1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [211]
This was more than slightly melodramatic. Still, as the Congress of 1861 prepared to convene, no cosmic portents—with the possible exception of the comet—were yet evident, and no one visiting Washington would have mistaken it for Bethlehem. The charms of the capital in summertime, an acquired taste in the best of circumstances, had not been enhanced much by the presence of a hundred thousand troops, unless one’s tastes ran to ladies of pleasure. “Beauty and sin done up in silk, with the accompaniment of lustrous eyes and luxurious hair, on every thoroughfare offer themselves for Treasury notes,” a Union officer wrote in his diary. Sin did not come in such uniformly luxurious guise, though: just after the national holiday, Private Thomas Curry of the Fire Zouaves was found knifed to death in front of one particularly “low” brothel.
And prostitutes were not the only ones making heavy use of L’Enfant’s stately boulevards; the constant passage of army wagons had deepened Pennsylvania Avenue’s ruts and morasses to the point that unwary pedestrians almost risked sinking out of sight, never to reemerge, while Second Street had gotten so bad that one poor gentleman’s carriage toppled off the eroding curbside and into the adjacent Tiber Creek canal, drowning him in the miasmal waters. (The capital’s sanitation system, if the term can be applied to a crude network of drainage ditches, was so overtaxed that official government reports used phrases like accumulated filth … hotbed of putrefaction … immense mass of fetid and corrupt matter.)6
Things had improved considerably at the Capitol itself, however. Arriving regiments were now shunted off to less stately campsites, as workmen readied the building for the legislators’ return, expunging every visible trace of the Fire Zouaves and their comrades-in-arms. Furniture was refinished; carpets replaced; graffiti scrubbed from the frescoes. The Senate chamber was painstakingly deloused. The paneling in the House chamber, formerly blazing red, was repainted a quiet “dove color,” perhaps in a belated attempt to tranquilize the distinguished members, perhaps to address the aesthetic concerns of critics like Theodore Winthrop, whose posthumously published essay in the July Atlantic suggested that the Capitol’s décor had “a slight flavor of the Southwestern steamboat saloon.” A less pleasant job was scooping up and hauling off what the building’s shell-shocked chief architect described to his wife as “cart loads of ---- in the dark corners,” apparently deposited there by certain members of the soldiery. (To be fair, one might argue that this particular commodity, then as now, was even more abundantly produced by Congress itself.) President Buchanan’s portrait had been removed to a private office to protect it “from threatened indignity,” while Tyler’s was exiled to deep storage. (It now hangs in the Blue Room of the White House.)7
In another respect, too, the Capitol was returning to normal, not counting a few important absences. On the morning of July 4, the two chambers began filling up again with senators and congressmen—mostly the same men who “dressed like parsons, said Sir, and chewed tobacco” whom Winthrop had mocked as belonging to a bygone epoch. Clearly their epoch was not wholly bygone just yet. But they were lonelier, and it did not take an especially sharp eye to discern that their desks and chairs had been artfully rearranged, a bit more widely spaced than before, to conceal the thinning of ranks. One significant absence was not the result of secession—or at least not quite as directly as the others. Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s old rival, the man whose popular sovereignty doctrine had promised Americans the freedom to commit a state to slavery, had died a month earlier, after a grueling lecture tour on which he rallied Northern Democrats “to protect this government and [our] flag from every assailant.