Well, I went "on to Richmond;" and my first reflection upon getting into it was, Lord! what a place for two big armies to fight about! A cold, piercing, rasping wind blew through the dismal streets from the river—a wind that would have done credit to old Boston at its fiercest. As to hotels, the deterioration begins at Baltimore, and "after that the deluge." As the horror-struck man said, when the tail-board of his cart came out going up hill, and distributed his potatoes right and left, "No swearing could do justice to it!" Amid remains of former splendor, dilapidation and stagnation reign.
Two visits I shall never forget. The first was to Libby prison. I looked through its grated, cobwebbed windows, not with my eyes, but with the hopeless eyes of hundreds whose last earthly glimpse of the sunlight was through them. The walls having been whitewashed, we discovered no marks or writings. Only upon the wooden floor, as the dirt was cleared away for us, we saw a place chipped out, upon which the prisoners had played checkers. Not far off was Belle Isle, where, in just such a biting wind from the river, as excoriated our faces that day, brave men, without shelter, froze and starved to death!
Yes, I passed through Washington, and I didn't want office either. Had I, I think my patience would soon have oozed out, in the stifling atmosphere of that room in the White House, where clamorous lobbyists sat with distended eyes, watching the chance of their possible entrance to the President's presence—sat there, too, for weary hours, a spectacle to gods and men; of human beings willing to sacrifice self-respect and time, and what little money they had left in their purses, for the gambler's chance. Anything, everything, but the open and above-board, and sure and independent, and old-fashioned way of getting a living!
So I thought as the living stream poured in, and I went out, thankful that I desired nothing in the gift of the President of the United States of America. How any man living can wish to be President passes my solving, I said, as I stepped out into the clear, fresh, bracing air, and shook my shoulders, as if I had really dropped a burden of my own under that much-coveted roof. I can very well conceive that a pure patriot might wish the office, because he sincerely believed himself able to serve his country in it, and therefore accepted its crown of thorns; but lacking this motive, that a man in the meridian of life, or descending its down-hill path, and consequently with the full knowledge of this life's emptiness, should stretch out even one hand to grasp such a distracting position, I can never understand. The good dame "who went to sleep with six gallons of milk on her mind" every night, was a fool to do it. A step-mother's life under the harrow were paradise to it; only the life of a country clergyman who writes three sermons a week, and attends weddings at sixpence a piece, and hoes his own potatoes, and feeds the pigs, and is on hand for church and vestry meetings during the week, and keeps the run of all the new-born babies and their middle names, and is always, in a highly devotional frame of mind, is a parallel case.
I should like to have taken all those lobbyists I saw in the White House with me the afternoon of that day to "Arlington Heights," and bade them look there at the thousands of head-stones, gleaming white like the billows of the sea in the sunlight, far as the eye could reach, labelled "unknown," "unknown," telling the simple tragic story of our national struggle more effectually than any sculptured monument could have done. I would like to have shown them this, to see if for one moment it had power to paralyze those eager hands outstretched for bubbles.
"Unknown?" Not to him, in whose book every one of those names are written in letters of light! Not to him, in whose army of the faithful unto death, there are no "privates"!
My eyes were blind with tears, as I signed my name in the visitor's book at the desk of the Freedman's Bureau there, once General Lee's residence. All was "quiet on the Potomac," as its blue waters glittered in the sunlight before us. Yet the very air was thick with utterances. The place on which I stood is now indeed holy ground. And far off rose the white dome of the Capitol, crowded with men, some of them, thank God, not forgetting these white head-stones, in their efforts to keep inviolate what these brave fellows died for; and some, alas! willing to sell their glorious birthright for a "mess of pottage."
The sharp contrast of luxury and squalor, in Washington, even exceeding New York,—the carriages and their liveries, and the sumptuous dames inside; the pigs which run rooting round the streets; the tumble-down, shambling, rickety carts, with their bob-tailed, worn-out donkeys, so expressive of lazy unthrift,—must be regarded with the eye of a New Englander, trained to thoroughness and "faculty," to be properly appreciated. I avow myself, cursed or blessed, as you will, with the New England "bringing up," to which anything that "hangs by the eyelids" is simple crucifixion, whether it be in a cart or a statute-book, unhinged door, or a two or a four-legged dawdle.
"Oh, you'd come into it, and be as lazy as anybody," said my companion, "if you lived here a while."
Shade of the Pilgrim Fathers!—Assembly's Catechism!—baked beans—fish-balls—"riz" brown bread! Never!