1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [161]
What, though, was the meaning of the sight—to say nothing of the sounds and smells—that greeted visitors in May? No poetical explanations came immediately to mind. In corridors off the rotunda, statues of lawmakers and patriots trembled precariously on their pedestals as hordes of young rowdies raced past. The building reeked of urine (and worse) as men, tired of lining up for the overcrowded privies, availed themselves of any corner they could find. When a sentry tried to block one group from entering an off-limits area, they rolled him down the Capitol steps. In the House of Representatives, they playacted a session of Congress, in the course of which they “elected a Speaker, Clerk, and other officers, went into full session, dissolved the Union and reconstructed it and then wound up the joke by going into executive session.”4 Others put their feet up, enjoying penny-ante card games on the desk of one South Carolina congressman, a fire-breathing states’ rights man, who had decamped when his state seceded.
In the Senate, the invaders quickly found the desk that until recently had been occupied by Senator Davis, still bearing a placard with his name neatly inked. A distraught custodian arrived to find the young men hacking it to pieces with their bayonets, and feebly protested that it was the property not of the Confederate traitor but of the federal government that they had just pledged their lives to defend. Ignoring him, the soldiers divvied up the wooden fragments as souvenirs.5
These were the thousand soldiers of the First New York Fire Zouaves, who, through the infinite wisdom of military authorities, had been bivouacked in the Capitol upon their arrival in Washington, two days before.
They had landed in a city already teeming with soldiers—so many, one newspaperman reflected, that its customarily drab streets at last resembled, in at least one respect, the imperial capitals of Paris, Vienna, and St. Petersburg: every third man you passed wore some sort of gaudy uniform. Everywhere, too, particularly in the grandest public buildings, in fact, was the stench of unwashed bodies and fresh piss. Troops bunked on makeshift cots among filing cabinets and display cases in the Patent Office; in the courtyard of the Treasury on Pennsylvania Avenue; even in the East Room of the White House, twenty feet directly below the president’s desk.6
Several different regiments quartered in the Capitol. Soldiers slept under congressmen’s desks by night; by day drilled hourly before the east front; in the intervening hours stretched out on the young grass beneath the horse chestnut trees heavy with pink-white blossoms in the burgeoning spring. Sometimes they played baseball on the lawn where, weeks earlier, a crowd had gathered to see Mr. Lincoln give his inaugural address. (How distant that seemed now!) At night, recalled one New York private, the crimson-and-gold House chamber reverberated with the rhythmic breathing of a thousand sleepers, until the drums beat reveille at dawn, when the din of rambunctious voices began again, unceasing until dusk. The irony of his location was not lost on this thoughtful recruit, Theodore Winthrop, a poet and travel writer of some repute who had joined up with the New York Seventh, and who was now hunched over a lamp in one corner of the hall, penning a dispatch to The Atlantic Monthly. “Our presence here was the inevitable sequel of past events,” he wrote. “We appeared with bayonets and bullets because of the bosh uttered on this floor; because of the bills—with treasonable stump-speeches in their bellies—passed