_Walks About Washington_
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration: _Where Lincoln Died_
FRONTISPIECE]
WALKS ABOUT
WASHINGTON
BY
FRANCIS E. LEUPP
WITH DRAWINGS BY
LESTER G. HORNBY
[Illustration]
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1915
_Copyright, 1915_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved_
Published, September, 1915
Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
Presswork by S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, Mass., U.S.A.
To
ADA, HAROLD, ETHEL,
CONSTANCE, KATHLEEN
AND THE
MEMORY OF GRAHAM
[Illustration]
_Preface_
This is not a history. It is not a guide-book. It is not an
encyclopedia. It is nothing more ambitious than the title would
indicate: a stroll about Washington with my arm through my reader’s, and
a bit of friendly chat by the way. Mr. Hornby, sketch-book in hand, will
accompany us, to give permanence to our impressions here and there.
First, we will take a general look at the city and recall some of the
more interesting incidents connected with its century and a quarter of
growth. Next, we will walk at our leisure through its public places and
try to people them in imagination with the figures which once were so
much in evidence there.
For the stories woven into our talk I make no further claim than that
they have come to me from a variety of sources--personal observation,
dinner-table gossip, old letters and diaries, and local tradition. A
few, which seemed rather too vague in detail, I have tried to verify. My
ardor for research, however, was dampened by the discovery of from two
to a dozen versions of every occurrence, so that I have been driven to
accepting those which appeared most probable or most picturesque,
falling back upon the plea of the Last Minstrel:
“I cannot tell how the truth may be;
I say the tale as ’twas said to me.”
And now, let us be off!
F. E. L.
WASHINGTON, D.C.,
August 1, 1915.
[Illustration]
_Contents_
PAGE
PREFACE vii
CHAPTER
I. A CAPITAL MADE TO ORDER 1
II. WAR TIMES AND THEIR SEQUEL 26
III. “ON THE HILL” 54
IV. THESE OUR LAWMAKERS 85
V. “THE OTHER END OF THE AVENUE” 114
VI. THROUGH MANY CHANGING YEARS 147
VII. “THE SPIRIT OF GREAT EVENTS” 177
VIII. NEW FACES IN OLD PLACES 207
IX. THE REGION ’ROUND ABOUT 235
X. MONUMENTS AND MEMORIES 261
INDEX 287
[Illustration]
_List of Illustrations_
PAGE
White House, from the State Department i
Where Lincoln Died _Frontispiece_
Down F Street to the Interior Department vii
Old Mill, on Bladensburg Battlefield ix
Washington, across the Potomac from Arlington xi
Capitol, from Pennsylvania Avenue, West xiii
FACING PAGE
General Washington’s Office in Georgetown 8
George Washington Tavern, Bladensburg 18
Octagon House 30
Union Engine House of 1815 42
On the Ruins of Fort Stevens 50
Survivals from “Before the War” 62
Rock Creek 74
Capitol, from New Jersey Avenue 84
Where Dolly Madison Gave Her Farewell Ball 96
Lee Mansion at Arlington 108
Old Carlyle Mansion, Alexandria 120
Washington’s Pew in Christ Church, Alexandria 132
Mount Vernon 142
Tudor House, Georgetown 154
Bladensburg Duelling-Ground 156
Decatur House 170
Soldiers’ Home 180
Old City Hall 192
The “Old Capitol” 204
St. Paul’s, the Oldest Church in the District 218
St. John’s, “the President’s Church” 234
Ford’s Theatre, the Old Front 248
Stage Entrance through which Booth Escaped 260
Rendezvous of the Lincoln Conspirators 274
A Herdic Cab 286
[Illustration]
_Walks About Washington_
CHAPTER I
A CAPITAL MADE TO ORDER
With the possible exception of Petrograd, Washington is the only one of
the world’s great capitals that was deliberately created for its
purpose. Look for the origin of London, Paris, Berlin, or Rome, and you
find it enveloped in a cloud of myth and fable, from which, it appears,
the city emerged and took its place in history because certain
evolutionary forces had made it the nucleus of a nation and hence the
natural seat of government. Not so the capital of the United States.
Here the Government was already established and seeking a habitation;
and, since no existing city offered one that seemed generally
satisfactory, a new city was made to order, so that from the outset it
could be shaped as its tenant-master deemed best.
The creative force at work in this instance found its outlet through a
dinner. Of the ready-made cities which had competed for the honor of
housing the Government, New York and Philadelphia were regarded by the
Southern members of Congress as too far north both geographically and in
sentiment, while the Northern members were equally unwilling to go far
south in view of the difficulties of travel. Another sectional
controversy broke out over the question whether the Federal Government,
since it owed its birth to the War for Independence, were not in honor
bound to assume the debts incurred by the several States in prosecuting
that war. The North, as the more serious sufferer, demanded that it
should, but the South insisted that every State should bear its own
burden. In the midst of the discussion, Thomas Jefferson, who happened
to be in a position to act as mediator, invited a few leaders of both
factions to meet at his table; there, under the influence of savory
viands and a bottle of port apiece, they arranged a compromise, whereby
the Southern members were to vote for the assumption of the debts, in
exchange for Northern votes for a southern site. The program went
through Congress by a small majority, and the site chosen was a tract
about ten miles square on both banks of the Potomac River, the land on
the upper shore being ceded by Maryland and that on the lower by
Virginia. The Virginia part was given back in 1846.
As far as we know, the first map of this region was drawn by Captain
John Smith of Pocahontas fame and published in 1620 in his “Sixth Voyage
to that Part of Virginia now Planted by English Colonies, whom God
increase and preserve”; and the picturesque river which runs through it
was described by him as the “Patawomeke, navigable 140 myles, and fed
with many sweet rivers and springs which fall from the bordering hils.
The river exceedth with aboundance of fish.”
When the Commissioners appointed by President Washington took it over as
a federal district, they changed its Indian name, Connogochegue, to the
Territory of Columbia; and the city which they laid out in it was by
universal acclaim called Washington, regardless of the modest protests
of the statesman thus honored. Georgetown, which is now a part of
Washington, was then a pretty, well-to-do, little Maryland town about a
hundred years old, and Alexandria, Virginia, included in the southern
end of the District as then bounded, was a shipping port of some
consequence. All the rest of the tract was forest and farm land. The
President felt a lively personal interest in the whole neighborhood. His
estate, Mount Vernon, lay only a short boat-ride down the Potomac; and
he had been instrumental in starting a project for the canal now known
as the Chesapeake and Ohio, connecting Georgetown with a bit of farming
country west of it, and had planned one from Alexandria which should
form part of the same system. During his activities on the Maryland side
of the river, he made his headquarters in a little stone house in
Georgetown which is still standing.
It took time and diplomacy to induce some of the local landholders to
part with their acres to the Commissioners. There is an old story, good
enough to be true, of one David Burns, a canny Scot, who held out so
long that President Washington personally undertook his conversion.
After pointing out to the farmer what advantages he would reap from
having the Government for a neighbor, the great man concluded:
“But for this opportunity, Mr. Burns, you might have died a poor
tobacco-planter.”
“Aye, mon,” snapped Burns, “an’ had ye no married the widder Custis, wi’
all her nagurs, ye’d ha’ been a land surveyor the noo, an’ a mighty poor
ane at that!”
However, when he learned that, unless he accepted the liberal terms
offered him, his land would be condemned and seized at an appraisal
probably much lower, Burns met the President in quite another mood, and
to the final question, “Well, sir, what have you concluded to do?”
astonished every one by his prompt response: “Whate’er your excellency
wad ha’ me.” On one of his fields now stands the White House, and an
adjacent lot became Lafayette Square. By the sale of property adjoining
that which the Government bought, he amassed what for those days was an
enormous fortune. It is within our generation that his cottage was torn
down for the improvement of the neighborhood from which we enter Potomac
Park. Although a poor building in its old age, in its prime it had
sheltered many eminent men. Among them was Tom Moore, the Irish poet,
who was under its roof when he wrote his diatribe against--
“This fam’d metropolis where Fancy sees
Squares in morasses, obelisks in trees;
Which second-sighted seers, ev’n now, adorn
With shrines unbuilt and heroes yet unborn.”
Little as we may relish such satire, we are bound to admit its modicum
of truthfulness, for the brave souls who founded Washington were given
to the grandiloquent habit of their day. They had called to their aid
Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a French military engineer who had served
in the patriot army of the Revolution, and who cherished brilliant
dreams of the future of his adopted country. To him they had committed
the preparation of a plan for the federal city, and he had laid it out
on the lines, not of an administrative center for a handful of newly
enfranchised colonies, but of a capital for a republic of fifty States
with five hundred million population. As he had lived in Versailles, he
is supposed to have taken that town as a general model in his
arrangement of streets and avenues, which some one has likened to “a
wheel laid on a gridiron.”
Of course, it was the business of the Commissioners to advertise the
attractions of the federal city as effectively as possible, to promote
its early settlement; so perhaps we may forgive their taking a good deal
for granted, and permitting real estate speculation to go practically
unchecked. Congress for several years ignored their appeals for an
appropriation for the development of the city, and in the interval their
chief dependence for the funds necessary to spend for highways and
buildings was on the sale of lots, and on grants or loans obtained from
neighboring States. The most sightly hill was set apart for the Capitol,
and a beautiful bit of rising ground, overlooking a bend in the river,
for the President’s House. The two buildings had their corner-stones
laid with much ceremony, but progress on them was slow. Nevertheless,
their sites, as well as the spaces reserved in L’Enfant’s plan for
parks, fountains, and statuary, were always treated by the speculators,
in correspondence with prospective customers, as if the improvements
designed eventually to crown them were already installed. The outside
public manifested no undue eagerness to buy, and the auction sales of
lots proved very disappointing. Then a lottery was organized, with
tickets at seven dollars apiece, and for a first prize “a superb hotel”
with baths and other comforts, worth fifty thousand dollars; but that,
too, fell short of expectations, all the desirable prizes going to
persons who felt no concern for the city’s future, and the hotel, though
started, never being finished. It was a pretty discouraging prospect,
therefore, which confronted the officers of the Government when, on May
16, 1800, President John Adams issued his order for their removal from
their cozy quarters in old Philadelphia to what seemed to them, by
contrast, like a camp in the wilderness.
The six Cabinet members, with their one hundred and thirty-two
subordinates, made the journey overland at various dates during the
summer, and in October the archives followed. These filled about a dozen
large boxes, which, with the office furniture, were brought down by sea
in a packet-boat and landed on a wharf at the mouth of Tiber Creek, a
tributary of the Potomac which then ran through the city but was later
converted into a sewer. All Washington, numbering perhaps three thousand
persons, turned out to greet the vessel; and amid cheers, ringing of
bells, and blasts from an antique cannon brought forth for the occasion,
its precious contents were carried ashore. “The Department buildings” to
which they were consigned were a wonderful assortment. The Treasury was
a two-story brick house at the southeast corner of the President’s
grounds, the War Office a still unfinished replica of it at the
southwest corner. The Post-office Department found shelter in a private
house in which only half the floors were laid and four rooms plastered;
while the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Navy, and the
Attorney-general had to direct their affairs from their lodgings. All
these temporary accommodations were sought as near as possible to the
President’s House. Congress had striven, for its greater ease of access,
to have the Departments quartered near the Capitol; but Washington had
set his face resolutely against every such proposal, citing the
experience of his own secretaries, who had been so pestered with
needless visits from Senators and Representatives that some of them “had
been obliged to go home and deny themselves, in order to transact
current business.” Which shows that one modern nuisance has a fairly
ancient precedent.
Members of both houses of Congress came straggling in all through the
first three weeks of November, to
[Illustration: _General Washington’s Office in Georgetown_]
find most of the best rooms in the two or three hotels and the little
cluster of boarding-houses already occupied by the executive
functionaries and their families. President Adams, who had preceded them
by a few weeks, was not much better off even in the official abode
reserved for him, if we may call his wife as a witness.
“The house is on a grand and superb scale,” she wrote to her daughter,
“requiring about thirty servants to attend and keep the apartments in
proper order, and perform the ordinary business of the house and
stables. The lighting the apartments, from the kitchen to the parlor and
chambers, is a tax indeed; and the fires we are obliged to keep, to
secure us from daily agues, is another very cheering comfort. Bells are
wholly wanting, not one single one being hung through the whole house,
and promises are all you can obtain. I could content myself almost
anywhere three months; but surrounded by forests, can you believe that
wood is not to be had, because people cannot be found to cut and cart
it! There is not a single apartment finished. We have not the least
fence or yard, or other convenience without; and the great unfinished
audience-room I make a drying-room of, to hang up the clothes in. The
principal stairs are not up, and will not be this winter. The ladies are
impatient for a drawing-room; I have no looking-glasses but dwarfs for
this house, not a twentieth part lamps enough to light it.”
Mrs. Adams’s consolatory reflection that she would have to endure these
conditions only three months, was probably shared by many of the
thirty-two Senators and one hundred and five Representatives who, on the
high hill to the east, shivered and shook and passed unflattering
criticisms on everybody who had had a hand in the construction of the
Capitol. Only the old north wing was in condition for use, and not all
of that. The Senate met in what is now the Supreme Court chamber; the
House took its chances wherever there was room, ending its travels in an
uncomfortable box of a hall commonly styled “the oven.” Most of the
members had made some study of the L’Enfant chart before coming to
Washington. One of them put into writing his impressions as he looked
about and tried to identify the public improvements he had been led to
expect. None of the streets was recognizable, he said, with the possible
exception of a road having two buildings on each side of it, which was
called New Jersey Avenue. The “magnificent Pennsylvania Avenue,”
connecting the Capitol with the President’s House, was for nearly the
entire distance a deep morass covered with wild bushes, through which a
passage had been hewn. The roads in every direction were muddy and
unimproved. The only attempt at a sidewalk had been made with chips of
stone left from building the Capitol, and this was little used because
the sharp edges cut the walker’s shoes in dry weather, and in wet
weather covered them with white mortar. Another member declared that
there was nothing in sight in Washington but scrub oak, and that, since
there was “only one good tavern within a day’s march,” many members had
to live in Georgetown and drive to and from the daily sessions of
Congress in a rickety coach. And a particularly disgusted critic, not
content with recording that “there are but few houses in any place, and
most of them are small, miserable huts,” added: “The people are poor,
and, as far as I can judge, live like fishes, by eating each other.”
Newspapers in all parts of the country echoed these depressing reports,
accompanying them with demands that the Government move again, this time
to some already well-populated and civilized region. Indeed, of several
resolutions to that end introduced in Congress, one was actually carried
to a vote and barely escaped passage. It may have been this accumulation
of discouraging elements which caused the delay in the arrival of the
Supreme Court from Philadelphia; or it may have been the paucity of
business before that tribunal, whose first Chief Justice, John Jay, had
resigned his commission to become Governor of New York, because he had
come to the conclusion that the Court could not command sufficient
support in the country at large to enforce its decisions! Whatever the
reason, the Justices did not find their way to Washington till well on
in the winter, or open their work there till February. They were
assigned the room in the basement of the Capitol now occupied by the
Supreme Court library.
Even when the first acute discomforts incident to removal had passed
away, the general depression was little relieved. Most of the earlier
citizens of Washington had entertained hopes of its becoming a
commercial as well as a political center of importance. They reasoned
that since Alexandria and Georgetown had already built up some trade
with the outside world, Washington, much more eligibly situated than
either, ought to attract a correspondingly larger measure of profitable
business. But all these bright anticipations were doomed to
disappointment: the progress of the city was as inconsiderable as if its
feet had become mired in one of its own marshes. The Mall, which on
L’Enfant’s map appeared as a boulevard fringed with fine public
buildings, soon degenerated into a common for pasturing cows. There was
good fishing above the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue from Sixth
Street to Thirteenth. Wild ducks found a favorite haunt where the Center
Market now stands. The whole place wore an air of suspended vitality in
striking contrast with the generous face of nature. “I am,” wrote a
visiting New Yorker to his wife, “almost enchanted with it--I mean the
situation for a city, for there is nothing here yet constituting one. As
to houses, there are very few, and those very scattering; and as to
streets, there are none, except you would call common roads streets. The
site, however, for a city, is the most delightful that can be
imagined--far beyond my expectation.”
“I took a hack after dinner to visit Nath’l Maxwell, and although he
lives near the center of the great city, yet such was the state of the
roads that I considered my life in danger. The distance on straight
lines does not exceed half a mile, but I had to ride up and down very
steep hills, with frightful gullies on almost every side.” And the
simplicity of life at the capital then is reflected in his statement
that after finishing his letters one night he was afraid to go out to
post them lest he lose his way in the dark, though he knew that the mail
would close at five in the morning. “After I had got comfortably into
bed,” he continued, “a watchman came past my window bawling out, ‘Past
one o’clock, and a very stormy night,’ on which I sprang out of bed and
called to him to take my letters to the post-office, which he consented
to do. I accordingly wrapped them in a sheet of paper to protect them
from the wet, and threw them out of the chamber window to him.”
The declaration of war against Great Britain in June, 1812, for which
the country at large held President Madison chiefly responsible, and
which reduced considerably such measure of popularity as he still
retained, did not produce much effect on the pulses of the stagnant
city. The first hostilities occurred in the north and on the sea; and,
although the enemy threatened Washington for more than a year, Madison
and most of his advisers regarded an attack as highly improbable. When,
however, it became known in 1814 that a large body of Wellington’s
veterans were setting sail from England, under convoy of a powerful
fleet, for the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, every one suddenly awoke to the
impending peril. It was then too late. Thanks to the misjudgment of
General Armstrong, Secretary of War, or General Winder, who was in
charge of military affairs in the District, midsummer found the enemy in
Maryland, but the city still without an efficient defensive force, or
ammunition or provisions to equip one properly. Hurried efforts brought
together a first line of thirty-one hundred men, all raw recruits except
six hundred sailors and a couple of hundred soldiers. A second line,
almost equal in number, was formed, mostly of militia, and disposed for
use as a home guard. At Bladensburg, Maryland, five miles north of
Washington, the decisive battle occurred on the twenty-fourth of August,
from which the seamen led by Captain Joshua Barney were the only
contingent that emerged with extraordinary credit; but they did so well
that a grateful community has not yet raised a monument to them or their
leader. The battlefield was close enough to the old George Washington
tavern, of which Mr. Hornby gives us an intimate glimpse, for the
occupants to hear the rattle of musketry and see the cannon-smoke from
the upper windows.
The outcome of the fight was that the British commanders, General Ross
and Admiral Cockburn, with six thousand men, drove the Americans back
and swept down upon the city, spreading ruin in their track. Ross had
his horse killed under him by a shot from a private house he was passing
and kept more in the background thereafter, but Cockburn was active in
the work of devastation. Tradition describes him as mounting the
Speaker’s dais in the Hall of Representatives, calling a burlesque
session of Congress to order, and putting the question: “Shall this
harbor of Yankee democracy be burned? All in favor will say, ‘Aye’!”
There was a roar of “Ayes” from the men, who at once set going a mammoth
bonfire of written records and volumes from the library of Congress, and
soon the whole Capitol was wrapped in flames. Thence the party proceeded
to the other public buildings, burning whatever was recognizable as the
property of the Government. Their progress was nearly everywhere
unopposed, the clerks in charge having gathered up such books and papers
as they could carry away, and transported them to the most convenient
hiding-places.
The first break in this program occurred at the Patent Office, which was
under the superintendency of Doctor William Thornton, himself of English
birth. A neighbor having warned him at his home that his office was in
danger, he mounted his horse and galloped to the spot, where he arrived
just in time to see a squad of soldiers training a field-piece upon the
building. Leaping from the saddle and dramatically covering the muzzle
of the gun with his body, he reminded the artillerists that the
inventions they purposed destroying were monuments of human progress
which belonged to the whole civilized world, and denounced such
vandalism as a disgrace to the British uniform. His boldness had its
effect, and the Patent Office was spared. Another check came, in the
form of an accident of poetic justice, at Greenleaf’s Point, the present
site of the Army War College. This place had been used as an arsenal by
the defenders of the city, who, before deserting it, had secreted all
their surplus gunpowder in a dry well in the midst of the grounds. A
body of British troops undertook to destroy the American cannon they
found there by firing one gun directly into another, when a fragment of
burning wadding was blown into the well, causing an explosion that
killed twelve and wounded more than thirty of the party.
President Madison, who had been at Bladensburg personally superintending
the placing of our troops, hastened southward when the rout began, and
took refuge among the hills of northern Virginia. There he was presently
joined by his wife, and both remained in seclusion till they received
word that the British had marched away. This message was preceded by the
news that the President’s House had been burned, with all its contents
except a few portable articles which could be gathered and put out of
harm’s reach at an hour’s notice. The property destroyed with absolute
wantonness in various parts of the city aggregated in value between two
and three million dollars--a heavy loss for a government which was just
managing to stagger along with its legitimate burdens, and in a capital
that could barely be kept from collapse under the most favoring
conditions. It is not wonderful that the British press was almost a unit
in condemning Cockburn’s vandalism, the London _Statesman_ saying:
“Willingly would we throw a veil of oblivion over the transactions at
Washington; the Cossacks spared Paris, but we spared not the capital of
America!” And the _Annual Register_: “The extent of the devastation
practised by the victors brought a heavy censure upon the British
character, not only in America, but on the Continent of Europe.” The
restoration of the President’s House alone, including the repainting of
its outside surface to remove the scars of the fire, consumed four
years, in the course of which President Madison made way for his
successor, Monroe, and the building had fastened to it, from its
freshened color, the title it has worn in popular speech from that day
to this.
It was a sorry-looking Washington to which the Madisons came back.
Blackened ruins were everywhere; placards posted here and there
denounced the President as the author of the city’s misfortunes;
mournful streams of women, children, old men, and
[Illustration: _George Washington Tavern, Bladensburg_]
shamefaced stragglers from the defensive force, trickled in from the
woods in the suburban country where they had been hiding since the
battle; the streets were strewn with the wreckage of a cyclone which had
swept the valley almost simultaneously with the hostile troops,
unroofing houses, uprooting trees, demolishing chimneys, and generally
supplementing the disasters of warfare. Indeed, almost the only
potentiality of evil that had not come to pass was an uprising of the
slaves, which had been widely feared, as some of the restless spirits
among them had been overheard counseling their fellows to join the
British in looting the city and then make a break for freedom. The
Madisons, after a brief visit with friends, rented the Octagon house at
the corner of New York Avenue and Eighteenth Street, now the
headquarters of the American Institute of Architects. It was here that
President Madison signed the treaty of Ghent, binding Great Britain and
the United States to a peace which has remained for a whole century
unbroken. Here, too, Dolly Madison held her republican court, the most
famous since Martha Washington’s in New York, and far eclipsing that in
splendor.
To provide a meeting-place for Congress till the Capitol could be
occupied once more, a building which stood at the corner of F and
Seventh Streets was made over for the purpose. It proved so
uncomfortable, however, as to revive with increased zest the discussion
whether, in view of the spread of population through the newly opened
West, it would not be wiser to remove the seat of government to some
fairly accessible point in that part of the country. The agitation
alarmed the more important property-owners in Washington, who, in order
to head it off before it had gone too far, hastily organized a company
to put up a temporary but better equipped substitute for the Capitol.
They chose a site a few hundred yards to the eastward of the burned
edifice, and there built a long house which is still standing, though
now divided into dwellings. The stratagem accomplished its aim, and
Congress stayed in its improvised domicile till 1819. This occupancy
gave the building the title, “the Old Capitol,” that clings to it to-day
in spite of the changes it has undergone in the interval.
Washington was early supplied with a good general newspaper in the
_National Intelligencer_, and the social side of life presently found a
weekly interpreter in _The Huntress_, edited by Mrs. Ann Royall, whose
personality was so aggressive that John Quincy Adams described her as
going about “like a virago-errant in enchanted armor.” She said so much,
also, in disparagement of some of her neighbors, that she was indicted
by the grand jury as a common scold and threatened with a ducking in
accordance with an old English law in force in the District. But the
disseminators of information to whose coming the citizens looked forward
more eagerly than to any printed sheet, were two men who made their
rounds daily on horseback among the homes of the well-to-do. One was the
postman, delivering the mails that came in by stage-coach from the outer
world; the other was the barber, who, like an endless-chain letter,
picked up the latest gossip at every house he visited, and left in
exchange all the items he had picked up at previous stopping-places.
During the next generation Washington saw, it is safe to say, more of
the ups and downs of fortune than any other American city. The reasons
were manifold. For one thing, the larger part of its population
consisted of persons whose permanent ties were elsewhere. As federal
officeholders they were residents of Washington, but they retained their
citizenship in the places from which they had been drawn. Under the
Constitution, moreover, Congress exercised supreme authority in the
District of Columbia, and every member of Congress had the interests of
his home constituency more at heart than those of the people who were
his neighbors for only a few months at a time. Nevertheless, the
population of the capital, which, when it rose from its ashes, numbered
between eight and nine thousand, more than doubled within the next
twenty years. Then came ten years of great uncertainty, during which
occurred the overwhelming business panic of 1837, that set awry nearly
everything in America, and for this period the increase averaged only
about five hundred souls annually. But another twenty years of forward
movement brought the total up to a little more than sixty thousand.
In the meantime many things had happened, calculated to attract public
attention generally to Washington. President Monroe had proclaimed his
famous doctrine, warning Europe to keep its hands off this hemisphere.
President Jackson had made his fight upon the United States Bank and won
it, changing the whole financial outlook of the country. The Capitol had
been enlarged, and several new Government buildings started; the
Smithsonian Institution had begun to make its mark in the scientific
world, and the Washington Monument had risen nearly two hundred feet
into the air. The long-threatened war with Mexico had come and gone,
adding a rich area to our public domain. Steamships had crowded sailing
vessels off the highways of commerce and become the main dependence of
the Yankee navy. The Baltimore and Ohio Railway, the first successful
experiment in its field, had brought what we now call the Middle West,
with its grain and minerals, to within a day’s journey of the capital,
and this pioneer enterprise had been followed by the opening of other
rail facilities. The Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska Act had
been passed, slavery had been abolished in the District of Columbia, the
Underground Railroad had begun to haul its daily consignment of runaway
negroes across the Canada border, the Supreme Court had rendered the
Dred Scott decision, and John Brown had led his raid in the mountain
country scarcely fifty miles from where the Court was sitting. Letter
postage, anywhere east of the Mississippi River, had come down to a
three-cent unit. The first telegraph message had been transmitted over a
wire connecting Baltimore with Washington, and out of this small
beginning had presently been developed a network of electric
communication covering all our more thickly populated territory; while
experimenters with a submarine line had effected an exchange of messages
between England and the United States which proved the practicability of
their enterprise. Last but not least, royalty had smiled upon us in the
person of the Prince of Wales, who had passed some days as the guest of
President Buchanan at the White House.
Had Washington been situated elsewhere than on the border line between
two sections, neither of which felt any pride in its success, or had it
been governed by executives whose records were to be made or marred by
the faithfulness with which they turned every opportunity to account for
its welfare and reputation, we should probably have seen the capital
beginning then its career as the model city of the new world. Instead,
the dependence of its people, at every stage, on the favor of what was
practically an alien governing body, bore natural fruit in a feeble
community spirit.
By 1860 Washington had reached the middle of its Slough of Despond. Not
a street was paved except for a patch here and there, and Pennsylvania
Avenue was the only one lighted after nightfall. Pigs roamed through the
less pretentious highways as freely as dogs. There was not a sewer
anywhere, a shallow, uncovered stream carrying off the common refuse to
the Potomac, which was held in its channel only by raw earthen bluffs.
Wells and springs furnished all the water, and the police and fire
departments were those of a village. The open squares, intended for
beauty spots, were densely overgrown with weeds. Except for an omnibus
line to Georgetown, not a public conveyance was running. Such permanent
Department buildings as had been started, though ambitious in design
and suggesting by their outlines a desire for something better than had
yet been accomplished, had not reached a habitable state. The Capitol
was in disorder, and still overrun with workmen who had been employed in
constructing the new wings and were preparing to raise the dome; the
White House had scarcely a fitter look, with its environment of stables
and shambling fences and its unkempt grounds.
Nor was there any prospect of speedy improvement in municipal
conditions. Every considerable stride in that direction would mean
largely increased taxation, and the bulk of the taxable property had
drifted into the hands of unprogressive whites and ignorant negroes, who
were equally unwilling to pay the price. Upon this seemingly hopeless
chaos descended the cloud of civil war.
It was a black cloud, but it had a sunlit lining.