The Old Capitol Prison

[L Verge]

In preparing a Facebook entry on Bastille Day and our American Bastilles, I ran across an entry on mrlincoln'swhitehouse.com (Lehrman Institute) credited to one of the excellent authors on the Lincoln assassination as well as a very nice gentleman, W. Emerson Reck. In commenting on the Old Capitol Prison (a prime example of an American Bastille), Reck mentioned something that I must have read in his book years ago and then forgotten:

Historian Waldo Emerson Reck noted that in the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, many Washington residents tried to turn their anger against inmates of the prison where 800 Confederate army officers were being held: “‘About 2,000 went to the Old Capitol prison to burn it, and they called upon the people to come out and see the rebels burn,’ Mrs. Beekman DuBarry, wife of the Assistant to the Commissary General of Subsistence, wrote her mother on April 16. ‘The police and troops were out and put a stop to it or it would have been done.'” Reck added: “It was fortunate that General Montgomery C. Meigs, the Quartermaster General, had ordered General Christopher C. Augur, Commander of the Department of Washington, to turn out the troops with ‘special vigilance and guards about the Capitol Prison.'

It appears that our Old Capitol might have been a true Bastille victim like the one in Paris of July 14, 1789.

I also noted in the same piece distributed by the Lehrman Institute a very glaring mistake. The claim is made that the Lincoln conspirators were executed in the jail yard at Old Capitol. Shame on them. Their next sentence was correct, however -- Henry Wirz of Andersonville Prison infamy was hanged there.