Walks about Washington

by Francis E. Leupp

The oath with which Vice-president Johnson took upon himself the obligations of the Presidency was administered to him at his rooms in the Kirkwood House, a hostelry on the Pennsylvania Avenue corner now occupied by the Hotel Raleigh. Of his administration, the most broadly interesting incident was the impeachment trial described in an earlier chapter; and in our reflections on how history is shaped, another personal anecdote seems worthy of a place. Its heroine was Miss Vinnie Ream, the sculptor, who later became Mrs. Hoxie.

As his trial drew near its close, and Johnson’s friends and enemies were able to figure out pretty accurately how the Senate was going to divide, it became plain that the issue would hang on a single vote. If all the Senators counted against the President stood firm, he would be convicted, thirty-six to eighteen; but Secretary Stanton insisted that Ross of Kansas was preparing to go over from the majority to the minority. Ross was occupying a room in the same house with Miss Ream on Capitol Hill, and General Daniel E. Sickles, who was acquainted with him, was deputed to see him on the night before the roll-call and try to hold him fast against the President. Miss Ream happened to meet the General at the door, ushered him into the parlor but refused to let him see the Senator, and held him at bay till dawn the following morning, when he gave up the effort as fruitless and went home. If she had weakened for a moment, there is no telling what might have happened, for Sickles was in a position to have brought very heavy pressure to bear upon Ross. The roll-call showed thirty-five for conviction to nineteen against—less than the two-thirds required to convict; and it was Ross’s vote that saved Johnson.

At the inauguration of Grant, the relations between him and the retiring President were so strained, owing to the recent struggle at the War Department, that Johnson refused to attend the ceremonies unless it could be arranged that he and Grant should ride in separate carriages. General Rawlins therefore acted as escort to Grant and Vice-president Colfax. Grant was not much of a speaker, but the delivery of his inaugural address is remembered for a pretty incident. His little daughter Nellie, confused by the continuous bustle all about her, obeyed on the platform the same childish impulse which moved her in any exigency at home, and, running to his side, nestled against him, clasping one of his hands in both of hers and holding it all the time he was speaking. At the ball that evening, access to the supper-room and to the cloak-room was by the same door, which caused a blockade in the passage. The servants in charge of the wraps became hopelessly demoralized, with the result that Horace Greeley had to wait two hours to recover his white overcoat and lost his hat entirely. The torrent of lurid expletives he let loose during his ordeal shared space and importance, in the next day’s newspapers, with the thirty-five thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds worn by Mrs. John Morrissey, wife of the prize-fighter.

Grant’s second inauguration began inauspiciously, his aged father falling down a flight of stairs at the Capitol and suffering injuries which finally caused his death. The day was stormy, and the evening the coldest known in Washington for years. Unfortunately, the only place where the ball could be held was an improvised wooden building, through the crevices of which the icy wind blew a gale; and, to complete everybody’s misery, the heating apparatus broke down, so that many of the ladies who had come in conventional toilets had to protect their shoulders with fur mantillas, while their escorts put on overcoats. The President was so cold that he forgot the figures in the state quadrille which he was to lead, and was obliged to depend on General Sherman to push him through them. The supper was ruined, the meats and salads competing in temperature with the ices; all that could be saved was the coffee, which was kept hot over alcohol lamps. The breath of the members of the band congealed in their instruments, and several hundred canaries which were to sing in the intervals between band pieces shriveled into little downy balls on the bottoms of their cages and uttered not a trill.

The key-note of Grant’s administration on its political side was his steadfast faith that any friend of his was capable of filling any office in his gift. He named Alexander T. Stewart, the New York dry-goods merchant, for Secretary of the Treasury, but had to let him resign on account of technical objections raised in the Senate. Wendell Phillips having come to his defense at a hostile mass-meeting in Boston, Grant wished to make him Minister to England, but the offer was declined because Mrs. Phillips would not be able to go abroad at that time. Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts, though a stanch Democrat before the war, had become an “administration man” as soon as the Union was threatened, and thereby aroused the admiration of Grant, who named him for Chief Justice after Chase’s death; but the same political independence which so won Grant had incensed a number of Senators, who caused the rejection of the nomination.

Later, however, Grant succeeded in sending Cushing as Minister to Spain. Cushing was a man full of peculiarities, which strengthened with his years. At an early age he discarded the umbrella as a nuisance and braved storms unprotected. Naturally his hats suffered. At the time he received his billet for Spain, he was wearing one of the chimney-pot variety, which, from its appearance, he must have bought many years before. The nap was a good deal worn, there was a slight bulge in the top, and, thanks to the squareness of his head, he could wear it with either side in front. When some one suggested that he had better buy a new hat before presenting himself at the Spanish court, he considered the question solemnly, turning the old hat around and examining it with care before answering: “No, I think I shall wait and see what the fashions are in Madrid.” Though ready to spend his money freely for any public purpose, in private indulgences the frugal notions inherited from his New England ancestry came to the front. Hardly anybody ever saw him light a fresh cigar, but he used to carry about in his pocket a case packed with partly consumed stumps, to one of which he would help himself when he wished a smoke, only to let it die again as soon as he had become interested in talking.

It was because of his liking for both Blaine and Conkling that Grant strove, as his last act in the White House, to reconcile the two men, who were intensely hostile to each other. Their quarrel had grown out of a passage in debate when Conkling had made some very sarcastic comments on Blaine. The latter retorted in kind. “The contempt of that large-minded gentleman,” said he, glancing toward Conkling, “is so wilting, his haughty disdain, his grandiloquent swell, his majestic, supereminent, overpowering, turkey-gobbler strut have been so crushing to myself and all the members of this House, that I know it was an act of temerity for me to venture upon a controversy with him.” Referring to a recent newspaper article in which Conkling had been likened to the late Henry Winter Davis, Blaine went on: “The gentleman took it seriously, and it has given his strut additional pomposity. The resemblance is great. It is striking. Hyperion to a satyr, Thersites to Hercules, mud to marble, a dunghill to a diamond, a singed cat to a Bengal tiger, a whining puppy to a roaring lion!”

Conkling never forgave this attack. It seems like a small thing to change the whole current of a nation’s history, but it probably cost Blaine the Presidency; for in 1884 the disaffection of the Republicans in Conkling’s old home in central New York gave the State to Cleveland. President Grant’s effort to bring the foes together failed because Blaine, though ready to make any ordinary concessions, balked when Conkling demanded that he should confess his “mud to marble” speech to have been “unqualifiedly and maliciously false.”

In 1874, Miss Nellie Grant was married to Algernon Sartoris, a British subject. She was her father’s pet. At her wedding, he stood beside his wife to receive the guests, his face wearing a sphinx-like calm, though every one knew how he would feel the parting soon to follow. His forced composure continued till Nellie had left the house with her husband, and then he disappeared. An old friend, seeking him up-stairs, tapped at his chamber door, and, as there was no response, pushed it slightly ajar and looked in. There, on the bed, face downward, his eyes buried in his hands and his whole frame shaken with grief, lay the great soldier, sobbing like a child.

Throughout the Grant administration, the social arbiter for Washington was Mrs. Hamilton Fish, wife of the Secretary of State. She was a woman of the world, broad-minded and efficient, but the White House was not a very ceremonious place in that era. When the new Danish Minister called, for instance, in full regalia, to present his credentials, he found no one prepared to receive him, even the negro boy who met him at the door having to hurry into a coat before ushering him in. Persons who attended the state dinners say that Grant often turned down his wine-glasses. It was, as far as I have ever heard, the first instance of a President’s doing this; and it paved the way for the reign of cold water which came in with the next President, Rutherford B. Hayes.