To provide a meeting-place for Congress till the Capitol could be occupied once more, a building which stood at the corner of F and Seventh Streets was made over for the purpose. It proved so uncomfortable, however, as to revive with increased zest the discussion whether, in view of the spread of population through the newly opened West, it would not be wiser to remove the seat of government to some fairly accessible point in that part of the country. The agitation alarmed the more important property-owners in Washington, who, in order to head it off before it had gone too far, hastily organized a company to put up a temporary but better equipped substitute for the Capitol. They chose a site a few hundred yards to the eastward of the burned edifice, and there built a long house which is still standing, though now divided into dwellings. The stratagem accomplished its aim, and Congress stayed in its improvised domicile till 1819. This occupancy gave the building the title, “the Old Capitol,” that clings to it to-day in spite of the changes it has undergone in the interval.
Washington was early supplied with a good general newspaper in the National Intelligencer, and the social side of life presently found a weekly interpreter in The Huntress, edited by Mrs. Ann Royall, whose personality was so aggressive that John Quincy Adams described her as going about “like a virago-errant in enchanted armor.” She said so much, also, in disparagement of some of her neighbors, that she was indicted by the grand jury as a common scold and threatened with a ducking in accordance with an old English law in force in the District. But the disseminators of information to whose coming the citizens looked forward more eagerly than to any printed sheet, were two men who made their rounds daily on horseback among the homes of the well-to-do. One was the postman, delivering the mails that came in by stage-coach from the outer world; the other was the barber, who, like an endless-chain letter, picked up the latest gossip at every house he visited, and left in exchange all the items he had picked up at previous stopping-places.
During the next generation Washington saw, it is safe to say, more of the ups and downs of fortune than any other American city. The reasons were manifold. For one thing, the larger part of its population consisted of persons whose permanent ties were elsewhere. As federal officeholders they were residents of Washington, but they retained their citizenship in the places from which they had been drawn. Under the Constitution, moreover, Congress exercised supreme authority in the District of Columbia, and every member of Congress had the interests of his home constituency more at heart than those of the people who were his neighbors for only a few months at a time. Nevertheless, the population of the capital, which, when it rose from its ashes, numbered between eight and nine thousand, more than doubled within the next twenty years. Then came ten years of great uncertainty, during which occurred the overwhelming business panic of 1837, that set awry nearly everything in America, and for this period the increase averaged only about five hundred souls annually. But another twenty years of forward movement brought the total up to a little more than sixty thousand.
In the meantime many things had happened, calculated to attract public attention generally to Washington. President Monroe had proclaimed his famous doctrine, warning Europe to keep its hands off this hemisphere. President Jackson had made his fight upon the United States Bank and won it, changing the whole financial outlook of the country. The Capitol had been enlarged, and several new Government buildings started; the Smithsonian Institution had begun to make its mark in the scientific world, and the Washington Monument had risen nearly two hundred feet into the air. The long-threatened war with Mexico had come and gone, adding a rich area to our public domain. Steamships had crowded sailing vessels off the highways of commerce and become the main dependence of the Yankee navy. The Baltimore and Ohio Railway, the first successful experiment in its field, had brought what we now call the Middle West, with its grain and minerals, to within a day’s journey of the capital, and this pioneer enterprise had been followed by the opening of other rail facilities. The Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska Act had been passed, slavery had been abolished in the District of Columbia, the Underground Railroad had begun to haul its daily consignment of runaway negroes across the Canada border, the Supreme Court had rendered the Dred Scott decision, and John Brown had led his raid in the mountain country scarcely fifty miles from where the Court was sitting. Letter postage, anywhere east of the Mississippi River, had come down to a three-cent unit. The first telegraph message had been transmitted over a wire connecting Baltimore with Washington, and out of this small beginning had presently been developed a network of electric communication covering all our more thickly populated territory; while experimenters with a submarine line had effected an exchange of messages between England and the United States which proved the practicability of their enterprise. Last but not least, royalty had smiled upon us in the person of the Prince of Wales, who had passed some days as the guest of President Buchanan at the White House.
Had Washington been situated elsewhere than on the border line between two sections, neither of which felt any pride in its success, or had it been governed by executives whose records were to be made or marred by the faithfulness with which they turned every opportunity to account for its welfare and reputation, we should probably have seen the capital beginning then its career as the model city of the new world. Instead, the dependence of its people, at every stage, on the favor of what was practically an alien governing body, bore natural fruit in a feeble community spirit.
By 1860 Washington had reached the middle of its Slough of Despond. Not a street was paved except for a patch here and there, and Pennsylvania Avenue was the only one lighted after nightfall. Pigs roamed through the less pretentious highways as freely as dogs. There was not a sewer anywhere, a shallow, uncovered stream carrying off the common refuse to the Potomac, which was held in its channel only by raw earthen bluffs. Wells and springs furnished all the water, and the police and fire departments were those of a village. The open squares, intended for beauty spots, were densely overgrown with weeds. Except for an omnibus line to Georgetown, not a public conveyance was running. Such permanent Department buildings as had been started, though ambitious in design and suggesting by their outlines a desire for something better than had yet been accomplished, had not reached a habitable state. The Capitol was in disorder, and still overrun with workmen who had been employed in constructing the new wings and were preparing to raise the dome; the White House had scarcely a fitter look, with its environment of stables and shambling fences and its unkempt grounds.
Nor was there any prospect of speedy improvement in municipal conditions. Every considerable stride in that direction would mean largely increased taxation, and the bulk of the taxable property had drifted into the hands of unprogressive whites and ignorant negroes, who were equally unwilling to pay the price. Upon this seemingly hopeless chaos descended the cloud of civil war.
It was a black cloud, but it had a sunlit lining.
CHAPTER II
WAR TIMES AND THEIR SEQUEL
THREE days after John Brown had been hanged for his Harper’s Ferry raid, the Thirty-sixth Congress convened. Brown’s exploit had sent a wave of excitement sweeping over the country, and the slavery controversy had entered a phase of emotional acuteness it had never known before. There was a strong Republican plurality in the new House of Representatives, but it was by no means of one mind, most of its members still hoping to avoid any action which might precipitate a dismemberment of the Union. It took forty-four ballots, covering a period of eight weeks, for a combination of Republicans with a few outsiders to choose a Speaker, and the wrangling which preceded and followed the choice reached at times the verge of bloodshed. A large majority of the Representatives from both Northern and Southern constituencies attended the sessions armed.