Walks about Washington

by Francis E. Leupp

The President, having received only cheering bulletins in the earlier part of Sunday, went out for his usual drive in the cool of the afternoon. On his return, about half-past six o’clock, he found awaiting him a request to come immediately to General Scott’s room at the War Department. All his Cabinet had gathered there, and his hurried consultation with them resulted in messages directing various movements of troops in the field, and appeals to the Governors of the loyal States for more men. When he came back to his office, he threw himself upon a lounge, where he spent the night, not in sleep, but in listening to, and closely catechising, parties of civilians who had made their way in from Manassas and had hastened to the White House to pour their disjointed narratives into his ear. By daylight the streets of Washington presented a pitiful spectacle. Ordinary business was almost at a standstill; excited citizens were gathered in knots at every corner; and a multitude of disheartened soldiers, lacking leaders and organization, not knowing where to look for their next orders and thinking with dread of the effect the bad news would have upon their friends at home, were wandering aimlessly about. The President, after twenty-four hours of anxiety, was greatly relieved when the responses from the Northern States began to reach him, showing that the shock had not broken the faith of the people but had awakened them to the realities of the situation. This change was reflected in the Cabinet councils, too, where a sudden revision of opinion was observed on the part of those members who had fancied that the war would be merely a three months’ holiday—a triumphal march of a Northern army from Mason and Dixon’s line to the Gulf of Mexico.

This is not a history of the civil conflict; its beginnings have been thus outlined only because they made so deep an impress on the future of Washington, which, from being generally regarded by the American people with comparative indifference, had become a center of interest for all the world. The city was not again seriously threatened with capture till July, 1864, when the Confederate General, Jubal A. Early, with a corps of seasoned soldiers, had worked his way around so as to descend upon it from the north. The news of his approach, spreading through the community, did not cause the consternation which might have been expected in view of the slight defensive preparation that had been made in the menaced quarter. Requisitions were sent to the army in Northern Virginia for such troops as could be spared. Wounded and discharged Union veterans shouldered their guns once more. The male nurses in the hospitals were drafted for active duty. A troop of cavalry was recruited among the civilian teamsters at work in the city. From all the executive Departments the able-bodied clerks were called out, armed with rifles or muskets as far as possible, and for the rest with pistols, old cutlasses, axes, shovels, and whatever other implements might be turned to emergency use, and ranged up on the sidewalks for elementary instruction and drill. Those who were least strong or most poorly armed were organized into a home-guard, to act as a last reserve if the Confederates succeeded in piercing a line of earthworks thrown out north of the city. Some of these fortifications can still be identified, though worn away by a half-century’s exposure to a variable climate, overgrown with trees and vines, and at intervals used as building sites. The most interesting of the chain is Fort Stevens, near the present Seventh Street Road, for there President Lincoln stood for hours under fire, refusing to go home as long as there seemed a chance that his presence could lend any inspiration to the men. The invading force was repulsed after a two days’ effort to break through, and Washington breathed freely once more.

We come now to the concluding stage of the great struggle. Mr. Lincoln was reëlected in November, 1864, and inaugurated on the fourth of March, 1865, making the chief theme of his address a plea for generous treatment of the South. Within a month Richmond fell, and five days after that General Lee surrendered his army. There was great rejoicing in Washington over both these portents of peace, and parties of men and women paraded the streets after

Union Engine House of 1815

nightfall, singing patriotic songs in front of the dwellings of prominent Government officers. On the night of April 11 a great crowd gathered in the White House yard, loudly cheering the President and calling for a speech. Having been notified in advance, he had jotted down a few remarks which he now read from manuscript. This memory of him we shall take away with us, as he stood framed in an open window, with one of his secretaries at his side holding a lighted candle for him to see by, and his little son Tad taking from his hand the pages of manuscript, one by one, as he finished reading them, while the rest of his family, with radiant faces, were grouped where they could overlook the scene.

Three nights later, almost at the same hour, Booth’s bullet laid the good man low in his box at Ford’s Theater; and in a little back hall bedroom of the house across the street to which he was carried, he breathed his last at an early hour on the following morning. Simultaneously with the shooting of Mr. Lincoln, an attempt was made to kill Secretary Seward, and the detectives unearthed evidence of a wide conspiracy, which contemplated a simultaneous murder of the President, the Vice-president, all the Cabinet, and General Grant. The conspirators were soon tracked. Booth was shot in a Virginia barn in which he had taken refuge from his pursuers; four others were tried by a military commission and hanged.

Andrew Johnson, the Vice-president, was not a tactful man, and had already drawn upon himself the enmity of the radical wing of his party in Congress, which was intensified by his first acts as President, foreshadowing a considerate policy toward the South. A tiresome petty warfare set in, Johnson vetoing bill after bill, only to see it repassed over his veto. Of the members of the Lincoln Cabinet he had retained, Secretary Stanton was the one with whom he had most friction, and in August, 1867, he called for Stanton’s resignation, designating General Grant to manage the War Department temporarily. On Stanton’s refusal to resign, Johnson suspended him, and Grant took over the Department and held it till the Senate adopted a resolution declaring its non-concurrence in Stanton’s suspension. Then Grant stepped out, and Stanton returned to duty. Johnson suspended him again, this time designating General Lorenzo Thomas to act in his stead. Matters had now reached a climax, and the House in 1868 impeached the President. His trial by the Senate consumed nearly two months and ended in a failure to convict. In view of this defeat, Stanton resigned, and from that time till the close of his term President Johnson continued his quarrel with the opponents of his policy, celebrating his last Christmas in the White House by proclaiming a general pardon and amnesty, so framed as to include all grades of political offenders.

Johnson was President when the enlargement of the Capitol building was finished, including the rearing of the present dome. While the alterations were in progress, the grand two days’ parade of the victorious armies took place on Pennsylvania Avenue, the President reviewing it as it passed the White House. General Grant was elected by the Republicans to succeed Johnson, taking office in March, 1869. During the next sixteen years, divided between his two terms and the administrations of Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur, Washington almost doubled in population. While Grant was President, it was so constantly in the public eye that many rich men discerned its future possibilities and invested in real estate there. Army and navy officers, retired from active duty, found it pleasant to settle down where they would be most likely to meet their old comrades. A few scholars drifted in, so as to have easy access to the Government libraries and records. Thus, in both a material and a social way, Washington took a strong upward start.

For the esthetic side of the general change, less can be said in praise. Most of the dwellings built during this era can still be distinguished by their gratuitous ugliness. The parks became strewn with flower-beds of fantastic shape, overrun by a riot of inharmonious colors. Statues sprang up like mushrooms, unrelated in size or style or any other quality. Alterations of street grades left little houses perched on bluffs and leaning against big neighbors built at the new level, or sunk in dingy pits. All this contributed to give the city an unfinished look, like that of a child growing out of its small clothes. Over the whole process of transformation loomed its master figure, Alexander R. Shepherd.