Walks about Washington

by Francis E. Leupp

With the growing preference for land approaches, a good many Southern houses of the colonial type altered their habits, the White House among them; the side which faced the street offered the easier entrance, and thus the back door gradually usurped the dignities of the front, and accordingly the grounds on that side were laid out with lawns, trees, and shrubbery. Its outlook, also, is upon Lafayette Park, which, if sundry plans are carried through, will one day be faced on three sides with stately buildings, housing those executive Departments with which the President has to keep in closest touch.

Though President Washington was never to occupy the White House, or even to see it after it was nearly enough finished for occupancy, he took the greatest interest in watching it go up, and, only a few weeks before his death, went all over it with Mrs. Washington, thoroughly inspecting every part then accessible. He had borne a share in the Masonic ceremony of laying its corner-stone, and by his personal influence had induced the State of Virginia to advance a large sum of money at one particularly critical stage of the building operations; so the old mansion may boast of having some honored association with every President from the foundation of our Government till now.

When John and Abigail Adams moved in, the scantiness of fuel and lights, and the necessity for devoting the east room to the humblest of domestic uses and converting an upstairs chamber into a salon, were not the only shortcomings in their environment. Surface drainage water from a considerable bit of high ground to the eastward had formed a turbid little creek which almost surrounded the mansion. There was no water fit to drink and of sufficient quantity to meet the daily needs of the President’s family, short of a spring in an open tract which we now know as Franklin Square, about half a mile away, whence it was brought down in crude pipes. Beds of growing vegetables filled parts of the garden area where to-day we find well-kept lawns and ornamental shrubbery. The only way of reaching the south door from Pennsylvania Avenue was by a narrow footpath, on which the pedestrian took a variety of chances after dark. The streets surrounding the President’s grounds were so deep in slush or mud for a large part of the year that, in order to keep their clothing fairly presentable, visitors were obliged to come in closed coaches; and when the Adamses gave their first New Year’s reception, their guests, though so few that the oval room in the second story accommodated them, could not obtain in Washington enough suitable vehicles, and had to draw upon the livery stables in Baltimore.

Adams was a well-bred and well-read man, reared in the best traditions of New England, including the sanctity of a pledge; and, having promised his friend and predecessor, Washington, to do what he could toward building up a capital in fact as well as in name, he pocketed his petty discomforts and made the best of things. Among his other efforts to promote the popularity of the new city must be counted several dinners of exceptional excellence, at which Mrs. Adams presided with distinguished graciousness in a costume that, though it would strike us now as rather prim, was in keeping with her age and antecedents. The President, who was a rotund, florid man of middle height, appeared at these entertainments in a richly embroidered coat, silk stockings, shoes with huge silver buckles, and a powdered wig. These were concessions to the general demand for elegance of attire on the part of the chief magistrate, following the precedent established by Washington. They did not at all reflect Mr. Adams’s preferences, for he was one of the plainest of men in his tastes, and his ordinary course of domestic life in the President’s House was to the last degree unpretentious; his luncheon, for example,

Old Carlyle Mansion, Alexandria

consisted usually of oatcake and lemonade, and one of his amusements was to play horse with a little grandchild, who used to drive him up and down the somber corridors with a switch.

Albeit Adams and Jefferson became, late in life, the warmest of friends, no love was lost between them during the period when both were active in politics. Adams, who would have been gratified to receive, like Washington, a second term, was not disposed to “enact the captive chief in the procession of the victor,” so he did not stay to see Jefferson inaugurated, but at daylight of the fourth of March, 1801, left Washington for Boston. There was no need for such haste to escape, for Jefferson, as the high priest of democratic simplicity, had no procession; though the cheerful little fiction about his riding down Pennsylvania Avenue alone, and hitching his horse to a sapling in front of the Capitol while he went in to be sworn, received its death-blow long ago. The truth is, he had no use for a horse. He was boarding in New Jersey Avenue, where he had lived for the latter part of his term as Vice-president. A few minutes before noon on inauguration day he set out on foot, in company with several Congressmen who were his fellow boarders, and walked the block or so to the Capitol, where he was escorted by a committee to the Senate chamber and there took the oath of office and delivered his address. Then he walked back again to his boarding-house, and at dinner occupied his customary seat at the foot of the table. A visitor from Baltimore complimented him on his address and “wished him joy” as President. “I should advise you,” was his smiling response, “to follow my example on nuptial occasions, when I always tell the bridegroom that I will wait till the end of the year before offering my congratulations.”

The accommodations in the President’s House were somewhat better by the time Mr. Jefferson moved in than they were when the Adams family opened it, yet he seems to have been more or less cramped during most of his two terms—owing, doubtless, to the continued presence of mechanics and building materials in the incomplete parts of the house. When the British Minister called in court costume to present his credentials, he was received, with his convoy the Secretary of State, in a space so narrow that he had to back out of one end of it to make room for the President to enter at the other. One of the legation described Jefferson as “a tall man, with a very red, freckled face and gray, neglected hair; his manners were good natured and rather friendly, though he had somewhat of a cynical expression of countenance. He wore a blue coat, a thick, gray-colored hairy waistcoat with a red under-waistcoat lapped over it, green velveteen breeches with pearl buttons, yarn stockings with slippers down at the heels, his appearance being very much like that of a tall, raw-boned farmer.” On the other hand, an admiring contemporary insists that his dress was “plain, unstudied and sometimes old-fashioned in its form,” but “always of the finest materials,” and that “in his personal habits he was fastidious and neat.” So there you are!

A social being Jefferson certainly was. He liked company, and his former residence in France had cultivated his taste for the good things of the table, including light wines and olives. He once said that he considered olives the most precious gift of heaven to man, and he had them on his table whenever he could get them. He was also fond of figs and mulberries, and his household records bristle with purchases of crabs, pineapples, oysters, venison, partridges, and oranges—a pretty fair list for a man devoted to plain living. One of his hobbies as a host at very small and confidential dinners was to insure to his guests the utmost privacy, so he devised a scheme for dispensing as far as practicable with the presence of servants and avoiding the needless opening and closing of doors. Beside every chair was placed a small “dumb-waiter” containing all the desirable accessories, like fresh plates and knives and forks and finger-bowls; while in a partition wall was hung a bank of circular shelves, so pivoted as to reverse itself at the pressure of a spring, the fresh viands entering the dining-room as the emptied platters swung around into the pantry. The company at table rarely exceeded four when this machinery was called into play. At big state dinners the usual array of servants did the waiting.