When the address was closed, the chief justice advanced and administered the oath. As the book touched the lips of the new President, there arose a general shout, and expression of feeling common enough in other countries but drawn with difficulty from an American assemblage. The sons, and the immediate friends of Mr. Van Buren, then closed about him; the Ex-President, the chief justice, and others, gave him the hand of congratulation, and the ceremony was over. They descended the steps, the people gave one more shout as they mounted the constitution carriage together, and the procession returned through the avenue, followed by the whole population of Washington.
Mr. Van Buren held a levee immediately afterward, but I endeavored in vain to get my foot over the threshold. The crowd was immense. At four, the diplomatic body had an audience; and in replying to the address of Don Angel Calderon, the President astonished the gold coats, by addressing them as the democratic corps. The representatives of the crowned heads of Europe stood rather uneasily under the epithet, till it was suggested that he possibly meant to say diplomatic.
WASHINGTON IN THE SESSION.
There is a sagacity acquired by travel on the subject of forage and quarters, which is useful in all other cities in the world where one may happen to be a stranger, but which is as inapplicable to the emergencies of an arrival in Washington as waltzing in a shipwreck. It is a capital whose peculiarities are as much sui generis as those of Venice; but as those who have become wise by a season’s experience neither remain on the spot to give warning, nor have recorded their experiences in a book, the stranger is worse off in a coach in Washington than in a gondola in the “city of silver streets.”
It is well known, I believe, that when the future city of Washington was about being laid out, there were two large lot-buyers or land-owners, living two miles apart, each of whom was interested in having the public buildings upon the centre of his own domain. Like children quarrelling for a sugar horse, the subject of dispute was pulled in two, and one got the head, the other the tail. The capitol stands on a rising ground in solitary grandeur, and the President’s house and department buildings two miles off on another. The city straddles and stretches between, doing its best to look continuous and compact; but the stranger soon sees that it is, after all, but a “city of magnificent distances,” built to please nobody on earth but a hackney-coachman.
The new-comer, when asked what hotel he will drive to, thinks himself very safe if he chooses that nearest the capitol—supposing, of course, that, as Washington is purely a legislative metropolis, the most central part will naturally be near the scene of action. He is accordingly set down at Gadsby’s, and, at a price that would startle an English nobleman, he engages a pigeon-hole in the seventh heaven of that boundless caravansary. Even at Gadsby’s, however, he finds himself over half a mile from the capitol, and wonders, for two or three days, why the deuce the hotel was not built on some of the waste lots at the foot of Capitol hill, an improvement which might have saved him, in rainy weather, at least five dollars a day in hack-hire. Meantime the secretaries and foreign ministers leave their cards, and the party and dinner-giving people shower upon him the “small rain” of pink billets. He sets apart the third or fourth day to return their calls, and inquires the addresses of his friends (which they never write on their cards, because, if they did, it would be no guide,) and is told it is impossible to direct him, but the hackney-coachmen all know! He calls the least ferocious-looking of the most bullying and ragged set of tatterdemalions he has ever seen, and delivers himself and his visiting-list into his hands. The first thing is a straight drive two miles away from the capitol. He passes the President’s house, and getting off the smooth road, begins to drive and drag through cross lanes and open lots, laid out according to no plan that his loose ideas of geometry can comprehend, and finds his friends living in houses that want nothing of being in the country, but trees, garden, and fences. It looks as if it had rained naked brick houses upon a waste plain, and each occupant had made a street with reference to his own front door. The much-shaken and more-astonished victim consumes his morning and his temper, and has made, by dinner-time, but six out of forty calls, all imperatively due, and all scattered far and wide with the same loose and irreconcilable geography.
A fortnight’s experience satisfies the stranger that the same journey is worse at night than at morning; and that, as he leaves his dinner which he pays for at home, runs the risk of his neck, passes an hour or two on the road, and ruins himself in hack-hire, it must be a very—yes, a very pleasant dinner party to compensate him. Consequently, he either sends a “p. p. c.” to all his acquaintances, and lives incog., or, which is a more sensible thing, moves up to the other settlement, and abandons the capitol.
Those who live on the other side of the President’s house are the secretaries, diplomatists, and a few wealthy citizens. There is no hotel in this quarter, but there are one or two boarding-houses, and (what we had been lucky enough to secure ourselves) furnished lodgings, in which you have every thing but board. Your dinner is sent you from a French cook’s near by, and your servant gets your breakfast—a plan which gives you the advantage of dining at your own hour, choosing your own society, and of having covers for a friend or two whenever it suits your humor, and at half an hour’s warning. There are very few of these lodgings (which combine many other advantages over a boarding-house,) but more of them would be a good speculation to house-owners, and I wish it were suggested, not only here, but in every city in our country.
Aside from society, the only amusement in Washington is frequenting the capitol. If one has a great deal of patience, and nothing better to do, this is very well; and it is very well at any rate till one becomes acquainted with the heads of the celebrated men in both the chambers, with the noble architecture of the building, and the routine of business. This done, it is time wearily spent for a spectator. The finer orators seldom speak, or seldom speak warmly, the floor is oftenest occupied by prosing and very sensible gentlemen, whose excellent ideas enter the mind more agreeably by the eye than the ear, or, in other words, are better delivered by the newspapers, and there is a great deal of formula and etiquetical sparring which is not even entertaining to the members, and which consumes time “consumedly.” Now and then the senate adjourns when some one of the great orators has taken the floor, and you are sure of a great effort the next morning. If you are there in time, and can sit, like Atlas with a world on your back, you may enjoy a front seat and hear oratory, unsurpassed, in my opinion, in the world.
The society in Washington, take it all in all, is by many degrees the best in the United States. One is prepared, though I cannot conceive why, for the contrary. We read in books of travels, and we are told by everybody, that the society here is promiscuous, rough, inelegant and even barbarous. This is an untrue representation, or it has very much changed.