CHAPTER I
THE WASHINGTON OF THE THIRTIES
The tourist traveling from Philadelphia to Washington in the Thirties anticipated few pleasures and no comforts from the trip that had to be made by coach from Baltimore, over roads intolerably wretched under the best conditions, and all but impassable and not without dangers in inclement weather. The journey from Philadelphia to Baltimore was usually made by boat through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, and the entire trip, in winter one of exposure, required the greater part of two days.[1] The fare from Baltimore to Washington was four dollars. Sometimes the ruts in the winter roads would overturn the coach, throwing the passengers into the mire, and occasionally resulting in sprains and broken bones.[2] Later in Jackson’s time, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was built, with a branch into Washington, and when the first cars, drawn by horses, reached the country-town capital, the enthusiastic statesmen felt that the problem of transportation had been solved. Urging Butler to accept the attorney-generalship, and stressing the fact that acceptance would not preclude his appearance in personal cases in New York and Albany, Van Buren made much of the fact that “to the former place you will next season be able to go in fifteen hours, and to the latter in a day and a night.”[3] Blair, of the “Globe,” boasted after the election of 1832 that “in eight days and nights after the closing of the polls in Ohio, the result was known in the city of Washington from all the organized counties except three.” This, he declared, “is an instance of rapid communication from the West unparalleled in this country.”[4]
The foreigner, expecting a national capital more or less pretentious and compact, was invariably shocked on entering the environs over miserable mud roads, to find only an occasional drab hut or cottage at wide intervals. Usually, until the Capitol attracted his attention, he was wholly unconscious of his arrival at his destination. One of these, who has left a record of his visit, relates that he was “looking from the window of his coach in a sort of brown study, at fields covered with snow,” when a fellow passenger startled him with the inquiry as to how he liked Washington.
“I will tell you when I see it,” he replied.
“Why, you have been in Washington the last quarter of an hour,” was the rejoinder.[5]
Another famous visitor “was taken by surprise” on finding herself within the shadow of the hall of the lawmakers, “so sordid are the enclosures and houses on its very verge.”[6]
But as the coach wound round the Capitol, and swung with a merry clatter into Pennsylvania Avenue, the houses at more frequent intervals and connected shops disclosed the town. With a characteristic “clatter and clamp,”[7] with a gay cracking of whips, the coach would splash and rumble up to one of the leading hotels, and the cramped and weary tourist would joyously take leave of the conveyance and seek lodgment within.
If well advised, he would instruct the coachman to drop him at Gadsby’s, then the most popular and comfortable hostelry in town, on the Avenue, a short distance from the Capitol.[8] There he would find, not only a clean bed, but excellent service and a lordly hospitality from the host. Gadsby, for his generation, was a genius at his trade. He moved his small army of negro servants with military precision. “Who that ever knew the hospitalities of this gentlemanly and most liberal Boniface,” wrote one who enjoyed them, “can ever forget his urbane manner, his careful attention to his guests, his well-ordered house, his fine old wines, and the princely manner in which he could send his bottle of choice Madeira to some old friend or favored guest at the table?”[9] It was not always, however, that accommodations could be found at Gadsby’s, and then the tourist would seek the Indian Queen at the sign of the luridly painted picture of Pocahontas, where he would be met at the curb by Jesse Brown, the landlord.[10] Here, for a dollar and a quarter a day, he could not only find a pleasant room, but a table loaded with decanters of brandy, rum, gin, at short intervals from the head to the foot. If the host of the Indian Queen lacked the lordly elegance of Gadsby, he made up for it in the homely virtues of hospitality. Wearing a large white apron, he met his guests at the door of the dining-room, and then hastened to the head of the table where he personally carved and helped to serve the principal dish.[11] If this, too, was crowded, the tourist would try Fuller’s near the White House,[12] where a room would be found for him either in the hotel proper, or in one of the two or three houses adjoining, which had been converted into an annex.[13]
Having rested from his journey and removed the stains of travel, if he were a person of some importance, and especially a foreigner, he would be speedily deluged with the cards of callers anxious to make his sojourn pleasant. Day by day the hotel registers were eagerly scanned for the names of visiting celebrities, for the Washington of the Thirties loved its lions and lionesses. No possible person was ever neglected, and real personages were fêted, wined, and dined. But not until he set forth to return the calls would he appreciate the Portuguese Minister’s description of the capital as “a city of magnificent distances.” Inquiring at the hotel how to reach the residences of his callers, he would be not a little puzzled at the nonchalant reply that the coachmen “knew where all the prominent people live.” Engaging a coach, he would set forth gayly, in the confident expectation of leaving his card at from thirty to forty houses in the course of the day. A short drive would take him to the end of the macadamized pavement of the Avenue, and thereafter for hours, pitching and plunging, over the ruts and the mud-holes, through miry lanes, and across vacant lots, shaken in body, and sore in spirit, he would find by evening that he had reached six or seven of the forty houses, and was charged by the coachman at a rate “which would keep a chariot and two posters for twice the time in London.”[14] In the course of a week he would find that he had spent as much as thirty dollars for coach hire—by odds, the most expensive feature of his Washington sojourn. An English visitor, startled at the cost of travel, contracted with a coachman for services from five o’clock to daylight for twenty dollars, but after having attended five parties on the first evening, the morose driver repudiated his contract, and it was necessary to add five dollars to retain his services.[15] “I should imagine [Washington] to be the very paradise of hackney coachmen,” wrote one disgusted visitor. “If these men do not get rich it must be owing to some culpable extravagance, for their vehicles are in continual demand from the hour of dinner[16] till five in the morning, and long distances and heavy charges are all in their favor.”[17]
As the visitor drove about the town he found nothing in the physical aspects of the country-town capital to indicate that L’Enfant ever had a vision or produced a plan for a city beautiful. Because real estate dealers had quarreled over the location of public buildings, the selection of the hill for the Capitol had led to the location of the White House a mile or more to the west, and for three decades the problem of building a compact city between the two had failed. The streets were all unpaved when Jackson was first inaugurated, and only Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the President’s Mansion had been rescued from the mire when he left office. Hub-deep in mud in inclement weather, these country roads sent forth great clouds of dust on dry and sunny days. With the exception of the Avenue, not a single street approached compactness, the houses on all other streets being occasionally grouped, but generally widely separated, and in some instances so much so as to suggest country houses with their shade trees and vegetable gardens.[18] “It looks as if it had rained naked buildings upon an open plain, and every man had made a street in reference to his own door,” wrote Nathaniel P. Willis, who knew his Washington.[19] Another writer of the day who was impressed with “the houses scattered in straggling groups, three in one quarter, and half a dozen in another,” was moved to compassion for “some disconsolate dwelling, the first or last born of a square or crescent, yet in nebulous suffering like an ancient maiden in the mournful solitude of single blessedness.”[20] Still another contemporary word painter tells us that even on the Avenue “the buildings were standing with wide spaces between, like the teeth of some superannuated crone.”[21]