Washington at War

REVEILLE IN WASHINGTON -- Margaret Leech-- Harper ($3.50).

This book makes the U.S. Civil War real, tragic, fantastic and much more read able than World War II. Author Leech's (Mrs. Ralph Pulitzer) literary sector is the home front at the point where all its conflicts were most fiercely focused --Washington, D.C. Her purpose: to show the city and the nation that converged on it in 1860 to 1865.

She works in masses of racy and ironic detail, leaves almost nothing out, has no use for filters. By the open sewers of Swampoodle (an Irish slum), in bivouacs and bordellos as well as at Willard's bar and the President's receptions, Author Leech makes history's dead bones come to life.

Some will read this book for the Hogarthian gusto of its descriptions, humor, writing. Some will read it for the great familiar story of the war with its almost too literary climax of Lincoln's death at the moment of victory. Others, in the mood of another great struggle for U.S. survival, will read it for its swarming picture of a people's energies, creating out of next to nothing the greatest armies and armaments the world had seen, bursting into rowdyism, drinking, drabbing, killing, doggedly enduring continual defeat until the strength had been built up for ultimate victory, never quite overcoming, but somehow bypassing at last their own vast corruption, treason, bureaucracy, in efficiency, despair.

The Capital. Washington in 1860 was "an idea set in a wilderness." "As in 1800 and 1850, so in 1860," wrote Henry Adams, "the same rude colony was camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads." The dome of the Capitol had been torn down for repairs; of hundreds of Corinthian columns, only three were in place. The rest lay scattered about the lawns among blocks of marble, lumber, iron, workmen's sheds, heaps of coal and wood. Augustly seated among the debris was the statue of George Washington, "modeled on the Roman conception of Jupiter Tonans . . . naked to the waist, with his limbs swathed in draperies."

In dry weather the ruts and holes in Pennsylvania Avenue were "iron traps, covered with thick dust." Rain turned the Avenue into a channel of mud. Flocks of geese waddled in it, "and hogs . . . roamed at large, making their muddy wallows on Capitol Hill and in Judiciary Square."

In this squalid town, which thousands of men in the next four years would die to gain or lose, there was a chill of fear in 1860, a feeling that democracy had reached the end of its rope. A revolution -- secession -- was under way. "It was unique among revolutions only in its impunity. Southern Senators and Representatives made no secret of their disloyalty."

The secessionists included three members of President Buchanan's Cabinet. One day around Christmas, the President was startled by a hubbub in the hall. He asked arch-Southerner Mrs. Roger Pryor (Reminiscences of War & Peace) "whether the house were on fire." She explained that "the shouts were those of rejoicing over a telegram announcing the secession of South Carolina." "That evening, Southern leaders, after celebrating in the parlor of Senator Jefferson Davis," went to call on Buchanan. Mrs. Davis rushed "impetuously ahead to share the good news with the President."

The North shouted for appeasement. Lincoln was inaugurated. At the Washington Theater Joseph Jefferson delighted Unionists and secesh alike with Rip Van Winkle. Hungry customers at Harvey's kept 20 men busy opening oysters. "A valuable Negro" was put up for sale at the county jail. Lilacs bloomed in the dooryards. The new President was driven crazy by "the unceasing tramp" of the Republican office seekers in the White House halls.

Then one night while Secretary of War Cameron "turned over for another nap," the Marylanders burned the railroad bridges on the Harrisburg and Philadelphia lines. Washington had no mail or newspapers. The telegraph "faltered on" until rioters seized the Baltimore office. Washington was left "in silence, isolation and fear."

Shops were shuttered; the people apathetic. "The general opinion was that the South was prepared, and the North was not." The Potomac Light Infantry disbanded with the toast: "The P.L.I., invincible in peace; invisible in war."

Said Lincoln to the Sixth Massachusetts, who had fought their way through Baltimore: "I don't believe there is any North. The Seventh Regiment is a myth. You are the only Northern realities." Next day reinforcements began to pour in.

The Soldiers Come to Town. The War Department did not know what to do with them. "Every regiment was greeted like an unexpected guest." Tents, cots, blankets, clothing, stoves, were immediately needed on a scale "beyond the wildest imagination of the functionaries." The War Department had almost no arms, issued modernized Revolutionary flintlocks.

"Washington's prayers for soldiers had been answered with a vengeance." The Fire Zouaves, a regiment of New York firemen, just took what they wanted. When they met a pig in the streets, they ate it. They bought shoes at a fashionable bootery, charged them to President Lincoln. Dinner, transportation, cigars they charged to President Davis. They also chased secessionists and old ladies.

The volunteers, with almost no experience of revolvers, took to firing them in any direction, used them to kill flies. In most camps the soldiers did not think it necessary to dig latrines. Said one bored volunteer, eying the national capital: "Hardly worth defending, except for the eclat of the thing." On payday hell broke loose. Some Zouaves, refused admittance to Julia Deane's bordello, fired pistols at Inmate Nelly Mathews, "who pluckily returned their fire."

Then came Bull Run. A passing sentence in this book is like a key signature of the Union mood for years--General McDowell "had been unable to procure a decent map of Virginia." The crowds poured out on Sunday ("a scandal to the godly") to see the battle. Caterers tripled their prices for hampers of food that picnickers bought to take along.

Lincoln and his Cabinet received the news of the Union defeat at Scott's headquarters. Then "above the hissing of the gas jets . . . another sound seemed to fill the bare little room--the roar of a mob in flight." "Hour after hour, the crowds stood . . . the Avenue solidly packed from the Capitol to the Treasury [over a mile]. In the small hours of the morning, they were still there; the population of a doomed city, listening for the thundering guns, the pounding cavalry, the shouts of the victorious rebel army." It never came. The Second Invasion. Instead, McClellan came to whip the shattered army into shape, to snub Lincoln, drive out Scott, feud with Stanton, end up in the Chickahominy swamps with thousands of his perfect army dead. New hordes invaded Washington: contractors, inventors, emigres, cranks.

"A delegation of Creek, Seminole and Chickasaw Indians, after inspecting the camps . . . expressed unlimited confidence in the success of the Union cause." Veterans of the Crimean war jostled Garibaldians in the lobbies. There were counterfeiters, confidence men, singers, comedians, vendors of obscene literature, prize fighters, gamblers, 5,000 trulls. "Dr. Schuman (all diseases of a private nature, permanent cure or no charge) set up [shop] in the Clarendon Hotel," but soon had to compete with "certain swindlers in the back streets."

When the great defeats began, and the "great army of the wounded" was hauled into Washington (Stanton was against an ambulance service), there was almost no way of caring for them. Churches were turned into hospitals and on Sundays the church bells could not be rung because of the masses of suffering below them.

Mrs. Lincoln, two of whose brothers were in the Southern Army, was long wrongly accused of sending information to Richmond. She gathered strange persons around her and some of them tried to blackmail her. After her son Willie died (of typhoid), she would start from her sleep at night.

Once the seamstress saw Lincoln bend gently over his wife, take her by the arm and lead her to the window. "Pointing to the battlements of the Insane Asylum . . ." he said, "Mother, do you see that large white building on the hill yonder? Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there." And all the while, "like a drug for her tortured nerves, she indulged in her orgies of buying things . . . things she could never use, for which she could never hope to pay." In four months she bought 300 pairs of gloves. She paid $3,000 for earrings and a pin, $5,000 for a shawl. She once told her seamstress she owed $27,000. "Does Mr. Lincoln know?" she was asked. Said Mrs. Lincoln: "God, no."

Exodus. One day, at long last, the Washington Star printed the great headline: "Glory!!! Hail Columbia!!! Hallelujah!!! Richmond Ours!!!" From a White House window Lincoln made a moderating speech that displeased radical Republicans and a man who was listening below--John Wilkes Booth. There were parades. The supply of flags gave out. Transparencies bore Biblical or patriotic quotes or the words Union and Grant. The banking house of Jay Cooke managed to telescope all these sentiments, hung out a sign: "Glory to God, Who hath to U.S. Grant-d the Victory."

A Washington theater owner dashed off a telegram to his partner in New York: "President Lincoln shot tonight in Ford's theater. Thank God it wasn't ours." But "one hospital nurse (Walt Whitman) would remember the smell of the lilacs, and the weeping soldiers coming to ask for bits of crape and ribbon to fasten on their sleeves."

After they buried Lincoln came the Grand Review. The armies marched together for the last time. The War Department was totting up the payrolls. "All over the nation . . . soldiers were going home: to take up the threads of small ambitions; to know their wives and kiss strange babies fathered on furlough. . . . Experts whose skills were useless, they must forget the lessons they had mastered. . . ." At last "the guards were gone from the Washington bridges. Virginians were no longer enemies, but farmers who trundled their crops to the city markets."

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