1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [160]
*Dred Scott and his family had been freed just after their case ended; their master had become embarrassed by all the publicity. Scott took a position at Barnum’s Hotel (owned by the circus impresario’s cousin), where his job was simply to welcome arriving guests, as a kind of celebrity greeter. He enjoyed his freedom for barely a year: he died in 1858 and was buried in an unmarked grave in the city’s Wesleyan Cemetery. His widow, Harriet, remained in St. Louis and supported herself as a laundress, living until 1876.
*Bush tried at first to continue his publishing career in America by launching a Jewish literary and philosophical journal, Israels Herold, but this quickly proved unprofitable, since St. Louis in the 1840s had only about a hundred Jews.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Crossing
Who here forecasteth the event?
—HERMAN MELVILLE,
“The March into Virginia” (1861)
The Marshall House, Alexandria, Virginia, circa 1862 (photo credit 7.1)
Washington, May 1861
DURING THE FIRST DAYS OF MAY, an unusual sight greeted visitors to the Capitol. In the great Rotunda, beneath the interrupted dome, young men in gray-and-red uniforms and fezzes swung like merry acrobats from ropes and shimmied up pillars. They capered over the muddy grounds, one observer wrote, “leaping fences, knocking down sentinels, turning aside indignant bayonets, hanging like monkeys from the outer ledges of the dome, some two hundred feet above the firm-set earth.”1
Those staid classical halls had witnessed some strange things already that year. The rancorous scenes to which they had long since become accustomed—Northerners thundering against Southerners, slaveholders denouncing abolitionists, torrents of baroque invective relieved only by occasional fistfights—had yielded suddenly to an unprecedented calm. But now, just weeks later, there was neither tranquility or rancor here. Rather, it might have seemed at first glance that a flying circus had invaded the Capitol.
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.2
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