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poked into the air with nothing on top. It was beneath this skeleton that Lincoln had taken the oath of office, yet another reminder that the national emblem, like the nation itself, was unfinished business. Walter was 56 when the war began, a tall, strongly built man with a thick shock of gray hair and a long beard.Hewas one of the most successful architects in the country when he came to the capital in 1851, and had toiled there for four different U.S. presidents. He had designed both the new wings and the dome, and for the last turn. Before the war, the new Capitol's biggest political patron had been Jefferson Davis, who, as aMississippi senator and as secretary ofwar during the Pierce adminis- tration, had espoused both national great- ness and sectional primacy without seeing any contradiction.Hewas gone, alongwith others of the building's boosters from both north and south. Those who remained had other things on theirminds. Walter had been settling his family in Philadelphia, his hometown, when Fort Sumter surrendered. He returned to the president's room into his headquarters. The Capitol became a halfway house. As each regiment received orders and departed, it was replaced by another. Very soon the soldiers wore out their welcome. Bassett, happy to welcome the Sixth Massachusetts, was appalled when he caught the New York Zouaves, a gang of hard-bitten Manhattan firefighters, ripping up a desk on the Democratic side of the Senate chamber with bayonets, thinking it had been used by Davis. The New Yorkers also rigged ropes from the cornice of the unfinished dome and amused themselves by swinging back and forth above the rotunda. Troops in both chambers spent their days conducting mock debates and shouting obscenities at one another from the galleries. "There are 4,000 [soldiers] in the Capitol,with all their provisions, ammuni- tion and baggage,"Walter wrote in a letter to hiswife. Bassett reported soldiers arriving with armloads of hamand bacon, finding a vacant room, and dropping themeat on the floor.Kitchenswere set up in the basement, along with a string of bakeries, and the odors of cooking food, yeast, and baking bread eddied through the corridors. Smoke from the bakeries invaded the Figure 2. Soldiers of the EighthMassachusettsRegiment—some of the nearly 4,000men quartered in theCapitol in 1861—bivouacked in the rotunda. several years had forsworn all outsidework so he could concentrate on the Capitol. He too, was in transition. Before the war he had been politically conservative and vaguely pro-South, and had bought himself a slave to work as his household servant. The war, he wrote his wife inMay 1861 "is an unholy one," and slavery, its fundamental cause, "a mere abstraction." By the end of 1861, however, the slave would be gone, andWalter would become militantly pro-Lincoln and unequivocally anti-slavery. He would damn the Confed- eracy in a letter to one of his sons as "demons in human form." But in July he did not know where to 20 THE CAPITOL DOME Capitol three days later to find a company of soldiers "quartered in our office, much to my annoyance." The "noise and tumult and the music and the pipe smoke daily interfere withmy personal comfort." Localmilitia soonwere bivouacking in Senate committee rooms. Two companies of Pennsylvania volunteers were put in the new House chamber, and on April 19, the Sixth Massachusetts, bloodied and covered with dust after fighting its way through angry crowds in Baltimore, reached the Capitol. Doorkeeper Isaac Bassett put them in the new Senate chamber. Troopers camped in the galleries while their colonel converted the vice Library of Congress—located on the Capitol's West Front—spreading soot through the stacks: "I am pained to see a treasure…that money cannot replace— receiving great damage,"wrote Librarian of Congress John G. Stephenson later in the year. "There is no remedy except in the removal of the circle of bakeries that hems us in." By the first week in May, it was clear that work on the Capitol could not continue. All the stone cutters and marble finishers had either volunteered or disap- peared. "Most of the passages in the building are filled up to the ceilings with barrels of flour, pork, beef, fish, crackers et al.,"Walter wrote to Amanda. Temporary doors had been erected everywhere,with guards posted.Getting up and down stairs was almost impossible. WINTER 2012 HARPERS WEEKLY, MAY 25, 1861