Mr. Hall went to his work that morning as usual; but he did not return. Mrs. Hall, who was soon to give birth to another son, took little Asaph and went in search of her husband. He was not at the observatory, but the following note explained his absence:
July 12, 1864.
Dear Angie: I am going out to Fort Lincoln. Don’t know how long I shall stay. Am to be under Admiral Goldsborough. We all go. Keep cool and take good care of little A.
Yours truly,
A. Hall.
Together with other Observatory officials, Mr. Hall was put in command of workmen from the Navy Yard, who manned an intrenchment near Fort Lincoln. Many of the men were foreigners, and some of them did not know how to load a gun. Had the Confederates charged upon them they might have been slaughtered like sheep. But in a day or two Union troops arrived in sufficient force to drive Early away.
Before the summer was over, the Halls moved to a house in Georgetown, on the corner of West and Montgomery Streets. It was an old-fashioned brick house, with a pleasant yard fenced by iron pickets. These were made of old gun barrels, and gave the place the name of “Gunbarrel Corner.” Here, on the 28th of September, 1864, their second child, Samuel, was born. And here the family lived for three years, renting rooms to various friends and relatives. One of these was Mr. Hall’s sister, Mrs. Charles Kennon, whose soldier husband lost his life in the Red River expedition, leaving her with three noble little sons. Mr. Kennon and the Halls had been neighbors in Cambridge, where he studied at the Harvard Divinity School.
From the beginning Mr. Hall had objected to having a home in Washington, and had looked to New England as a fitter place for his family to live; but his wife would not be separated from him. The curse of war was upon the city. Crowded with sick and wounded soldiers, idle officers and immoral women, it was scourged by disease. Forty cases of small-pox were at one time reported within half a mile of the place where Mr. Hall lived. But people had become so reckless as to attend a ball at a small-pox hospital. Most of the native population were Southern sympathizers, and some of the women were very bitter. They hated all Yankees—people who had lived upon saw-dust, and who came to Washington to take the Government offices away from Southern gentlemen. As Union soldiers were carried, sick and wounded, to the hospital, these women would laugh and jeer at them.
But there were people in Washington who were making history. One day Mr. Hall saw Grant—short, thin, and stoop-shouldered, dressed in his uniform, a slouch hat pulled over his brow—on his way to take command of the Army of the Potomac. That venerable patriot John Pierpont, whom she had seen and admired at McGrawville, became attached to Mrs. Hall, and used to dine at her house. She took her little boy to one of Lincoln’s receptions, and one night Lincoln and Secretary Stanton made a visit to the Naval Observatory, where Mr. Hall showed them some objects through his telescope. At the Cambridge Observatory the Prince of Wales had once appeared, but on that occasion the young astronomer was made to feel less than nobody. Now the great War President, who signed his commission in the United States Navy, talked with him face to face. One night soon afterward, when alone in the observing tower, he heard a knock at the trap door. He leisurely completed his observation, then went to lift the door, when up through the floor the tall President raised his head. Lincoln had come unattended through the dark streets to inquire why the moon had appeared inverted in the telescope. Surveyors’ instruments, which he had once used, show objects in their true position.
At length the war was over, and the Army of the Potomac and Sherman’s Army passed in review through the city. Mrs. Hall was one of those who witnessed these glorious spectacles—rank after rank, regiment after regiment of seasoned veterans, their battle-flags torn and begrimed, their uniforms shabby enough but their arms burnished and glistening, the finest soldiers in the world! Among the officers was General Osborne, an old Jefferson County acquaintance.