A stranger in Washington, looking down the wide outer avenue named
"Massachusetts," which goes bowling from knoll to knoll and disappears
in the unknown hills of the east, has no notion that it leads
anywhere, and gives up the conundrum. On the contrary, it points
straight to the Washington Asylum, better known as the District
Poor-House, an institution to become hereafter conspicuous to every
tourist who shall prefer the Baltimore and Potomac to the Baltimore
and Ohio Railroad; for the new line crosses the Eastern Branch by a
pile-bridge nearly in the rear of the poor-house, and let us hope that
when the whistle, like
"the pibroch's music, thrills
To the heart of those lone hills,"
the dreary banks and bluffs of the Eastern Branch will show more
frequent signs of habitation and visitation.
To visit the poor-house one must have a "permit" from the mayor,
physician, or a poor commissioner. Provided with this, he will follow
out Pennsylvania Avenue over Capitol Hill, until nearly at the brink
of the Anacostia or Eastern Branch, when by the oblique avenue called
"Georgia" he will pass to his right the Congressional burying-ground,
and arriving at the powder magazine in front, draw up at the almshouse
gate, a mile and a quarter from the palace of Congress.
It is a smart brick building, four stories high, with green trimmings,
standing on the last promontory of some grassy commons beloved of
geese and billygoats. The short, black cedars, which appear to be a
species of vegetable crape, give a stubby look of grief to the region
round the poor-house, and, thickest at the Congressional Cemetery,
screen from the paupers the view of the city. Across the plains, once
made populous by army hospitals, few objects move except funeral
processions, creeping toward the graveyard or receding at a merry
gait, and occasional pensioners, out on leave, coming home dutifully
to their bed of charity. The report of some sportsman's gun, where he
is rowing in the marshes of the gray river, sometimes raises echoes in
the high hills and ravines of the other shore, where, many years ago,
the rifles of Graves and Cilley were heard by every partisan in the
land. Now the tall forts, raised in the war, are silent and deserted;
the few villas and farm-houses look from their background of pine upon
the smart edifice on the city shore, and its circle of hospitals
nearer the water, and its small-pox hospital a little removed, and
upon the dead-house and the Potter's Field at the river brink. We all
know the melancholy landscape of a poor-house.
The Potter's Field preceded the poor-house on this site by many years.
The almshouse was formerly erected on M Street, between Sixth and
Seventh, and, being removed here, it burned to the ground in the month
of March, fourteen years ago, when the present brick structure was
raised. The entire premises, of which the main part is the almshouse
garden, occupy less than fifty acres, and the number of inmates is
less than two hundred, the females preponderating in the proportion of
three to one. Under the same roof are the almshouse and the
work-house, the inmates of the former being styled "Infirmants," and
of the latter "Penitents." The government of the institution is vested
in three commissioners, to whom is responsible the intendent, Mr.
Joseph F. Hodgson, a very cheerful and practical-looking "Bumble."
Every Wednesday the three commissioners meet at this almshouse and
receive the weekly reports of the intendent, physician, and gardener.
Once every year these officers, and the matron, wagoner, and baker are
elected. Sixteen ounces of bread and eight ounces of beef are the
ration of the district pauper. The turnkey, gate-keeper, chief
watchmen, and chief nurses, are selected from the inmates. The gates
are closed at sunset, and the lights go out at eight P.M. all
winter. The inmates wear a uniform, labelled in large letters
"Work-house," or "Washington Asylum."
The poor-house is an institution coeval with the capital. We are told
that while crabbed old Davy Burns, the owner of the most valuable part
of the site of Washington City, was haggling with General Washington
over his proportion of lots, his neglected and intemperate brother,
Tommy, was an inmate of the poor-house.
Thus, while the Romulus of the place married his daughter to a
Congressman, and was buried in a "mausoleum" on H Street, Remus died
without the walls and mingled his ashes, perhaps, with paupers.
The vaunted metropolis of the republican hopes of mankind--for such
was Washington, the fabulous city, advertised and praised in every
capital of Western Europe--drew to its site artists, adventurers, and
speculators from all lands. From Thomas Law, a secretary of Warren
Hastings, who wasted the earnings of India on enterprises here, to a
Frenchman who died on the guillotine for practising with an infernal
machine upon the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, the long train of
pilgrims came and saw and despaired, and many of them, perhaps, lie in
the Potter's Field. Old books and newspapers, chary on such personal
questions, contain occasional references as to some sculptor's
suicide, or to the straits of this or that French officer, a claimant
about Congress; and we know that Major L'Enfant, who conceived the
plan of the place, sought refuge with a pitying friend and died here
penniless. The long war of twenty years in Europe brought to America
thousands in search of safety and rest, and to these the magnetism of
the word "capital" was often the song of the siren wiling them to the
poor-house. By the time Europe had wearied of the sword, the fatality
attending high living, large slave-tilled estates, the love of
official society, and the defective education of the young men of
tide-water Virginia and Maryland, produced a new class of native-born
errants and broken profligates at Washington, and many a life whose
memories began with a coach-and-four and a park of deer ended them
between the coverlets of a poor-house bed. The old times were, after
all, very hollow times! We are fond of reading about the hospitality
of the Madisonian age, but could so many have accepted it if all were
prosperous?
In our time, work being the fate and the redemption of us all, the
District Almshouse contains few government employés. Now and then, as
Mr. Hodgson told us, some clerk, spent with sickness or exhausted by
evil indulgences, takes the inevitable road across the vacant plains
and eats his pauper ration in silence or in resignation; but the age
is better, not, perhaps, because the heart of man is changed, but in
that society is organized upon truer principles of honor, of
manfulness, and of labor. The class of well-bred young men who are
ashamed to admit that they must earn their living, and who affect the
company of gamesters and chicken-fighters, has some remnants left
among us, but they find no aliment in the public sentiment, and hear
no response in the public tone. Duelling is over; visiting one's
relatives as a profession is done; thrift is no more a reproach, and
even the reputation of being a miser is rather complimentary to a man.
The worst chapters of humanity in America are those narrating the
indigence of the old agricultural families on the streams of the
Chesapeake; the quarterly sale of a slave to supply the demands of a
false understanding of generosity; the inhuman revelling of one's
friends upon the last possessions of his family, holding it to be a
jest to precipitate his ruin; the wild orgies held on the glebe of
some old parish church, horses hitched to the gravestones, and punch
mixed in the baptismal font; and at the last, delirium, impotence,
decay! Let those who would understand it read Bishop Meade, or descend
the Potomac and Rappahannock, even at this day, and cross certain
thresholds.
The Washington poor-house seems to be well-arranged, except in one
respect: under the same roof, divided only by a partition and a
corridor, the vicious are lodged for punishment and the unfortunate
for refuge.
We passed through a part of the building where, among old, toothless
women, semi-imbecile girls--the relicts of error, the heirs of
affliction--three babies of one mother were in charge of a strong,
rosy Irish nurse. Two of them, twins, were in her lap, and a third
upon the floor halloaing for joy. Such noble specimens of childhood we
had never seen; heads like Cæsar's, eyes bright as the depths of wells
into which one laughs and receives his laughter back, and the
complexions and carriage of high birth. The woman was suckling them
all, and all crowed alternately, so that they made the bare floors and
walls light up as with pictures. A few yards off, though out of
hearing, were the thick forms of criminals, drunkards, wantons, and
vagrants, seen through the iron bars of their wicket, raising the
croon and song of an idle din, drumming on the floor, or moving to and
fro restlessly. Beneath this part of the almshouse were cells where
bad cases were locked up. The association of the poor and the wicked
affected us painfully.
Strolling into the syphilitic wards, where, in the awful contemplation
of their daily, piecemeal decay, the silent victims were stretched all
day upon their cots; among the idiotic and the crazed; into the
apartments of the aged poor, seeing, let us hope, blessed visions of
life beyond these shambles; and drinking in, as we walked, the solemn
but needful lesson of our own possibilities and the mutations of our
nature, we stood at last among the graves of the almshouse dead--those
who have escaped the dissecting-knife. Scattered about, with little
stones and mounds here and there, under the occasional sullen green of
cedars, a dead-cart and a spade sticking up as symbols, and the
neglected river, deserted as the Styx, plashing against the low banks,
we felt the sobering melancholy of the spot and made the prayer of
"Give me neither poverty nor riches!"
1871.