CHAPTER FIVE

Barracks and Blankets

NO SOLDIERS SNAPPED to attention and no musicians struck up a patriotic tune as the brightly decorated locomotive arrived in a gush of steam and clanging bells. The throngs of ordinary New Yorkers at the Hudson River Railroad depot in Manhattan surged forward to catch a glimpse of the president-elect, but New York City had not prepared an official welcome. There were no drums, uniforms, or speeches to detain Abraham Lincoln.

After a hurried walk through the depot and “a five-minute delay for an inscrutable something about the baggage,” Lincoln’s cortege was ready to depart. The roughly six thousand people who had been waiting for hours on 30th Street and Tenth Avenue let out a cheer and those watching from the windows waved white handkerchiefs. Climbing into a barouche, Lincoln gracefully raised his stovepipe hat to acknowledge them. Whips cracked beside the horses and the double line of carriages headed downtown. The procession turned left at 23rd Street, then right onto Fifth Avenue. At Union Square, the columns slanted onto Broadway. The avenue had been cleared of vehicles, and the formation traveled toward the Astor House in perfect order. The people crowded the side streets, doors, balconies, and windows and lined the roofs of the buildings on either side of Broadway to gain a clear view of the man who had pledged to save the Union. They, too, were waving white handkerchiefs—so many the New York Illustrated News claimed Lincoln “moved forward on the white bosom of a huge linen billow of colossal dimensions.”

It was February 19, 1861, and the president-elect had stopped in New York on his way to Washington for his March 4 inauguration. The previous December, South Carolina had seceded. By February 1, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had left, too, but the conflict had not yet turned violent. Many, perhaps most, New Yorkers were hoping Lincoln would reach a deal with the South to avoid bloodshed.

Diarist George Templeton Strong saw the procession as it passed St. Thomas Church, with an “escort of mounted policemen and a torrent of rag-tag and bobtail rushing and hooraying behind.” Strong glimpsed the face of “the great rail-splitter” and thought it keen, clear, honest, and not nearly as ugly as it appeared in portraits. Without the omnibuses and other vehicles that usually roared up and down Broadway, there was an unusual hush as several of the barouches drew up to the Astor House entrance. Lincoln unfurled himself from one of them. He paused on the sidewalk, gazed up at the looming granite walls of the old hotel, and stretched his arms and legs. He was dressed entirely in black, and his hat was pushed back on his head, revealing a thatch of dark, bushy hair. Holding his hands behind him, he turned around and scanned the crowd for a minute with a bemused look on his wrinkled brown face.

Walt Whitman was on top of an omnibus that had been pulled over to the side of the street to let Lincoln’s procession pass. From that vantage point, the poet had “a capital view of it all, and especially of Mr. Lincoln, his look and gait—his perfect composure and coolness—his unusual and uncouth height.” Whitman had been on Broadway when New York welcomed Lafayette, Andrew Jackson, and the Prince of Wales. On those occasions, the great avenue had reverberated with “the glad exulting thunder-shouts of countless unloos’d throats of men.” This time, it was cloaked in an eerie silence. “The crowd that hemm’d around consisted I should think of thirty to forty thousand men, not a single one his friend—while I have no doubt (so frenzied were the ferments of the time), many an assassin’s knife and pistol lurk’d in hip or breast pocket there, ready, soon as break and riot came,” Whitman recalled. “But no break or riot came. The tall figure gave another relieving stretch or two of arms and legs; then with moderate pace, and accompanied by a few unknown looking persons, ascended the portico-steps of the Astor House, disappear’d through its broad entrance—and the dumb-show ended.”

Early the next morning, Thurlow Weed took Lincoln to the Fifth Avenue home of the daughter of a prominent New York shipping magnate named Moses Grinnell. There the president-elect had breakfast with about a hundred of the city’s most prosperous merchants, some of them leading Republican proponents of compromise with the secessionists. Many members of New York’s business community were in no hurry to sever their lucrative ties with the South. One breakfast attendee pointed out to Lincoln that there were numerous millionaires in the group, a less than subtle reference to New York’s financial clout. But the president-elect would not be intimidated. “Oh, indeed, is that so?” he replied. “Well, that’s quite right. I’m a millionaire myself. I got a minority of a million in the votes last November.” (Lincoln actually got nearly 1.9 million votes—less than a majority but enough to defeat the three other candidates.)

Later in the day, Lincoln delivered brief remarks to Democratic Mayor Fernando Wood and the City Council before a huge crowd at City Hall, while Mary Lincoln visited Barnum’s museum and received ladies at the Astor House. That night, after an elaborate dinner and reception, Lincoln attended a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s new A Masked Ball at the Academy of Music. Lincoln arrived shortly after the curtain rose, causing a stir in the house as “one thousand opera glasses turned in one direction.” When the lights went up for intermission, the president-elect acknowledged the shouted cries of “Lincoln!” by rising from his seat and bowing. A reporter in attendance described the initial expression on Lincoln’s face as “stern, rugged and uncompromising.” But then Lincoln smiled, and the reporter felt confident that “justice would be tempered with mercy and stern principle would be leavened with that wisdom which springs from a knowledge of the human heart.”

Several months later, Whitman also went to see Verdi’s A Masked Ball. The performance ended around midnight, and the poet was walking down Broadway on his way back home to Brooklyn when he heard the loud cries of the newsboys, who were “rushing from side to side even more furiously than usual.” Whitman bought a paper and strode across Broadway so he could read it under the gaslights of the Metropolitan Hotel: Confederate batteries had opened fire on Fort Sumter at dawn that morning. The Civil War had begun.

On Monday, April 15, 1861, President Lincoln proclaimed that there was an insurrection in the South and called for 75,000 loyal Union men to crush it. Recruiting and equipping those troops would be up to individual states. Each governor oversaw his own war department, and the federal government took control of the regiments formed by each state only when they had reached full strength and had a proper complement of officers. On April 16, the New York Legislature approved $3 million to recruit, arm, and equip 30,000 troops for two years of service. Before the end of the month, Governor Morgan ordered the creation of 38 New York regiments, each with 780 men, to be mustered in New York City, Albany, and Elmira.

New York’s business community, cool to the cause before Fort Sumter, now rallied behind Lincoln and the Union. In the weeks immediately following the attack on Fort Sumter, the city’s leading merchants helped launch a Union Defense Committee charged with organizing volunteer regiments, providing local relief to the wives and children of soldiers, and supplying the army with equipment. Impressed by the New Yorkers’ efforts, Lincoln transferred $2 million in federal money to the committee. New York was designated as the headquarters of the army’s Department of the East, and four military depots were established to process recruits.

The business community’s change of heart corresponded with an outpouring of popular enthusiasm. Hundreds of thousands of shouting and singing people attended rallies in Union Square. Still in their civilian clothes, recruits paraded up and down Broadway in front of cheering multitudes. It seemed that the Stars and Stripes hung from every window in the city, and every vehicle—from omnibuses to common horse carts—was decked out in red, white, and blue. “The battle cry was sounded from almost every pulpit—flag-raisings took place in every square… and the oath was taken to trample Secession under foot, and to quench the fire of the Southern heart forever,” wrote William Howard Russell, a correspondent for the London Times.

The challenge for Governor Morgan was to channel that popular enthusiasm into the recruitment of real soldiers, trained and equipped for battle. For that, he turned to Arthur. Morgan made the young lawyer a brigadier general and assigned him to be the state quartermaster general’s New York City representative. Arthur would be responsible for feeding, housing, clothing, and equipping thousands of enlisted men, not only from the city but thousands from New England, too, since regiments from that region were streaming into New York on their way south. From his second-floor office in a large military storehouse at 51 Walker Street, Arthur awarded contracts, audited expenditures, and quickly became an expert in rations, blankets, ammunition, and underwear.

State regulations prescribed the uniform of the New York militiaman: he was to wear a dark blue jacket, cut to flow from the waist and to fall four inches below the belt; sky blue trousers; a sky blue overcoat; and a dark blue cap with a waterproof cover with a cape attached. Each soldier was issued two flannel shirts, two pairs of flannel underwear, two pairs of woolen socks, one pair of pegged-sole cowhide shoes, and one double Mackinaw blanket. But the sudden demand for military uniforms and other supplies soon exhausted the existing stocks, and the private firms that were supposed to manufacture more struggled to fulfill their contracts. Inevitably, this led to corner cutting. Brooks Brothers had a contract to furnish 12,000 New York uniforms—jacket, trousers, and overcoat—at a cost of $19.50 per uniform. But army-grade wool was scarce, so the firm made 7,300 of the uniforms using an imitation satin that not only failed to protect the soldiers from the elements, but literally disintegrated in the first rain. The New York Assembly ended up hauling the Brooks brothers—Daniel, John, Elisha, and Edward—before an investigative committee. Procuring high-quality blankets was similarly difficult, as some contractors saved money by using hemp and cotton instead of pure wool.

Finding enough housing for the growing number of troops in the city was another vexing problem that Arthur had to solve. At the beginning of the war, military authorities relied on local citizens to volunteer their buildings. When that quickly proved to be inadequate, Arthur supervised the construction of temporary barracks in Central Park and on Staten Island, Riker’s Island, and Long Island.

Then there were the soldiers themselves. After New York’s initial 38 regiments were recruited, all sorts of adventurers managed to procure commissions to raise troops. One of the most colorful was former boxer and Democratic alderman Billy Wilson.

Many members of Wilson’s 6th New York Regiment were Irish immigrants he had wrangled at a dog-fighting and rat-baiting house on White Street in the Five Points. Some of Wilson’s recruits wanted to risk their lives for the Union to undercut the nativist argument that Irish Catholics were unworthy of American citizenship, while others sought escape from the city’s dismal slums. Many of “Billy Wilson’s Boys,” unable to foresee the years of slaughter to come, viewed the war as a lark, a glorified street brawl that would be over in a matter of weeks. Before departing for their encampment on Staten Island, Colonel Wilson formally mustered his men at Tammany Hall. As uniforms, he had given them gray shirts and pants, brown felt hats, brogans, and leather belts, and each man was armed with a seven-inch knife, a slungshot, a Minnie rifle, and either one or two revolvers. Holding a saber in one hand and the American flag in the other, Wilson knelt on the floor and led his men in a pledge to support the flag, and “never flinch from its path through blood or death.” When Wilson said he would lead the regiment to secessionist Baltimore and march through the city or die trying, the men sprang to their feet and flung their hats in the air, shouting “Death to the secessionists! Death to the traitors!” They also swore to vanquish the “Plug Uglies,” a notorious Baltimore street gang. Slashing the air with his sword, Wilson vowed that the regiment would “leave a monument of their bones in the streets of Baltimore.”

Encamped on Staten Island, Billy Wilson’s Boys scrapped with other regiments, plundered local restaurants, and drank prodigiously. When restaurant owners appealed to Morgan for relief, the governor ordered Arthur to rein in Wilson and his rowdy regiment. A short time later, Wilson strutted into Arthur’s Walker Street office wearing his colonel’s uniform. When Arthur delivered Morgan’s message, Wilson was irate. “Neither you nor the governor has anything to do with me,” he shouted. “I am a colonel in the United States service, and you’ve got no right to order me.”

“You are not a colonel,” Arthur replied calmly, “and you will not be until you have raised your quota of men and received your commission.”

“Well, I’ve got my shoulder-straps, anyway, and as long as I wear them, I don’t want any orders from any of you fellows.”

At this, General Arthur bolted from his chair, ripped the straps from Wilson’s shoulders, and had the insubordinate colonel placed under arrest.

Arthur also had to bring the “Fire Zouaves” to heel. Led by Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, a personal friend of President Lincoln’s, the 11th New York Regiment drew its men from the ranks of the city’s many volunteer fire companies. The regiment got its nickname from its uniforms, which were inspired by the Franco-Algerian Zouaves. Like their North African counterparts, the Fire Zouaves wore red billowing trousers, loose tunics, sashes, and turbans. Unlike the Algerians, the New Yorkers were fond of breaking into taverns and charging restaurant meals to Jefferson Davis. One day the men refused to obey Ellsworth’s order to unpack their muskets, and the colonel appealed to Arthur for help. The general, accompanied by several policemen, visited the regiment’s headquarters on Canal Street and had the ringleaders arrested.

Arthur performed his job so well that in February of 1862, Morgan made him inspector general. In July 1862 Morgan promoted Arthur again, this time to quartermaster general for the state of New York. Arthur’s responsibilities broadened: he inspected forts and defenses throughout New York, and helped come up with a plan to block New York harbor in the event of an attack by the British navy, which seemed likely for a time after a Union warship removed two Confederate emissaries from a British vessel. He assigned a quartermaster to each New York regiment and brought the men to Manhattan to learn the intricacies of that vital position. To save state money, he used enlisted men to construct more than two hundred temporary barracks and forged special contracts with the railroads to transport troops to the front. Between August and December, Arthur’s office clothed, equipped, and transported to the front 68 infantry regiments, two cavalry battalions, and four battalions and ten batteries of artillery. Morgan called Arthur “my chief reliance in the duties of equipping and transporting troops and munitions of war.” During a time when many used their positions of influence to reap personal profits, Morgan praised Arthur for displaying “not only great executive ability and unbending integrity, but great knowledge of Army Regulations. He can say No (which is important) without giving offence.”

Arthur’s service for the Union did not sit well with everybody. His mother-in-law was openly sympathetic to the South—fortunately, she spent much of the war in Europe. Several of Nell’s Southern relatives, including Dr. Brodie Herndon and two of his sons, Chester’s close friend Dabney and Brodie Jr., enlisted in the Confederate army. It was difficult for the Herndons of Fredericksburg to reconcile their warm memories of the polite young man they had welcomed into their home with their burning hatred of the Union soldiers who had invaded their homeland. “Mr. Arthur is an officer in Lincoln’s army. How the people here do abuse him,” Dr. Herndon wrote in his diary in 1861.

In the spring of 1862, Union troops occupied Fredericksburg, forcing residents to endure the humiliation of blue-coated Yankees walking their streets. “We can hear nothing from our army or our friends, nothing which might tend in some measure to alleviate the affliction under which we are sorrowing,” one of the Herndons’ neighbors wrote in her diary in the middle of May. “We are shut in by the enemy on all sides and even the comforts of life are many of them cut off, no one is allowed even to bring wood to town and we know not how we are to be supplied with the means of cooking the small amount of food we can procure.”

Around the same time, Arthur traveled to Fredericksburg to review the Union troops stationed there. Though it must have been uncomfortable, he paid a visit to his wife’s relatives to see how they were holding up. Arthur “was very affectionate & kind. He thought we might be suffering and delicately proffered aid. We told him we forgot the General in the man,” Dr. Herndon wrote in his diary. But a cousin by marriage whose house had been ransacked by the Yankees wasn’t so forgiving. Upon seeing Arthur she “tossed her head, and with nose in air turned away from him… and walked away.”

Arthur’s sister Malvina also lived in Virginia while Arthur was serving in the New York militia. Malvina met her husband, Henry Haynesworth, a South Carolinian, when she took a teaching job in the South in 1854. Now Henry was a Confederate civil servant stationed in Petersburg.

Relations with Malvina and the Herndons were challenging enough; Arthur also had to navigate perilous shoals at home, where his own wife was a quiet but steadfast Confederate sympathizer.

The Arthurs and their infant son were living in a plush two-story family hotel near 22nd and Broadway, and they often entertained guests after Arthur returned from his work on Walker Street. Nell was a graceful and charming hostess, and Chester tried to lighten the mood by joking about his “little rebel wife,” but there was a chill in the household the couple could not conceal from their visitors. Silas Burt, a frequent guest during this period, thought that Nell almost surely shared her mother’s sympathies “but she certainly suppressed them at most times and was loyal to her husband’s position and views.” He remembered, however, “one or two passages between them that indicated much friction and probably heat in their respective relations to the war. Mrs. Arthur was in a cruel position during those dreadful four years—her husband prominent in the effort to subdue her kindred while she herself was the only child of a widow whose feelings were strongly enlisted for the rebels.”

When Nell’s beloved cousin “Dab” Herndon was captured, she asked Chester’s permission to visit him at the Union prison camp on Davids’ Island in Long Island Sound. Another Herndon cousin was wounded, while a third went missing in battle and was never found.

The war was not going well for the Union in the fall of 1862. Tens of thousands had been killed or maimed at Shiloh, Seven Days, Second Bull Run, and Antietam. A series of defeats in the East overshadowed some scattered victories in the West, and the eruption of public enthusiasm that followed the attack on Fort Sumter dissipated. Strong confided to his diary that in New York “traitors” were “now beginning cautiously to tamper with the great torrent of national feeling that burst out in April 1861.”

In November, voters in New York and other key Northern states registered their discontent with the ruling Republicans at the ballot box. Morgan, who had his eye on a US Senate seat, declined to run again for governor, and Democrat Horatio Seymour narrowly defeated the GOP candidate chosen to succeed him. The Democrats won every statewide position on the New York ballot and half the seats in the State Assembly. When Seymour took office on January 1, 1863, Morgan and his staff, including Arthur, lost their military commissions.

Though Arthur could have volunteered to fight, he didn’t. One reason was that Seymour was unlikely to give him a commission as high-ranking as the one he was being forced to give up. Family tension was another deterrent, and like many conservative Republicans, Arthur seems to have been disenchanted with the Lincoln administration’s shifting justifications for the war. Conservative Republicans like Arthur took their cue from the New York Times. “Slavery has nothing whatever to do with the tremendous issues now awaiting decision,” the paper argued. “The issue is between anarchy and order,—between Government and lawlessness,—between the authority of the Constitution and the reckless will of those who seek its destruction.” But Lincoln was gravitating toward the Radical Republican view that the primary aim of the war should be to end slavery. Military defeats, increasing debts, and the threat of a draft led many New Yorkers to question whether that goal was worth fighting for.

But there was another factor dissuading Arthur from reenlisting: he wanted to get rich. Nell was socially ambitious, and to play a role in high society, like her mother, she had to live in a fine home with servants. Arthur shared his wife’s aspirations, and as a high-ranking officer in the militia, he had begun to cultivate some expensive tastes. An old college friend noted that Arthur took “great interest in matters of dress and [was] always neat and tasteful in his attire.… He loved the pleasures of the table and had an extraordinary power of digestion and could carry a great deal of wine and liquor without any manifest effect other than greater vivacity of speech.” Arthur’s military service had given him an array of useful contacts, and he had become an expert in supplies, contracts, and military law. Many people with similar skills and experience were making fortunes. Arthur set out to do the same.