed up his confidence in the Almighty. Remembering how his abolitionist colleague Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was caned near to death a few desks away by the South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, he made known that any Southern fire-eater who threatened or insulted him would be invited to duel-with rifles, at twenty paces, with paper targets the size of silver dollars over each man's heart.

For four weeks after the election, Southern voices in the capital were even more dominant than usual, because Congress was in recess. Until the legislature returned, most of the politicians on hand were Democratic bureaucrats and supplicants, whose party had controlled the White House and thus patronage through the Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan administrations. Between the election and Congress's return, Buchanan called two meetings of his ideologically split cabinet, and reached no consensus at all on how to deal with the situation. But in the cabinet, in the saloons and in Congress when it returned, the focus of debate had shifted from expansion of slavery to the right of secession, and the use of Federal force to prevent it.

The legalistic Buchanan, whom one fellow Democrat had called "that damned old wry-necked, squinty-eyed, white-livered scoundrel who disgraces the White House with his presence," was squeezed from both sides. He had come to the job with what seemed eminent qualifications: after service in the War of 1812, he had been elected to the Pennsylvania legislature in 1814, spent ten years as a congressman and ten years as a senator, then become minister to Russia, secretary of state, and minister to G...