State of Siege
By JOHN LOCKWOOD and CHARLES LOCKWOOD
On April 21, secessionist William B. Gulick, a clerk in the Department Interior Department, wrote North Carolina Gov. John W. Ellis to inform him about the precarious state of affairs in Washington. Gulick, who planned to resign his government post but remained in the city to serve the Confederacy, described an anxious Union capital, whose pro-Union citizens feared an attack at any moment, even as its secessionist residents spoke openly of welcoming a Southern assault.
“The city is, now just sufficiently excited to be disturbed by the merest trifle,” Gulick wrote. “Republicans here are frightened to death, and scarcely know what to expect. They anticipate an attack every night from an unseen force.” Gulick believed the city was under a “real state of siege”— and, practically speaking, he was right.
Gulick wrote that secessionists in Virginia and Maryland had successfully checked Union reinforcements from reaching the under-defended city from all compass points. To the north, on April 19 the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteers had been attacked — and four soldiers killed — as they changed trains in Baltimore. Early the next morning, Baltimore leaders had ordered the burning of railroad bridges north of the city to prevent the further passage of Union troops. To the east of Washington, Maryland secessionist militias had torn up the feeder rail line to Annapolis, blocking a key route for reinforcements trying to bypass Baltimore.
Meanwhile, to the south, Virginia had voted to secede from the Union on April 17, bringing the borders of the Confederacy to the opposite banks of the Potomac. To the west, Virginia militiamen had seized the Union Army armory and arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, and now controlled the B & O Railroad route to the Midwest. Finally, at least according to the latest rumor, Virginia forces had mined the Potomac and placed gun batteries below Washington to shell Union troop ships trying to reach the capital by water.
Staunch Unionists in Washington shared this grim assessment of the peril facing the capital, just one week after the surrender of Fort Sumter. Vermont native Lucius Chittenden, who had arrived in the city only days before to serve as register of the Treasury, recorded in his diary on April 20 that Washington now wore the “aspects of a besieged town.” Gen. Winfield Scott, who commanded efforts to defend the capital, wrote on April 22 that Washington was “now partially besieged, threatened, and in danger of being attacked on all sides.”
Lincoln himself later catalogued Washington’s isolation in the days after the fall of Sumter: “mails in every direction were stopped,” while telegraph lines were “cut off by the insurgents” and “all the roads and avenues to this city were obstructed” by the “treasonable resistance” of secessionist militias blocking Union troops from reaching Washington. In short, Lincoln wrote, the “capital was put into the condition of a siege.”
The three days from April 19 to April 21, recorded Lincoln’s secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, “exhibited a degree of real peril such as had not menaced Washington since the British invasion in 1814,” when it was sacked by the British army. To Nicolay and Hay, the danger of an attack was not an abstraction — they lived on the second floor of the White House, which many expected to be the first target of an invading Confederate army. A hastily assembled group of volunteer defenders, dubbed the Frontier Guard and organized by James H. Lane, a Republican senator from Kansas, was stationed in White House to protect Lincoln. They made their camp in the East Room, where they slept with their rifles at their sides.
On the evening April 18, expecting imminent attack, the Frontier Guard had assembled at the White House, an affair that unexpectedly turned into a festive celebration as cabinet members and their friends showed up to greet the men. Now, only three days later, the prevailing mood in the White House had grown somber. One of the guards, Clifford Arrick — an Ohio native who also worked as an examiner in the Copyright and Patent Office — recorded in his diary on April 20: “A universal gloom and anxiety sits upon every countenance.”
In fact, the city had received only two regiments of soldiers since Lincoln’s April 15 emergency proclamation for 75,000 volunteers soldiers: the 475 men of First Pennsylvania Volunteers, who arrived mostly unarmed on April 18, and the 1,000 men of the Sixth Massachusetts, who reached Washington late in the afternoon the following day after the deadly attack on their unit in Baltimore. The sabotage of the railroad bridges north of Baltimore meant that no more Northern troops could be expected immediately — and that any units trying to reach the capital might have to fight their way through hostile Maryland. “When will re-inforcements come?” Arrick fretted in his diary. “Will it be too late?”
Washington residents were frightened by the precipitous decline in the federal government’s authority, as made plain by the events of recent days. Why hadn’t the Lincoln administration been able to prevent the attack on the Sixth Massachusetts and keep Baltimore secessionists from destroying the key rail routes over which reinforcements would pass? Other residents were exhausted from the emotional whipsaw of rumors whose import changed hourly, many of which augured an imminent attack. Edwin Stanton, who had just ended his service as attorney general under James Buchanan, noted his own pessimism that Washington would escape safe: “Before long this city is doomed to be the scene of battle and carnage.”
Not surprisingly, many residents fled in terror, as Stanton recorded in a letter to Buchanan: “Almost every family packed up their effects. Women and children were sent away in great numbers.” Secretary of War Simon Cameron had sent his wife Margaret to Philadelphia on April 19, before the Baltimoreans cut rail lines. Others chose to stay despite the risk, including Mary Lincoln. Her stock response to those urging here to flee was, “I am as safe as Mr. Lincoln, and I shall not leave him.”
Two of her sons, Tad and Willie Lincoln, did their part to defend Washington by building a fort on the White House roof, as their friend Julia Taft remembered. “It did not present a very formidable appearance, with a small log to represent a cannon and a few old condemned rifles,” she later wrote, “but the boys took a great deal of pride in it and laid private plans for the defense of the White House in case the city was attacked.”
Months earlier, secessionist friends had urged Julia’s father, Patent Office examiner Horatio N. Taft, to side with the Confederacy, an entreaty the Northern-born Taft rebuffed. Before departing the capital, Senator David Yulee of Florida had threatened Taft directly, telling him “when the Southern army enters Washington, you will be hanging on one of these lampposts.” In his April 20 diary entry, Taft noted that he had had his pistol “put in better performance” by a gunsmith — little comfort against an invading army, since he knew that the city might be “in the midst of bloodshed [at] any hour.”
If the South took the city, Washington’s free black population faced a truly frightening prospect: re-enslavement. As Frederick Douglass noted, Confederate designs on the seat of the federal government “would place their iron yoke upon the necks of freemen” — who numbered 9,209 in the 1860 city census, or around 15 percent of its population. Unlike the city’s itinerant population of congressmen and government officials — or its slaves, who could be sold across the Potomac at Alexandria’s thriving slave market, though the slave trade was banned within the District of Columbia — Washington’s free African Americans formed a stable community, many of whom had been slaves earlier in their lives.
Paul Jennings, a Pension Office employee and one of the few blacks working for the federal government, was old enough to have witnessed firsthand the power of an invading army in Washington. In 1814 Jennings, then a 15-year-old slave owned by James Madison, had escaped the White House before the British Army set it ablaze, though not before helping rescue the famed Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington.
Now, with a desperate shortage of Union defenders in Washington, the free black community rallied several hundred men to protect their homes and hard-won freedom. On April 23, Jacob Dodson, a servant in the Senate who had fought under Gen. John C. Frémont in California during the Mexican War, wrote to Secretary of War Cameron that he knew of “some 300 reliable free citizens of this city who desire to enter the service of the city.” He signed the letter, “Jacob Dodson (Colored).” Cameron’s reply rejected Dodson’s offer, affirming longstanding policy barring blacks from military service. The War Department, Cameron wrote, had “no intention at present to call into the service of the Government any colored soldiers.”
A few hundred volunteer soldiers might have been the balance between victory and defeat if the city were attacked — especially when the city needed defenders of unquestionable loyalty to the Union. Many Southern sympathizers remained in the capital, and they were prepared to raise arms against the federal government if the Confederacy took the offensive. As Gulick tallied, the National Volunteers secessionist militia in Washington was “said to be a thousand strong” and “ready to cooperate with any Southern troops who may attack the City.” And he noted that the pro-Southern views of many District Militia members were “pretty certain to control their actions when the issue” was brought to a head by a Confederate assault on the city.
With Washington isolated, many Southerners saw the opportunity to deliver a decisive — and perhaps fatal — blow to the Union war effort. “Strike the blow quickly and Washington will be ours” was the terse message that North Carolina Governor John Ellis had telegrammed Jefferson Davis on April 17.
Virginian H. D. Bird, the superintendent of the state’s South Side Railroad, had an even more dramatic outcome in mind: the capture of the Union president. “Lincoln is in a trap,” he cabled Confederate Secretary of War Leroy P. Walker on April 20. “An hour now is worth years of common fighting. One dash and Lincoln is taken, the country saved, and the leader who does it will be immortalized.”
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