Walks about Washington

by Francis E. Leupp

Leaving the court-room and continuing northward, we come to the present Hall of the Senate. It is smaller than the present Hall of Representatives and also cleaner looking and more comfortable. When Congress is in full session, the contrast may be extended further so as to include what we hear as well as what we see, for there is little likeness between the two houses in the matter of orderliness of procedure. But that’s another story, which will keep. It was from this chamber that the Senators from the seceding States took their departure in 1860 and 1861. For years afterward the first request of every visiting stranger was to be shown the seats formerly occupied by these men. As long as the old doorkeeper of the Senate, Captain Bassett, lived, he was reputed to be the only person who knew the history of every desk on the floor. Whether he transmitted this knowledge to any of his assistants before his death, I cannot say; but more than once he saved some of the furniture from injury at the hands of wanton vandals or curio collectors.

During the early days of the Civil War, a party of Northern zouaves, passing through the city on their way to the front, entered the Senate Hall during a recess and tried to identify Davis’s desk. They frankly avowed their purpose of destroying, if possible, the last trace of the Confederate President’s connection with the United States Government; but Bassett refused to be coaxed, bribed, or bullied into revealing the information they wished. Their persistency presently aroused his fears lest they might come back later and renew their attempt in his absence; so he resorted to diplomacy and made them a little speech, reminding them that, no matter what Mr. Davis might have done to provoke their indignation, the desk at which he had sat was not his property, but that of the Government which they had come South to defend. His reasoning had its effect, and, admitting that he was right, they went away peaceably.

Back of the Senate chamber are two rooms set apart for the President and Vice-president respectively. Till lately, the President’s room as a rule has been occupied only during a few closing hours of a session, when the President wishes to be readily accessible for the signing of such acts as he approves. Sometimes he has spent the entire last night of a Congress here, returning to the White House for breakfast and coming to the Capitol again for an hour or two before noon. President Wilson has used the room more than any of his recent predecessors, going there to consult the leading members of his party in Congress while legislation is in course of preparation or passage.

The Vice-president’s room has been more constantly in use as a retiring room for its occupant during the intervals when he is not presiding over the sessions of the Senate. On its wall has hung for many years a little gilt-framed mirror for which John Adams, while Vice-president, paid forty dollars, and which was brought with the other appurtenances of the Senate from Philadelphia when the Government removed its headquarters to Washington. Many of the frugal founders of the republic were scandalized at the extravagance of the purchase, and one gravely introduced in the Senate a resolution censuring Adams for having drawn thus heavily upon the public funds “to gratify his personal vanity.” What these good men would say if they were to revisit the Capitol now and see in the same room with the forty-dollar mirror a silver inkstand that cost two hundred dollars and a clock that cost a thousand, we can only imagine. It was in this room, by the way, that Vice-president Wilson died in November, 1875, after an attack of illness which suddenly overcame him at the Capitol and was too severe to justify his being carried to his home.

On the floor below are two other points of interest. We shall do well to descend, not by the broad marble staircases in the north wing, but by an old iron-railed and curved flight of stone steps a little south of the Supreme Court. Note, in passing, its columns, as truly American in design as those above-stairs to which attention has already been directed; for they conventionalize our Indian corn, the stalks making the body of a pillar and the leaves and ears the capital. The first point we shall visit is the crypt, which is directly under the rotunda. It is a vaulted chamber originally intended as a resting-place for the body of George Washington. There was to have been a circular opening in the ceiling, so that visitors in the rotunda could look down upon the sarcophagus, above which a suspended taper was to be kept continually burning. The light was duly hung there, and not extinguished for many years; but as Washington’s heirs were unwilling to allow his remains to leave Mount Vernon, the rest of the plan was abandoned.

A little way north of the crypt we come to the room that the Supreme Court occupied for about forty

Rock Creek

years after the restoration of the Capitol. Out of it was sent the first message with which Samuel F. B. Morse announced to the world the success of his invention, the magnetic telegraph. Morse was perfectly convinced that his device was workable, but he had exhausted his means before being able to make a satisfactory experiment. He therefore asked Congress for an appropriation to equip a trial line between Washington and Baltimore. Some of the members scoffed at his appeal as visionary; others intimated that he was trying to impose upon the Government; only a handful seemed to feel enough confidence in him and his project to vote for the appropriation. After a discouraging struggle lasting till the third of March, 1843, Morse was at the Capitol watching the dying hours of the Congress, when his friends advised him that his cause was hopeless, and he returned to his hotel and went to bed.

Before breakfast the next morning he received a call from Miss Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the Commissioner of Patents, who brought him the news that after he had left the Capitol his appropriation had gone through, and the President had signed the bill just before midnight. To reward her as the bearer of glad tidings, Morse invited her to frame the first message to be sent to Baltimore. It took more than a year to build the line and insure its successful operation; but on May 24, 1844, in the presence of a gathering which filled the court chamber, the inventor seated himself at the instrument, and Miss Ellsworth placed in his hand a phrase she had selected from the twenty-third verse of the twenty-third chapter of the Book of Numbers: “What hath God wrought!” In less time than it takes to tell the facts, the operator in Baltimore had received the message and ticked it back without an error. In that hour of his triumph over skepticism and abuse, Morse could have asked almost anything of Congress without fear of repulse.