Walks about Washington

by Francis E. Leupp

The only parallel to these instances of frequent shifts in the local art world is the case of a painting entitled “Love and Life,” presented by the English artist, George F. Watts, to our Government. Mr. Cleveland, who was President at the time, hung it in the White House, but the prudish comments passed upon it by visitors led to its transfer to the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In the Roosevelt administration it made three trips, first to the White House, then back to the Corcoran Gallery, and then to the White House again, where it rested till President Taft came in, only to be rebanished to the Corcoran Gallery. President Wilson had it returned to the White House, and there it is at the present writing.

Although there has never been in Washington a definite scheme for the location of statues, which have been planted, hit or miss, wherever space offered, accident has arranged a few of them so as to form a rather remarkable historical series. Starting with the Washington National Monument, in honor of the foremost figure in the Revolution and the President who set in motion the machinery of the embryo republic, we pass directly northward to the White House, home of all his successors in the Presidency and emblematic of the civil government which emerged from the War for Independence. A few hundred feet further northward stands the statue of Andrew Jackson, the hero of the War of 1812, the first fought by the United States as a nation. About a half-mile more to the north we reach the statue of Winfield Scott, the general whose capture of Mexico City ended the second foreign war in which the nation engaged. All that is needed to complete this remarkable procession is a memorial arch on Sixteenth Street heights, to the soldiers and sailors on both sides of the Civil War which cemented the Union begun under Washington.

Strange to say, the city which best knew Lincoln and Grant has had, up to this time, no out-of-doors statue whatever of Grant and no adequate one of Lincoln. In Lincoln Park, about a mile east of the Capitol, is the Emancipation statue, and in front of the City Hall there is an insignificant standing figure of Lincoln, perched on a pillar so high that the features can be seen only dimly. A statue of Grant will later occupy the central pedestal of a group in the little park at the foot of the western slope of the Capitol grounds, which it is proposed to call Union Square. On either side of Grant, the plan originally was to place Sherman and Sheridan; but as the Sherman and Sheridan statues already set up elsewhere are so diverse in character, it has been questioned whether they would fit into the Union Square group. After many suggestions, controversies, and reports, Congress decided, a year or two ago, upon a form of memorial for Lincoln, which is already under way. It will be a marble temple, designed by Henry Bacon, in Potomac Park, with a statue of the War President, by Daniel Chester French, visible in the recesses of its dignified colonnade.

Besides the scores of statues and miles of painted portraits which keep vivid the memory of great and good men who are gone, Washington has many institutions and buildings with personal associations that fulfil a similar purpose. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, for instance, was the gift of the late William W. Corcoran, the financier. The national deaf-mute college at Kendall Green, on the northeastern edge of the city, recalls its original benefactor, Amos Kendall, who was Postmaster-general under Jackson, as well as the work of Doctor Edward M. Gallaudet in raising it from its modest beginnings to its present eminence. The Pension Office, in which eight inaugural balls have been held, takes first rank among our public edifices for architectural ugliness. It is nevertheless an honor to the memory of Quartermaster-general Meigs, who asked the privilege of proving, in an era of extravagance, that a suitable building could be reared for the money allotted to it, and who turned back into the treasury a large slice of his appropriation after having paid every bill. The present Library of Congress is, in a like manner, a monument to the late Bernard R. Green, whose engineering skill and administrative faculty performed a feat corresponding to General Meigs’s; it reminds us, also, of Thomas Jefferson, whose private library, purchased after the burning of the Capitol, formed the nucleus of the present magnificent collection. The Soldiers’ Home, near the north boundary of the city, commemorates General Scott’s success in Mexico, the tribute he exacted there for a breach of truce being used in founding this beautiful retreat, where veterans of the regular army may pass their declining years in comfort.

Few people, probably, are aware that the Smithsonian Institution, whose fame is as wide as civilization, owes its origin to the rejection of a manuscript prepared for publication. James Smithson, an Englishman of means, who had been a frequent contributor to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, sent in, a little less than a century ago, a paper which the censors refused to print; and its author avenged the affront by altering his will, in which he had bequeathed his entire fortune to the Society, so as to throw the reversion to the United States, a country he had never seen, to be used for “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” Congress had a long quibble about the disposal of the money, but at last hit upon a plan, and since then has turned over much of the public scientific research work to be performed “under the direction of the Smithsonian Institution.” The accumulation of trophies of exploration, historical relics, and gifts of objects of art and industry from foreign potentates, presently overflowed the accommodations of the Institution proper, and a National Museum was built to house these treasures. The Smithsonian commemorates not only the beneficence of Smithson, but the great achievements of its several executive heads, like Joseph Henry’s in electromagnetism, Spencer F. Baird’s in the culture of fish as a source of food-supply, and Samuel P. Langley’s in aërial navigation and the standardization of time.

The old City Hall, better known now as the District Court House, will be remembered as the place where the first President Harrison probably caught the cold which resulted in his death. It has a tragic association with another President, also, for in one of its court-rooms was conducted the trial of Guiteau for assassinating James A. Garfield. This trial excited vigorous comment throughout the country by what seemed to many critics an unwarrantable latitude allowed the defendant for self-exploitation.

Rendezvous of the Lincoln Conspirators

Judge Walter T. Cox, who presided, was one of the ablest and most conscientious jurists who ever sat on the Supreme bench of the District. From personal attendance on the trial, I feel sure that the course pursued by him was the only one which could have given the jury a sure ground for dooming the assassin to death; and it was doubtless a realization of that fact which held in check the mob spirit that began to show itself at one stage and threatened to save the Government the trouble of putting up a gallows. The popular rancor against Guiteau was so strong that in order to get him safely into the Court House from the “black Maria” which brought him from the jail every morning, and to reverse the operation at the close of every day’s session, the vehicle was backed up within about twenty feet of one of the basement doors, and a double file of police, standing shoulder to shoulder with clubs drawn, made a narrow little lane through which he was rushed at a quickstep, his face blanched with terror, and his furtive eyes fixed on the earth.

Another historical incident is associated with the old building, to which many attribute the final resolve of President Lincoln to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. I refer to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. A bill to this end, introduced by Henry Wilson in December, 1861, was hotly debated in Congress but finally passed, and was signed on April 16, 1862. Only loyal owners were to be paid for their slaves, and every applicant for compensation had to take an iron-clad oath of allegiance to the Government. The whole business was handled by a board of three commissioners, who employed for their assistance an experienced slave-dealer imported from Baltimore. They met in one of the court-rooms, and the dealer put the negroes through their paces just as he had been accustomed to in the heyday of his trade, making them dance to show their suppleness and bite various tough substances as a test of the soundness of their teeth. Many of the black men and women came into the room singing hosannas to glorify the dawn of freedom. The highest appraisement of any slave was seven hundred and eighty-eight dollars for a good blacksmith; the lowest was ten dollars and ninety-five cents for a baby. These were about half the prices which would have been brought but for the fact that only one million dollars was appropriated, whereas the total estimated value of the slaves paid for was nearer two million, and all payments had to be scaled accordingly.