1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [162]
NO CROWDS HAD GREETED the Zouaves’ entry into the capital. The troop train from Annapolis rattled slowly and unceremoniously through the fields of Maryland amid the gathering dusk, through cow pastures and then past the garbage dumps, drainage pipes, and heaps of abandoned bricks that lined the approach to the city. At last the dome of the Capitol loomed up from out of nowhere, moments before it was blotted from sight by the low roof of the soot-blackened central depot.8 No one but the president himself seemed to have been notified of the regiment’s arrival—and in any case Washington was, by this point, jaded by the coming of troops—so only a few passersby were there to give the disembarking men handshakes and wan cheers.9 Even the military authorities seemed less pleased to see them than irritated at the task of having to find somewhere to put them, before shrugging their shoulders and deciding to quarter the Zouaves in the Capitol.
None of this was exactly what Ellsworth had planned for his triumphant return at the head of his regiment. So, before letting his weary and hungry men find rest and food in their makeshift barracks, he insisted on marching them up Pennsylvania Avenue in the opposite direction, toward the White House. Though it was now fully dark, an overcast and almost moonless night, he was still set on making the grand entrance he had lovingly envisioned. By the time the regiment reached the presidential mansion, he could see a familiar stooping figure silhouetted against the north portico. The president, his family, and a few aides had gathered on the gravel drive to watch as the companies passed by for their impromptu nighttime review, and hundreds of throaty voices boomed, “Three cheers for Abraham Lincoln!” or “Hooray for Old Abe!”
As the marchers strode abreast past the streetlamps, circles of gaslight revealed their whiskered faces, flattened noses, and shining scalps. The firemen had, nearly to a man, shaved their heads in preparation for battle. “A jolly gay set of blackguards,” John Hay called them.10 These Zouaves were not the lithe gymnasts Ellsworth had paraded here for President Buchanan the summer before, a summer that already seemed a century ago. Their uniforms may have been just as splendid—red caps and shirts, gray jackets, baggy pantaloons in authentic Franco-Algerian style—but from their belts hung unromantic implements of killing: large and wicked-looking bowie knives, omens of fraternal bloodshed not merely imminent but brutal and close range.
In New York, the war had seemed a somewhat remote adventure, a fanfare in the middle distance. Here in Washington, it was palpable in the ever-present drumbeat of men drilling for war, the measured tramp of boots, and the urgent click of telegraph keys transmitting mostly bad news. Virginia’s legislature had cast its lot with the Confederacy three weeks earlier; Arkansas and Tennessee were teetering on the brink. Resignations still arrived daily at the War Department from many of the most seasoned officers of the regular army. Amid the panic and disorder after Sumter’s fall, many residents had fled the city—Union sympathizers jammed Seventeenth Street in carriages, wagons, and loaded carts, pressing northward toward the Maryland line, while Southerners slipped one by one across the Potomac.11
There had been good reason for those Unionists to panic. Washington was encircled by slave territory, and it looked as though Marylanders might be following the Virginians into rebellion. Baltimore secessionists, who controlled the city’s telegraph office, severed communications