> [furgurson]{.underline}
>
> John Cole:\
> Well, good evening and welcome to the Library of Congress \[Library\].
> I\'m John Cole. I\'m the director of the Center For the Book in the
> Library of Congress, and I have the wonderful job of being paid to
> help promote books and reading and literacy in libraries, not only
> here in Washington but across the country where we have affiliated
> centers for the book now in every state, and I also have the wonderful
> opportunity to work with the National Book Festival. And I hope that
> several of you joined us Oct. 9 on the \[National\] Mall. This is an
> event organized and sponsored by the Library of Congress and hosted by
> first lady Laura Bush, but we managed to attract 85,000 book lovers to
> the Mall this last year, and it was an exciting time for us and for
> the world of books.
>
> One of our best projects here in Washington you\'re joining us tonight
> for and thank you for coming out. It\'s called "Books & Beyond" and
> these are talks by authors of new books and those books are generally
> popular books that often draw on the collections of the Library of
> Congress or on the Library of Congress\'s programs, and we\'re pleased
> that we are able to hold these talks. We also are pleased that the
> Library of Congress is able to film them, and the talks are available
> after a short period of time on our Web site. And as you go out
> tonight after the book signing and the reception, I have put a stack
> of papers that give you a list of what book talks are available now on
> the Library of Congress Web site.
>
> Tonight, as you know, we have a special treat in store. We actually
> are having a ‑‑ almost a prepublication talk and book signing. The
> book is just out, "Freedom Rising," by our guest speaker tonight, and
> we were a little worried about getting books early enough but the
> books have arrived, and you\'ll have a chance to buy one and have it
> signed. The publication date, I understand is ‑‑\
> \
> Ernest Furgurson:\
> Second of November.\
> \
> John Cole:\
> Second of November. And so we\'re just a little bit ahead of the curve
> and I always like that, I always like the first appearance of an
> author of a new book to be at the Library of Congress, and we are able
> to do it tonight.
>
> Our speaker, as you know, Ernest B. Furgurson, is a historian and a
> journalist. I\'m going to read you just a little blurb about "Freedom
> Rising." He\'s managed to get lots of blurbs and it\'s getting a good
> takeoff for this wonderful book. \"'Freedom Rising' tells the story of
> how the Civil War transformed the nation\'s capital from a provincial
> city into one of America\'s most important cultural and social
> centers. The author focuses on the men and women who brought
> Washington, D.C., to life during this crucial period in our history,
> including William Seward, Walt Whitman, Allan Pinkerton, Elizabeth
> Keckley \-- an ex‑slave who became a dressmaker for both Mrs. Abraham
> Lincoln and Mrs. Jefferson Davis, Architect of the Capitol Thomas U.
> Walter and, of course, President Abraham Lincoln.\" Presidential
> biographer and White House historian Hugh Sidey calls "Freedom Rising"
> \"a beautiful book; this nation\'s greatest drama wonderfully woven in
> rich and arresting detail.\"
>
> I\'ll give you one tidbit about the Library of Congress during the
> Civil War. In those days, of course, the Library was in the U.S.
> Capitol. It was before the days of the Jefferson Building or the
> complicated Madison Building that you\'re in tonight. And it was ‑‑
> but the Library of Congress during the Civil War shared in what was
> happening in Washington, D.C., and that was a great period of growth.
> And the reason was that right after ‑‑ during the Civil War a
> Librarian \[of Congress\] named Ainsworth Rand Spofford came here and
> his idea was to build this tiny little library in the Capitol into a
> national institution. And he became Librarian the last day of 1864.
>
> He ‑‑ Lincoln finally signed his commission as Librarian because
> Spofford himself had put up petitions in the Library getting members
> of Congress to sign favoring Mr. Spofford as the next Librarian. As
> you know, Lincoln made many basically political appointments,
> including his predecessor, but Spofford managed to get the job and
> then he managed to, as Librarian, to start centralizing copyright at
> the Library of Congress and developing exchanges through the
> Smithsonian, getting money to buy Peter Force\'s collection and his
> wonderful collection of Americana, and lo and behold, the Library of
> Congress, like much of Washington, really took off in part because of
> the Civil War.
>
> Our speaker tonight, Ernest B. Furgurson was a reporter, as I said,
> for the "Baltimore Sun". He served in Moscow and Vietnam as a
> columnist and bureau chief in Washington, D.C., and many of you know
> his other books. He has written three other books about the Civil War,
> all of them are available as vintage paperbacks: "Ashes of Glory:
> Richmond at War, Chancellorsville 1863," "The Souls of the Brave," and
> "Not War but Murder: Cold Harbor 1864." It\'s my pleasure now to
> introduce our speaker, Ernest Bud Furgurson. Bud.\
> \
> \[applause\]
>
> Ernest Furgurson:\
> Thanks, John. In speaking about the time when the Library of Congress
> was in the Capitol building reminds that there was some trouble about
> that because early in the war, up until the fall of '61 when all the
> troops were arriving in Washington and there was no place to put them,
> a lot of troops were first quartered in the Capitol and then after
> that, even extending after they moved out, there was a huge bakery in
> the basement of the Capitol by brick masons from Massachusetts who
> turned out something like 50,000 loaves of bread a day for the troops
> in the area. And there was a major protest by the people who were
> taking care of the Capitol because the fumes, the smoke from the
> bakery below was ruining the books in what was then the small Library
> of Congress. What goes around comes around.
>
> \[laughter\]\
> \
> I\'m sure that a lot of you here feel as I do if you\'ve been in this
> city long, that Washington is full of ghosts, the looming spirits of
> giants and pygmies of our past who were led and betrayed and saved the
> country. For most of my life I have lived here and worked here
> surrounded by them and I have never spent a day without sensing their
> presence. My first assignment here was to cover the Senate, and as I
> watched Paul Douglas and Barry Goldwater and Hubert Humphrey and
> Richard Russell debate civil rights and war, I couldn\'t help but hear
> across the years echoes of Charles Sumner and Jefferson Davis and
> William Seward and Judah Benjamin in the days when those issues
> literally split the nation.
>
> Looking down from the House gallery on to Lyndon Johnson when he made
> his memorable \"We shall Overcome\" speech in 1965 on voting rights, I
> could easily believe the uncompromising abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens
> was listening and saying, \"About time.\" Sitting waiting for the
> president to appear at press conferences in the East Room of the White
> House, I have tried to envision Jim Lane\'s volunteer militia camping
> out there in those nervous weeks when the Confederates were expected
> to march in at any time.
>
> The day I was married in St. John\'s Church on Lafayette Square and
> later years at funerals there, I have imagined beside me all the
> presidents beginning with Madison who worshipped in those pews bowing
> in prayer for guidance. From a roof of the Hay‑Adams Hotel across the
> street from the church on the site where the society widow Rose
> O\'Neal Greenhow lived during the Civil War, I\'ve looked across the
> White House down the Potomac, the same line of sight that Abraham
> Lincoln had peering through his telescope at the huge Confederate flag
> flying over Alexandria in those first days before the Union troops
> marched into Virginia.
>
> My office for years was in the National Press Building, direct
> descendant in what was then called Newspaper Row, looking down on the
> Willard Hotel, which is a direct descendant of the Willard\'s, which
> Nathaniel Hawthorne said in those days was the center of Washington
> and the Union. And Ford\'s Theatre on 10th Street is properly a shine,
> and every time I have been inside it I have been moved.
>
> But that feeling caught me by surprise the night that I saw the brassy
> musical the "Hot Mikado" there on the stage to which John Wilkes Booth
> had vaulted after murdering the president. Some might have been
> offended by such irreverent song and dance there beneath the
> presidential box which is still draped with flags as it was that night
> in 1865. But I believe if the great emancipator was there looking on
> that night, he would have been pleased. He was a devoted theatergoer.
> He had applauded many a comedian \[unintelligible\] there at Ford\'s,
> including the man who would later assassinate him. Perhaps the sight
> of black and white performers making bright music together and a
> cosmopolitan audience from all over America applauding and laughing
> would have been more proof to him that he hadn\'t died in vain.
>
> However momentous the national crises of our lifetime, no emergency in
> the history has approached the gravity of what faced the Union from
> 1860 to '65. Here in Washington, as on the battlefield, that mortal
> crisis was confronted and defeated. Over the decades, my desire to
> write about the history around me here grew into a need and then a
> compulsion and so eventually I spent five years of my life working on
> this book seeking out new things about the major figures of Civil War
> history and especially finding fascinating new characters, heroes and
> villains, heroines and eccentrics that most of us have never met
> before.
>
> Few of us realize today that when the great unpleasantness began no
> won could be sure whether this city would wind up as a capital of the
> Union or the Confederacy. Months before the war began riots and rumors
> and plots kept Washington in a state of high tension and emotion. It
> began with scenes like what happened at the Tremont House at Indiana
> Avenue and 2^nd^ Street on the night of November 6th, Election Day,
> 1860. Hiding on the roof of the gutted building just three blocks from
> the Capitol, a hand full of scared young Lincoln fans peeked down at a
> mob in the street that was shouting \"burn the building, burn it
> down.\" All that fall boisterous Republicans who called themselves
> Wide Awakes had marched in northern cities waving torches and carrying
> fence rails to show their enthusiasm for Abe Lincoln, the great
> rail-splitter.
>
> But in Washington, surrounded by Southern partisans, they had kept
> quite until the last weeks when Lincoln\'s victory seemed likely. Then
> they paraded openly, defying taunts and showers of rocks from
> pro‑slavery ruffians, and late on election evening they gathered to
> greet the results at their Tremont House headquarters. Loud as they
> were, these demonstrators had no legal voice in what was coming.
> Washingtonians couldn\'t vote for president, so all their excitement
> was focused on the returns from elsewhere.
>
> Pennsylvania Avenue, 7th and C Streets were alive with people
> streaming from one hotel to another, one political club to another,
> looking for free drinks and news. The crowd surrounded the telegraph
> office at Grover\'s Theatre where the National is today. The comic
> actor Joe Jefferson kept interrupting the show to announce the latest
> returns. The audience cheered each Democratic upswing and hissed at
> Republican successes. At the Democratic Jackson Association, which
> some on the other side abbreviated as Dem Jack Ass ‑‑\
> \
> \[laughter\]\
> \
> \-- misleading early bulletins encouraged the officers to send for a
> brass band to lead a celebration, but after tuning up the musicians
> went home and the hard truth set in. The disappointed losers milled
> around Brown\'s Hotel between 6th and 7th Streets where one of them
> dared anybody to admit being a damn black Republican and set off a
> mass scrimmage that left a lot of noses bloody.
>
> By that time, about 12:30, news from Pennsylvania had confirmed that
> Lincoln would become the 16th president. The Wide Awakes was
> celebrating at their clubhouse when one of them rushed in yelling that
> a gang of roughnecks was on its way to tear the place down. The
> Lincoln fans scattered. When the fighting drunk mob arrived it
> starting firing pistols and throwing rocks, smashing windows and
> breaking in doors. The few Republicans left retreated to the roof.
> When police arrived, rioters leaped out windows to escape and outside
> they began chanting, \"Burn the building, burn it down.\" The Wide
> Awakes trapped on the roof were finally saved when the police arrested
> some of the wreckers and they marched off singing and shouting until
> it\'s last ‑‑ it\'s energy had last flickered out near dawn.
>
> That wasn\'t the end of such scenes in the city. An emotional
> momentous election in the nation\'s history, Lincoln had won only
> 39 percent of the popular vote against the divided opposition. The
> result inspired more political turbulence than celebration in a
> Capitol dominated then by Marylanders, Virginians and Southern
> Democrats who had held power for most of the previous decade. Both
> Virginia and Maryland had rejected Lincoln by overwhelming margins.
> Flaming politicians further South immediately started agitating for
> secession. Some of them talked secretly of mounting a coup to prevent
> the president‑elect from taking office. The captain of the National
> Rifles, a Washington militia company, said he would march his men
> north to the Susquehanna River to defend Maryland against the Yankees,
> but Washingtonians, most of them, were more alarmed than inspired by
> all this clamor.
>
> Across the street from us at the Capitol surrounded by scaffolding,
> sheets of cast iron and scattered columns of marble, the architect,
> Thomas Walter was near despair. \"Our country is in the midst of a
> terrible partisan conflict,\" he told his son, \"and we are in the
> vortex of it.\" Walter was a tall, imposing Philadelphian but as
> tension rose he wrote that \"the North looks to me to be insane. It\'s
> mere stinking pride of opinion that is this moment moving on to allow
> the country to be deluged in blood. I have no idea that there will be
> any appropriation this winter for public works,\" he wrote.
>
> And so the great mission of his life, building the new dome that he
> had designed could stop before it was well started. Vendors could
> still hawk fruit and beer and souvenirs within the hallways of the
> Capitol and members could still trade votes in their hideaway watering
> holes, but Walter feared that his work would halt and the Capitol
> would stand as it was, seemingly decapitated, leaking around the edges
> of the new construction, some of the brick walls without their marble
> facings.
>
> For four weeks after the election Southern voices in the Capitol were
> even more dominant than usual because Congress was in recess.
> President James Buchanan, whom one fellow Democrat had called \"that
> damned old rye‑neck, squinty‑eyed, white‑livered scoundrel who
> disgraces the White House\" was squeezed from both sides. The best he
> could do was a weak warning to South Carolina where the legislature
> had scheduled the secession convention to begin that December 17.
>
> Washington, like the president, was caught in the middle. The District
> of Columbia \[District\] then had only 75,000 people, 11,000 of them
> black, just over 3,000 of those slaves. A quarter of the population
> was born in either Maryland or Virginia, and most of the 47 percent
> born in the District were from families in those states. Slaves and
> ex‑slaves were governed by the local Black Code, which duplicated the
> laws of slave‑holding Maryland when the District was created in 1791.
> It required free blacks to carry a resident\'s permit or risk being
> jailed or sold into slavery. And restricted the way blacks could
> assemble or worship, drive carriages, racehorses, swim in the Potomac
> or walk on the streets after 10:00 p.m.
>
> Alexandria, part of the original ten‑square mile ‑‑ not square mile,
> ten‑mile square district laid out by George Washington, had been
> returned to state jurisdiction in Virginia in 1846. But Georgetown,
> half a century older than the Capitol, was still a separate town of
> some 10,000 within the District. There and in the west end near the
> White House at Lafayette Park lived most of the Washington
> establishment, old line families, ranking politicians, high military
> officers and a diplomatic corps whose principles and staff together
> then numbered just 44 bodies.
>
> Politicians moving between White House and Congress, crinoline ladies
> moving from receptions to balls and recitals, near‑do‑wells offering
> shady deals to visitors all had to traverse streets deep with mud in
> winter and clouded by dust in the summer. Washington\'s unfinished
> Capitol building stood above an unfinished city. The few monumental
> government buildings balked far out of scale with scattered brick
> townhouses, rows of low-rise hotels and squalid slums. Cattle, pigs
> and geese roamed free over broad empty stretches, including the
> acreage around the stub of the Washington Monument where a shortage of
> funds and vandalism had halted construction at the 156‑foot level.
> Only Pennsylvania Avenue and the adjacent stretch of 7th Street were
> paved with cobblestones.
>
> Along the avenue between Capitol Hill and the White House,
> Washingtonians tested the gullibility of innocent visitors and a wit
> of writers like one Dr. George William Bagby. \"The city is the
> paradise of paradoxes,\" Bagby wrote, \"a great little splendid, mean,
> extravagant, poverty stricken barrack. The one and only absolutely
> certain thing is the absence of everything, that is it all
> permanent?\"
>
> In his cubbyhole office on Newspaper Row across 14th Street from
> Willard\'s, Bagby was one of a tribe of correspondents who whipped out
> dispatches for cities around the nation. Many of them moonlighted
> while on the payroll of Congress or the Executive Branch. Bagby wrote
> that the population of Washington is a floating population.
> "President, senators, honorables, judges, generals, commodores,
> governors and the exes of all those congregate here as thick as
> pickpockets at a horse race. Add ambassadors, plenipotentiaries,
> lords, counts, barons, chevaliers, captains, lieutenants, claim
> agents, Negroes, perpetual motion men, fire eaters, Irishmen, plug
> uglies, hoosiers, gamblers, Californians, Mexicans, Japanese, Indians
> and organ grinders together with females to match."\
> \
> \[laughter\]\
> \
> This mix of transient opportunists was thickest in the hotels and
> rooming houses that lined both sides of the avenue from the sweet cake
> and ginger pop stands at the foot of Capitol Hill to the columned
> Treasury \[Building\] which is still being built at 15th Street.
> Halfway along between 7th and 8th Streets where the \[Nationa\]l
> Archives now stands, sprawled the center market heaped in season with
> fruit, vegetables, oysters, shed and beef, all of it swarming with
> flies from the canal behind it, the loathsome gulch along what\'s now
> Constitution Avenue through the heart of the city.
>
> Wiser pedestrians avoided the blocks between the avenue and the canal,
> a neighborhood called Murder Bay because of cutthroats and cut rate
> prostitutes who infested the slums there. Along the avenue itself the
> stranger was likely to be welcomed by a better class of entrepreneur.
> Visitors checking into Willard\'s, Brown\'s, the National or the
> Metropolitan Hotel or stepping up to the bar at one of the fancy
> saloons on the north side would encounter gambling house decoys, phony
> congressmen and others who claimed to be able to fix appointments or
> contracts for cash in advance.
>
> After Lincoln\'s election, George Bagby\'s usual light touch became
> increasingly blunt. \"Blessed with the name of the purest of men, the
> Capitol has the reputation of Sodom,\" he wrote, citing the Bible\'s
> warning to ancient Jerusalem. He concluded that \"Washington will be
> the greatest Capitol the world ever saw or it will be a parched place
> in the wilderness, a salt land and not inhabited.\" Not long afterward
> Bagby went back to Richmond, whence he came and was very active there
> as a journalist during the war.
>
> Even before the crisis arose, Southerners and Northerners in
> Washington had preferred to socialize with their own kind. This
> clannishness was most pronounced among the women. When protocol threw
> them together as at presidential and diplomatic receptions, they still
> managed to uphold their regional loyalties with averted eyes and
> conspicuously unturned chins. Mrs. Clement Clay, wife of an Alabama
> senator, boasted of the twists and turns she went through to avoid
> meeting that politically sophisticated but socially unpolished New
> Yorker, Republican Senator William Seward. \"Not even to save the
> nation could I be induced to eat his bread, to drink his wine, to
> enter his domicile, to speak to him,\" she declared. Seward laughed
> about the time he broke through her defenses when both were
> masquerading as fictional characters at a fancy dress ball.
>
> Just before Christmas of 1860 many of those invited to the wedding of
> Congressman John Bouligny of Louisiana to Mary Carter, daughter of the
> Capitol\'s most prosperous grocer, realized that it might be the last
> social fling before disunion. Some of them hoped so. The rosy cheeked
> bachelor President Buchanan himself was there with his niece and White
> House hostess, the statuesque Harriet Lane. After vows were spoken and
> Buchanan kissed the bride, the guests mingled, sipping champagne. The
> president, his head congenitally tilted as if waiting for the answer
> to a witty question, sat and shook hands with well wishers. Sara
> Pryor, whose husband Roger was Virginia\'s most volatile congressman,
> stood listening and suddenly there were shouts outside. \"What is
> it?\" asked Buchanan, turning to Mrs. Pryor. He said, \"Madam, do you
> suppose the house is on fire?\"
>
> In the largest sense it was. Sara stepped out to investigate. There
> Congressman Lawrence Kit was leaping and shouting with joy, waving a
> telegram. \"Thank God, South Carolina seceded. Oh thank God, thank
> God,\" he said. Buchanan sat stunned. Some men cheered, others
> solemnly gathered up their ladies, hurried to thank the Carters and
> departed. Then pale and shaking, the president asked Mrs. Pryor to
> send a servant for his carriage. Harriet took his elbow as he stepped
> out into the cold December rain and trundled home to the White House
> wondering what to do.
>
> Those four months from Lincoln\'s election to his arrival in
> Washington and inauguration were full of suspense and melodrama.
> Desperate, fruitless peace conferences, tearful speeches by departing
> Southern senators like Jefferson Davis and Judah Benjamin.
> Congressional investigations into alleged Southern plots to kidnap the
> president‑elect and seize power in the Capitol. To avoid the real
> threat that assassins lay in wait for him in Baltimore,
> President‑Elect Lincoln sneaked through in dark of night on his way to
> Washington. Instead of coming through Baltimore direct from
> Harrisonburg \[*sic*, Harrisburg\] where he had spoken on
> Washington\'s birthday, he turned secretly back through Philadelphia.
> He left Mrs. Lincoln and their two sons behind to follow the announced
> schedule while he went ahead, escorted by two bodyguards \-- the
> detective Allan Pinkerton and his Illinois friend Ward Hill Lamon.
>
> They arrived in Washington at dawn, ten hours earlier than expected at
> the B & O Station, where Union Station is today, and they surprised
> the desk clerk at Willard\'s when they checked in. Ten days later when
> Lincoln was sworn in on the east front of the Capitol, old General
> Winfield Scott had horse artillery standing by in case of trouble.
> Alerted by fears of an attempted \--
>
> \[end of transcript\]