During the War of the Rebellion this building perfectly swarmed with prisoners. Not only soldiers from the Rebel army, and undoubted culprits, but also hundreds of citizens, arrested on the faintest suspicion, were incarcerated within its walls. Any one suspected of having given comfort to the enemy, of having interfered with military discipline, or of having defrauded the Government in the remotest way, was hurried off to the Old Capitol Prison. It was a small American Bastile, and it is well, perhaps, that its walls cannot tell all or aught of the oppression and outrage which transpired within them. In its yard stood the just gallows whereon Wirz was hung for the tortures which he inflicted on Union prisoners at Andersonville. Others were also executed here during the war.
Soon after the close of the war, Mr. George T. Brown, then Sergeant-at-Arms of the Senate, bought the property and proceeded to transmute the Old Capitol Prison into the three elegant mansions which now occupy its ground.
With this famous house must close my chapter on the Historic Homes and Haunts of Washington. To write minutely of them all would require a volume. Full detail is here impossible, but no one of the most famous has been omitted.
CHAPTER XLIX.
MOUNT VERNON—MEMORIAL DAY—ARLINGTON.
The Tomb of Washington—The Pilgrims Who Visit it—Where George and Martha Washington Rest—The American Mecca—The Thought of Other Graves—The Defenders of the Republic—Eating Boiled Eggs—A Butterfly Visit—The Old Mansion-House—Patriarchal Dogs—Remembering a Feast—The Room in which Washington Died—The Great Key of the Bastile—The Gift of Lafayette—The Harpsichord of Eleanor Custis—The Belle of Mount Vernon—Moralizing—Inside the Mansion—Uncle Tom’s Bouquets—Beautiful Scenery—Memorial Day at Arlington—The Soldiers’ Orphans—The Grave of Forty Soldiers—The Sacrifice of a Widow’s Son—The Children’s Offering—The Record of the Brave—A National Prayer for the Dead.
We have newer and dearer shrines, even, than the tomb of Washington; yet, in these soft, summer mornings, many pilgrims turn their faces toward Mount Vernon.
Every morning a large company, including the young and the old, the refined and the vulgar, land at the little wharf below the home of Washington. Fathers and mothers come with their children and their lunch-baskets. Pretty girls come with venerable duennas, and young men come to look at them in spite of their keepers. Lovers come and go, maundering along the lanes, as lovers will. Relic-hunters come to break off twigs and pilfer pansies; newspaper people come, agog for an item; and, for the climax, we will believe that a few come solely to do reverence at the tomb of the Father of their country.
Passing up a wooded lane that winds over the hill, we reached the famed sarcophagus, which engravings have made familiar to many eyes that have never beheld it. Here, on their marble couch, amid the grassy slopes and tutelary trees of their ancient domain, rest the bodies of George and Martha Washington. Full of years and full of honors they laid down, and their tomb has been the Mecca of this continent. It never can be other than it is. Who would rob it of one hallowed memory? Yet, as I looked at its sculptured marble, I thought of many and many a nameless grave that I had seen by the roadside, and on the scathed fields of Virginia, parched by summer’s sun, covered by winter’s snow, unturfed, uncared-for—the grave of the volunteer. Dear to me as this sepulchre of the great, is the grave of the lowliest soldier who perished for his country.
The nation will reverence always the grave of Washington. But to this generation, and to the generations which shall come after, are committed many graves which cannot be held less dear. Let every city and every village in the land gather, as most precious jewels, the names of its dead who died for liberty. Set them in enduring marble; blazon them in the public places; let them greet the traveller on silent hill-tops, and in the peaceful vales; the names of our heroes, that we, our children, our children’s children, to remotest time, may never forget the defenders of the republic, what they suffered and what they gained.
We ate boiled eggs and other good things within sight of the tomb of the Father of our Country—a very necessary proceeding before essaying to climb the hill. While we were eating, a bright blue butterfly came and paid us a visit. It looked just as if one of the myrtles had danced up from the bank before us, and was palpitating in the sunshiny air. Miss Butterfly was the loveliest “blue” I ever saw.