Within the Senate Chamber, the secession of the Southern states left a visible impact. “There will be some graves reeking with blood, watered by tears of affection.” Little did Baker know that he was describing his own imminent fate. “It is our duty to advance, if we can to suppress insurrection to put down rebellion to scatter the enemy and when we have done so, to preserve in the terms of the bill, the liberty, lives, and property of the people of the country, by just and fair police regulations.” Encouraged by applause from the gallery, Baker acknowledged that the war would exact a heavy price. “How could we make peace? Upon what terms?” Baker thundered in reply to Breckinridge. In the spring of 1861 he had raised a “California regiment” (actually recruiting on the East Coast), and had spent that morning training his troops. An old friend of Lincoln’s from Springfield, Illinois, Baker had resigned from the House of Representatives to lead troops in battle during the Mexican-American War, and had later moved to Oregon, where he was elected senator. “Nothing but ruin, utter ruin, to the North, to the South, to the East, to the West, will follow the prosecution of this conflict.” As soon as Breckinridge took his seat, Oregon senator Edward Dickinson Baker, dressed in military uniform, rose to rebut him. “Here we have been hurling gallant fellows on to death, and the blood of Americans has been shed-for what?” he asked. Breckinridge rose in the Senate Chamber to oppose efforts to declare that a state of insurrection existed. One of the soldiers’ mock sessions of the Senate was witnessed by a Washington correspondent for the Providence Journal, who wrote:Ī week after Bull Run, Kentucky senator John C. “It did not seem to be a novel feat to the others, as they noticed it no more than any ordinary occurrence,” the reporter remarked. In the Capitol Rotunda, a reporter witnessed a young member of the New York Zouaves, “a mere boy,” swing nearly 100 feet on a rope from an interior cornice of the new dome. “We joked, we shouted, we sang, we mounted the Speaker’s desk and made speeches.” Seated at the senators’ desks in the still-new chamber, soldiers used Senate stationery and franked envelopes to correspond with their loved ones back home. “Our life in the Capitol was most dramatic and sensational. A young writer named Theodore Winthrop of the Seventh New York Regiment documented his experience in the Atlantic Monthly, published in July 1861. Walter commented that “the Capitol itself is turned into a barracks there will be 30,000 troops here by tomorrow night.” Company E of the National Guard, a group formed from mechanics who had been working in and around the Capitol, made their quarters in the Revolutionary Claims Committee room.
In a letter to his son on April 19, Architect of the Capitol Thomas U. Soon Washington was teeming with soldiers, thousands making their camp in and around the Capitol. Longtime Senate doorkeeper Isaac Bassett described the arrival of these embattled troops: They established their camp in the Senate Chamber. Having encountered angry mobs of Southern sympathizers in Baltimore, the Massachusetts soldiers arrived in Washington on April 19 bloodied and exhausted. The next to arrive was the Sixth Regiment from Massachusetts. Within a few days the road to Washington was opened, but the men who answered the call were not soldiers, but citizens, badly armed, and without drill or discipline.” The first Union troops, volunteers from Pennsylvania, arrived in Washington on April 18 and were quartered in the House wing of the Capitol. Every city and hamlet had its flag-raising.” Senator John Sherman of Ohio later described this impressive reaction in his memoirs: “The response of the loyal states to the call of Lincoln was perhaps the most remarkable uprising of a great people in the history of mankind. As one journalist recorded, Lincoln’s proclamation “was received with the beating of drums and the ringing notes of the bugle, calling the defenders of the capitol to their colors. The response across the North to the president’s call was swift.
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