A CORRESPONDENT ONCE MORE.
Again on the way to Washington! I have made the trip more than sixty
times. I saw the Gunpowder Bridge in flames when Baltimore was in arms
and the Capital cut off from the North. I saw from Perryville the State
flag of Maryland waving at Havre de Grace across the Susquehanna. I saw
at the Washington Navy Yard the blackened body of Ellsworth, manipulated
by the surgeons. I moved through the city with McClellan's onward army
toward the transports which were to carry it to the Peninsula. The awful
tidings of the seven days' retreat came first through the Capital in my
haversack, and before Stonewall Jackson fell upon the flank of Pope, I
crossed the Long Bridge with the story of the disaster of Cedar
Mountain. In like manner the crowning glory of Five Forks made me its
earliest emissary, and the murder of the President brought me hot from
Richmond to participate in the pursuit of Booth and chronicle his
midnight expiation.
Again am I on the way to the city of centralization, to paint by
electricity the closing scenes of the conspirators, and, as I pass the
Pennsylvania line, the recollection of those frequent pilgrimages--pray
God this be the last!--comes upon me like the sequences of delirium.
As I look abroad upon the thrifty fields and the rich glebe of the
ploughman, I wonder if the revolutions of peace are not as sweeping and
sudden as those of war. He who wrote the certain downfall of this
Nation, did not keep his eye upon the steadily ascending dome of the
capitol, nor remark, during the thunders of Gettysburg, the as energetic
stroke of the pile-drivers upon the piers of the great Susquehanna
bridge. We built while we desolated. No fatalist convert to Mohammed had
so sure faith in the eternity of his institutions. More masonry has been
laid along the border during the war than in any five previous years. We
have finished the Treasury, raised the bronze gates on the Capitol,
double-railed all the roads between New York and the Potomac, and gone
on as if architecture were imperishable, while thrice the Rebels swept
down toward the Relay.
And we have done one strategic thing, which, I think, will compare with
the passing of Vicksburg or the raid of Sherman; we have turned
Philadelphia.
This modern Pompeii used to be the stumbling-block on the great highway.
It was to the direct Washington route what Hell-gate was to the Sound
Channel. We were forbidden the right of way through it, on the ground
that by retarding travel Philadelphia would gain trade, and had to cross
the Delaware on a scow, or lay up in some inn over night. New Jerseymen,
I hear, pray every morning for their daily stranger; Philadelphia has
much sinned to entrap its daily customer. But Maillefert--by which name
I designate the inevitable sledge which spares the grand and pulverizes
the little--has built a road around the Quaker City. It is a very
curious road, going by two hypothenuses of about fifteen miles to make a
base of three or four, so that we lose an hour on the way to the
Capital, all because of Philadelphia's overnight toil.
The bridge at Perryville will be one of the staunchest upon our
continent: the forts around Baltimore make the outlying landscapes
scarcely recognizable to the returning Maryland Rebels. At last,--woe be
the necessity! we have garrisoned our cities. The Relay House is the
most picturesque spot between the two foci of the country. Wandering
through the woods, I see the dirty blouses of the remnant of "the boys"
and the old abatis on the height looks sunburnt and rusty; away through
the gorge thunders the Baltimore and Ohio train, over what ruins and
resurrections, torn up a hundred times, and as obstinately relaid, until
all its engineers are veteran officers, and can stand fire both of the
furnace and the musket. Everybody in the country is a veteran; the
contractor, who ran his schooner of fodder past the Rebel batteries; the
correspondent, whose lean horse slipped through the crevices of dropping
shells; the teamster, who whipped his mule out of the mud-hole, while
his ammunition wagon behind grew hot with the heaviness of battle; the
old farmer, who took to his cellar while the fight raged in his
chimneys, but ventured out between the bayonet charges to secure his
fatted calf.
Annapolis Junction has still the sterile guise of the campaign, where
the hills are bare around the hospitals, and the railway taverns are
whittled to skeletons. I have really seen whole houses, little more than
shells, reduced to meagreness by the pocket-knife. The name of almost
everybody on the continent is cut somewhere in the South; Virginia has
more than enough names carved over her fireside altars to inscribe upon
all her multitudinous graves.
There are close to the city fine bits of landscape, where the fields dip
gracefully into fertile basins, and rise in swells of tilled fields and
orchard to some knoll, enthroning a porticoed home. Two years ago all
these fields were quagmires, where stranded wheels and the carcasses of
hybrids, looked as if a mud-geyser had opened near by. The grass has
spread its covering, as the birds spread their leaves over the poor
babes in the wood, and we walk we know not where, nor over what
struggles, and shadows, and sorrows.
I pity the army mule, though he never asked me for sympathy. Who ever
loved a mule? You can love a lion, and make him lick your hand: some
people love parrots, and owls; and I once knew a person who could catch
black snakes and carry them lovingly in his bosom; but I never knew a
beloved mule. Yet this war has been fought and won by hybrids. They have
pulled us out of ruts and fed us, and starved for us. The mule is the
great quartermaster. See him and his brethren yonder in
corral,--miserable veterans of no particular race, slab-sided, and
capable of holding ink between their ribs. They mounch, and mounch, and
wear the same stolid eye which you have seen under the driver's lash,
and in the vaulting moment of victory. No stunning receptions greet
them, no cheers and banquets when Muley comes marching home; over at
_Giesboro_ they come in crippled, die by the musket without a murmur,
and are immediately boiled down and forgotten.
I was once beaten by a rival correspondent upon a prominent battle, by
riding a mule with my despatches. He walked into a mud-puddle just half
way between the field and the post-office, and stopped there till
morning.
Here we are, at Washington. I have been in most of the cities of Europe:
some of them have dirty suburbs, but the first impression of the Capitol
City is dreary in the extreme; a number of the lost tribes have
established booths contiguous to the terminus, wherein the filthiest
people in the world eat the filthiest dishes; a man's sense of
cleanliness vanishes when he enters the District of Columbia. I have
been astonished to remark how greatness loses its stature here. Mr.
Charles Sumner is a handsome man on Broadway or Beacon Street, but
eating dinner at Thompson's, his shoulders seem to narrow and his fine
face to grow commonplace.
Above the squalid wideness of ungraded streets and the waste of shanties
propped upon poles above abysses of vacant lots, where two drunken
soldiers are pummelling each other, towers the marvellous dome with its
airy genius firmly planted above, like the ruins of Palmyra above
contemporary meanness. Moving up the streets, in dust and mud-puddle,
you see shabbily ambitious churches, with wooden towers; hotels, the
curbs whereof are speckled with human blemishes, sustaining like
hip-shotten caryatides the sandstone-wooden columns. Within there is a
pandemonium of legs in the air, and an agglomeration of saliva, ending
with an impertinent clerk and two crescents of lazy waiters, who shy
whisks, and are ambitious to run superfluous errands, for the warrant to
rob you. Of people, you see squads; of residents, none. The public
edifices have not picked their company, neither have the public
functionaries. There is a quantity of vulgar statuary lying around,
horses standing on their tails, and impossible Washingtons imbedded in
arm-chairs; but the noble facade of the treasury always suggests to me
Couture's great picture of the Decadence, where, under a pure colonnade,
some tipplers are carousing. If we are to have statues at the Capital,
let us make them with uplifted hands, and shame upon their grave,
contemplative faces.
Shall we ever make Washington the representative Capital of the country?
Certainly all efforts to improve the site worthy of the seat of gigantic
legislation have hitherto failed. The sword and the malaria have
attacked it. Every year sees the President driven from his Mansion by
pestilential vapors, and the sanitary condition of the city is
extraordinarily bad. The carcasses of slain horses at Giesboro send
their effluvia straight into Washington on the wind, and the "Island,"
or that part of the city between the river and the canal, is dangerous
almost all the year.
Moreover, the entire river front of the city seems to be untenable,
except for negroes; the Washington monument stands on the yielding plain
in the rear of the Chief Magistrate's, a stunted ruin, finding no
foundation; and much of the great Capital reserve near by, would be a
dead weight, if any effort were made to dispose it of, as building lots.
The small portion of Washington lying upon Capitol Hill, is the most
salubrious and covetable; but it is a lonesome journey by night around
the Capitol grounds to the city. The finest residences lie north of the
President's house, but the number of these grows apace, and the quantity
of capital invested in private real estate, remains almost stationary.
We recall but two or three citizens of Washington who have spent their
money on the spot where they have made it. Corcoran was the most
generous; he erected a museum of art, and Government has made it a
Commissary depot! But how few of the illustrious Senators, Chief
Justices, Generals, etc., who draw their sustenance from the Capital,
care a penny to decorate it? Compare the home of Governor Sprague on 6th
Street, to his splendid mansion at Providence, or the Club House of the
Secretary of State, to his place at Auburn. Washington has power, but it
cannot attract. It is the solitary monarch, at whose feet all kneel, but
by none beloved. Strangers repair to it, grow rich, and quit it with
their earnings. Government works nobly to imitate the Palaces of the
Caesars, and the public edifices leave our municipal structures far
beneath, but these marble and granite piles seem to mock the littleness
of individual ambition. Two hotels have been built during the war, both
of the caravansary class, but the city, for four years, has been
miserably incompetent to entertain its guests, or to command their
respect.
Washington, to be a city, lacks three elements--commerce,
representation, health; the environs are picturesque, and the new forts
on the hill-tops little injure the landscape.
But the question is not premature, whether Washington city will ever
answer the purposes of a stable seat of government, and reflect the
enterprise, patriotism, and taste of the American people.
I have sometimes thought that these huge public buildings,--now
inadequate to accommodate the machinery of the Government,--would, at
some future day, be the nucleus of a great _lycee_, and that Washington
would become the Padua of the Republic, its University and Louvre, while
legislation and administration, despairing of giving dignity to the
place, would depart for a more congenial locality.
At any rate, the old Federal theory of a sylvan seat of government has
failed.
For a sequestered and virtuous retreat of legislation, we have
corruption augmented by dirt, and business stagnation aggravated by
disease. There are virtues in the town; but these must be searched for,
and the vices are obvious.