09 Jul 2012

Lost Capitol Hill: Lodging in the Senate

The 6th Massachussetts battles its way through Baltimore on its way to Washington. (Senate.gov)

I recently began reading Reveille in Washington, Margaret Leech’s wonderful 1941 book that describes the Civil War from the perspective of DC. In it, you get a real sense of what it was like to survive that disastrous war in the nation’s capital – and get to meet some of the remarkable characters that flocked to the city during those trying years. Capitol Hill was not nearly as important a neighborhood in those years as it is today, but the Navy Yard and Capitol attracted their share of these visitors to DC. Today, I want to point out a particular event that had one of the most famous women to come out of the Civil War do her work on Capitol Hill.

 On April 17, 1861, a little over a month after Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated, Virginia passed an “ordinance of secession,” leaving Washington DC bordering directly on Secessia (a wonderful word for the Confederacy that has sadly fallen into disuse of late) This would not have been as great a problem if it hadn’t been for a painful lack of Union troops in the Capitol. Two days later, after having battled with secessionists in Baltimore, the 6th Massachusetts Volunteer Militia arrived in the capital, much to the relief of all whose sympathies remained with the Union.

The militamen had among them 30 wounded compatriots, and thus the local health care workers were able to take care of them, but there was no barracks for the rest of the troops to be bivouacked. It was thus decided that they would be allowed to stay in the Capitol, and they ended up in the Senate Chamber, which had only been completed two years earlier. A doorkeeper described them as “a tired, dusty, and bedraggled lot of men, showing every evidence of the struggle which they had so recently passed through” when they arrived, and continued that “it almost broke my heart to see the soldiers bring armfuls of bacon and hams and throw them down upon the floor of the marble room. Almost with tears in my eyes, I begged them not to grease up the walls and the furniture.”

His entreaties were ignored, and the hall, as well as other rooms nearby, soon were disastrously dirty. With the troops housed and fed, they now became increasingly keen to find out what was going on around them, and particularly, what was happening at home. Someone scrounged up a copy of the Worcester Spy, the almost one hundred year old paper that was the source of hometown news to a large contingent within the regiment. Since they could not all read it at once, they asked a woman who had already shown herself to be of service to the troops, by supplying them with sundries that they needed.

In a letter she wrote to a friend, she describes the scene: “You would have smiled to see me and my audience in the Senate Chamber of the United States. Oh! but it was better attention than I have been accustomed to see there in the old time.”

The woman was Clarissa Barton, better know as Clara, and from this uncertain beginning, she became known as the “Angel of the Battlefield” and a tireless nurse and organizer. Her crowning achievement was the founding of the American Red Cross, who ensures that the United States will never be as unprepared for tragedies as it was in the early days of the Civil War.

 

 

 


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