OP-ED: James Veech’s frantic, patriotic summer
At 52 years of age, James Veech of Uniontown was beckoned from his law practice and book-writing to serve his state and nation just as the United States began four years of bitter fratricidal fighting in the spring of 1861.
“Judge” Veech, as he was known (though he was never a judge), was asked by Gov. Andrew Curtin to serve as one of three Pennsylvania paymasters for newly enrolled Civil War soldiers, prior to their induction into federal service.
A past candidate for a U.S Senate seat, Veech was one of the most accomplished western Pennsylvanians of his time. He was a triple threat: attorney, businessman, author. Even now he was working on what would become a renowned regional history, “The Monongahela Of Old.”
Accepting the governor’s challenge, Veech wired Curtin’s military aide, “I go to Harrisburg this afternoon.”
“All government is a process of experimentation, full of errors and blind gropings,” the historian Allan Nevins once wrote, and never was this truer than in Veech’s case. Late in the game, Veech defended himself against the “odious” charge of having “cheated” army volunteers of their pay.
It was not true, he insisted, and he counter-charged that the newspapermen who said so performed a national disservice by contributing to “weakened confidence in and thereby the efficiency of our government … at a time when we should be striving to sustain” it.
Thanks to his papers, archived at the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, we know of Veech’s struggles. Long hours and arduous travel nearly did him in.
Veech followed troops about, starting in Pittsburgh, then to Harrisburg, and finally to Washington, D.C., where he found himself three times between July and September 1861. In a letter to his wife Mariah, back home in Uniontown, he grumbled that rest and recuperation were hardly possible aboard a train leaving the depot at 3 in the morning.
Early in July of that fateful year 1861, Veech reported to Mariah that Harrisburg was “swelling with soldiers…. The capitol is full of them – the capitol grounds – all the taverns, hotels – streets, even churches.”
Washington, of course, was the center of action. During his visit in the heat of late July, Veech failed to see President Lincoln or any member of the Cabinet. And he didn’t make it up to Capitol Hill to take in Congress. However, he did see the new Army commander, Gen. George McClellan, declaring, “He is a fine looking man, young and active.”
Despite the Union defeat at Bull Run, which Veech feared had “set us back a year at least,” the troops were in excellent spirit, thanks to McClellan. The general had introduced “very strict discipline,” as part of his “reorganizing” the army, Veech told Mariah.
The Judge was especially impressed by the irrepressible and colorful New York Zouaves, a regiment consisting of volunteer firefighters. Donning gaudy gray, scarlet, and blue Zouaves costumes, they were swashbuckling and pugnacious.
On his initial visit to Washington, Veech strolled over to their campground near the Treasury building. There he learned that despite the regiment’s fearful losses at Bull Run, the men would “soon be ready for another fight.”
More than 200 killed, wounded and captured was not good. Neither was it the end of the world, not to the Zouaves.
Veech made his way to Alexandria and “out to Ft. Ellsworth about a mile beyond the city.” Alexandria, he noted, “looks deserted,” many of its houses “in ruins…. Such is war.”
Veech visited the Marshall House in Alexandria, where young Elmer Ellsworth, the beloved leader of the Zouaves, had been gunned down by a Confederate sympathizer during a raid on the tavern in the weeks before Bull Run.
A special favorite of the Lincolns, Ellsworth had accompanied the first family on the trip from Illinois to Washington earlier in the year. Now, several months later, Veech took a piece of the platform “on which Ellsworth was killed.”
In the fall of 1861, James Veech finished up his duties as paymaster and returned to Uniontown, where he died in December 1879 at age 71. His burial spot in Oak Grove Cemetery is just down the hill from Business Route 40, East Main Street. Mariah is alongside him.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.