Walks about Washington

by Francis E. Leupp

A remarkable feature of this episode was the discovery of how many slaveholders there were who were not white people. Now and then in the past, when for some special reason a negro had been freed, he would save his earnings till he had accumulated enough to buy his wife and children, who still remained in bondage to him till he saw fit to manumit them. One case which attracted wide attention was that of a woman who had bought her husband, a graceless scamp who proceeded to celebrate his good fortune by becoming an incorrigible drunkard. This had so outraged the feelings of his wife that she had finally sold him to a dealer who was picking up a boatload of cheap slaves to carry south. From that hour she had lost sight of him; but she haunted the commissioners’ sessions from day to day in the hope that the Government, now that it was going into the slave-buying business, might give her a little addition to the bargain price at which she had sold the old man.

Judiciary Square, in which the Court House and the Pension Office stand, was, when Chief Justice Taney lived in Indiana Avenue, a neighborhood of consequence. Several of the older buildings thereabout exhale a flavor of fifty or sixty years ago, and tradition connects them with such personages as Rufus Choate, Caleb Cushing, Thomas H. Benton, Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Fremont, and John A. Dix.

Opposite the east park of the Capitol, as we have already seen, stands the Old Capitol, a building with a variegated history. It was erected for the accommodation of Congress after the burning of the Capitol by the British. In it Henry Clay passed some years of his Speakership, and till very lately there was a scar on the wall of one of the rooms which was said to have been made by his desk. Under its roof the first Senators from Indiana, Illinois, and Mississippi took their seats. In front of it, President Monroe was inaugurated. After Congress left it to return to the restored Capitol, it was rented for a boarding-house, patronized chiefly by Senators and Representatives. Here John C. Calhoun lived for some time, and here he died. In one of the rooms, Persico, the Italian sculptor, worked out the model of his “Discoverer.” In another, Ann Royall edited her Huntress.

After the Civil War broke out, the Old Capitol was turned into a jail for the confinement of military offenders who were awaiting trial by court-martial, and for Confederate spies and other persons accused of unlawfully giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Belle Boyd, who was locked up there for a while, has left us her impressions of the place as “a vast brick building, like all prisons, somber, chilling, and repulsive.” She describes William P. Wood, who was superintendent of the prison, as “having a humane heart beneath a rough exterior.” Every Sunday he used to provide facilities for religious worship to his compulsory guests, announcing the hours and forms in characteristic fashion: “All you who want to hear the word of God preached according to Jeff Davis, go down into the yard; and all of you who want to hear it preached according to Abe Lincoln, go into No. 16.” In the jail yard Henry Wirz, who had been the keeper of the Confederate military prison at Andersonville, Georgia, where so many Union soldiers died of starvation and disease, was hanged for murder. At the close of the war the building was divided into a block of dwellings, of which the southernmost was long the home of the late Justice Field of the Supreme Court. The Justice used to enjoy telling his visitors about the distinguished men from the South who, after dining at his table, had roamed over the premises and located their one-time places of confinement.

The oldest house of worship in Washington is St. Paul’s, a spireless Protestant Episcopal church not far from the Soldiers’ Home. It stands well toward the rear of the Rock Creek Cemetery, which also contains the world-famous bronze by St. Gaudens, in the Adams lot. This is a seated female figure, in flowing classic drapery, to which no one has ventured to attach a permanent title, though it has been variously known as “Grief” and “The Peace of God.” St. Paul’s goes back to the colonial era and was built of brick imported from England. A younger church, nevertheless numbered among the oldest relics of its class within the city proper, is St. John’s, at the corner of Sixteenth and H streets. It was designed by Latrobe about the time he undertook the restoration of the Capitol and was consecrated in 1816. It has long been called “the President’s church” because so many tenants of the White House, just across Lafayette Square, have worshiped in it.

Madison and Monroe were the first, and the vestry soon set apart one pew to be preserved always for the free use of the reigning Presidential family. John Quincy Adams was a Unitarian, but came to the afternoon services; and Jackson, though a Methodist, was frequently to be seen there. Van Buren was a constant attendant both as Vice-president and as President. William Henry Harrison, for the month he lived in Washington, came regularly, regardless of the weather or his state of health; and he was to have been confirmed the very week he died. Tyler was a member of the congregation. Polk had other affiliations, but Taylor, Fillmore, and Buchanan used the President’s pew. Then came a break in the line till Arthur entered the White House; and his retirement appears to have been followed by another lapse in the succession till Mrs. Roosevelt revived it. Her husband used to accompany her from time to time, though he retained his active connection with the Reformed (Dutch) communion. Since the Roosevelts, the line has been broken again. John Quincy Adams became so fond of St. John’s that, when he returned to Washington as a Representative, he renewed his Sunday visits. He paid close attention to the preliminary service but seemed to sleep through the sermon, though he was usually able to repeat the next day, with considerable accuracy, the main things the minister had said.

This whole neighborhood bristles with memories of great people. The old Tayloe mansion was styled, in its later years, “the Cream-white House,” partly because of its color, and partly in jocose reference to its occupancy by two or three Vice-presidents. The house on the corner north of it, now owned by the Cosmos Club, was the home of Dolly Madison in her widowhood. After her death it passed into the hands of Charles Wilkes, the gallant naval officer who was for many years the unrecognized discoverer of the Antarctic continent, and who, in the early days of the Civil War, forcibly took two of his late Washington neighbors, Messrs. Mason and Slidell, off the British steamer Trent, which was conveying them to Europe on a diplomatic mission for the Confederate Government. South of the Tayloe house is the Belasco Theater, on the site of the old-fashioned red brick building in which occurred the attempted assassination of Secretary Seward and where James G. Blaine passed the last years of his life. On H Street, about a block to the eastward, General McClellan made his headquarters in the intervals between his commands of the Army of the Potomac; while in a near cluster are former homes of Commodore Decatur, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Montgomery Blair, Gideon Welles, George Bancroft, and John Hay, as well as the house where the Ashburton treaty was negotiated and where Owen Meredith wrote his “Lucile.” Edward Everett, Jefferson Davis, and Tobias Lear lived, at various times, a short distance away.

One of my favorite excursions about the city with friends who revere the memory of the War President is what I call my “Lincoln pilgrimage.” We start at the White House, turn eastward and take F Street to Tenth, and then southward a half-square. This brings us in front of the building which once was Ford’s Theater, by the route taken by Lincoln on the evening of Good Friday, 1865. Here are the arches which once opened into the theater lobby but are now used for ground-floor windows; through one of them he passed on his way to his box. Directly across the street is the house to which he was carried to die. In it is preserved the Oldroyd collection of Lincoln relics, a really remarkable array. After inspecting it, we return to F Street and go eastward again to about the middle of the block, where an alley emerges from a lower level south of us. Down into this we dive, and, making a sharp right-angle turn, find ourselves at the old stage-door of the theater, beside which Booth left his horse, and through which he made his dash for liberty after his mad deed.

Back again up the alley we climb, through F Street to Ninth, through Ninth to H, and eastward on H Street to Number 604, the house of Mrs. Surratt, the rendezvous of the conspirators and the place where some of them were captured. It looks to-day very much as it did on the night of the assassination. Retracing our steps to Seventh Street, we board a southbound car, which carries us to the gate of the reservation now occupied by the Washington Barracks and the Army War College. Here, within a few hundred feet of the entrance, used to stand the military prison where the conspirators were confined, and in the yard of which they paid the last penalty for their crime.

And here, dear reader, we come to the end of our present walks and talks about Washington. As I warned you at the outset, I have treated our wanderings as a pleasure-jaunt rather than as a medium of solid instruction. When you find yourself thirsting for the severely practical, you can come back and make the round again, if you choose, in a sight-seeing car, and the megaphone-man will point out to you twice as many objects of interest and give you three times as much information about them—accurate or otherwise. He will take pains to show you all the Government buildings and the hotels, the foreign legations and the theaters, the millionaires’ houses, and parks and circles and statuary which I have dismissed with a line or left unmentioned. He will tell you how many tons every bronze weighs, how long every edifice took in building, and how large a fortune every Senator amassed before crowning his career with a tour of public service. I could have told you these things, too, but, rather than force too fast a gait upon you, I have left them for the megaphone-man and taken for my task some odds and ends he could not take for his. I should have liked to tell you how the Government swept all the electric wires out of the sky and hid them underground; how it drained the marshes on the city’s western edge, cleared the channels of the Potomac, and built out of the dredgings a big pleasure-ground; and how it got rid of the annual inundations, in one of which, just about a generation ago, I crossed the busiest part of Pennsylvania Avenue in a rowboat.