A state dinner at the White House--Mrs. Lincoln--The Cabinet
Ministers--A newspaper correspondent--Good Friday at Washington.
_March 28th._--I was honoured to-day by visits from a great number
of Members of Congress, journalists, and others. Judging from the
expressions of most of the Washington people, they would gladly
see a Southern Cabinet installed in their city. The cold shoulder
is given to Mr. Lincoln, and all kinds of stories and jokes are
circulated at his expense. People take particular pleasure in
telling how he came towards the seat of his Government disguised in
a Scotch cap and cloak, whatever that may mean.
In the evening I repaired to the White House. The servant who
took my hat and coat was particularly inquisitive as to my name
and condition in life; and when he heard I was not a minister,
he seemed inclined to question my right to be there at all:
“for,” said he, “there are none but members of the cabinet, and
their wives and daughters, dining here to-day.” Eventually he
relaxed--instructed me how to place my hat so that it would be
exposed to no indignity, and informed me that I was about to
participate in a prandial enjoyment of no ordinary character. There
was no parade or display, no announcement--no gilded staircase,
with its liveried heralds, transmitting and translating one’s name
from landing to landing. From the unpretending ante-chamber, a walk
across the lofty hall led us to the reception-room, which was the
same as that in which the President held his interview yesterday.
Mrs. Lincoln was already seated to receive her guests. She is of
the middle age and height, of a plumpness degenerating to the
_embonpoint_ natural to her years; her features are plain, her
nose and mouth of an ordinary type, and her manners and appearance
homely, stiffened, however, by the consciousness that her position
requires her to be something more than plain Mrs. Lincoln, the wife
of the Illinois lawyer; she is profuse in the introduction of the
word “sir” in every sentence, which is now almost an Americanism
confined to certain classes, although it was once as common in
England. Her dress I shall not attempt to describe, though it
was very gorgeous and highly coloured. She handled a fan with
much energy, displaying a round, well-proportioned arm, and was
adorned with some simple jewellery. Mrs. Lincoln struck me as being
desirous of making herself agreeable; and I own I was agreeably
disappointed, as the Secessionist ladies at Washington had been
amusing themselves by anecdotes which could scarcely have been
founded on fact.
Several of the Ministers had already arrived; by-and-by all had
come, and the party only waited for General Scott, who seemed
to be the representative man in Washington of the monarchical
idea, and to absorb some of the feeling which is lavished on the
pictures and memory, if not on the monument, of Washington. Whilst
we were waiting, Mr. Seward took me round, and introduced me to
the Ministers, and to their wives and daughters, among the latter,
Miss Chase, who is very attractive, agreeable, and sprightly.
Her father, the Finance Minister, struck me as one of the most
intelligent and distinguished persons in the whole assemblage;
tall, of a good presence, with a well-formed head, fine forehead,
and a face indicating energy and power. There is a peculiar droop
and motion of the lid of one eye, which seems to have suffered from
some injury, that detracts from the agreeable effect of his face;
but, on the whole, he is one who would not pass quite unnoticed in
a European crowd of the same description.
In the whole assemblage there was not a scrap of lace or a piece
of ribbon, except the gorgeous epaulettes of an old naval officer
who had served against us in the last war, and who represented some
branch of the naval department. Nor were the Ministers by any means
remarkable for their personal appearance.
Mr. Cameron, the Secretary for War, a slight man, above the middle
height, with grey hair, deep-set keen grey eyes, and a thin mouth,
gave me the idea of a person of ability and adroitness. His
colleague, the Secretary of the Navy, a small man, with a great
long grey beard and spectacles, did not look like one of much
originality or ability; but people who know Mr. Welles declare
that he is possessed of administrative power, although they admit
that he does not know the stem from the stern of a ship, and are
in doubt whether he ever saw the sea in his life. Mr. Smith, the
Minister of the Interior, is a bright-eyed, smart (I use the word
in the English sense) gentleman, with the reputation of being one
of the most conservative members of the cabinet. Mr. Blair, the
Postmaster-General, is a person of much greater influence than his
position would indicate. He has the reputation of being one of the
most determined republicans in the Ministry; but he held peculiar
notions with reference to the black and the white races, which,
if carried out, would not by any means conduce to the comfort or
happiness of free negroes in the United States. He is a tall,
lean man, with a hard, Scotch, practical-looking head--an anvil
for ideas to be hammered on. His eyes are small and deeply set,
and have a rat-like expression; and he speaks with caution, as
though he weighed every word before he uttered it. The last of the
Ministers is Mr. Bates, a stout, thick-set, common-looking man,
with a large beard, who fills the office of Attorney-General. Some
of the gentlemen were in evening dress; others wore black frock
coats, which it seems, as in Turkey, are considered to be _en
regle_ at a Republican Ministerial dinner.
In the conversation which occurred before dinner, I was amused
to observe the manner in which Mr. Lincoln used the anecdotes
for which he is famous. Where men bred in courts, accustomed to
the world, or versed in diplomacy, would use some subterfuge, or
would make a polite speech, or give a shrug of the shoulders as
the means of getting out of an embarrassing position, Mr. Lincoln
raises a laugh by some bold west-country anecdote, and moves off
in the cloud of merriment produced by his joke. Thus, when Mr.
Bates was remonstrating apparently against the appointment of some
indifferent lawyer to a place of judicial importance, the President
interposed with, “Come now, Bates, he’s not half as bad as you
think. Besides that, I must tell you, he did me a good turn long
ago. When I took to the law, I was going to court one morning, with
some ten or twelve miles of bad road before me, and I had no horse.
The judge overtook me in his waggon. ‘Hollo, Lincoln! Are you not
going to the courthouse? Come in and I’ll give you a seat.’ Well,
I got in, and the judge went on reading his papers. Presently the
waggon struck a stump on one side of the road; then it hopped off
to the other. I looked out, and I saw the driver was jerking from
side to side in his seat; so says I, ‘Judge, I think your coachman
has been taking a little drop too much this morning.’ ‘Well I
declare, Lincoln,’ said he, ‘I should not much wonder if you are
right, for he has nearly upset me half-a-dozen of times since
starting.’ So, putting his head out of the window, he shouted,
‘Why, you infernal scoundrel, you are drunk!’ Upon which, pulling
up his horses, and turning round with great gravity, the coachman
said, ‘By gorra! that’s the first rightful decision you have given
for the last twelvemonth.’” Whilst the company were laughing,
the President beat a quiet retreat from the neighbourhood of the
Attorney-General.
It was at last announced that General Scott was unable to be
present, and that, although actually in the house, he had been
compelled to retire from indisposition, and we moved in to the
banquetting-hall. The first “state dinner,” as it is called, of the
President was not remarkable for ostentation. No liveried servants,
no Persic splendour of ancient plate, or _chefs d’œuvre_ of art
glittered round the board. Vases of flowers decorated the table,
combined with dishes in what may be called the “Gallo-American”
style, with wines which owed their parentage to France, and
their rearing and education to the United States, which abound in
cunning nurses for such productions. The conversation was suited
to the state dinner of a cabinet at which women and strangers
were present. I was seated next Mr. Bates and the very agreeable
and lively Secretary of the President, Mr. Hay, and except when
there was an attentive silence caused by one of the President’s
stories, there was a Babel of small talk round the table, in which
I was surprised to find a diversity of accent almost as great as
if a number of foreigners had been speaking English. I omitted the
name of Mr. Hamlin, the Vice-President, as well as those of less
remarkable people who were present; but it would not be becoming to
pass over a man distinguished for nothing so much as his persistent
and unvarying adhesion to one political doctrine, which has made
him, in combination with the belief in his honesty, the occupant of
a post which leads to the Presidency, in event of any occurrence
which may remove Mr. Lincoln.
After dinner the ladies and gentlemen retired to the drawing-room,
and the circle was increased by the addition of several
politicians. I had an opportunity of conversing with some of the
Ministers, if not with all, from time to time, and I was struck by
the uniform tendency of their remarks in reference to the policy of
Great Britain. They seemed to think that England was bound by her
anti-slavery antecedents to discourage to the utmost any attempts
of the South to establish its independence on a basis of slavery,
and to assume that they were the representatives of an active war
of emancipation. As the veteran Commodore Stewart passed the chair
of the young lady to whom I was speaking, she said, “I suppose,
Mr. Russell, you do not admire that officer?” “On the contrary,” I
said, “I think he is a very fine-looking old man.” “I don’t mean
that,” she replied; “but you know he can’t be very much liked by
you, because he fought so gallantly against you in the last war,
as you must know.” I had not the courage to confess ignorance of
the Captain’s antecedents. There is a delusion among more than the
fair American who spoke to me, that we entertain in England the
sort of feeling, morbid or wholesome as it may be, in reference to
our reverses at New Orleans and elsewhere, that is attributed to
Frenchmen respecting Waterloo.
On returning to Willard’s Hotel, I was accosted by a gentleman
who came out from the crowd in front of the office. “Sir,” he
said, “you have been dining with our President to-night.” I bowed.
“Was it an agreeable party?” said he. “What do you think of Mr.
Lincoln?” “May I ask to whom I have the pleasure of speaking?”
“My name is Mr. ----, and I am the correspondent of the New York
----.” “Then, sir,” I replied, “it gives me satisfaction to tell
you that I think a great deal of Mr. Lincoln, and that I am equally
pleased with my dinner. I have the honour to bid you good evening.”
The same gentleman informed me afterwards that he had created the
office of Washington Correspondent to the New York papers. “At
first,” said he, “I merely wrote news, and no one cared much;
then I spiced it up, squibbed a little, and let off stories of my
own. Congressmen contradicted me--issued cards--said they were
not facts. The public attention was attracted, and I was told to
go on; and so the Washington correspondence became a feature in
all the New York papers by degrees.” The hum and bustle in the
hotel to-night were wonderful All the office-seekers were in the
passages, hungering after senators and representatives, and the
ladies in any way related to influential people, had an _entourage_
of courtiers sedulously paying their respects. Miss Chase, indeed,
laughingly told me that she was pestered by applicants for her
father’s good offices, and by persons seeking introduction to her
as a means of making demands on “Uncle Sam.”
As I was visiting a book-shop to-day, a pert, smiling young fellow,
of slight figure and boyish appearance came up and introduced
himself to me as an artist who had contributed to an illustrated
London paper during the Prince of Wales’s tour, and who had become
acquainted with some of my friends; and he requested permission
to call on me, which I gave without difficulty or hesitation. He
visited me this evening, poor lad! and told me a sad story of his
struggles, and of the dependence of his family on his efforts, as
a prelude to a request that I would allow him to go South when I
was making the tour there, of which he had heard. He was under an
engagement with the London paper, and had no doubt that if he was
with me his sketches would all be received as illustrations of
the places to which my letters were attracting public interest in
England at the time. There was no reason why I should be averse to
his travelling with me in the same train. He could certainly go if
he pleased. At the same time I intimated that I was in no way to be
connected with or responsible for him.
_March 29th, Good Friday._--The religious observance of the day
was not quite as strict as it would be in England. The Puritan
aversion to ceremonials and formulary observances has apparently
affected the American world, even as far south as this. The people
of colour were in the streets dressed in their best. The first
impression produced by fine bonnets, gay shawls, brightly-coloured
dresses, and silk brodequins, on black faces, flat figures, and
feet to match, is singular; but, in justice to the backs of many
of the gaudily-dressed women, who, in little groups, were going to
church or chapel, it must be admitted that this surprise only came
upon one when he got a front view. The men generally affected black
coats, silk or satin waistcoats, and parti-coloured pantaloons.
They carried Missal or Prayer-book, pocket-handkerchief, cane or
parasol, with infinite affectation of correctness.
As I was looking out of the window, a very fine, tall young negro,
dressed irreproachably, save as to hat and boots, passed by. “I
wonder what he is?” I exclaimed inquiringly to a gentleman who
stood beside me. “Well,” he said, “that fellow is not a free
nigger; he looks too respectable. I daresay you could get him for
1500 dollars, without his clothes. You know,” continued he, “what
our Minister said when he saw a nigger at some Court in Europe,
and was asked what he thought of him: ‘Well, I guess,’ said he,
‘if you take off his fixings, he may be worth 1000 dollars down.’”
In the course of the day, Mr. Banks, a corpulent, energetic young
Virginian, of strong Southern views, again called on me. As the
friend of the Southern Commissioners he complained vehemently of
the refusal of Mr. Seward to hold intercourse with him. “These
fellows mean treachery, but we will baulk them.” In answer to a
remark of mine, that the English Minister would certainly refuse
to receive Commissioners from any part of the Queen’s dominions
which had seized upon the forts and arsenals of the empire and
menaced war, he replied: “The case is quite different. The Crown
claims a right to govern the whole of your empire; but the Austrian
Government could not refuse to receive a deputation from Hungary
for an adjustment of grievances; nor could any State belonging to
the German Diet attempt to claim sovereignty over another, because
they were members of the same Confederation.” I remarked “that his
views of the obligations of each State of the Union were perfectly
new to me, as a stranger ignorant of the controversies which
distracted them. An Englishman had nothing to do with a Virginian
and New Yorkist, or a South Carolinian--he scarcely knew anything
of a Texan, or of an Arkansasian; we only were conversant with
the United States as an entity; and all our dealings were with
citizens of the United States of North America.” This, however,
only provoked logically diffuse dissertations on the Articles of
the Constitution, and on the spirit of the Federal Compact.
Later in the day, I had the advantage of a conversation with
Mr. Truman Smith, an old and respected representative in former
days, who gave me a very different account of the matter; and who
maintained that by the Federal Compact each State had delegated
irrevocably the essence of its sovereignty to a Government to be
established in perpetuity for the benefit of the whole body. The
Slave States, seeing that the progress of free ideas, and the
material power of the North, were obtaining an influence which
must be subversive of the supremacy they had so long exercised in
the Federal Government for their own advantage, had developed this
doctrine of States’ Rights as a cloak to treason, preferring the
material advantages to be gained by the extension of their system
to the grand moral position which they would occupy as a portion of
the United States in the face of all the world.
It is on such radical differences of ideas as these, that the
whole of the quarrel, which is widening every day, is founded. The
Federal Compact, at the very outset, was written on a torn sheet of
paper, and time has worn away the artificial cement by which it was
kept together. The corner-stone of the Constitution had a crack in
it, which the heat and fury of faction have widened into a fissure
from top to bottom, never to be closed again.
In the evening I had the pleasure of dining with an American
gentleman who has seen much of the world, travelled far and wide,
who has read much and beheld more, a scholar, a politician, after
his way, a poet, and an ologist--one of those modern Grœculi, who
is unlike his prototype in Juvenal only in this, that he is not
hungry, and that he will not go to heaven if you order him.
Such men never do or can succeed in the United States; they are
far too refined, philosophical, and cosmopolitan. From what I
see, success here may be obtained by refined men, if they are
dishonest, never by philosophical men, unless they be corrupt--not
by cosmopolitan men under any circumstances whatever; for to have
sympathies with any people, or with any nation in the world, except
his own, is to doom a statesman with the American public, unless
it be in the form of an affectation of pity or good will, intended
really as an offence to some allied people. At dinner there was the
very largest naval officer I have ever seen in company, although
I must own that our own service is not destitute of some good
specimens, and I have seen an Austrian admiral at Pola, and the
superintendent of the Arsenal at Tophaneh, who were not unfit to be
marshals of France. This Lieutenant, named Nelson, was certainly
greater in one sense than his British namesake, for he weighed 260
pounds.
It may be here remarked, _passim_ and _obiter_, that the Americans
are much more precise than ourselves in the enumeration of weights
and matters of this kind. They speak of pieces of artillery, for
example, as being of so many pounds weight, and of so many inches
long, where we would use cwts. and feet. With a people addicted to
vertical rather than lateral extension in everything but politics
and morals, precision is a matter of importance. I was amused by a
description of some popular personage I saw in one of the papers
the other day, which after an enumeration of many high mental and
physical attributes, ended thus, “In fact he is a remarkably fine
high-toned gentleman, and weighs 210 pounds.”
The Lieutenant was a strong Union man, and he inveighed fiercely,
and even coarsely, against the members of his profession who had
thrown up their commissions. The superintendent of the Washington
Navy Yard is supposed to be very little disposed in favour of
this present Government; in fact, Capt. Buchanan may be called a
Secessionist, nevertheless, I am invited to the wedding of his
daughter, in order to see the President give away the bride. Mr.
Nelson says, Sumter and Pickens are to be reinforced. Charleston is
to be reduced to order, and all traitors hanged, or he will know
the reason why; and, says he, “I have some weight in the country.”
In the evening, as we were going home, notwithstanding the cold,
we saw a number of ladies sitting out on the door-steps, in white
dresses. The streets were remarkably quiet and deserted; all the
coloured population had been sent to bed long ago. The fire bell,
as usual, made an alarm or two about midnight.