Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
The timing could not have been more eerily ironic. On June 17, 1864, an official read a letter thanking the girls and women who worked at Washington's federal arsenal for a donation to a monument for the 78 victims of a deadly 1862 arsenal blast in Pittsburgh. Then, just hours later, an explosion – like "a sudden flash of lightning," in the words of one survivor – went off inside the arsenal's 100-foot-long wooden laboratory.
Almost immediately, the fire engulfed the building at the south end of the arsenal where the women worked. The alarm was sounded, and some of the arsenal's 1,500 workers raced to help contain the blaze. Many ran from the scene, fearful that more blasts were coming as the fire spread. Indeed, the fire threatened to spread to the magazines, where several tons of gunpowder was kept. It took more than an hour to extinguish the fire.
The arsenal was located on "The Island," actually a peninsula jutting out into the Anacostia River, south of the Capitol. Frantic citizens descended upon the arsenal on the site desperate to know what had happened to their sisters, wives and daughters. Scores did not make it: The young women working in the east part of the building escaped by jumping from windows or fleeing through doors away from the fire, but a number on the west side, who were charging artillery shells, died immediately in the blast or were killed in the blaze.
A dozen or so women who were burned or injured in their escape made it to a tugboat wharf and were treated at the Armory Hospital, already filled with the wounded from the battles of Spotsylvania, the Wilderness and Cold Harbor.
A death count was never conclusively reached: many fled in the chaos and never returned, while the remains of those who died were difficult to identify. Their hoop skirts, worn at the insistence of government officials to preserve the women's modesty and not distract the male workers, not only restricted their movement to escape, but held in place the fabric that so easily ignited. What was thought to be 17 to 19 bodies were laid out in five-foot boxes with as many as five sets of remains inside — body parts actually, on boards or in tin pans on the grass. A few were identified by scraps of clothing, a piece of jewelry or a shoe, but most were burned beyond recognition.
Arsenal blasts were common during the war: Alongside Washington and Pittsburgh, major explosions occurred in Richmond, in 1863, and Augusta, Ga., in 1864. And at each, the bulk of the victims were girls and young women. As in later conflicts, these jobs were filled by women because men were off fighting. The rolls of "government girls" – workers at the arsenal, as well as clerks, printers, sewers and munitions makers – swelled through the war.
Life for these women was hard: As a contemporary correspondent, Lois Bryan Adams, reported, they often were supporting severely wounded or disabled husbands and children. And while many made good wages – arsenal workers made $50 to $60 a month – they had a hard time keeping up with rampant inflation that reached a whopping 76 percent, and, according to the economic historian Elden E. Billings, was probably even higher in the capital. Rent, even in poor, remote suburbs like Georgetown, ate up at least $25 (though single women often boarded together), and another $30 went to food. A cord of wood to ward off the winter cold cost between $12 and $16.
Life was even harder for the countless girls who represented a large portion of the munitions-factory work force – "little indigent girls," in the words of a Confederate War Department clerk, J.B. Jones, very often Irish in the case of those killed in Richmond and Washington. It was one of the few ways they could earn a living other than prostitution. Yet they had no real standing in labor negotiations, unlike men.
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Despite their precarious existence, the women killed in the blast received a hero's funeral. The next day "the working men" of the arsenal adopted resolutions calling for the dead to be buried at Congressional Cemetery, to make arrangements for the families to attend the services and interment, to march from the arsenal to the cemetery in what one correspondent called "one of the most imposing and extensive funeral processions ever beheld in the national metropolis," have Roman Catholic and Protestant clergymen conduct the service and erect "a new and noble monument" on the cemetery's grounds to those killed in the explosion.
This was different from the funeral after the Pittsburgh blast, when the victims were buried in a mass grave. Washington could not do that. Like residents of Richmond, home front and battlefront had merged; the women were not soldiers, but they were not complete civilians, either. Some 200,000 soldiers camped in the capital, along with thousands of cattle ready to be sent to Ulysses S. Grant's army in Virginia. And by the summer of 1864, Washington had become a large receiving hospital with tents and temporary buildings erected all over the city to treat the casualties of the Union's Overland campaign. Near the arsenal were the Sixth Street wharves, where the wounded and those too sick to fight were landed.
Official Washington was forced to respond, too. A hastily called coroner's inquest traced the cause of the explosion to the decision by the arsenal's superintendent, Thomas B. Brown, to set out pans of red stars for fireworks to dry in the June day's heat too close to the building where the women were "choking cartridges," a process where a machine would attach the end of the cartridge to the ball. The coroner's jury found Brown, who had more than 20 years' experience as a "pyrotechnician," guilty of "carelessness and negligence and reckless disregard for life" in placing inflammable substances "so near a building filled with human beings."
As news of what happened spread, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton ordered the government to pay the funeral expenses for the women who died that day. Stanton, President Abraham Lincoln and one of his sons would serve as "chief mourners" for the thousands who marched to the cemetery to join the thousands already there for the burials.
The next year, a 25-foot monument with a female figure symbolizing grief, inscribed with the names of 21 victims, standing atop was erected, near the western border of Congressional Cemetery, where 17 of them are buried. The four others were buried in Mount Olivet, the city's Catholic cemetery.
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Sources: The Alexandria Gazette (Alexandria, Va.); The Daily Chronicle (Washington); The Daily National Intelligencer (Washington); The New York Times; The Evening Star (Washington); L.B. Adams, Evelyn Leasher, eds., "Letter from Washington"; Brian Bergin and Elizabeth Bergin Voorhees, "The Washington Arsenal Explosion: Civil War Disaster in the Capital"; Elden E. Billings, "Washington during the Civil War and Reconstruction," Records of the Columbia Historical Society 1963-1965; Drew Gilpin Faust, "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War; Ernest B. Furgurson, "Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War"; Judith Giesberg, "Army at Home, Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front"; J.B. Jones, "A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital, Vol. 1"; Margaret Leech, "Reveille in Washington"; Allan Nevins, "War for the Union 1863-1864: The Organized War"; Association for the Preservation of The Historic Congressional Cemetery, Newspaper Clips (1860-1869).
John Grady, a former editor of Navy Times and a retired director of communications at the Association of the United States Army, is completing a biography of Matthew Fontaine Maury. He is also a contributor to the Navy's Civil War Sesquicentennial blog.
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