THE REGION ’ROUND ABOUT
No American city has suburbs more interesting than Washington’s. Those
that hold first rank, naturally, are on the Virginia side of the
Potomac, the region most redolent of the memory of the great patriot
whose name was given to the capital. The Arlington estate, which lies
nearest, was never the home of George Washington, but he visited it
often, for it belonged by inheritance to the grandson of his wife by her
earlier marriage; and George and Martha were so pleased with it that
they built a little summer-house about where the flagstaff now stands,
whence they could overlook the work going on in the new federal city
across the river. Young George Custis, owner of the place, built the
spacious dwelling substantially as we now find it, finishing it four
years after Washington’s death. He left the property to his daughter
Mary, who in 1831 became the wife of Robert E. Lee, then a lieutenant in
the regular army, but thirty years later commander-in-chief of the
Confederate forces. Their wedding took place in the old drawing-room,
where visitors now register their names.
Lee had just reached colonel’s rank when the Civil War broke out. He was
opposed to secession, but, faithful to the traditions of State
sovereignty in which he had been trained, decided that it was his duty
to sacrifice all other ties and follow the fortunes of Virginia. After a
painful interview with General Scott, who strove vainly to shake his
resolution, he wrote, in the library across the hall from the
drawing-room, his resignation of his commission in the United States
army. Then, accompanied by his family, he set out for the South, never
to return. In a few days the Federal troops took possession of the
estate as important to the protection of Washington. Here McClellan
worked out his plans for the reorganization of the Union army following
the Bull Run disaster. A few years afterward, there being no one at hand
to pay the war-tax laid on the land, it was sold under the hammer, and
the Government bid it in. Before the sale had been definitely ordered, a
Northern relative of the Lees came forward with an offer to pay the levy
and costs, but the tax commissioners declined the tender on the ground
that the delinquent taxpayer had not made it in person.
Meanwhile, the house had been turned into a military hospital, and the
patients who died there were buried close by. When it became necessary
to have a soldiers’ burial-ground near Washington, Quartermaster-general
Meigs was permitted to lay off two hundred acres of the estate for the
purpose. This was the beginning of the National Cemetery of to-day,
where about eighteen thousand soldiers and sailors have found a last
resting-place.
Some time after the war, General Lee’s son brought suit for the recovery
of the property and won it, the Supreme Court holding that the tax
commissioners ought to have accepted the tender made them; but Mr. Lee
compromised with the Government, conveying to it his interest for one
hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Since then the house has been put
into excellent repair, and the land about it suitably enclosed and
improved. On the upper edge of the estate has been established the
military post known as Fort Myer, where cavalry-training is carried to a
high point, weather observations are made, and a wireless telegraph
station exchanges despatches with the Eiffel tower in Paris. Some of the
land down by the river has been made over into an experimental farm
under the auspices of the Department of Agriculture.
Happily, the Cemetery has been kept free from tawdry memorials and
inconsequential ornament, and enveloped in an atmosphere of dignity
well fitting its sacred character. Its most impressive tomb is that
dedicated to the Unknown Dead, which contains the remains of more than
two thousand soldiers found on various battlefields but never
identified. “Their names and deaths,” says the inscription, “are
recorded in the archives of their country, and its grateful citizens
honor them as their noble army of martyrs.” Not far away is a fine
amphitheater with a carpet of turf and a canopy of trellised vines,
where memorial exercises are held annually on Decoration Day, the
President almost always taking part. There is also a Temple of Fame,
bearing the names of Washington and Lincoln, with those of the military
leaders who particularly distinguished themselves in the Civil War. An
extension has recently been made in the grounds devoted to sepulture,
where the most conspicuous monument is that which commemorates the
tragedy of the battleship _Maine_ in Havana harbor. The base is built to
represent a gun-turret on the deck of a man-of-war; on this are
inscribed the names of the victims, while from the center of the turret
rises a mast with a fighting-top. A larger and more ambitious
amphitheater, also, has been laid out in the extension.
From Arlington we can go, by the same road that Washington trod on his
trips, to Alexandria, a town which fairly reeks with associations, from
the colonial names of some of its streets--King, Queen, Prince,
Princess, Duke, Duchess, Royal--to its remnants of cobblestone pavement
laid by the Hessian prisoners in the Revolution. Here is the old Carlyle
mansion, where General Braddock had his headquarters before starting on
his ill-fated expedition against the French and Indians. In its blue
drawing-room Washington, as a young surveyor ambitious to serve his
king, received the first rudiments of his military education; and at the
foot of yonder staircase one evening stood the same Washington,
expectant, while pretty Sally Fairfax tripped lightly down to join him
and be led through the opening cotillion at her coming-out ball.
This must have been a splendid mansion in its time, with a terraced
garden descending to the river-bank, and a fountain in the midst of the
flower-beds. It was built on the ruins of a fort used by the early
settlers against the Indians; the living-rooms of the fort became the
cellar of the mansion, and the fort proper the plaza, upon which the
main hallway opens. You enter the house now through a cozy little
tea-room established by a group of young ladies of Alexandria; and it
may be your good fortune to be shown about the premises by one of them
who is herself a member of the historic Carlyle and Fairfax families
and familiar with all their ancestral tales.
A prominent site in town is covered by Christ Church, where Washington
worshiped, and where you can see the square family pew for which he paid
the record price, thirty-six pounds and ten shillings. The church stands
in a large, old-fashioned yard, sprinkled with the gravestones of men
and women of local renown. Hither, on Sundays, drove the ladies from
Mount Vernon, seven miles away, in a chariot with a mahogany body, green
Venetian blinds, and pictured panels, drawn by four horses. The General
did not take kindly to the coach for himself, but rode beside it on his
favorite saddle-horse, followed at a respectful distance by Bishop, his
colored body-servant, in scarlet livery. After service he would linger
in the churchyard, chatting with his friends, till Bishop reminded him
of the flight of time by bringing up his horse and holding the stirrup
for him to mount.
A spirited historical controversy has been waged over the question of
Washington’s attitude toward religion. The weight of evidence favors the
idea that, though not bound by dogma, he had a broad faith in the
philosophy of Christianity, always knelt with the rest of the
congregation and joined in the responses, and occasionally remained for
the communion. He certainly encouraged his slaves to believe in the
efficacy of prayer; for once, when a long-continued drought threatened
to ruin his crops, he called his farm-hands together on Sunday morning
and bade them put up their united supplication for rain. They did so,
and to their great delight the flood-gates of heaven suddenly opened and
deluged the earth; but the Washington family were caught in the storm on
their way home from church, and could not make shelter soon enough to
save Mrs. Washington’s best gown from serious damage or the General from
being soaked to the skin.
In his younger days, Washington was fond of dancing, and used to come
into town to attend assemblies at Clagett’s Tavern. The assembly-hall
was up-stairs. It was afterward divided into three rooms, one of which,
having fallen into the hands of persons who respect its pedigree, has
been pretty well preserved. In the old times it had at one end a gallery
for the musicians, accessible only by a ladder, which was removed as
soon as they were all in their places. This arrangement was designed to
compel them to stay at their work till released, and to drink only what
was passed up to them with the approval of the floor-committee.
Across the corridor from the old assembly-hall was a chamber that later
became interesting through its occupancy by an unknown woman who came to
the tavern one morning in 1816, plainly in ill health. She was
accompanied by a few servants, with whom she conversed only in French,
and neither she nor they could be drawn into any communication with
other persons, except what was necessary to engage accommodations and
order meals. On the fourth day of her stay, there appeared on the scene
a strange man, who from various indications was assumed to be her
husband. An hour after his arrival she died in his arms. He buried her
in St. Paul’s cemetery on the outskirts of the town, planting a
willow-tree over her grave, and raising at its head a stone inscribed to
the memory simply of “A Female Stranger,” with this stanza from Pope’s
“Unfortunate Lady”:
“How loved, how honored once, avails thee not,
To whom related, or by whom begot.
A heap of dust alone remains of thee,
’Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be.”
And the Female Stranger remains a mystery to this day, though many
efforts have been made to discover her identity. A local suspicion that
she was Theodosia Allston, the daughter of Aaron Burr, seems to be
discredited by the fact that Theodosia’s disappearance occurred in 1812,
and that her husband was dead long before the Stranger came to
Clagett’s Tavern.
How public-spirited a citizen Washington was is attested by his having
laid the foundation of Alexandria’s free-school system, presented the
town with its first fire-engine, organized its first militia company,
and got up a lottery to raise a fund for improving the country roads
thereabout. He was an earnest Freemason, and the lodge named for him
owns a number of relics like the chair in which he presided as Master,
his apron, his wedding gloves, his spurs, his pruning-knife, and a
penknife which his mother gave him when he was eleven years old and
which he carried till he died. It has also the last authentic portrait
of him taken from life, a pastel done by William Williams of
Philadelphia.
In and around Alexandria are other points of interest, including the
house in which Colonel Ellsworth was killed, and one where, it is said,
Martha Washington secreted herself for a while during her widowhood for
fear of a slave uprising; a theological seminary which has graduated,
among other eminent divines, Bishops Phillips Brooks of Boston and Henry
C. Potter of New York; and the nearly obliterated remains of the road
which, in 1765, General Braddock began to build into the West.
We can go to Mount Vernon by boat, or over a road which Congress has
repeatedly, but without effect, been petitioned to acquire and improve.
Already a trolley company has recognized a public demand and is running
cars on a regular schedule from the heart of the capital city to the
borders of Washington’s old estate. On the way down we pass Wellington,
once the home of Tobias Lear, whom General Washington hired for two
hundred dollars a year to act as tutor to the children at Mount Vernon,
promoting him later to the post of private secretary. In both
capacities, his employer provided, he “will sit at my table, will live
as I live, will mix with the company who resort to the house, and will
be treated in every respect with courtesy and proper attention.” Lear
married three wives, one of them a kinswoman of the General’s. He
acquired means, removed in later life to Washington, and became a
merchant with a warehouse on the river. His tombstone in the
Congressional Cemetery recites an overflowing list of his virtues and
honors, and posterity owes him a large debt for having preserved many of
the Washingtoniana most valued now by historians.
Mount Vernon became the property of the Washington family by a grant
from Lord Culpepper in 1670 to John Washington, the great-grandfather of
George. It was christened in honor of Admiral Vernon, a friend of
Lawrence Washington, the half-brother who brought George up and
superintended his education. George, who received it by inheritance,
willed it to his nephew Bushrod, he to his nephew John, and John to a
son of the same name. Financial embarrassments led the last heir to part
with some of the land; but to an area of a few hundred acres, including
the mansion, the family tomb, and the wharf on the Potomac, he held fast
till arrangements could be made for its purchase by the Mount Vernon
Ladies’ Association, a society of patriotic women who, with money
privately raised, have restored the place and kept it in order ever
since. There is good reason to doubt whether this would ever have come
about but for the heroic energy of Miss Ann Pamela Cunningham of South
Carolina, who, though a confirmed invalid, devised and executed a plan
which saved the estate from being sold to a professional showman.
Just as in Alexandria we found ourselves in touch with a George
Washington who was a flesh-and-blood Virginian as distinguished from the
colorless paragon of the standard histories, so at Mount Vernon we meet
the same Washington in his character of husband, farmer, and host. Even
here, however, we are not wholly beyond the penumbra of fiction; for
only five miles away is the town of Pohick, once the parish seat of
Parson Weems, the inventor of the cherry-tree myth on which my
generation were industriously fed. Although, of course, no one still
living in the region can remember Washington, there are not a few who
are familiar with the details of his daily life, handed down in their
families from ancestors who did remember him. These make him out a very
human country gentleman, who loved to ride, to shoot, to fence, and to
wrestle; who mixed business with pleasure in an occasional horse-race or
real estate speculation; who disbelieved in slavery, and was recognized
by his own two hundred bondmen as a kind master, yet was noted for
getting more work out of a negro than any other slaveholder in Virginia,
and for not hesitating to administer corporal punishment to one who
deserved it.
We learn from these sources that he was “as straight as an Indian, and
as free in his walk”; that he was what the ladies of that day, in spite
of some marks left by the smallpox, styled “a pretty man”; that his
weight of two hundred and ten pounds was all bone and muscle; and that
he stood six feet and two inches tall in his shoes, which ranged in size
from Number eleven to Number thirteen. His hands seem to have been his
only physical deformity; they were so large as to attract attention and
required gloves made expressly for them, three sizes larger than
ordinary. His eyes are variously described as “blue,” as “of a bluish
cast and very lively,” as “a cold, light gray,” and as “so gray that
they looked almost white.” These alternatives may be reconciled,
perhaps, by Gilbert Stuart’s recollection that his eyes were “a light
grayish blue, deep sunken in their sockets, giving the expression of
gravity of thought.” His hair was originally dark brown and fairly
thick; his face was long, his nose prominent, his mouth large, and his
chin firm. He suffered a good deal with toothache, particularly after
his military service, and, as the rural remedy was the simplest known,
he passed his last years almost toothless. This drove at least one
portrait-painter into padding the front of his mouth with cotton wool,
to make his lips look more natural than they did when drawn over the
ill-fitting artificial teeth which he inserted for state occasions.
The great man lived well, his principal meal being a three o’clock
dinner, which he washed down with five glasses of Madeira, taken with
dessert. This allowance he gradually increased toward the close of his
life till it reached two bottles. In sending away for sale a slave whom,
though troublesome, he guaranteed as “exceedingly healthy, strong and
good at the hoe,” he expressed his willingness to take in part payment
“a hogshead of the best rum” and an indefinite quantity of “good old
spirits.” In our gout-fearing era, these data have the ring of
immoderate indulgence, but measured by the standards of the eighteenth
century they were temperate enough. It must be said for the General,
also, that he was charitable in his judgment of the weaknesses of
others, as shown by his contract with an overseer, to whom he conceded
the privilege of getting drunk for a week once a year; and his campaign
expenses for election to the Virginia legislature embraced a hogshead
and a barrel of punch, thirty-five gallons of wine, and forty-three
gallons of strong cider.
It makes us feel a little nearer to the Father of our Country to learn
that he was not immune to the influence of bright eyes and dainty
toilets; that he was in love, or fancied he was, with several different
damsels at as many different times; and that his self-surrender
occasionally declared itself in amatory verse too dreadful for belief.
His most serious infatuation seems to have been with a Miss Gary, whom
he courted fervently, only to be dismissed by her father with the sordid
reminder: “My daughter, sir, has been accustomed to ride in her own
coach!” As this was a knock-down argument for a stripling surveyor who
[Illustration: _Ford’s Theatre, the Old Front_]
was just struggling to raise his professional terms to twenty-five
dollars a day when employed, he went his way, but sought consolation in
winning Martha Custis, who resembled Miss Cary almost as a twin sister.
Of Mary Washington, mother of George, we get glimpses in the familiar
chat of the vicinage. She appears as a rather difficult person, who
tried the methodical soul of her son by her thriftless habits and her
incessant complaints of being out of money. For years he did his utmost
to induce her to rent her plantation further down the State, hire out
her slaves, and live on her fixed income thus obtained, but to no
purpose. Yet after he had become so famous that he was obliged to
entertain at Mount Vernon all the traveling celebrities of two
hemispheres, she suddenly took it into her head that she would like to
come and live with him. In spite of his filial piety, candor compelled
him to show her the impracticability of her proposal; and, though he
tried to soften her disappointment by sending her the last seventy-five
dollars in his purse, she seems to have continued dissatisfied.
George was not stingy. On the contrary, on each of three plantations
which he farmed he kept one crib of corn always set apart for free
distribution among the poor, and never let this fail, even if he had to
rob his own table supply or to buy corn at a dollar a bushel to make up
a deficit. He was not a rich man, but for sentimental reasons held on to
Mount Vernon after it had ceased to be profitable property. At his
death, he was worth only about seventy-five thousand dollars in his own
right, and, had he lived ten years longer at the same rate, he would
have died a bankrupt. It was his wife’s better investments that kept up
the expenses of their home.
As we go over the old mansion, we are shown the various rooms associated
with Washington’s activities, and that in which his death occurred.
Notwithstanding his sturdy muscular development, his throat and chest
were always weak spots; and in 1799, after a soaking and chill from a
ride through a December storm, he went to bed with a cold which left him
unable to swallow. Soon he realized that the end was not far off. It was
characteristic of the man that he should then discharge the doctors from
further useless ministrations, give such directions about his burial as
he deemed important, and calmly proceed to watch the waning of his own
pulse. After a little the hand that held his wrist relaxed and dropped
upon the coverlet, and the friends gathered in the chamber knew that all
was over.
On the Maryland side of the Potomac, the suburb most convenient of
access is Georgetown. In fact, it long ago ceased to be strictly a
suburb, by incorporation with the city of Washington, from which it was
separated only by Rock Creek, a narrow tributary of the Potomac.
Officially, it is now West Washington, and its streets have been renamed
and renumbered so as to conform as nearly as practicable to the system
in use in the capital. All the same, Georgetown has never lost its
identity. It had a life of its own before Washington was thought of; and
within my recollection the old society of Georgetown used to look
askance at the “new people” with whom Washington was filling up. It is
still sprinkled with hoary houses set in quaint ancestral gardens,
though modernism has touched the place at so many points that we can get
a glimpse of these survivals sometimes only through deep vistas lined
with the red brick side-walls of urban blocks. The most attractive of
the old mansions, and the best preserved, is the Tudor house, built by
Doctor William Thornton about 1810. It is a good specimen from the
Georgian epoch in architecture, standing fitly in the midst of a great
square of lawn, with shade trees and box hedges to correspond; and one
of its traditions is that pretty little Nellie Custis went there to her
first ball, though--but I leave others to struggle with the problem of
conflicting dates. One thing we do know, that the place has always been
in the possession of kinsfolk of the Mount Vernon family.
Many amusing stories are told of Georgetown’s early days, when the
Scotch element were so strong in its population that a man could not be
appointed to the office of flour inspector without subscribing to a test
oath declaring his disbelief in the doctrine of “transsubstantiation in
the sacrament of the Lord’s supper”; when the city fathers sought to
save the expense of employing a surveyor to calculate the width of the
Potomac at a point where a bridge was to be built, by ordering out all
good citizens to pull at the opposite ends of a measuring-rope; and when
the big triangle which was pounded as an alarm of fire fell from the
belfry in which it hung, and fire-alarms were sounded thereafter by
blowing a fish-horn through the streets. But none of these tales will
have an interest for most visitors equal to the local version of the
origin of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” For Georgetown was Francis Scott
Key’s old home.
As the story goes, part of the British forces which marched upon
Washington in the summer of 1814 passed through Upper Marlboro,
Maryland, on a day when Doctor William Beanes, a prominent physician,
was entertaining several friends at dinner. As the gentlemen talked,
they grew more and more indignant against the invaders, and, news being
brought to them at table that a few red-coated stragglers were still in
town committing depredations after the main body of their comrades had
passed on, some one suggested that the party go out and arrest these men
as disturbers of the peace. This was done, but to little effect; for as
soon as the stragglers got away, they hastened to catch up with the army
and lodge a complaint with their officers, who at once sent back a squad
of soldiers to arrest the arresters. Three of the dining party,
including Beanes, were carried off to Admiral Cockburn’s flagship, which
was lying in the Patuxent River. Cockburn, after administering a
disciplinary lecture to the trio, dismissed the others but took Beanes
as a prisoner on his ship to Baltimore.
Key, who was Beanes’s nephew, hastened to Baltimore as soon as he heard
of the doctor’s plight, and under a flag of truce went aboard the vessel
to intercede with Cockburn for his uncle’s release. His plea was vain;
and Cockburn would not even let him go ashore again till after the
bombardment of Fort McHenry. When Key returned to Georgetown, he related
his adventures at the next meeting of the local glee-club, and his
fellow members urged him to put his narrative into verse. He read his
production at a later meeting, and the club introduced it to the
public, who adopted it as the national anthem.
Among the noted names associated with Georgetown, outside of political
life, may be mentioned those of Joel Benton, the poet and essayist, who
bought a farm on the Washington side of Rock Creek, since famous as the
Kalorama estate; Robert Fulton, the pioneer in steam navigation, who
made some of his early experiments with water-craft and submarine
explosives on the small streams of the neighborhood; George Peabody,
financier and philanthropist, who came as a poor boy from Massachusetts
and worked as a clerk in a store in Bridge Street; William W. Corcoran,
whose later career somewhat resembled Peabody’s, and whose real start in
life dated from the failure of a little shop he kept in the heart of the
town; and, last but not least, a youthful belle whose romance demands a
paragraph or two of its own.
Baron Bodisco, Russian Minister to the United States during the Van
Buren administration, lived, as did most of the foreign envoys of that
time, in Georgetown. He was a bachelor, well on toward sixty years of
age, uncompromisingly ugly, with a face covered with wrinkles, and a
bald head which he tried to conceal under a somewhat obtrusive wig. He
had for visitors one winter two young nephews, for whom he gave a
dancing party at the legation, inviting all the socially eligible boys
and girls in town. By some accident, one of his invitations miscarried
and failed to reach Harriet Beall Williams, a most attractive and
popular schoolgirl of sixteen. He hastened to repair his error as soon
as he discovered it, and on the evening of the party hunted her up to
make his apologies in person. It was a case of love at first sight.
After that he contrived to meet her occasionally on her way to or from
school, and ere long he became an avowed suitor for her hand. The
courtship, though not displeasing to the girl, was for some time
discouraged by her family. Finding her resolved to accept her elderly
lover, however, they withdrew their active opposition, and Beauty and
the Beast, as they were commonly called, were married in June.
The Baron, who had excellent taste in everything except his own make-up,
superintended all the details of the affair, even to the costumes of the
bridal party. The bridesmaids were schoolmates of Miss Williams, one
being Jessie Benton, then aged fourteen, who afterward became the wife
of General John C. Fremont. The groomsmen were generally contemporaries
of the groom, so that the note of age disparity was uniform throughout.
President Van Buren and Henry Clay were conspicuous among the guests.
At the first opportunity, the Baron took his bride to Russia and
presented her at court, where she electrified the assembled nobility by
shaking the Czar’s hand in cordial American fashion. It delighted the
Czar, however, which was more to the point; and, although she did many
unusual things, like declining the Czarina’s invitation to a Sunday
function because she had been brought up to “keep the Sabbath,” she
became a great favorite in the inner imperial circle, and loved to dwell
on her foreign experiences after she came back to Georgetown to live.
The Bodisco house is still pointed out to strangers.
Not all the historic associations of Georgetown and its neighborhood
have been so peaceful. For a few miles out of town the river’s edge is
dotted with sequestered nooks to which hot-brained gentlemen could
retire on occasion, to wipe out their grievances in one another’s blood.
The Little Falls bridge afforded such a retreat to Henry Clay and John
Randolph after Randolph’s speech declaring that the “alphabet that
writes the name of Thersites, of blackguard, of squalidity, refuses her
letters for” Clay. The combatants took the precaution to cross the
bridge far enough to avoid the jurisdiction of the District
authorities. Clay’s first shot cut Randolph’s coat near the hip,
Randolph’s did nothing. At the second word, Clay’s bullet went wild, and
Randolph deliberately sent his into the air, remarking: “I do not fire
at you, Mr. Clay!” At the same time he advanced with hand outstretched,
Clay meeting him halfway. Randolph, as they were leaving the field,
pointed to the hole made by Clay’s first bullet, saying jocosely: “You
owe me a coat, Mr. Clay.” “I am glad, sir,” answered Clay, “that the
debt is no greater.”
The subject of duels calls to mind another suburb, to wit, Bladensburg,
Maryland, where the defenders of Washington made their brief and
ineffectual stand against the invading British in 1814. Here, for sixty
years, in a green little dell about a mile out of town, all sorts of
personal and political feuds were settled with deadly weapons. The most
celebrated of these meetings was that of March 22, 1820, between two
Commodores of the American navy, Stephen Decatur and James Barren. Like
most duels, it was more the work of mischief-makers than of the
principals themselves.
Decatur was at the height of his fame for achievements in the War of
1812 and against the Barbary pirates; he was a fine marksman with the
pistol, and had had several earlier experiences on the dueling-field.
Barren, on the other hand, was under a cloud for some professional
mistakes; he was six years Decatur’s senior, had no taste for dueling,
and was near-sighted. Down to the last, Barron was plainly disposed to
accept any reasonable concession and call the affair off; but Decatur
was in high spirits and full of confidence.
Two shots rang out simultaneously, and both men fell. Decatur, who was
at first supposed to be dead, presently showed signs of returning
animation and was lifted to his feet, only to stagger a few paces toward
his antagonist and fall again. As the two men lay side by side, Barron
turned his face to say to Decatur that he hoped, when they met in
another world, they would be better friends than in this. Decatur
responded that he had never been Barren’s enemy, and, though he
cherished no animosity to Barron for killing him, he found it harder to
forgive the men who had goaded them into this quarrel. Both combatants
were carried back to Washington, where Barron slowly recovered from his
wound; but Decatur, after a day of intense suffering, died in the house
which still bears his name, at the corner of Jackson Place and H Street.
So habitually was this one ravine chosen for the settlement of affairs
of honor that when two Representatives, Jonathan Cilley of Maine and
William J. Graves of Kentucky, decided in 1838 to end a dispute with
rifles, they outwitted pursuit by choosing for their fight the eastern
end of the Anacostia bridge on the high-road to Marlboro, Maryland; and
a posse who started out to stop them went to the accustomed ground only
to find it empty. This duel had naught of the dramatic quality of that
between Decatur and Barren, but its effect on the public mind proved
more far-reaching. Cilley was a young man of brilliant promise, highly
respected as well as popular, with a wife and three little children. The
quarrel was forced upon him because, in the interest of the proper
dignity of Congress, he objected to a proposed investigation by the
House of some vague and irresponsible insinuations made in a recent
newspaper letter against sundry members who were not named or otherwise
identified. Graves insisted that this speech was an insult to the author
of the article, whose championship he gratuitously undertook.
The first two shots were thrown away on both sides. At the third fire,
Cilley fell upon his face, his adversary’s bullet having killed him
instantly. When the news of his death spread through Washington,
indignation against Graves rose to fever heat, and his public career
ended with that hour. The wantonness of such a sacrifice of a useful
life, where the writer who figured as the cause of the quarrel did not
even take a part in it, gave special point to the condemnation of the
false standard of honor set up by the “code.” The funeral services for
Cilley at the Capitol were attended by the President and Cabinet, in
testimony to the high esteem in which he had universally been held;
while the Supreme Court declined its invitation in a body, as the most
emphatic means of expressing its abhorrence of glossing murder with a
thin coat of etiquette. Ministers, not only in Washington but in all the
more highly civilized parts of the country, denounced dueling from the
pulpit, newspapers published editorials and associations adopted
resolutions against it, additional legislation for the abolition of the
practice was introduced in various legislatures, and Congress passed an
act to punish, with a term in the penitentiary, the sending or
acceptance of a challenge in the District of Columbia.
[Illustration: _Stage Entrance through which Booth Escaped_]