During Fillmore’s term Louis Kossuth visited Washington. The country was just passing through one of its occasional periods of revolutionary fervor, and Kossuth’s stand for the rights of Hungary against Austria had aroused much sympathy here. Our public men were divided in opinion as to how far to go with their demonstrations in his favor, wishing to win the support of the Hungarians in the United States and of immigrants who had fled from other countries to escape oppression, yet hoping to keep clear of entanglements with Austria. As Kossuth had left home to escape death for high treason and taken refuge in Constantinople, one of our men-of-war was sent to the Dardanelles to bring him to America. He did not then care to go further than England, whence, after an agreeable visit, he came over, in the expectation of inducing our Government to take up arms for Hungarian liberty. Henry Clay, who was already stricken with his last illness, promptly put a damper upon that scheme; but Kossuth remained the guest of the nation for a time and was dined and fêted prodigiously. He maintained the state of a royal personage, keeping a uniformed and armed guard about the door of his suite of apartments at what is now the Metropolitan Hotel, and a lot of carousing young subalterns always in his anteroom. He never appeared in public except in full military uniform, with his cavalry sword, in its steel scabbard, clanking by his side. Mrs. Kossuth, who accompanied him on his tour, was unable to overcome her distrust of American cooking, and used to scandalize her neighbors at table by ostentatiously smelling of every new dish before tasting it.
The inauguration of Pierce was marked by several innovations: he drove to and from the Capitol standing up in his carriage, delivered his address without notes, and made affirmation instead of taking the oath of office. A tragic interest attaches itself to his administration, because, just as he was preparing to remove to Washington, he lost his only child, a boy of thirteen, in a railway accident. Mrs. Pierce, who was an invalid, was terribly broken by this bereavement, and all social festivities at the White House were abandoned till toward the close of her stay there. The new Vice-president, William R. King, was not inaugurated at the same time and place with the President. He had gone to Cuba in January for his health, and, as he was not well enough to come home, Congress passed a special act permitting him to take the oath before the American Consul-general at Havana. Soon after his return to the United States, in April, he died.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was a college mate and intimate friend of Pierce, was anxious to see something of Europe, but had not the means to gratify his desire; so Pierce appointed him consul at Liverpool, where he was able to live in comfort on his pay and save enough for a sojourn on the Continent. To this experience American literature owes most of his later work, including “The Marble Faun” and “Our Old Home.” In Washington still linger stories of a visit Hawthorne paid the city about the time of his appointment. Pierce tried to show him some informal attentions; but Hawthorne’s shyness, which went to such an extreme that he could not say anything to the lady next him at table without trembling and blushing, prevented his making much headway socially.
All through Pierce’s term, political conditions were working up to the point which caused the irruption of a few years later. The habit of carrying deadly weapons on the person became so common in Washington, especially in Congress, that scarcely an altercation occurred between two men without the exposure, if not the use, of a pistol or a dirk. The newspapers in their serious columns treated such incidents severely, while the comic paragraphers satirized them; and Preston Brooks, a Representative from South Carolina, in a half-earnest, half-cynical vein, gave notice one day of his intention to offer this amendment to the rules of the House: “Any member who shall bring into the House a concealed weapon, shall be expelled by a vote of two-thirds. The Sergeant-at-Arms shall cause a suitable rack to be erected in the rotunda, where members who are addicted to carrying concealed weapons shall be required to place them for the inspection of the curious, so long as the owners are employed in legislation.”
Senator Sumner of Massachusetts having, a few days later, in a speech on slavery, spoken disparagingly of a South Carolina Senator who was absent, Brooks, on the twenty-second of May, 1856, entered the Senate chamber when it was nearly deserted, and, with a heavy gutta-percha cane, rained blows with all his strength upon the head of Sumner, who was quietly writing at his desk. Sumner fell to the floor and for some days thereafter hovered between life and death. He was three or four years in recovering from the direct effects of the assault, and never was entirely restored to health and strength. The incident excited bitter feeling throughout both North and South. For denouncing the assault as paralleling that of Cain upon Abel, Representative Anson Burlingame of New York was challenged by Brooks; he accepted the challenge, naming date, place, and weapons, but Brooks failed to appear on the field.
The next President was James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, also a Democrat. The two incidents in his term which most impressed Washington were the first successful experiments with the Atlantic cable in August, 1858, and the visit to the White House of the Prince of Wales, who later became King Edward VII. Cyrus W. Field, after a struggle as soul-wearing as Morse’s over the introduction of the telegraph, succeeded in making his submarine cable work and induced Queen Victoria to send the first despatch, a message of greeting to President Buchanan, who was requested to answer it in kind. The skepticism of the day toward all scientific novelties was reflected in Buchanan’s summoning a newspaper correspondent whom he trusted and begging to be told frankly whether he were not the victim of a hoax. At the White House all the members of the Cabinet were gathered, earnestly debating the same question. The most stubborn disbeliever was the Secretary of the Treasury, Howell Cobb, who jeered at the whole thing as a wild absurdity. In spite of Cobb’s resistance, the correspondent persuaded the President to answer the Queen’s message. As bad luck would have it, the cable parted in mid-ocean soon thereafter and was not restored to working order for several years; and in the interval the skeptics were appropriately exultant.
Buchanan, who was our first bachelor President, was sometimes slangily called “the O. P. F.,” having once referred to himself in a message as an “old public functionary.” The image of him carried in the popular mind is derived from contemporaneous pictures, which show him as a stiff, precise, ministerial-looking old man, wearing a black coat, a high choker collar, and a spotless white neckerchief. But this was the style of the day in portraiture and must not be accepted too literally. The late Frederick O. Prince of Boston used to tell of a morning call he paid Buchanan, whom he had imagined a model of formality and elegance, and of his astonishment when the President entered the room clad in a greenish figured dressing-gown, woolen socks, and carpet slippers, and, to put the standing visitors at their ease, called to a servant: “Jeems, sit some cheers!”
When Buchanan came to Washington for his inauguration, attended by a number of Pennsylvania friends, he took lodgings at the National Hotel, where the whole party fell ill with symptoms which to-day we should charge to ptomaine poisoning. One or two of the sufferers died. Buchanan escaped with a comparatively light attack; but a rumor gained circulation that the Free Soilers had tried to assassinate him because of his conservative disposition toward slavery. For some time after he entered the White House, therefore, the police kept a watch on his movements, and one rough-looking Kansan was arrested on suspicion, having bought an air-gun and engaged a room in a building which the President was in the habit of passing every day when he went out for exercise.
The domestic accommodations at the White House were already so limited that, when the Prince of Wales visited it in 1860, the President had to give up his bedchamber to his guest and sleep on a cot in the anteroom of his office. As I recall the Prince he was not
