Walks about Washington

by Francis E. Leupp

was just struggling to raise his professional terms to twenty-five dollars a day when employed, he went his way, but sought consolation in winning Martha Custis, who resembled Miss Cary almost as a twin sister.

Of Mary Washington, mother of George, we get glimpses in the familiar chat of the vicinage. She appears as a rather difficult person, who tried the methodical soul of her son by her thriftless habits and her incessant complaints of being out of money. For years he did his utmost to induce her to rent her plantation further down the State, hire out her slaves, and live on her fixed income thus obtained, but to no purpose. Yet after he had become so famous that he was obliged to entertain at Mount Vernon all the traveling celebrities of two hemispheres, she suddenly took it into her head that she would like to come and live with him. In spite of his filial piety, candor compelled him to show her the impracticability of her proposal; and, though he tried to soften her disappointment by sending her the last seventy-five dollars in his purse, she seems to have continued dissatisfied.

George was not stingy. On the contrary, on each of three plantations which he farmed he kept one crib of corn always set apart for free distribution among the poor, and never let this fail, even if he had to rob his own table supply or to buy corn at a dollar a bushel to make up a deficit. He was not a rich man, but for sentimental reasons held on to Mount Vernon after it had ceased to be profitable property. At his death, he was worth only about seventy-five thousand dollars in his own right, and, had he lived ten years longer at the same rate, he would have died a bankrupt. It was his wife’s better investments that kept up the expenses of their home.

As we go over the old mansion, we are shown the various rooms associated with Washington’s activities, and that in which his death occurred. Notwithstanding his sturdy muscular development, his throat and chest were always weak spots; and in 1799, after a soaking and chill from a ride through a December storm, he went to bed with a cold which left him unable to swallow. Soon he realized that the end was not far off. It was characteristic of the man that he should then discharge the doctors from further useless ministrations, give such directions about his burial as he deemed important, and calmly proceed to watch the waning of his own pulse. After a little the hand that held his wrist relaxed and dropped upon the coverlet, and the friends gathered in the chamber knew that all was over.

On the Maryland side of the Potomac, the suburb most convenient of access is Georgetown. In fact, it long ago ceased to be strictly a suburb, by incorporation with the city of Washington, from which it was separated only by Rock Creek, a narrow tributary of the Potomac. Officially, it is now West Washington, and its streets have been renamed and renumbered so as to conform as nearly as practicable to the system in use in the capital. All the same, Georgetown has never lost its identity. It had a life of its own before Washington was thought of; and within my recollection the old society of Georgetown used to look askance at the “new people” with whom Washington was filling up. It is still sprinkled with hoary houses set in quaint ancestral gardens, though modernism has touched the place at so many points that we can get a glimpse of these survivals sometimes only through deep vistas lined with the red brick side-walls of urban blocks. The most attractive of the old mansions, and the best preserved, is the Tudor house, built by Doctor William Thornton about 1810. It is a good specimen from the Georgian epoch in architecture, standing fitly in the midst of a great square of lawn, with shade trees and box hedges to correspond; and one of its traditions is that pretty little Nellie Custis went there to her first ball, though—but I leave others to struggle with the problem of conflicting dates. One thing we do know, that the place has always been in the possession of kinsfolk of the Mount Vernon family.

Many amusing stories are told of Georgetown’s early days, when the Scotch element were so strong in its population that a man could not be appointed to the office of flour inspector without subscribing to a test oath declaring his disbelief in the doctrine of “transsubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord’s supper”; when the city fathers sought to save the expense of employing a surveyor to calculate the width of the Potomac at a point where a bridge was to be built, by ordering out all good citizens to pull at the opposite ends of a measuring-rope; and when the big triangle which was pounded as an alarm of fire fell from the belfry in which it hung, and fire-alarms were sounded thereafter by blowing a fish-horn through the streets. But none of these tales will have an interest for most visitors equal to the local version of the origin of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” For Georgetown was Francis Scott Key’s old home.

As the story goes, part of the British forces which marched upon Washington in the summer of 1814 passed through Upper Marlboro, Maryland, on a day when Doctor William Beanes, a prominent physician, was entertaining several friends at dinner. As the gentlemen talked, they grew more and more indignant against the invaders, and, news being brought to them at table that a few red-coated stragglers were still in town committing depredations after the main body of their comrades had passed on, some one suggested that the party go out and arrest these men as disturbers of the peace. This was done, but to little effect; for as soon as the stragglers got away, they hastened to catch up with the army and lodge a complaint with their officers, who at once sent back a squad of soldiers to arrest the arresters. Three of the dining party, including Beanes, were carried off to Admiral Cockburn’s flagship, which was lying in the Patuxent River. Cockburn, after administering a disciplinary lecture to the trio, dismissed the others but took Beanes as a prisoner on his ship to Baltimore.

Key, who was Beanes’s nephew, hastened to Baltimore as soon as he heard of the doctor’s plight, and under a flag of truce went aboard the vessel to intercede with Cockburn for his uncle’s release. His plea was vain; and Cockburn would not even let him go ashore again till after the bombardment of Fort McHenry. When Key returned to Georgetown, he related his adventures at the next meeting of the local glee-club, and his fellow members urged him to put his narrative into verse. He read his production at a later meeting, and the club introduced it to the public, who adopted it as the national anthem.

Among the noted names associated with Georgetown, outside of political life, may be mentioned those of Joel Benton, the poet and essayist, who bought a farm on the Washington side of Rock Creek, since famous as the Kalorama estate; Robert Fulton, the pioneer in steam navigation, who made some of his early experiments with water-craft and submarine explosives on the small streams of the neighborhood; George Peabody, financier and philanthropist, who came as a poor boy from Massachusetts and worked as a clerk in a store in Bridge Street; William W. Corcoran, whose later career somewhat resembled Peabody’s, and whose real start in life dated from the failure of a little shop he kept in the heart of the town; and, last but not least, a youthful belle whose romance demands a paragraph or two of its own.

Baron Bodisco, Russian Minister to the United States during the Van Buren administration, lived, as did most of the foreign envoys of that time, in Georgetown. He was a bachelor, well on toward sixty years of age, uncompromisingly ugly, with a face covered with wrinkles, and a bald head which he tried to conceal under a somewhat obtrusive wig. He had for visitors one winter two young nephews, for whom he gave a dancing party at the legation, inviting all the socially eligible boys and girls in town. By some accident, one of his invitations miscarried and failed to reach Harriet Beall Williams, a most attractive and popular schoolgirl of sixteen. He hastened to repair his error as soon as he discovered it, and on the evening of the party hunted her up to make his apologies in person. It was a case of love at first sight. After that he contrived to meet her occasionally on her way to or from school, and ere long he became an avowed suitor for her hand. The courtship, though not displeasing to the girl, was for some time discouraged by her family. Finding her resolved to accept her elderly lover, however, they withdrew their active opposition, and Beauty and the Beast, as they were commonly called, were married in June.