“How do you know?”
“Oh, as we were on the way, I saw a dish carried; and as we had none at Cass’s, I knew they were either for the Woodburys or the Attorney-General’s.”[95]
It was the golden age of gallantry as well as gossip, some flirtatious, some courtly. If the admirer of John Forsyth’s daughter proposed in a Valentine Day verse[96] throbbing with adolescent passion, the more staid and sober-minded Francis Scott Key wrote, in a fine hand, religious hymns for the pleasure of her mother.[97]
The evening parties were the most popular form of entertainment, and the hostesses of the Cabinet circle set the pace. The invitations were sent out nine days in advance. Because of the exigencies of politics, and the exactions of an awakened “Democracy,” these could be neither small nor exclusive in character, and from seven to nine hundred invitations were usually extended. Between nine and ten o’clock all the apartments would be thrown open. The muddy streets in front would be congested with carriages. The host and hostess, standing in the drawing-room, would receive their guests, and then the more serious would withdraw to quiet corners for conversation, the gay and frivolous would swing into the dance, and the devotees of chance would seek and find a remote corner for cards. Servants would gingerly thread their way through the throng with light refreshments until eleven o’clock when an elaborate supper would be served. By three o’clock the company would begin to retire, and usually, at daybreak, the lights would be extinguished.[98]
It was a day of social novelties. Ice-cream as a refreshment first made its appearance in the country capital at the home of the widow of Alexander Hamilton. Introduced at the White House immediately afterwards by Jackson, it took society by storm,[99] and Kinchy, the confectioner on the Avenue, who had a monopoly on ice-cream and ices, became as indispensable socially as the chef and the fiddler.[100] Of the dances, the most popular was the waltz, introduced two years before Jackson’s inauguration, and, considered at first of questionable modesty, it soon won its way, and the matrons found it as alluring as the débutantes. Even then there were censorious people to see in the dreamy glide an example of the moral degeneracy of the age.[101] To accentuate their pessimism, the crowds were invariably so dense that the dancers could scarcely move, reminding an amused Kentuckian “of a Kentucky fight when the crowd draws the circle so close that the combatants have no room to use their limbs.” But despite the crowded quarters, the twenty-four fiddlers in a row bravely sought “by dint of loud music to put the amateurs in motion,” until they jumped “up and down in a hole, and nobody sees more of them than their heads.”[102] Queer, conglomerate crowds packed the balls and receptions of men in public life, forced to accept official society as they found it, and if members of Congress appeared at the dance in their morning habiliments and in unpolished boots, in worsted stockings and in garments fashioned by a backwoods tailor, they were not conspicuous.[103] All, or most, entered with zest into the social activities of the time. On the night of a big ball “the rolling of carriages sounded like continual peals of thunder, or roaring of the wind.” In the dark, dismal streets, the lamps on the vehicles alone were visible, and these, moving rapidly in the blackness, “appeared like brilliant meteors in the air.”[104] Sometimes, in the case of the more pretentious entertainers, like the foreign ministers, the streets in front of the houses were light as day from the line of flaming torches along the pavement. Fox, the British Minister, a relative of the great orator; Baron von Roenne, the Prussian, a brilliant jurist and publicist; and Baron Bodisco, the Russian, made great displays of equipages and appointments, and were noted for their wines and exotic entertainments. At the legations of Fox and Bodisco, great sums passed over the card table, the most famous statesmen of the time among the players, and the British Minister so seldom saw the sun that on the occasion of a funeral, while seated beside the wife of the Spanish Minister, he turned a puzzled look upon her with the comment, “How strange we all look by daylight!” Both ministers contributed not a little to the gayety of gossip, Bodisco, by his squat ugliness and courtliness, and Fox, by his whimsical refusal at dinners to go to the table until the dishes had cooled.[105] During the period the most celebrated functions were given at Carusi’s Assembly rooms which could accommodate great numbers. Leaders of fashion and the socially ambitious of Baltimore and Alexandria, wishing to make an impression in introducing a débutante or to repay social obligations, found these rooms suited to their purpose. It was in these rooms that Washington society had its first presentation of the “Barber of Seville,” and “John of Paris” in the winter of 1833.[106] The same year a Washington birthday party was given there, both rooms thrown open, “decorated and illuminated and with a band in each,” and diplomats admitted without an entrance fee.[107] Hither all the ladies of the capital, unfamiliar with the dances, or wishing to learn new ones, found their way to learn from the popular Louis, only the inclemency of the weather and the impossible mire of the streets interfering with his profits.[108] Thus the fashionables of the Thirties managed to create the illusion of living in the great world, chattering in the Senate, bustling into the Supreme Court chamber, dining, dancing, flirting, gossiping, attending the theater to see a Booth or a Kemble, going to the circus to see the animals fed at eight o’clock, “in the presence of the audience,”[109] or riding to the National Course near town to witness the races, or attending an exhibit of the paintings of John G. Chapman on the Avenue.[110] Only on Sundays did the capital become quiet and sedate, for, after a pious morning pilgrimage to church, the ladies carrying a hymn or a prayer book and leaning on the arms of their escorts, they retired to the seclusion of their homes and the streets were deserted or given over to the promenades of the colored folks.[111]
In this Washington, where men were feverishly fighting for place and prestige, and women were engaged in a hectic struggle for social leadership, Death lurked always, for a less healthful spot could not easily have been found. Built originally in a swamp reeking with malaria, surrounded with morasses, and with not a few of these in the heart of the town, with sanitation poor and water wretched, the residents were constantly menaced by disease. With the gradual disappearance of the forests immediately surrounding it, the conditions became worse. The death-rate was as high as one in fifty-three, with August claiming the heaviest toll from fevers.[112] Between the fevers of the summers and the influenza of the winters, the residents had to be constantly on guard. Whiskey and quinine were taken with the regularity of bread and meat, and tourists were wont to sit late at their quarters “sipping gently a medicine which the doctors of the capital thought destructive of the influenza germs which were lying in wait for the unwary.”[113] Fevers, pneumonia, influenza, and the cholera made the swampy capital of the Thirties as profitable to the doctors as to the coachmen.
Such, in brief, was the scene of the most dramatic and significant political battles that were staged in America between the foundation of the Republic and the Administration of Woodrow Wilson. Such was the day-by-day life of the men, now steel engravings, who played the leading rôles. And by bearing in mind the sordidness and pettiness of the environment, and of the men and women with whom they daily and nightly gossiped and dined and danced, it may be less of a shock to discover, in the unfolding of the story of these eight crowded years, that even the greatest were men of moral weaknesses and limitations.
CHAPTER II
THE RISING OF THE MASSES
I
With the election of 1828 a new era dawned in American politics. Up to this time the election of Presidents and the determination of policies had been a matter of manipulation among the congressional politicians. The possessors of property and the aristocrats of intellect had been the only classes with whom the politicians had concerned themselves. The Virginia Dynasty and the Secretarial Succession died on the day that the rising of the masses raised to the Presidency a man who had never served in the Cabinet, distinguished himself in the Congress, or appealed to the “aristocracy of intellect and culture.” To the politicians, office-holders, and society leaders in Washington, the election of Andrew Jackson was something more than a shock—it was an affront. In the campaign he had been opposed by two thirds of the newspapers, four fifths of the preachers, practically all the manufacturers, and seven eighths of the banking capital. Respectability sternly set itself against the presumptuous ambitions of what it conceived to be a rough, illiterate representative of the “mob.”