Walks about Washington

by Francis E. Leupp

Little as we may relish such satire, we are bound to admit its modicum of truthfulness, for the brave souls who founded Washington were given to the grandiloquent habit of their day. They had called to their aid Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a French military engineer who had served in the patriot army of the Revolution, and who cherished brilliant dreams of the future of his adopted country. To him they had committed the preparation of a plan for the federal city, and he had laid it out on the lines, not of an administrative center for a handful of newly enfranchised colonies, but of a capital for a republic of fifty States with five hundred million population. As he had lived in Versailles, he is supposed to have taken that town as a general model in his arrangement of streets and avenues, which some one has likened to “a wheel laid on a gridiron.”

Of course, it was the business of the Commissioners to advertise the attractions of the federal city as effectively as possible, to promote its early settlement; so perhaps we may forgive their taking a good deal for granted, and permitting real estate speculation to go practically unchecked. Congress for several years ignored their appeals for an appropriation for the development of the city, and in the interval their chief dependence for the funds necessary to spend for highways and buildings was on the sale of lots, and on grants or loans obtained from neighboring States. The most sightly hill was set apart for the Capitol, and a beautiful bit of rising ground, overlooking a bend in the river, for the President’s House. The two buildings had their corner-stones laid with much ceremony, but progress on them was slow. Nevertheless, their sites, as well as the spaces reserved in L’Enfant’s plan for parks, fountains, and statuary, were always treated by the speculators, in correspondence with prospective customers, as if the improvements designed eventually to crown them were already installed. The outside public manifested no undue eagerness to buy, and the auction sales of lots proved very disappointing. Then a lottery was organized, with tickets at seven dollars apiece, and for a first prize “a superb hotel” with baths and other comforts, worth fifty thousand dollars; but that, too, fell short of expectations, all the desirable prizes going to persons who felt no concern for the city’s future, and the hotel, though started, never being finished. It was a pretty discouraging prospect, therefore, which confronted the officers of the Government when, on May 16, 1800, President John Adams issued his order for their removal from their cozy quarters in old Philadelphia to what seemed to them, by contrast, like a camp in the wilderness.

The six Cabinet members, with their one hundred and thirty-two subordinates, made the journey overland at various dates during the summer, and in October the archives followed. These filled about a dozen large boxes, which, with the office furniture, were brought down by sea in a packet-boat and landed on a wharf at the mouth of Tiber Creek, a tributary of the Potomac which then ran through the city but was later converted into a sewer. All Washington, numbering perhaps three thousand persons, turned out to greet the vessel; and amid cheers, ringing of bells, and blasts from an antique cannon brought forth for the occasion, its precious contents were carried ashore. “The Department buildings” to which they were consigned were a wonderful assortment. The Treasury was a two-story brick house at the southeast corner of the President’s grounds, the War Office a still unfinished replica of it at the southwest corner. The Post-office Department found shelter in a private house in which only half the floors were laid and four rooms plastered; while the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Navy, and the Attorney-general had to direct their affairs from their lodgings. All these temporary accommodations were sought as near as possible to the President’s House. Congress had striven, for its greater ease of access, to have the Departments quartered near the Capitol; but Washington had set his face resolutely against every such proposal, citing the experience of his own secretaries, who had been so pestered with needless visits from Senators and Representatives that some of them “had been obliged to go home and deny themselves, in order to transact current business.” Which shows that one modern nuisance has a fairly ancient precedent.

Members of both houses of Congress came straggling in all through the first three weeks of November, to

General Washington’s Office in Georgetown

find most of the best rooms in the two or three hotels and the little cluster of boarding-houses already occupied by the executive functionaries and their families. President Adams, who had preceded them by a few weeks, was not much better off even in the official abode reserved for him, if we may call his wife as a witness.

“The house is on a grand and superb scale,” she wrote to her daughter, “requiring about thirty servants to attend and keep the apartments in proper order, and perform the ordinary business of the house and stables. The lighting the apartments, from the kitchen to the parlor and chambers, is a tax indeed; and the fires we are obliged to keep, to secure us from daily agues, is another very cheering comfort. Bells are wholly wanting, not one single one being hung through the whole house, and promises are all you can obtain. I could content myself almost anywhere three months; but surrounded by forests, can you believe that wood is not to be had, because people cannot be found to cut and cart it! There is not a single apartment finished. We have not the least fence or yard, or other convenience without; and the great unfinished audience-room I make a drying-room of, to hang up the clothes in. The principal stairs are not up, and will not be this winter. The ladies are impatient for a drawing-room; I have no looking-glasses but dwarfs for this house, not a twentieth part lamps enough to light it.”

Mrs. Adams’s consolatory reflection that she would have to endure these conditions only three months, was probably shared by many of the thirty-two Senators and one hundred and five Representatives who, on the high hill to the east, shivered and shook and passed unflattering criticisms on everybody who had had a hand in the construction of the Capitol. Only the old north wing was in condition for use, and not all of that. The Senate met in what is now the Supreme Court chamber; the House took its chances wherever there was room, ending its travels in an uncomfortable box of a hall commonly styled “the oven.” Most of the members had made some study of the L’Enfant chart before coming to Washington. One of them put into writing his impressions as he looked about and tried to identify the public improvements he had been led to expect. None of the streets was recognizable, he said, with the possible exception of a road having two buildings on each side of it, which was called New Jersey Avenue. The “magnificent Pennsylvania Avenue,” connecting the Capitol with the President’s House, was for nearly the entire distance a deep morass covered with wild bushes, through which a passage had been hewn. The roads in every direction were muddy and unimproved. The only attempt at a sidewalk had been made with chips of stone left from building the Capitol, and this was little used because the sharp edges cut the walker’s shoes in dry weather, and in wet weather covered them with white mortar. Another member declared that there was nothing in sight in Washington but scrub oak, and that, since there was “only one good tavern within a day’s march,” many members had to live in Georgetown and drive to and from the daily sessions of Congress in a rickety coach. And a particularly disgusted critic, not content with recording that “there are but few houses in any place, and most of them are small, miserable huts,” added: “The people are poor, and, as far as I can judge, live like fishes, by eating each other.”

Newspapers in all parts of the country echoed these depressing reports, accompanying them with demands that the Government move again, this time to some already well-populated and civilized region. Indeed, of several resolutions to that end introduced in Congress, one was actually carried to a vote and barely escaped passage. It may have been this accumulation of discouraging elements which caused the delay in the arrival of the Supreme Court from Philadelphia; or it may have been the paucity of business before that tribunal, whose first Chief Justice, John Jay, had resigned his commission to become Governor of New York, because he had come to the conclusion that the Court could not command sufficient support in the country at large to enforce its decisions! Whatever the reason, the Justices did not find their way to Washington till well on in the winter, or open their work there till February. They were assigned the room in the basement of the Capitol now occupied by the Supreme Court library.