1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [163]
Southerners were calling for an immediate attack on the capital. “There is one wild shout of fierce resolve to capture Washington City, at all and every human hazard,” wrote the editors of the Richmond Examiner. “The filthy cage of unclean birds must and will be purified by fire. . . . Many indeed will be the carcasses of dogs and caitiffs that will blacken the air upon the gallows, before the great work is accomplished.”13
But the birds, dogs, and caitiffs had managed to squeak through, at least for the time being. The Sixth Massachusetts, the Seventh New York, and other regiments eventually arrived, and soon more troops were pouring into Washington daily. They represented, if not a cross section of the North, then at least a vivid assortment of citizen-soldiers. Later in the war, Union enlisted men would nearly all be clad in identical navy blue tunics, factory made by the tens of thousands—indeed, the concept of standard sizes in men’s clothing, eventually picked up for civilian attire, began with that wartime mass production. But there was nothing mass-produced about the war in early 1861. The volunteers who had converged upon the capital sported scarlet plumes and gold lace, turbans and tyroleans. (That is, those who had any uniforms at all: quite a few, awaiting shipments from home, were still in civilian garb.) Some belonged to prewar militias, but there were many newly formed regiments. As with the Fire Zouaves, these had customarily been organized in local communities by individual men of sufficient wealth or charisma to rally the troops together, arm them, and lead them off toward the front. Each of these colonels was a grandee of some sort—whether a metropolitan police commissioner or a country squire—and often the regiment bore his name.14
These fresh volunteers, with their spotless clothing and jaunty self-confidence, had done much to relieve the feeling of siege, and some Washington citizens were returning home, a bit sheepishly. Still, no one could forget that the enemy forces were massing just on the other side of the river. In Alexandria—until recently part of the District of Columbia—a hotelkeeper had raised an enormous secession banner atop his establishment, so large that on the clear spring afternoons it could be seen in downtown Washington. From the windows of the White House, Hay, Nicolay, and even the president and first lady stole glances at it through a spyglass.
For the New York fire boys, many of whom had never ventured farther from home than certain out-of-the-way sections of Brooklyn, the national capital was a disappointment. Even in wartime, the city seemed sleepy in comparison to Gotham, almost rustic. With the exception of a few gleaming federal temples, the buildings were mostly ramshackle wooden affairs set amid sprawling yards, where black men and women—the first slaves that most of the Yankees had ever actually seen—looked up from their chores to watch with wary eyes the passing troops. Pigs and goats foraged for scraps in the avenues laid out optimistically by L’Enfant at the end of the previous century: broad, empty thoroughfares that dead-ended suddenly in cornfields, and whose mud was so deep in springtime that you often had to walk several blocks before finding a safe place to cross the street. Not many years earlier, the Great Compromiser himself, Senator Henry Clay, had found himself attacked by a large billy goat in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, much to the delight of the newsboys and bootblacks who gathered to watch the contest between