1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [74]
Mrs. Lincoln and her young sons, meanwhile, following later that day, were welcomed to Baltimore with loud huzzas—for Jefferson Davis. As their car was drawn slowly through the streets by a team of horses, mobs of men and boys surrounded it, rocking it violently back and forth and forcing the windows open as they screamed threats and obscenities at the terrified family. Police rescued the Lincolns not a moment too soon and sent them on their way southward, toward the city that would be their home for the next four years.86
An anxious and dispirited capital awaited them. The celebration of Washington’s Birthday the day before had been overshadowed by an unfortunate misstep. As the blue-coated cavalry, infantry, artillerymen, and marines—boots polished and dress uniforms crisply pressed—were forming ranks for their traditional parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, a courier arrived with orders from the White House: no troops were to march this year. John Tyler, still closeted with his fellow delegates at the Willard, had convinced President Buchanan that a display of military force was inadvisable at that particular moment. Later in the day, after cries of outrage from the city’s Unionists, the president reversed himself in characteristic fashion, and a few of the dismissed soldiers were rounded up for a feeble second parade. Buchanan then sat down to write an apologetic note to his predecessor, begging pardon for having allowed U.S. troops to appear in broad daylight in the federal district.87
Rumors of secessionist plots circulated daily. It was said that the secessionists planned to kill Lincoln rather than let his inauguration proceed. An openly pro-Southern militia company drilled nightly in the streets, obliging the mayor—himself a Democrat who would eventually be jailed for sedition—to blandly reassure the public that these were merely members of a respectable political organization who enjoyed the cool air of February evenings. This did little to soothe the District’s jangled nerves. One morning when the sudden crash of cannon fire set windowpanes rattling, panicked Washingtonians ran into the streets to find out whether this was the opening volley of a secessionist uprising, or the first salvo in a federal invasion of the South. It was neither: just an artillery battery firing an imprudent thirty-four-gun salute, celebrating Kansas’s admission to the Union.88
In Congress, the statesmen, too, were now firing blanks. From Americans in every corner of the North, petitions for peace and compromise continued to arrive—but now there were also more and more scrolls of signatures demanding that no compromise whatsoever be struck. These clamorous demands all converged upon a point of almost eerie inactivity. Daily debates in the House and Senate had become a tourist attraction and fodder for newspaper columns set in tiny agate type; little more. Politicians gave patriotic, long-winded, ineffectual speeches rebuking all the other politicians for doing likewise, while in the half-empty chamber their colleagues dozed, wrote letters, or picked their teeth with their penknives. The only other signs of life were the busy scratching of the stenographers’ pencils and the scurrying of congressional pages bringing fresh glasses of water to cool the orators’ overtaxed vocal cords. Senator Crittenden was now almost the only man with any faith in his compromise proposal, and even his was waning fast. He and his few allies—Stephen Douglas and a couple of other senators—could not even get the resolutions onto the floor for a vote. Most Northerners felt it went too far in appeasing the South, while Southerners, of course, felt it did not go far enough. A popular New England humorist offered