CHAPTER 19
New York to the Rescue
Now, there’s our City Regiments,
Just see what they have done:
The first to offer to the State
To go to Washington,
To protect the Federal Capital
And the flag they love so dear!
And they’ve done their duty nobly,
Like New York Volunteers.
—“The New York Volunteer”
The start of hostilities put Washington City in a terribly vulnerable spot, wedged as it was between Virginia, which was about to secede, and Maryland, which almost did. It was very much a Southern city, and the Southerners who hadn’t already left now considered the federal government a hostile foreign power. Some had stood in the long receiving line at Lincoln’s inaugural reception in March only for the pleasure of refusing to shake his hand when their turn came. The city was effectively undefended against attack, with almost the entire U.S. Army out west.
Virtually all the rail lines connecting the city to the North ran through rebellious Baltimore. Lincoln commissioned John Dix a major general of volunteers for New York, then had him posted to Baltimore’s Fort McHenry with the mandate of keeping the city from going into full-on revolt. Dix got quickly to work. “The condition of Baltimore was like that of a volcano intent on eruption,” Morgan Dix later wrote, and “signs pointed distinctly to a terrible outbreak as imminent.” Dix arrested prominent figures among the city’s secessionists, shut down the city’s more vociferously pro-South newspapers, and suppressed large public gatherings. It was well known that when the Maryland legislature returned to session in September it would most likely vote for secession. Dix prevented this by the simple expedient of jailing the legislators, along with Baltimore’s mayor, George William Brown. For all Dix’s efforts, Baltimore continued to seethe.
Southerners expected to seize Washington in short order. Because Congress was adjourned, and only Congress could increase the country’s military size and budget, Lincoln called on the governors of the Union to raise seventy-five thousand militia volunteers and send them instantly to defend the capital and the Union. Lincoln would place the volunteers under General Winfield Scott, “Old Fuss and Feathers,” who’d turn seventy-five in June. He had been in the service since Thomas Jefferson was president. Scott had come from New York to Washington late in 1860, anticipating conflict. He was mountainously overweight, rheumatic and gouty, “and his physical infirmities were such that he could scarcely leave his invalid-chair,” Villard would later recall. “His mind, too, clearly showed the effect of old age.” On Thursday, April 18, Scott met with the career officer he considered most qualified to command the Union army: Robert E. Lee. The legislature of their home state, Virginia, had voted for secession the day before, and after some soul-searching Lee resigned his commission. He would fight for Virginia.
To fund the start-up of the war effort, Secretary of the Treasury Chase went to the New York banks for loans. They were only too happy to comply, not least because they hoped that a swift and successful prosecution of the war would mean they could recoup some of the vast debt that Southerners were now defaulting on. They also hoped to go back to doing business with a chastened South as soon as possible. Of the $260 million Washington borrowed to pay for the war in 1861, New York banks put up $210 million.
Governors in the North had put their state militias, such as they were, on readiness alert back when South Carolina seceded; they now promised to have troops in Washington in forty-eight hours. The first troops to arrive, on the evening of April 18, were a contingent of Pennsylvania militia who were already bloodied: They’d been attacked by a mob of enraged secessionists as they changed trains in Baltimore.
New York’s Republican governor, Edwin Morgan, convinced the legislature to put $3 million toward raising thirty thousand volunteers. By the end of May, Morgan had already achieved that goal. New York State would provide more Union troops than any other during the war—an estimated 17 percent of the total—and have the most casualties, roughly fifty-three thousand. In New York City and Brooklyn, recruiting offices popped up “in almost every street,” the Tribune said, and there was “no lack of persons desirous of joining the regiments being raised.” Tent camps and ramshackle wooden barracks sprang up all over Manhattan—in Union Square and Central Park and City Hall Park—and on Staten Island and Long Island.
At first many recruits committed only to three months’ service. In those heady first days of the war, optimists believed it would take no longer than that to crush the Rebels. In January, William Seward had told Judge Daly that there would be no war, and even if there were, it wouldn’t last more than six weeks. Realists, including General Scott, considered the three-month volunteers an emergency stopgap to keep the Rebels out of Washington while the Union trained a better force. The majority of the three-month volunteers hastily shoved into uniform at the start of the war would come to the end of their contracted service without ever seeing combat. Some would immediately reenlist for longer terms of service; others had had their fling and went home. By the end of summer, volunteers would be signing up for two or three years.
Raising a company of volunteers (a hundred men), a regiment (a thousand), or a brigade (three to five thousand) was a way for ambitious men and organizations to show their patriotism, earn some glory, and maybe enhance their standing in the city’s social, political, and business circles. Anybody could do it, and almost anybody did. No military expertise was required, and early on in the war little was demonstrated. Raising a company meant you got to call yourself a captain; raising a regiment made you a colonel; if you could pull together an entire brigade you were suddenly a brigadier general. Washington had to certify your commission, but in the desperate early period of the war that approval wasn’t very hard to secure. The Union army’s small cadre of trained and experienced officers would complain bitterly about having to fight alongside these overnight amateurs, whom they despised, usually with good reason, as “political officers.” They’d also resent the amateur Lincoln’s micromanaging their activities.
Tammany Hall put together a regiment, the Jackson Guard, officially designated the 42nd New York. It was mostly made up of Tammany’s usual Irish street toughs from in and around the Five Points, but several of its officers were seasoned, and they drilled the men seriously at Camp Tammany in Great Neck, Long Island. The grand sachem himself, Colonel William Kennedy—Metropolitan superintendent John Kennedy’s brother—led them at first. However, he would die of a “congestion of the brain” just a few days after they reached Washington.
William “Billy” Wilson, a lightweight boxer and Tammany stalwart, put together his own regiment, the 6th, another rowdy collection that was described at the time as “composed entirely of thieves, burglars, and pickpockets.” That was a bit exaggerated; they also included volunteer firemen and grizzled veterans of the Mexican War. Maria Daly, who liked him, described Wilson in her diary as “very broad-shouldered, rather undersized, with a pair of black eyes which look as though they might blaze out like Drummond lights [i.e., limelight] when excited.” Unlike many other overnight officers in the Union army, Billy affected no grand airs, preferring to wear a private’s uniform. At the 6th’s mustering-in ceremony at Tammany Hall he waved a sword and a pistol and whipped the men into a frenzy. They brandished knives and pistols, shouted, “Blood! Blood!” and vowed to build monuments of secessionists’ bones. The frantic ceremony concluded with rousing renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Dixie.”
Not to be outdone, Mayor Wood recruited and funded “out of my purse” his own Mozart Regiment, the 40th New York Volunteer Infantry. New Yorkers wondered what to make of Wood’s conversion to the cause of war. The Sun was not buying it. The mayor, it warned its readers, was still “a traitor down to the bottom of his heart.” The Mozart Regiment signed up a father-son team, Frederick and Gustav “Gus” Schurmann. Frederick, an accomplished musician and music teacher, had left Prussia with his wife and one-year-old Gustav after the failed revolutions of 1848 and settled in New York City. He taught Gus several instruments. Gus was twelve and carrying a shoeshine kit around City Hall Park, three pennies a shine, when the war broke out. Frederick signed up with the Mozart Regiment’s drum and bugle corps; it’s likely he chose it, rather than one of the city’s all-German regiments, for its musical name. When Gus begged to join as well, Frederick gave in. Eighteen was the official minimum age to serve with the Union army, but thousands of younger boys lied about their age to get in. Legend has it that a common trick was to write “18” on a slip of paper and stick it in your shoe, so that when the recruiter asked, you could say, “I’m over 18.” Like Gus, the youngest of them served as “little drummer boys” or “little buglers.” In addition they were officers’ and hospital orderlies.
When Sumter fell, Dan Sickles was fresh out of Congress, back in the city, bored and unhappy at the prospect of practicing law with his father. His reconciliation with Teresa was proving hard. He went about his partying while she, still shunned by the whole city, hid at home with their pretty daughter, Laura. At Lincoln’s call for volunteers, Sickles enlisted as a private in the National Guard. As a Tammany Democrat, Dan had always been sympathetic to the South, and when other states began to follow South Carolina out of the Union he had been among the New Yorkers who argued that they should be allowed to go if they did it peacefully. But for all his faults Dan was a patriot, and the taking of Fort Sumter pushed him over into the war camp.
He was about to embark with his battalion for Washington when he and a friend, drinking at the bar in Delmonico’s, got to talking about putting together a regiment of their own, with Dan at the head of it. That sounded a lot better than serving as a private in someone else’s unit, so Dan resigned from the National Guard and set to work. He had a major’s rank from marching around parade grounds with the state militia but precisely no real military training or experience. He didn’t let that stop him. With rage militaire at fever pitch, it didn’t take long for Sickles and his friend to recruit not just a regiment but a full brigade of five thousand, attracting men not only from New York but from as far away as Michigan. They named it the Excelsior Brigade, after New York State’s motto.
Raising a brigade was just the first step. Then you had to raise the funds to house, clothe, and feed them. The same men who had organized the Union Square rally formed the Union Defense Committee for that purpose. Officers and members included John Dix, president; Fernando Wood; Peter Cooper; John Jacob Astor; Moses Grinnell; George Opdyke; and the former governor Hamilton Fish. Twelve of them were Republicans, thirteen War Democrats. The city and state gave the UDC $3 million to spend on military and naval necessaries. Lincoln sent $2 million. In the first few months of the war the UDC equipped and armed an impressive thirty-six regiments.
Sickles secured his brigade a camp on Staten Island, then went asking for funds. But between his lurid reputation and his many political enemies, he found raising money very difficult. The quality of the volunteers he’d attracted didn’t help. The Excelsior was yet another motley assortment of roughnecks and hard-drinking heathens, many of them Irish Catholic workingmen. A soldier in the brigade’s 1st Regiment named James Stevenson wrote a pamphlet called History of the Excelsior or Sickles’ Brigade, published in 1863. In it he recalled that “a person belonging to the Excelsior Brigade met with nothing but scorn and contempt” in the city and was “excluded from any society or company.” “Such a collection of men was never before united in one body since the flood,” wrote Irish-born Father Joseph O’Hagan, a Jesuit chaplain with the brigade. “Most of them were the scum of New York society, reeking with vice and spreading a moral malaria around them.” Joseph Twichell, a young abolitionist and Congregationalist from Yale, was in New York studying at the progressive Union Theological Seminary in Chelsea when the war broke out. When he became a chaplain in the brigade, he wrote his father in Connecticut, “If you ask why I fixed upon this particular regiment, composed as it is of rough, wicked men, I answer, that was the very reason.… I should expect to make some good impressions, by treating with kindness a class of men who are little used to it.” He and Father O’Hagan became known as the Excelsior’s Holy Joes.
For three months Sickles ran up bills everywhere from Delmonico’s to the barbers who cut and shaved all the men to P. T. Barnum, who’d given him a large tent on credit. Seeing disaster loom, Sickles twice took a train to Washington and met personally with President Lincoln to ask his help. Although they were different in almost every way, he managed to charm Lincoln as he did so many others. The president promised federal assistance, and the two men would remain friendly for the rest of Lincoln’s life.
The behavior of Colonel Billy Wilson’s 6th was just as bad as the Excelsiors’. They also made camp on Staten Island, where they named their barracks Astor, Metropolitan, St. Nicholas, and Fifth Avenue. Surrounding Staten Islanders were soon complaining of an outbreak of thefts. Before they were to ship out in June, Wilson would rashly allow his men one last night on the town. Few showed up on the dock the next morning, the ones who did were worse for wear, and Colonel Wilson himself had somehow managed to fall down and crack his head. They shipped out a day late and several dozen men short. Although they would prove themselves fierce fighters during their two years of service, they’d be much better known for their hijinks off the battlefield. In 1863, while helping to secure the Mississippi for the Union, they’d reputedly confiscate any whiskey they could find, attempt to throw a reprimanding general off a steamboat, and burglarize plantation homes. One drunken soldier punched an officer, who shot him dead and had him buried on the spot in riverbank mud. “Colonel Wilson’s men,” a contemporary reported, “are to be quartered, rather appropriately, in the Baton Rouge penitentiary.”
Late on the afternoon of Friday, April 19, the same day that the Baltic arrived in New York harbor, massive crowds lined Broadway to cheer the first New York City regiment to head to Washington, the 7th Regiment of Volunteer Infantry, as they marched to the Cortlandt Street ferry terminal. There they “escaped the deafening noise, the struggling, jostling crowd, and the tears and caresses of friends and kindred” to cross the Hudson and board a southbound train in Jersey City. The 7th, also known as the Darling Seventh, the Silk Stocking Regiment, and the Kid Glove Regiment, represented the cream of New York City society, from old Knickerbocker families like the Verplancks and Schuylers and Lefferts (Colonel Marshall Lefferts, an engineer, was their commander) to the nouveau riche Vanderbilts and Tiffanys. Their chaplain was Reverend Weston of Morgan Dix’s elite Trinity Church. Their headquarters above the butchers’ stalls at the Tompkins Market and Armory on Third Avenue near Cooper Union was like a swanky gentlemen’s club. Their gray uniforms were more smartly tailored than most men’s Sunday suits. Marching among them were Herman Melville’s cousin Henry Gansevoort and Whitman’s well-born bohemian friend Private Fitz-James O’Brien. Another 7th volunteer, Private Robert Gould Shaw of Boston and Staten Island, is now famous as the officer who died leading the black 54th Massachusetts Infantry in battle in 1863. (He would write that he preferred fighting with black soldiers to Irish ones, whom he found impervious to discipline.) The 7th had never been to war, yet they were well experienced in combat of a sort: Whenever mob violence broke out on New York’s streets, the 7th was called out to suppress it, as they had done in Astor Place in 1849 and when the Dead Rabbits ran amok in 1857.
By the time the 7th reached Philadelphia, rioters had burned railroad bridges and cut telegraph lines around Baltimore. The troops had to circumvent the area and sail to Annapolis. Along the way, Private O’Brien cheered his fellows with a little fake-Irish ditty he wrote in their honor, including the lines:
We’re fond of love,
But fonder still of victuals,
Wid turtle steaks
An’ codfish cakes
We always fills our kittles.
To dhrown sich dish,
We dhrinks like fish,
And Mumm’s the word we utter,
An’ thin we swill
Our Leoville [a type of very expensive claret],
That oils our throats like butter.
After repairing sabotaged rail lines outside of Annapolis, the 7th Regiment, dusty and unshaven, finally marched down Pennsylvania Avenue on Thursday, April 25, to “one of the wildest scenes of excitement ever witnessed here,” a New York World correspondent wrote. “The fears, the hopes, the false alarms, the doubts, and the prayers of all for the past week were satisfied in an instant.” The 7th turned smartly off Pennsylvania Avenue, onto the White House grounds, and past the front portico, where a relieved Lincoln, who just that morning had gloomily said he didn’t believe the 7th would ever arrive, smiled and awkwardly doffed his hat as they passed. A Tribune reporter wrote that the president was now the “happiest-looking man in town.”
As more regiments flowed into Washington over the coming days, the city scrambled to house and feed them. With Congress still adjourned, the 7th bedded down at first in the House of Representatives galleries, where, Private Shaw wrote his mother, “we each have a desk, and easy-chair to sleep in, but generally prefer the floor and our blankets, as the last eight days’ experience has accustomed us to hard beds. The Capitol is a magnificent building, and the men all take the greatest pains not to harm anything. Jeff Davis shan’t get it without trouble.” When the 8th Massachusetts arrived, they lodged in the Capitol Rotunda, still open to the sky. Other units unfurled their bedrolls in the city’s parks. The kitchens at Willard’s and other hotels churned out meals for hundreds and gave them places to bathe. Eventually troops shifted to large tent camps around the city. The 7th set up Camp Cameron on a hill overlooking the Potomac. Lincoln, escorted by Fort Sumter’s Major Anderson, visited them there.
So did the photographers George Barnard and C. O. Bostwick, working out of Mathew Brady’s National Photographic Art Gallery on Pennsylvania Avenue. Many of the men and officers of the 7th had already stopped in there to have their pictures taken looking brave and dashing for cartes de visite to send to their families and loved ones back in New York. Now Barnard, a longtime associate of Brady’s, took casual, jolly shots of the 7th in camp, some of the first field photography of the war. Like other early entrepreneurs of photography, Brady had quickly grasped what an enormous commercial opportunity the war presented. British and French photographers had begun documenting their wars about a decade earlier, and an unknown American had shot some carefully staged daguerreotypes of the Mexican War. But this was to be the first American war to be extensively photographed—more than a million photos would be taken—and Brady was determined to lead the pack.
The 7th tarried in Washington City only until June, when they returned to New York to a joyous reception and mustered out of federal service. The regiment would not fire a single shot in battle during the war. But many 7th men signed up with other units after mustering out; the 7th would in fact provide the Union army with more officers than any other militia regiment. Fitz-James O’Brien went on to help recruit another volunteer unit, the McLelland Rifles, in which he held the rank of captain. In November 1861 he’d make the news for shooting one of his own men. The Times reported that a Sergeant Davenport, “who is said to be the most desperate and unruly man in the regiment,” attacked O’Brien, who was forced to shoot him in the abdomen.
Shortly after that O’Brien would leave the Rifles and join the regular army as a lieutenant, posted to West Virginia. In a clash with a Confederate patrol in February 1862 he and a Rebel officer would exchange fire; the Rebel died, and O’Brien’s left arm was shattered. From his hospital bed he wrote an extraordinary letter to the Times, demonstrating that while his body was damaged his wit was not:
For the first week of my wound, nothing but enormous doses of morphine kept me from going crazy with pain. I had to be kept all day in a lazy, half-slumberous condition, in which I felt like a kind of hot-house plant, dozing and living, and that’s all.…
While highly morphinized, and in a semi-conscious state, I formed the idea that the aggravating limb did not belong to me, but was a vagabond and malicious arm that had attached itself to me for the purpose of preventing my being Commander-in-Chief, which I was to be as soon as I had fought Beauregard in the Colisseum with a trident and a shrimp-net.…
Jesting apart, the day is lovely. The sun shines on the distant hills. The singing of the birds comes through my window with a grateful sound as I lie sad, and silent, and suffering. Oh, liberty of motion, health and strength! I never knew what treasures you were till now.
As he wrote this O’Brien was dying a long and agonizing death, not from the wound itself but from lockjaw contracted when the doctors operated on it. His body was brought back to New York in April, where the 7th gave him a hero’s funeral and interred him with full honors at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. He was thirty-three.
Along with the scramble to defend Washington, there was a rush to build up the port of New York’s harbor defenses against a feared assault by the Confederate navy. The harbor already bristled with fortresses from the War of Independence and War of 1812. Forts Lafayette and Hamilton (where both Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson had served before the war) guarded the entrance from the Brooklyn side; Forts Richmond and Tompkins were on Staten Island; Castle Williams and Fort Columbus (originally called Fort Jay, and renamed that in 1904) stood on Governors Island, which was also a U.S. Army command headquarters; Fort Wood was a small garrison on Bedloe’s Island (Liberty Island); and Fort Schuyler, up at the tip of the Bronx, guarded the northern entrance to the East River. They trained more than one thousand guns on the harbor from their various vantages, but it wasn’t enough for the city’s fretful civic leaders. With congressional funds, they saw to it that many more guns were added and the fortifications modernized. It was never enough for some New Yorkers, who worried throughout the war about a naval invasion that never came. Fort Lafayette and Governors Island would see the most action, not as defensive installations but as prisons and sites of military executions.