MONUMENTS AND MEMORIES
Among the projects in the minds of the founders of the federal city was
a monument to celebrate the success of the American Revolution. George
Washington personally selected the site for it, due south of the center
of the President’s House. Meanwhile the Continental Congress had
recommended the erection of an equestrian statue of General Washington,
and, immediately after his death, the Congress then in session resolved
to rear a monument under which his body should be entombed. But, though
resolutions were cheap, monuments were costly, and the project gradually
faded out of mind till revived in 1816 by a member of Congress from
South Carolina. Still nothing happened, till another generation devised
a plan for raising the money by popular subscription without waiting
longer for a Government appropriation. The Washington Monument Society
was organized with a membership fee of one dollar, so as to give every
American opportunity to subscribe. By 1848 a sufficient fund had been
collected to spur Congress into presenting a site; and the spot chosen
was that marked by Washington for the monument to the Revolution, thus
happily combining his plan with the nation’s tribute to himself. Tests
of the ground showed that, in order to get a safe footing, it would be
necessary to move a little further to the eastward, which accounts for
the present monument’s being not quite on the short axis of the White
House.
For the original plan of a statue, an obelisk of granite and marble was
substituted, which by its simplicity of lines, its towering height, and
its purity of color, should symbolize the exceptional character and
services of the foremost American. The building fund held out pretty
well till a politico-religious quarrel arose over the acceptance, for
incorporation in the monument, of a fine block of African marble sent by
the Pope; and on Washington’s birthday, 1855, a Know-Nothing mob
descended upon the headquarters of the Society, seized its books and
papers, and took forcible possession of the monument. The Know-Nothing
party ended its political existence three years later, and the monument
went back to its former custodians; but the riotous demonstration had
checked the orderly progress of the work, and, as the Civil War was
imminent, the shaft, then one hundred seventy-eight feet high, was
roofed over to await the return of normal conditions. It was not till
1876 that, under the patriotic impetus of the centenary, Congress was
induced to coöperate. The work was vigorously pushed from 1880 to 1884;
and in the spring of 1885, when it had attained a height of five hundred
fifty-five feet and five and five-tenths inches, occurred the formal
dedication of the Washington National Monument as we see it to-day.
For the benefit of any one whose pleasure in a masterpiece is measured
with a plummet, it may be noted that the Monument falls less than fifty
feet short of the Tower of Babel; to him who revels in terms of
distance, the glistening pile will appeal on the ground that it is
visible from a crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains, more than forty miles
away as the bee flies. But most of its neighbors in Washington find it
for other reasons an unceasing joy. To us it is more truly at the heart
of things than even the Capitol. It is the hoary sentinel at our
water-gate; or, spread the city out like a fan, and the Monument is the
pivot which holds the frame together.
The visitor who has seen it once has just begun to see it. A
smooth-faced obelisk, devoid of ornament, it would appear the stolidest
object in the landscape; in truth, it is as versatile as the clouds.
Every change in your position reveals it in a new phase. Go close to it
and look up, and its walls seem to rise infinitely and dissolve into the
atmosphere; stand on the neighboring hills, and you are tempted to throw
a stone over its top; sail down the Potomac, and the slender white shaft
is still sending its farewells after you when the city has passed out of
sight. It plays chameleon to the weather. It may be gay one moment and
grave the next, like the world. Sometimes, in the varying lights, it
loses its perspective and becomes merely a flat blade struck against
space; an hour later, every line and seam is marked with the crispness
of chiseled sculpture. On a fair morning, it is radiant under the first
beams of the rising sun; in the full of the moon, it is like a thing
from another world--cold, shimmering, unreal. Often in the spring and
fall its peak is lost in vapor, and the shaft looks as if it were a
tall, thin Ossa penetrating the home of the gods. Again, with its base
wrapped in fog and its summit in cloud, it is a symbol of human destiny,
emerging from one mystery only to pass into another. Always the same,
yet never twice alike, it is to the old Washingtonian a being instinct
with life, a personality to be known and loved. It has relatively
little to tell the passing stranger, but many confidences for the friend
of years.
To realize all that it is to us, you must see it on a changeable day.
Come with me then to the Capitol, whence, from an outlook on the western
terrace, we face a thick and troubled sky. The air is murky. Clouds
fringed with gray fleece, which have been hanging so low as to hide the
apex of the Monument, are folding back upon themselves in the southern
heavens, forming a rampart dark and forbidding. Against this the obelisk
is projected, having caught and held one ray of pure sunshine which has
found an opening and shot through like a searchlight. It is plain that
an atmospheric battle is at hand. The garrulous city seems struck dumb;
the timid trees are shivering with apprehension; the voice of the wind
is half sob and half warning. The search-ray vanishes as the door of the
cloud fort is closed and the rumbling of the bolts is heard behind it.
The landscape in the background is blotted from view by eddies of yellow
dust, as if a myriad of horsemen were making a tentative charge. Silent
and unmoved, the obelisk stands there, a white warrior bidding defiance
to the forces of sky and earth. As the subsiding dust marks the retreat
of the cavalry, the artillery opens fire. First one masked porthole and
then another belches flame, but the sharp crash or dull roar which
follows passes quite unnoticed by the champion. Then comes the rattle of
musketry, as a sheet of hail sweeps across the field.
We are not watching a combat, only an assault, for these demonstrations
call forth no response. On the champion--taking everything, giving
nothing--the only effect they produce is a change of color from snowy
white to ashen gray. Even that is but for a moment. As the storm of hail
melts into a shower of limpid raindrops to which the relieved trees open
their palms, the wind ceases its wailing, and the wall of cloud falls
apart to let the sun’s rays through once more.
The Monument is, of course, only one of many memorials to great men in
Washington. We have heroes and philanthropists, poets and physicians,
soldiers and men of science, mounted and afoot, standing and sitting. We
have horses in every posture that will hold a rider: Jackson’s balanced
on its hind legs like the toy charger on the nursery mantelpiece;
Washington’s getting ready to try the same trick; Sheridan’s dashing
along the line to the lilt of Buchanan Read’s poem; Pulaski’s, Greene’s
and McPherson’s, Hancock’s and McClellan’s and Logan’s, walking calmly
over the field; Scott’s and Sherman’s watching the parade. The best
equestrian statue is that of General George H. Thomas, by Quincy Ward,
at the junction of Massachusetts Avenue with Fourteenth Street. Here we
have the acme of art in treating such a subject: spirit coupled with
repose. The horse has been moving, but has been checked by the rider to
give him a chance to look about; they could go on the next moment if
need be, or they could stand indefinitely just as they are.
The Scott statue, at Massachusetts Avenue and Sixteenth Street, is good
if we take it apart and examine it piecemeal; but the massive rider
threatens to break down his slender-limbed steed, which is, by some
mischance, of the mare’s build and not the stallion’s. General Sheridan,
who used to live within a stone’s throw of this statue, lay while ill in
a bedroom commanding a view of it. “I hope,” he remarked one day, “that
if a grateful country ever commemorates me in bronze, it will give me a
better mount than old Scott’s!” It is hard to find anything new to do
with a general officer and a horse without putting them into some
impossible attitude. A sculptor who attempts a reasonable innovation is
liable to be snubbed for it, as one was not long ago when he offered in
competition a statue of General Grant, dismounted, with his bridle
swung over one of his arms while he used the other hand to hold his
field-glass.
Some of the best-known statues in the city have attracted as much
attention by their travels as by their artistic qualities. One of these
is Greenough’s colossal marble presentment of George Washington, which
visitors to the Capitol ten years ago will recall as standing in the
open space facing the main east portico. Greenough was in Italy in 1835,
when it was ordered, and spent eight years on its production. It shows
Washington seated, nude to the waist, and below that draped in a flowing
robe. It weighed, when finished, twelve tons without a pedestal, and
required twenty-two yoke of oxen to haul from Florence to Genoa.
Peasants who saw it on the way took it for the image of some mighty
saint, and dropped upon their knees and crossed themselves as it passed.
The man-of-war which was waiting for it at Genoa had no hatchway large
enough to take it in, so a merchant vessel had to be chartered for its
voyage to America. Arrived at the Capitol, where it was intended to
stand in the center of the rotunda, it could not be squeezed through the
doors, and the masonry had to be cut away. Then it was discovered that
it was causing the floor to settle, and a lot of shoring had to be done
in the crypt underneath. Finally, as it was not suited to its place, the
masonry around the doorway was ripped out again, and the statue was set
up in the plaza, where it remained till 1908, the sport of rains and
frosts and souvenir-maniacs, when it took what every one hopes will be
its last journey--to the National Museum. The original purpose of
Congress was to have a “pedestrian statue” costing, all told, five
thousand dollars. What has eventuated is Washington’s head set on a
torso of Jupiter Tonans, costing, with all its traveling expenses, more
than fifty thousand dollars.
Another peregrinating statue is that of Thomas Jefferson, which stands
to-day against the east wall of the rotunda. In 1833 it occupied the
center of this room. When Greenough’s Washington was brought in,
Jefferson was removed to the Library of Congress, which was then housed
in the rooms of the west front of the Capitol. In 1850 it was carried up
to the White House and planted in the middle of the north garden. It
held that site for twenty-four years and then came back to the rotunda,
from which there is no reason to think it will be moved again.
The only parallel to these instances of frequent shifts in the local art
world is the case of a painting entitled “Love and Life,” presented by
the English artist, George F. Watts, to our Government. Mr. Cleveland,
who was President at the time, hung it in the White House, but the
prudish comments passed upon it by visitors led to its transfer to the
Corcoran Gallery of Art. In the Roosevelt administration it made three
trips, first to the White House, then back to the Corcoran Gallery, and
then to the White House again, where it rested till President Taft came
in, only to be rebanished to the Corcoran Gallery. President Wilson had
it returned to the White House, and there it is at the present writing.
Although there has never been in Washington a definite scheme for the
location of statues, which have been planted, hit or miss, wherever
space offered, accident has arranged a few of them so as to form a
rather remarkable historical series. Starting with the Washington
National Monument, in honor of the foremost figure in the Revolution and
the President who set in motion the machinery of the embryo republic, we
pass directly northward to the White House, home of all his successors
in the Presidency and emblematic of the civil government which emerged
from the War for Independence. A few hundred feet further northward
stands the statue of Andrew Jackson, the hero of the War of 1812, the
first fought by the United States as a nation. About a half-mile more
to the north we reach the statue of Winfield Scott, the general whose
capture of Mexico City ended the second foreign war in which the nation
engaged. All that is needed to complete this remarkable procession is a
memorial arch on Sixteenth Street heights, to the soldiers and sailors
on both sides of the Civil War which cemented the Union begun under
Washington.
Strange to say, the city which best knew Lincoln and Grant has had, up
to this time, no out-of-doors statue whatever of Grant and no adequate
one of Lincoln. In Lincoln Park, about a mile east of the Capitol, is
the Emancipation statue, and in front of the City Hall there is an
insignificant standing figure of Lincoln, perched on a pillar so high
that the features can be seen only dimly. A statue of Grant will later
occupy the central pedestal of a group in the little park at the foot of
the western slope of the Capitol grounds, which it is proposed to call
Union Square. On either side of Grant, the plan originally was to place
Sherman and Sheridan; but as the Sherman and Sheridan statues already
set up elsewhere are so diverse in character, it has been questioned
whether they would fit into the Union Square group. After many
suggestions, controversies, and reports, Congress decided, a year or
two ago, upon a form of memorial for Lincoln, which is already under
way. It will be a marble temple, designed by Henry Bacon, in Potomac
Park, with a statue of the War President, by Daniel Chester French,
visible in the recesses of its dignified colonnade.
Besides the scores of statues and miles of painted portraits which keep
vivid the memory of great and good men who are gone, Washington has many
institutions and buildings with personal associations that fulfil a
similar purpose. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, for instance, was the gift
of the late William W. Corcoran, the financier. The national deaf-mute
college at Kendall Green, on the northeastern edge of the city, recalls
its original benefactor, Amos Kendall, who was Postmaster-general under
Jackson, as well as the work of Doctor Edward M. Gallaudet in raising it
from its modest beginnings to its present eminence. The Pension Office,
in which eight inaugural balls have been held, takes first rank among
our public edifices for architectural ugliness. It is nevertheless an
honor to the memory of Quartermaster-general Meigs, who asked the
privilege of proving, in an era of extravagance, that a suitable
building could be reared for the money allotted to it, and who turned
back into the treasury a large slice of his appropriation after having
paid every bill. The present Library of Congress is, in a like manner,
a monument to the late Bernard R. Green, whose engineering skill and
administrative faculty performed a feat corresponding to General
Meigs’s; it reminds us, also, of Thomas Jefferson, whose private
library, purchased after the burning of the Capitol, formed the nucleus
of the present magnificent collection. The Soldiers’ Home, near the
north boundary of the city, commemorates General Scott’s success in
Mexico, the tribute he exacted there for a breach of truce being used in
founding this beautiful retreat, where veterans of the regular army may
pass their declining years in comfort.
Few people, probably, are aware that the Smithsonian Institution, whose
fame is as wide as civilization, owes its origin to the rejection of a
manuscript prepared for publication. James Smithson, an Englishman of
means, who had been a frequent contributor to the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London, sent in, a little less than
a century ago, a paper which the censors refused to print; and its
author avenged the affront by altering his will, in which he had
bequeathed his entire fortune to the Society, so as to throw the
reversion to the United States, a country he had never seen, to be used
for “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among
men.” Congress had a long quibble about the disposal of the money, but
at last hit upon a plan, and since then has turned over much of the
public scientific research work to be performed “under the direction of
the Smithsonian Institution.” The accumulation of trophies of
exploration, historical relics, and gifts of objects of art and industry
from foreign potentates, presently overflowed the accommodations of the
Institution proper, and a National Museum was built to house these
treasures. The Smithsonian commemorates not only the beneficence of
Smithson, but the great achievements of its several executive heads,
like Joseph Henry’s in electromagnetism, Spencer F. Baird’s in the
culture of fish as a source of food-supply, and Samuel P. Langley’s in
aërial navigation and the standardization of time.
The old City Hall, better known now as the District Court House, will be
remembered as the place where the first President Harrison probably
caught the cold which resulted in his death. It has a tragic association
with another President, also, for in one of its court-rooms was
conducted the trial of Guiteau for assassinating James A. Garfield. This
trial excited vigorous comment throughout the country by what seemed to
many critics an unwarrantable latitude allowed the defendant for
self-exploitation.
[Illustration: _Rendezvous of the Lincoln Conspirators_]
Judge Walter T. Cox, who presided, was one of the ablest and most
conscientious jurists who ever sat on the Supreme bench of the District.
From personal attendance on the trial, I feel sure that the course
pursued by him was the only one which could have given the jury a sure
ground for dooming the assassin to death; and it was doubtless a
realization of that fact which held in check the mob spirit that began
to show itself at one stage and threatened to save the Government the
trouble of putting up a gallows. The popular rancor against Guiteau was
so strong that in order to get him safely into the Court House from the
“black Maria” which brought him from the jail every morning, and to
reverse the operation at the close of every day’s session, the vehicle
was backed up within about twenty feet of one of the basement doors, and
a double file of police, standing shoulder to shoulder with clubs drawn,
made a narrow little lane through which he was rushed at a quickstep,
his face blanched with terror, and his furtive eyes fixed on the earth.
Another historical incident is associated with the old building, to
which many attribute the final resolve of President Lincoln to issue his
Emancipation Proclamation. I refer to the abolition of slavery in the
District of Columbia. A bill to this end, introduced by Henry Wilson in
December, 1861, was hotly debated in Congress but finally passed, and
was signed on April 16, 1862. Only loyal owners were to be paid for
their slaves, and every applicant for compensation had to take an
iron-clad oath of allegiance to the Government. The whole business was
handled by a board of three commissioners, who employed for their
assistance an experienced slave-dealer imported from Baltimore. They met
in one of the court-rooms, and the dealer put the negroes through their
paces just as he had been accustomed to in the heyday of his trade,
making them dance to show their suppleness and bite various tough
substances as a test of the soundness of their teeth. Many of the black
men and women came into the room singing hosannas to glorify the dawn of
freedom. The highest appraisement of any slave was seven hundred and
eighty-eight dollars for a good blacksmith; the lowest was ten dollars
and ninety-five cents for a baby. These were about half the prices which
would have been brought but for the fact that only one million dollars
was appropriated, whereas the total estimated value of the slaves paid
for was nearer two million, and all payments had to be scaled
accordingly.
A remarkable feature of this episode was the discovery of how many
slaveholders there were who were not white people. Now and then in the
past, when for some special reason a negro had been freed, he would save
his earnings till he had accumulated enough to buy his wife and
children, who still remained in bondage to him till he saw fit to
manumit them. One case which attracted wide attention was that of a
woman who had bought her husband, a graceless scamp who proceeded to
celebrate his good fortune by becoming an incorrigible drunkard. This
had so outraged the feelings of his wife that she had finally sold him
to a dealer who was picking up a boatload of cheap slaves to carry
south. From that hour she had lost sight of him; but she haunted the
commissioners’ sessions from day to day in the hope that the Government,
now that it was going into the slave-buying business, might give her a
little addition to the bargain price at which she had sold the old man.
Judiciary Square, in which the Court House and the Pension Office stand,
was, when Chief Justice Taney lived in Indiana Avenue, a neighborhood of
consequence. Several of the older buildings thereabout exhale a flavor
of fifty or sixty years ago, and tradition connects them with such
personages as Rufus Choate, Caleb Cushing, Thomas H. Benton, Stephen A.
Douglas, John C. Fremont, and John A. Dix.
Opposite the east park of the Capitol, as we have already seen, stands
the Old Capitol, a building with a variegated history. It was erected
for the accommodation of Congress after the burning of the Capitol by
the British. In it Henry Clay passed some years of his Speakership, and
till very lately there was a scar on the wall of one of the rooms which
was said to have been made by his desk. Under its roof the first
Senators from Indiana, Illinois, and Mississippi took their seats. In
front of it, President Monroe was inaugurated. After Congress left it to
return to the restored Capitol, it was rented for a boarding-house,
patronized chiefly by Senators and Representatives. Here John C. Calhoun
lived for some time, and here he died. In one of the rooms, Persico, the
Italian sculptor, worked out the model of his “Discoverer.” In another,
Ann Royall edited her _Huntress_.
After the Civil War broke out, the Old Capitol was turned into a jail
for the confinement of military offenders who were awaiting trial by
court-martial, and for Confederate spies and other persons accused of
unlawfully giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Belle Boyd, who was
locked up there for a while, has left us her impressions of the place as
“a vast brick building, like all prisons, somber, chilling, and
repulsive.” She describes William P. Wood, who was superintendent of
the prison, as “having a humane heart beneath a rough exterior.” Every
Sunday he used to provide facilities for religious worship to his
compulsory guests, announcing the hours and forms in characteristic
fashion: “All you who want to hear the word of God preached according to
Jeff Davis, go down into the yard; and all of you who want to hear it
preached according to Abe Lincoln, go into No. 16.” In the jail yard
Henry Wirz, who had been the keeper of the Confederate military prison
at Andersonville, Georgia, where so many Union soldiers died of
starvation and disease, was hanged for murder. At the close of the war
the building was divided into a block of dwellings, of which the
southernmost was long the home of the late Justice Field of the Supreme
Court. The Justice used to enjoy telling his visitors about the
distinguished men from the South who, after dining at his table, had
roamed over the premises and located their one-time places of
confinement.
The oldest house of worship in Washington is St. Paul’s, a spireless
Protestant Episcopal church not far from the Soldiers’ Home. It stands
well toward the rear of the Rock Creek Cemetery, which also contains the
world-famous bronze by St. Gaudens, in the Adams lot. This is a seated
female figure, in flowing classic drapery, to which no one has ventured
to attach a permanent title, though it has been variously known as
“Grief” and “The Peace of God.” St. Paul’s goes back to the colonial era
and was built of brick imported from England. A younger church,
nevertheless numbered among the oldest relics of its class within the
city proper, is St. John’s, at the corner of Sixteenth and H streets. It
was designed by Latrobe about the time he undertook the restoration of
the Capitol and was consecrated in 1816. It has long been called “the
President’s church” because so many tenants of the White House, just
across Lafayette Square, have worshiped in it.
Madison and Monroe were the first, and the vestry soon set apart one pew
to be preserved always for the free use of the reigning Presidential
family. John Quincy Adams was a Unitarian, but came to the afternoon
services; and Jackson, though a Methodist, was frequently to be seen
there. Van Buren was a constant attendant both as Vice-president and as
President. William Henry Harrison, for the month he lived in Washington,
came regularly, regardless of the weather or his state of health; and he
was to have been confirmed the very week he died. Tyler was a member of
the congregation. Polk had other affiliations, but Taylor, Fillmore,
and Buchanan used the President’s pew. Then came a break in the line
till Arthur entered the White House; and his retirement appears to have
been followed by another lapse in the succession till Mrs. Roosevelt
revived it. Her husband used to accompany her from time to time, though
he retained his active connection with the Reformed (Dutch) communion.
Since the Roosevelts, the line has been broken again. John Quincy Adams
became so fond of St. John’s that, when he returned to Washington as a
Representative, he renewed his Sunday visits. He paid close attention to
the preliminary service but seemed to sleep through the sermon, though
he was usually able to repeat the next day, with considerable accuracy,
the main things the minister had said.
This whole neighborhood bristles with memories of great people. The old
Tayloe mansion was styled, in its later years, “the Cream-white House,”
partly because of its color, and partly in jocose reference to its
occupancy by two or three Vice-presidents. The house on the corner north
of it, now owned by the Cosmos Club, was the home of Dolly Madison in
her widowhood. After her death it passed into the hands of Charles
Wilkes, the gallant naval officer who was for many years the
unrecognized discoverer of the Antarctic continent, and who, in the
early days of the Civil War, forcibly took two of his late Washington
neighbors, Messrs. Mason and Slidell, off the British steamer _Trent_,
which was conveying them to Europe on a diplomatic mission for the
Confederate Government. South of the Tayloe house is the Belasco
Theater, on the site of the old-fashioned red brick building in which
occurred the attempted assassination of Secretary Seward and where James
G. Blaine passed the last years of his life. On H Street, about a block
to the eastward, General McClellan made his headquarters in the
intervals between his commands of the Army of the Potomac; while in a
near cluster are former homes of Commodore Decatur, John Quincy Adams,
Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Montgomery Blair, Gideon Welles, George
Bancroft, and John Hay, as well as the house where the Ashburton treaty
was negotiated and where Owen Meredith wrote his “Lucile.” Edward
Everett, Jefferson Davis, and Tobias Lear lived, at various times, a
short distance away.
One of my favorite excursions about the city with friends who revere the
memory of the War President is what I call my “Lincoln pilgrimage.” We
start at the White House, turn eastward and take F Street to Tenth, and
then southward a half-square. This brings us in front of the building
which once was Ford’s Theater, by the route taken by Lincoln on the
evening of Good Friday, 1865. Here are the arches which once opened into
the theater lobby but are now used for ground-floor windows; through one
of them he passed on his way to his box. Directly across the street is
the house to which he was carried to die. In it is preserved the Oldroyd
collection of Lincoln relics, a really remarkable array. After
inspecting it, we return to F Street and go eastward again to about the
middle of the block, where an alley emerges from a lower level south of
us. Down into this we dive, and, making a sharp right-angle turn, find
ourselves at the old stage-door of the theater, beside which Booth left
his horse, and through which he made his dash for liberty after his mad
deed.
Back again up the alley we climb, through F Street to Ninth, through
Ninth to H, and eastward on H Street to Number 604, the house of Mrs.
Surratt, the rendezvous of the conspirators and the place where some of
them were captured. It looks to-day very much as it did on the night of
the assassination. Retracing our steps to Seventh Street, we board a
southbound car, which carries us to the gate of the reservation now
occupied by the Washington Barracks and the Army War College. Here,
within a few hundred feet of the entrance, used to stand the military
prison where the conspirators were confined, and in the yard of which
they paid the last penalty for their crime.
* * * * *
And here, dear reader, we come to the end of our present walks and talks
about Washington. As I warned you at the outset, I have treated our
wanderings as a pleasure-jaunt rather than as a medium of solid
instruction. When you find yourself thirsting for the severely
practical, you can come back and make the round again, if you choose, in
a sight-seeing car, and the megaphone-man will point out to you twice as
many objects of interest and give you three times as much information
about them--accurate or otherwise. He will take pains to show you all
the Government buildings and the hotels, the foreign legations and the
theaters, the millionaires’ houses, and parks and circles and statuary
which I have dismissed with a line or left unmentioned. He will tell you
how many tons every bronze weighs, how long every edifice took in
building, and how large a fortune every Senator amassed before crowning
his career with a tour of public service. I could have told you these
things, too, but, rather than force too fast a gait upon you, I have
left them for the megaphone-man and taken for my task some odds and
ends he could not take for his. I should have liked to tell you how the
Government swept all the electric wires out of the sky and hid them
underground; how it drained the marshes on the city’s western edge,
cleared the channels of the Potomac, and built out of the dredgings a
big pleasure-ground; and how it got rid of the annual inundations, in
one of which, just about a generation ago, I crossed the busiest part of
Pennsylvania Avenue in a rowboat.
These improvements, and others in the same category, have been
paralleled by the changes in the architecture of the city, at the
expense of tearing down something old to make room for whatever new was
to go up. Touched by the spirit of progress, the face of Washington is
rapidly becoming as destitute of landmarks as its origin is destitute of
myths, and the artist who visits it in quest of the antique has a hunt
before him. Nevertheless, it has not lost its picturesque appeal for the
pencil guided by imagination, or its colorful legends for the memory
seeking relief from more serious things.
Hence this book.
[Illustration]
INDEX
Adams, Abigail, 9, 115, 119.
John, 7, 73, 110, 119, 150, 156, 228.
John Quincy, 20, 58, 65, 96, 147, 150, 151, 181, 280, 281, 282.
Mrs. John Quincy, 151.
Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, 23, 192, 233.
Alexandria, Va., 4, 12, 54, 238.
Allston, Theodosia, 242.
Anacostia, D.C., 84.
Anderson, Major Robert, 193.
Arlington Cemetery, 235.
Army War College, 17, 283.
Arthur, Chester A., 224, 281.
Bagot, Sir George, 138.
Baird, Spencer F., 274.
Bancroft, George, 282.
Barksdale, William, 103.
Barney, Joshua, 15.
Barron, James, 257.
Beanes, Dr. William, 252.
Belasco Theater, 282.
Bell, John, 27.
Bellows, Rev. Dr. Henry W., 198.
Benton, Joel, 254.
Thomas H., 277.
Bladensburg, Md., 15, 135, 257.
Blaine, James G., 203, 215, 227, 282.
Blair, Montgomery, 282.
Bodisco, Baron, 254.
Baroness, 255.
Bonaparte, Jerome, 128.
Booth, John Wilkes, 43.
Boyd, Belle, 278.
Braddock, Edward, 239, 243.
Breckinridge, John C., 27, 30.
William C. P., 105.
Brooks, Rt. Rev. Phillips, 243.
Preston, 68, 189.
Buchanan, James, 30, 190, 196, 281.
Buchignani, Mrs. (See MRS. JOHN H. EATON.)
Bulfinch, Charles, 56, 57, 60.
Bull Run, Battle of, 37, 236.
Burlingame, Anson, 190.
Burns, David, 4.
Burr, Aaron, 93, 242.
Calhoun, John C., 164, 278.
Capitol, 6, 15, 45, 54, 136.
Cary, Mary, 248.
Chase, Salmon P., 202.
Choate, Rufus, 277.
Cilley, Jonathan, 259.
City Hall, 173, 271, 274, 277.
Civil War, 25, 26, 194, 278.
Clay, Henry, 65, 68, 140, 152, 164, 172, 181, 187, 256, 278, 282.
Cleveland, Frances Folsom, 226, 229.
Grover, 112, 225, 229, 232.
Clinton, George, 93.
Cobb, Howell, 191.
Cockburn, Sir George, 15, 253.
Congress, 8, 19, 54, 82, 85, 138.
(See also SENATE and HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.)
Conkling, Roscoe, 203, 215.
Corcoran, William W., 254.
Corcoran Gallery of Art, 270, 272.
Cosmos Club, 281.
Court House. (See CITY HALL.)
Covode, John, 102.
Cox, Judge Walter T., 275.
Coxey’s Army, 80.
Craig, Burton F., 102.
Crawford, Thomas, 57.
Crisp, Charles F., 104.
Cunningham, Ann Pamela, 245.
Gushing, Caleb, 214, 277.
Custis, George, 133, 235.
Nellie, 251.
Davis, Harriet Riddle, 209.
Jefferson, 29, 57, 72, 282.
Decatur, Stephen, 257, 282.
Dix, John A., 29, 277.
Donelson, Andrew J., 162.
Mary Emily, 162.
Douglas, Stephen A., 27, 33, 196, 277.
Douglass, Frederick, 221.
Dreams, Strange, of Lincoln, 208.
Dueling, Condemnation of, 260.
Early, Jubal A., 41.
Eaton, John H., 159, 169.
Mrs. John H., 159, 168, 179.
Electoral Commission, 68, 219.
Ellsworth, Ephraim E., 35, 243.
Emancipation Proclamation, 200, 275.
Emancipation Statue, 271.
Everett, Edward, 282.
Field, Cyrus W., 190.
Stephen J., 279.
Fillmore, Millard, 185, 281.
Ford’s Theater, 43, 209, 283.
Fort McHenry, Md., 253.
Fort Myer, Va., 237.
Foster, Sir Augustus, 76, 127.
Franklin Square, 119.
Frelinghuysen, Mrs. Frederick T., 225.
Fremont, Jessie Benton, 255.
John C., 255, 277.
French, Daniel Chester, 272.
Fulton, Robert, 254.
Gallaudet, Dr. Edward M., 272.
Gardiner, David, 180.
Julia, 179.
Garfield, “Grandma,” 222.
James A., 222, 233, 274.
Georgetown, D.C., 3, 11, 12, 251.
Grant, Nellie. (See NELLIE GRANT SARTORIS.)
Ulysses S., 43, 44, 45, 205, 212, 225, 232, 271.
Mrs. Ulysses S., 225.
Graves, William J., 259.
Greeley, Horace, 203, 213.
Green, Bernard R., 273.
Greenough, Horatio, 58, 268.
Grow, Galusha A., 101.
Guiteau, Charles J., 223, 274.
Halford, Elijah W., 228.
Hamlin, Hannibal, 32.
Hancock, Winfield S., 223, 266.
Harrison, Benjamin, 112, 226.
William Henry, 172, 274, 280.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 188.
Hay, John, 282.
Hayes, Lucy Webb, 220.
Rutherford B., 218.
Henry, Joseph, 274.
Hoban, James, 116, 231.
House of Representatives, 10, 56, 63, 76, 85, 139. (See also CONGRESS.)
Hoxie, Vinnie Ream, 211.
Humboldt, Baron von, 125.
Hutchinson Family, 204.
Huygens, Bangeman, 160, 162.
Inaugural Balls, 134, 175, 212, 219.
Jackson, Andrew, 58, 150, 156, 232, 266, 270, 280.
Andrew, Jr., 161.
Mrs. Andrew, 157, 159.
Jay, John, 12, 69.
Jefferson, Thomas, 2, 54, 68, 111, 121, 231, 269.
Johnson, Andrew, 44, 211.
Judiciary Square, 277.
Kearney, Dennis, 222.
Keitt, Lawrence M., 101.
Kendall, Amos, 272.
Key, Francis Scott, 252.
Kilbourn, Hallet, 97.
Kilgore, Constantine Buckley, 109.
King, William R., 142, 188.
Kossuth, Louis, 186.
Lafayette, Marquis de, 65.
Lafayette Park, 5, 118.
Lamar, Lucius Q. C., 102.
Lane, Harriet, 193.
Latrobe, Benjamin H., 56, 280.
Lear, Tobias, 244, 282.
Lee, Robert E., 42, 235.
L’Enfant, Pierre Charles, 5, 83, 231.
Library, Public, 49.
Library of Congress, 273.
Liliuokalani, Queen, 221.
Lincoln, Abraham, 30, 65, 195, 232, 271, 275, 282.
Mary Todd, 196, 208.
“Tad,” 43, 201.
Willie, 201.
Lind, Jennie, 146.
Lovejoy, Owen, 102.
McClellan, George B., 236, 266, 282.
McCreary, James B., 106.
McElroy, Mrs. John, 224.
McKee, “Baby,” 228.
McKinley, William, Jr., 112, 221, 230, 232.
McLean, John, 194.
Madison, Dolly, 19, 78, 115, 124, 135, 144, 281.
James, 14, 54, 125, 132, 280.
Mall, 12, 83, 114.
Marine Band, 77, 124, 178, 225.
Marshall, John, 65, 164.
Martineau, Harriet, 161, 163.
Meigs, Montgomery C., 237, 272.
Mellanelli, Sidi, 127.
Meredith, Owen, 282.
Merry, Anthony, 125.
Mexican War, 22, 182, 271, 273.
Mitchill, Dr. Samuel, 127.
Monroe, Eliza Kortright, 115, 147.
James, 18, 138, 147, 151, 278, 280.
Moore, Thomas, 5, 125.
Morrissey, Mrs. John, 213.
Morse, Samuel F. B., 75, 182.
Mott, Richard T., 102.
Mount Vernon, Va., 244, 249.
Negroes, First, in Inaugural parade, 208.
Nilsson, Christine, 224.
Octagon House, 19, 137.
O’Ferrall, Charles T., 108.
Old Capitol, 20, 278.
O’Neil, “Peggy.” (See Mrs. JOHN H. EATON.)
Paine, Thomas, 129.
Patterson, Elizabeth, 128. (See also JEROME BONAPARTE.)
Peabody, George, 254.
Pension Office, 272, 277.
Pennsylvania Avenue, 10, 47, 49, 114, 285.
Persico, Luigi, 58, 278.
Phillips, Wendell, 214.
Pierce, Franklin, 186.
Mrs. Franklin, 188.
Pohick, Va., 246.
Polk, James K., 182.
Sarah Childress, 182.
Potter, Rt. Rev. Henry C., 243.
Presidents, Deaths of, in office, 43, 176, 185, 208, 223, 230.
Presidents and Congress, 72, 89, 109.
Press, Congress and the, 94.
Prince, Frederick O., 191.
_Princeton_, Sloop-of-War, 180.
Randolph, John, 59, 64, 94, 140, 256.
Robert B., 168.
Ream, Vinnie. (See HOXIE.)
Reed, Thomas B., 79, 103.
Religious Exercises in Congress, 77, 98.
Robinson, William E., 95.
Rock Creek Cemetery, 279.
Rogers, Randolph, 59.
Roosevelt, Edith Kermit, 116, 233, 281.
Theodore, 52, 230, 270, 281.
Root, Elihu, 224.
Ross, Edmund G., 211.
Ross, Robert, 15.
Royall, Ann, 20, 278.
Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 279.
Saint John’s Church, 280.
Saint Paul’s Church, 279.
Sartoris, Algernon, 217.
Nellie Grant, 212, 217.
Scott, Winfield, 39, 183, 186, 194, 236, 266, 267, 271, 273.
Secession, Progress of, movement, 27.
Senate, United States, 10, 55, 68, 71, 86, 139. (See also CONGRESS.)
Seward, William H., 31, 43, 198, 282.
Shepherd, Alexander R., 46.
Sheridan, Philip H., 267, 271.
Sherman, John, 102.
William T., 213, 271.
Shuter’s Hill, 54.
Sickles, Daniel E., 211.
Slavery, 23, 64, 99, 186, 275. (See also EMANCIPATION.)
Smith, Capt. John, 3.
Margaret Bayard, 141.
Smithsonian Institution, 273.
Soldiers’ Home, 84, 273.
Sprague, Kate Chase, 202.
William, 202.
Stanton, Edwin M., 44, 200, 207, 211.
“Star-Spangled Banner,” Song, 252.
Statues of Celebrities, 266.
Stephens, Alexander H., 29, 65.
Stewart, Alexander T., 214.
Stockton, Robert F., 180.
Stranger, “The Female,” 242.
Sumner, Charles, 68, 189.
Sunderland, Rev. Dr. Byron, 99.
Supreme Court of the United States, 11, 67, 74.
Surratt, Mary E., 283.
Taft, William H., 52, 233, 270.
Taney, Roger B., 34, 277.
Tayloe, Mrs. Ogle, 170.
Tayloe House, 281.
Taylor, Zachary, 183, 195, 281.
Telegraph, Atlantic, cable, 190.
First American, 75, 182.
Thomas, George H., 267.
Thornton, Dr. William, 16, 55, 251.
Tilden, Samuel J., 218.
Timberlake, Mrs. (See MRS. JOHN H. EATON.)
Purser, 159, 168.
Virginia, 179.
Tracy, Benjamin F., 228.
_Trent_ Affair, 282.
Trumbull, John, 59.
Turreau, Louis M., 127.
Tyler, John, 177, 280.
Van Buren, John, 171.
Martin, 158, 162, 169, 176, 256, 280.
Victoria, Queen, 190.
Walter, Thomas U., 56, 63.
War of 1812, 14, 135, 270.
Ward, Artemus, 200.
J. Q. A., 267.
Washburn, Cadwallader, 102.
Washburne, Elihu, 102.
Washington, D.C.,
Beginnings of, 1;
Captured by British in 1814, 15, 56, 278;
Growth of, 45;
In Civil War Times, 24, 26;
Journalism in Early Days, 20, 154;
Plan of, 5, 83, 114, 231;
Police Force, 178;
Removal of Government to, 7;
Suburbs of, 235;
Threatened by Gen. Early in 1864, 41;
Varying Fortunes of, 21.
Washington, George, 3, 67, 74, 81, 89, 118, 235, 238, 239, 240, 243, 268.
Martha, 118, 235, 240, 243, 249.
Mary, 249.
Washington National Monument, 261, 270.
Watts, George F., 270.
Webster, Daniel, 68, 140, 164, 173.
Weems, Rev. Mason L., 246.
Welles, Gideon, 282.
White House, 6, 8, 17, 114, 118, 135, 147, 155,
162, 164, 172, 178, 182, 184, 195, 197, 201, 219, 231.
Wilkes, Charles, 281.
Williams, Harriet Beall. (See BARONESS BODISCO.)
Wilmot, David, 64.
Wilson, Henry, 74, 276.
Woodrow, 52, 73, 112, 234, 270.
Windom, William, 228.
Wirz, Henry, 279.
Women visiting Congress, 93, 141.
Wood, William P., 279.