This has happened before. Lincoln asked for volunteers. The results were hilarious.

But, Sherman noted, they were not trained soldiers and had no discipline. Their stay in the Capitol — complete with staining the walls with bacon grease, swinging from ropes hanging from the dome and debating if they should ask for more booze — generated enormous anxiety for the people who worked in its halls.

Immediately upon entering the Capitol, they rushed into the Senate Chamber, the galleries, committee rooms, marble room, and wherever they could find accommodations,” the doorkeeper continued. “Everything that was possible was done to make them comfortable as the circumstances permitted. But it almost broke my heart to see the soldiers bring armfuls of bacon and hams and throw them down upon the floor of the marble room. Almost with tears in my eyes, I begged them not to grease up the walls and the furniture.”

As 4,000 troops occupied the building, the raucous scene was a far cry from the civility of lawmaking. Soldiers defecated in hallways, rigged ropes to swing from the unfinished dome and unwittingly spread lice among each other.

The odor of cooking and pipe smoke penetrated the air, and soot from baking bread in the basement damaged books in the Library of Congress, a librarian noted.

“> The smell is awful,” Architect of the Capitol Thomas U. Walter wrote in a letter to his wife. “The building is like one grand water closet — every hole and corner is defiled.”

Joes are going to be Joes.