Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  The hotels were a recent development in a capital whose politicians had emerged only in mid-century from a background of small taverns and boardinghouses. The large, ugly buildings were the chief attractions of the Avenue, enlivening its dullness with their uniformed attendants, their ranks of hacks and the bustle of arriving and departing guests. When Congress was in session, their halls and parlors, dining-rooms and bars were crowded. The din was frightful, the prices were high, and the clerks were haughty and disobliging; but, to see and to be seen, to establish contact with the political personages of the day and feel the pulse of Government, it was necessary to go to the hotels.

  Two of them were situated on opposite sides of Sixth Street: the National, a huge caravansary, and the marble-fronted pile of Brown’s, later known as the Metropolitan. Because of their convenience to the Capitol, these houses were much patronized by members of Congress, especially by Southerners. The slaves of the planter-politicians loitered on the sidewalk of the Avenue, while their masters, in broad-brimmed hats, conferred in the corridors, or called for bourbon and juleps in the bars. At the time of Mr. Buchanan’s inauguration, the National had suffered an eclipse, because of an outbreak of an intestinal malady among its guests. The new President was one of the many who became ill, and his nephew died of the National Hotel disease. In extreme pro-Southern circles, the epidemic was declared to have been the result of a Republican plot to poison the leaders of the Democratic party; but most people accepted the explanation that it had been caused by sewer gas, and after a brief closure for repairs the National had regained its former popularity.

  The Kirkwood, on the corner of Twelfth Street, had its devoted clientele, as did two or three smaller houses on the Avenue. The most famous of all the hotels, however, was Willard’s at Fourteenth Street. Formerly a small and unsuccessful hostelry, its failure had been ascribed to the fact that it was too far uptown. Its reputation had been made under the efficient management of the Willard brothers, who hailed from Vermont; and, enlarged and redecorated, Willard’s had become the great meeting place of Washington. Much of the business of Government was said to be done in its passages and its bar. From eight to eleven in the morning—for Washingtonians were not early risers—a procession of celebrities might be observed passing to the breakfast table. The huge breakfast, which included such items as fried oysters, steak and onions, blanc mange and pâté de foie gras, was succeeded by a gargantuan midday dinner; by another dinner at five o’clock; by a robust tea at seven-thirty; and finally by supper at nine. Englishmen, themselves no inconsiderable feeders, were appalled by the meals that the American guests, ladies as well as gentlemen, were able to consume.

  The British visitors hated Willard’s. Its very architecture offended them. Accustomed to snug inns with private parlors, they could find no decent seclusion in this rambling, uncomfortable barracks. American hotel life was gregarious, and a peaceful withdrawal from an atmosphere of “heat, noise, dust, smoke, expectoration” was the last thing that the natives appeared to be seeking. After breakfast, as after dinner, the guests hastened to mingle in the public rooms. At Willard’s, the parlor furniture was occupied by the same sallow, determined men, the same dressy ladies and the same screaming, precocious children that travelers observed elsewhere in the United States.

  Yet, when the secretaries at the British legation had finished their work, it was to Willard’s bar that they ran. There was life in the masculine voices that clamored in the blue cigar smoke; and the youngsters had formed “the pernicious local habit of swallowing cocktails.” Lord Lyons, the red-faced British minister, wrote that Washington was a dreadful place for young men; it had no clubs and no good restaurants, no permanent theatre or opera. There were, however, saloons in profusion, and a suitable complement of brothels; while, behind discreetly curtained windows on the Avenue, gentlemen were able to wile away an evening at faro, without any serious interference from the Washington police.

  The area immediately north of the Avenue, between the Capitol and the Executive Mansion, was the only part of Washington which was sufficiently built up to warrant the description of a city. Here were houses and churches and a few inadequate school buildings, and here, on Seventh Street, was the principal business section. The government of the seven wards, into which Washington was divided, was administered from the stucco City Hall on Judiciary Square, which contained the office of the mayor and the rooms used by the Boards of Aldermen and Common Council. This building also held the circuit and criminal courts and the office of the United States marshal of the District. Behind the City Hall was the town’s only general hospital, the E Street Infirmary; and still farther north on the square, which extended as far as G Street, was the ancient county jail.

  The city’s business—in contrast to that of Federal Government, which required a setting of porticoed immensity—seemed all to be done in a small way. Ugly blocks of offices had been hastily run up as a speculation. Shabby boardinghouses, little grocery shops, petty attorneys’ offices and mean restaurants and saloons served the fifteen hundred clerks who were employed in the departments. The clerks were too poorly paid, and, in the unceasing scramble for appointment, too insecure to bring their families with them; and, since so many bachelors in single rooms required a large number of individual fires, they were also responsible for the unusual quantity of woodyards, which plied an untidy trade in almost every other square.

  It was a Southern town, without the picturesqueness, but with the indolence, the disorder and the want of sanitation. Its lounging Negroes startled Northern visitors with the reminder that slaves were held in the capital. Hucksters abounded. Fish and oyster peddlers cried their wares and tooted their horns on the corners. Flocks of geese waddled on the Avenue, and hogs, of every size and color, roamed at large, making their muddy wallows on Capitol Hill and in Judiciary Square. People emptied slops and refuse in the gutters, and threw dead domestic animals into the canal. Most of the population still depended on the questionable water supply afforded by wells and by springs in the hills behind the city. Privies, in the absence of adequate sewage disposal, were plentiful in yards and dirty alleys, and every day the carts of night soil trundled out to the commons ten blocks north of the White House.

  Outside the area in which the population was concentrated were lonely tracts of woodland and commons, broken at intervals by large estates, planted and bowered in trees, and by settlements which had pushed out from the expanding center of the town. The effect of this random development reminded one foreign observer of “a frame of Berlin wool work in which the fair embroideress has made spasmodic attempts at a commencement.” The elaborate paper plan of the capital gave no indication that within the city limits the labeled streets and avenues were country roads, which crisscrossed in the wilderness.

  There is a map of Washington accurately laid down [wrote that genial traveler, Anthony Trollope]; and taking that map with him in his journeyings a man may lose himself in the streets, not as one loses oneself in London between Shoreditch and Russell-Square, but as one does so in the deserts of the Holy Land, between Emmaus and Arimathea. In the first place no one knows where the places are, or is sure of their existence, and then between their presumed localities the country is wild, trackless, unbridged, uninhabited and desolate. . . . Tucking your trousers up to your knees, you will wade through the bogs, you will lose yourself among rude hillocks, you will be out of the reach of humanity. . . . If you are a sportsman, you will desire to shoot snipe within sight of the President’s house.

  The oldest of the village communities which had developed in Washington was situated near the Navy Yard on the Eastern Branch, and was the home of the mechanics, laborers, carpenters and office workers who were employed at the yard. Neighbored by the Marine Barracks, it was rural and self-contained, although it was connected with the rest of the city by an omnibus line. At the foot of Eleventh Street, an infirm wooden structure, the Navy Yard or Eastern Branch Bridge, gave access to the Government Insane Asylum
and to the Maryland countryside. Farther east of the yard was the Congressional Cemetery, city property, in spite of its name; while the bend of the river was bordered by the extensive grounds in which stood the poorhouse and the smallpox hospital. The Eastern Branch was not navigable for ships of war above the Navy Yard, and commerce with Bladensburg, once lively on its waters, had become a thing of the past.

  Southwest Washington, divided from the other sections of the city by the old canal, was familiarly known as the Island. On Greenleaf’s Point, the angle of confluence of the Potomac and the Eastern Branch, was situated the United States Arsenal, with the Penitentiary a little to the north. The Island had some reason for local pride and ambitions for further development. It included the Mall, with the Smithsonian Institution and also the militia armory. At the foot of Sixth and Seventh Streets were the wharves for the steamboats and sailing vessels which connected the capital with the railroads at Alexandria and Aquia Creek; or made longer voyages by way of Chesapeake Bay and the sea. From the end of Maryland Avenue ran the Long Bridge, the thoroughfare from Washington to Virginia, and the great mail road between the Northern and Southern States.

  The good name of the Island, however, was tarnished by the disorder that frequently broke out in its tangle of poverty-stricken alleys. The less populous parts of the city harbored, not only ill-famed resorts, but gangs of rowdies who disturbed good citizens by their lawlessness, and had even started riots during municipal elections. The respectable settlement of the Northern Liberties, located above G Street, had its sordid districts. Other plague spots were Negro Hill far out on North Tenth Street; English Hill, east of the City Hall; and Swampoodle, an Irish colony in a marshy tract near North Capitol Street.

  It was a courageous man who ventured to walk alone by night in the ill-lighted streets of the capital of the United States. The inefficiency of the Washington police was as notorious as the prevalence of its footpads and hoodlums. The municipality supported a day force of fifty patrolmen; while the fifty members of the night force were paid by the Government. The chief duty of the latter, however, was the protection of the public buildings; while the city’s appointments were made as a reward for services in the local elections. Both forces, remarked Philp’s guidebook, “contrary to the usages of other cities, do not separately patrol the entire city, but are to be found in bodies at the most public places.”

  The town’s outstanding grievance, as well as its great pride, derived from the fact that it was the seat of Federal Government. Toward Congress, the supreme authority in the District, it maintained the attitude of a neglected and fretful stepchild. In truth, the grand scale of the city’s design was responsible for most of its deficiencies. The fitful Federal appropriations for improving the streets were at no time the equivalent of a tax on the Government property; and, except for the grounds around the Capitol and the President’s House, the national authorities had done little to beautify Washington.

  From the viewpoint of Congress, the demands of the city were insatiable. Enormous sums had been appropriated to build the aqueduct which would eventually carry over Rock Creek a supply of pure Potomac water adequate for the city’s needs. In making this outlay, the legislators had been prompted, not only by considerations of health, but by a desire to reduce the fire hazards. The Washington fire companies, however, were controlled by gangs of toughs, and the frequent conflagrations raged unchecked, not only because of a scarcity of water, but because of rowdyism, confusion, and stone and pistol fights. In every department of civic life in which Congress lent aid to Washington, it encountered the inefficiency of the ward system of municipal government, common in towns of that day.

  From its close association with the Government, Washington derived the peculiarity of its seasonal character. It was a winter resort. After the quiet drowse of a long, unhealthy summer, the town awakened each autumn to prepare for the opening of Congress. The dismal railway depot welcomed travelers from North and West. The wharves were busy with the Southerners, arriving by steamer from Aquia Creek. In the train of the legislators followed office seekers, claimants, lobbyists, delegations, inventors and reporters. Minstrel shows came, and opera companies; and famous stars, Joe Jefferson and Charlotte Cushman, Edwin Forrest and Edwin Booth, played at the dingy old Washington Theatre at C and Eleventh Streets. There was a stealthy invasion of pickpockets, confidence men and vagrants. By the end of November, the town was lively. The desolate Avenue hummed with hacks, with the elaborate carriages of the legations and the blooded horses of the Southerners. Shops furbished their windows. Hotels and boardinghouses filled up, and so did the E Street Infirmary, the poorhouse and the county jail. Practical motives dictated the presence of all the winter sojourners. There were no parties of idle, amusement-seeking tourists. The townsfolk entertained their friends and relatives, and every winter a bevy of pretty girls came for the festivities of the social season; but, apart from these negligible few, Americans did not visit Washington for pleasure. Although it had many churches, an active Young Men’s Christian Association and a dignified official society, the city bore an unwholesome name among the pious folk of the nation. It was darkly imagined as a sink of iniquity, where weak-minded bachelors were exposed to the temptations of saloons, gambling hells and light women; and the prevalence of hotel life was instanced as a proof of the city’s immorality.

  Such was the capital of the United States in December of 1860, the sprawling and unfulfilled embodiment of a vision of national grandeur. Unfinished though it was, it perpetually evoked comparisons with remote antiquity. Henry Adams would recall a boyhood impression of “the Post-Office and the Patent Office which faced each other . . . . like white Greek temples in the abandoned gravel pits of a deserted Syrian city.” An Army officer, Colonel Charles P. Stone, thought that the Treasury would make the grandest Palmyra of them all. Anthony Trollope was also reminded of the ruins of Palmyra by the framework of the new Capitol dome; and a popular designation of Captain Montgomery Meigs of the engineers, often seen superintending the work on the Capitol Extension, was “Meigs among the ruins of Carthage.”

  It was a mere ambitious beginner, a baby among capitals. Its defects were those of youth and energy and inexperience. Yet people were ready to fancy it moldering and abandoned, a relic of an optimistic moment of history when men had essayed an experiment called democracy. Dissolution was heavy in the air; and even the rising monuments of the republic wore the image of ruin and decay.

  The presence of the old General was reassuring to the worried residents of Washington: to those who were used to living in the capital; who depended on their jobs in it; owned property in it; saw it hopefully, not as it was, but as it might grow to be; and even cherished, some of them, the ideal of a permanent Union of the States. As Scott limped to Winder’s Building from his low coupé, drawn by a powerful horse, the passers-by lined up, removed their hats, and cried, “God bless you, General.”

  II. “The Union, Sir, Is Dissolved”

  THERE WERE PEOPLE who loved Washington, not alone with an habitual affection for warm firesides and growing gardens, but because they found enjoyment in the particular life the town afforded. They derived a vicarious excitement from the proximity of Government, and from the many rumors of which Washington was the sounding box. They watched with pride and pleasure the progress of the public buildings, attended the improving lectures at the Smithsonian Institution, danced at the hops at the big hotels, and ran pell-mell to the fires.

  In spite of many diversions, living was leisurely and almost rustic in character. After church on Sunday, friends went to hospitable houses to dine, sometime between the hours of four and seven, on the excellent and varied fare provided by the markets. There were agreeable evening tea parties in the parlors. From lamp-lit windows came the sound of piano music, or the deliberate slap of the cards in a game of euchre or whist. Like villagers, the townsfolk went to the depot to welcome visitors, or speed them on their way. Sportsmen caught rock bass at the Little Falls, and gu
nned for duck and reedbird in the Potomac marshes. Along Rock Creek in springtime, the Judas trees unfolded their purplish-pink blossoms. Everyone feasted on shad and strawberries, and in the dimming light white dresses gleamed on the doorsteps. The city’s children shuffled in the dry gray slush of the poplar plumes, and April gave place to May, not only as mud is succeeded by dust, but as hyacinths and snowdrops and lilacs yield to woodbine and clematis and a wilderness of roses.

  In fine weather, there were many outdoor excursions. Lodges and societies danced and picnicked at pavilions in the groves near the town. People voyaged by steamboat to Alexandria and Fort Washington and the dilapidated countryseat of George Washington at Mount Vernon. Columbian College on the pretty eminence of Meridian Hill was a favorite place to visit. North of Washington, too, were the fine estates of Eckington, Harewood and Kalorama. Three miles beyond the crossing of the city boundary and Seventh Street was a wooded hill on which stood the Soldiers’ Home, founded by a part of the tribute which General Scott had levied on Mexico City. A long drive out on the Seventh Street Road, beyond the District line, led to Silver Spring, the summer home of the venerable statesman, Mr. Francis P. Blair. Across the Long Bridge, the pillared mansion of Colonel Robert E. Lee crested the Arlington Heights. Carriages were always rolling across Rock Creek to Georgetown, with its dignified streets of old-fashioned, red-brick houses. The duty of paying calls involved an arduous amount of travel, for ladies were expected to leave their cartes de visite, not only in Georgetown, but even in distant Bladensburg.