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“Everything worth looking at seemed unfinished,” said one acerbic visitor. “Everything finished looked as if it should have been destroyed generations before.” Indeed, the Washington of 1861 seemed in itself a kind of tacit argument against the very idea of a national government, or at least as evidence of that government’s incapability to maintain its own existence. The few offices of the executive branch had an almost makeshift feel: even the State Department possessed the atmosphere of a county courthouse, with a posted notice in the front hall listing the weekly hours that Secretary Seward received callers. “The government had an air of social instability and incompleteness that went far to support the right of secession in theory as in fact; but right or wrong, secession was likely to be easy where there was so little to secede from,” Henry Adams later wrote. “The Union was a sentiment, but not much more.”16

The local civilians’ sole professional activity seemed to be the leisurely task of waiting: waiting for a bill to wend its way through the slow peristalsis of congressional committees; waiting in the lobby of Willard’s for an elusive cabinet patron to make his appearance; waiting in the shabby White House anteroom to ask a favor of the president. The archetypal Washingtonian had his feet propped on the end table, a wad of tobacco in his cheek, and a newspaper in his hand.17

Waiting may have been the locals’ favorite pastime, but the New York firemen did not share their taste. After four days en route to the capital, cooped up on the steamer and then the train, they had expected and hoped to disembark straight into the thick of battle. (You could hardly blame them—it had been weeks since their last chance for even a good street brawl.) As they tumbled out of their train, a newspaperman had heard one Zouave ask, “Can you tell us where Jeff Davis is? We’re lookin’ for him.” A comrade chimed in: “We’re bound to hang his scalp in the White House before we go back.” Others squinted in perplexity, looking around for secession flags to capture but failing to discover any.18

On the morning after their arrival, ten-year-old Willie Lincoln, whose parents had allowed him to stay up late and watch the grand procession the evening before, wrote excitedly to a former playmate in Illinois, eking out the letters in a laborious schoolboy hand: “I suppose that you did not learn that Colonel, E.E. Ellsworth had gone up to New York and organized a regiment,—divided in to companys, and brought them here, & to be sworn in—I dont know when. Some people call them the B’hoys, & others call them, the firemen.” It wasn’t long before Willie and his younger brother, Tad, had asked their indulgent father for their own pint-size Zouave uniforms, in which they paraded, chests out and heads high, around the White House grounds. Their parents solemnly reviewed the two-man regiment (which the boys had named Mrs. Lincoln’s Zouaves) and presented it with a flag; a photograph of Tad in his uniform survives to this day.19

Willie and Tad Lincoln were not alone in having gone a bit b’hoy crazy. “Every zouave is surrounded by a group of eager listeners,” a New York Herald writer reported, amused at how these ordinary Bowery roughnecks had become exotic novelties. Washington was not without its own, homegrown rowdy element, to be sure: “Riot and bloodshed are of daily occurrence,” reported a Senate committee in 1858, exaggerating perhaps just a little. But it is safe to say that few locals had ever observed at close range such a colorful troupe of ruffians as the b’hoys. Their salty New York dialect won particular admiration.20

Local newspapermen delighted in regaling readers with tales of the Zouave exploits—many at least slightly exaggerated in the telling—and these stories were picked by newspapers throughout the Union, even in the odd corner of the Confederacy. One gang of b’hoys was said to have strolled nonchalantly into a restaurant, ordered themselves a fine meal, knocked over the tables, and smashed the crockery,