Chapter I: The Washington of the Thirties

The tourist traveling from Philadelphia to Washington in the Thirties anticipated few pleasures and no comforts from the trip that had to be made by coach from Baltimore, over roads intolerably wretched under the best conditions, and all but impassable and not without dangers in inclement weather. The journey from Philadelphia to Baltimore was usually made by boat through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, and the entire trip, in winter one of exposure, required the greater part of two days.[1] The fare from Baltimore to Washington was four dollars. Sometimes the ruts in the winter roads would overturn the coach, throwing the passengers into the mire, and occasionally resulting in sprains and broken bones.[2] Later in Jackson’s time, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was built, with a branch into Washington, and when the first cars, drawn by horses, reached the country-town capital, the enthusiastic statesmen felt that the problem of transportation had been solved. Urging Butler to accept the attorney-generalship, and stressing the fact that acceptance would not preclude his appearance in personal cases in New York and Albany, Van Buren made much of the fact that “to the former place you will next season be able to go in fifteen hours, and to the latter in a day and a night.”[3] Blair, of the “Globe,” boasted after the election of 1832 that “in eight days and nights after the closing of the polls in Ohio, the result was known in the city of Washington from all the organized counties except three.” This, he declared, “is an instance of rapid communication from the West unparalleled in this country.”[4]

The foreigner, expecting a national capital more or less pretentious and compact, was invariably shocked on entering the environs over miserable mud roads, to find only an occasional drab hut or cottage at wide intervals. Usually, until the Capitol attracted his attention, he was wholly unconscious of his arrival at his destination. One of these, who has left a record of his visit, relates that he was “looking from the window of his coach in a sort of brown study, at fields covered with snow,” when a fellow passenger startled him with the inquiry as to how he liked Washington.

“I will tell you when I see it,” he replied.

“Why, you have been in Washington the last quarter of an hour,” was the rejoinder.[5]

Another famous visitor “was taken by surprise” on finding herself within the shadow of the hall of the lawmakers, “so sordid are the enclosures and houses on its very verge.”[6]

But as the coach wound round the Capitol, and swung with a merry clatter into Pennsylvania Avenue, the houses at more frequent intervals and connected shops disclosed the town. With a characteristic “clatter and clamp,”[7] with a gay cracking of whips, the coach would splash and rumble up to one of the leading hotels, and the cramped and weary tourist would joyously take leave of the conveyance and seek lodgment within.

If well advised, he would instruct the coachman to drop him at Gadsby’s, then the most popular and comfortable hostelry in town, on the Avenue, a short distance from the Capitol.[8] There he would find, not only a clean bed, but excellent service and a lordly hospitality from the host. Gadsby, for his generation, was a genius at his trade. He moved his small army of negro servants with military precision. “Who that ever knew the hospitalities of this gentlemanly and most liberal Boniface,” wrote one who enjoyed them, “can ever forget his urbane manner, his careful attention to his guests, his well-ordered house, his fine old wines, and the princely manner in which he could send his bottle of choice Madeira to some old friend or favored guest at the table?”[9] It was not always, however, that accommodations could be found at Gadsby’s, and then the tourist would seek the Indian Queen at the sign of the luridly painted picture of Pocahontas, where he would be met at the curb by Jesse Brown, the landlord.[10] Here, for a dollar and a quarter a day, he could not only find a pleasant room, but a table loaded with decanters of brandy, rum, gin, at short intervals from the head to the foot. If the host of the Indian Queen lacked the lordly elegance of Gadsby, he made up for it in the homely virtues of hospitality. Wearing a large white apron, he met his guests at the door of the dining-room, and then hastened to the head of the table where he personally carved and helped to serve the principal dish.[11] If this, too, was crowded, the tourist would try Fuller’s near the White House,[12] where a room would be found for him either in the hotel proper, or in one of the two or three houses adjoining, which had been converted into an annex.[13]

Having rested from his journey and removed the stains of travel, if he were a person of some importance, and especially a foreigner, he would be speedily deluged with the cards of callers anxious to make his sojourn pleasant. Day by day the hotel registers were eagerly scanned for the names of visiting celebrities, for the Washington of the Thirties loved its lions and lionesses. No possible person was ever neglected, and real personages were fêted, wined, and dined. But not until he set forth to return the calls would he appreciate the Portuguese Minister’s description of the capital as “a city of magnificent distances.” Inquiring at the hotel how to reach the residences of his callers, he would be not a little puzzled at the nonchalant reply that the coachmen “knew where all the prominent people live.” Engaging a coach, he would set forth gayly, in the confident expectation of leaving his card at from thirty to forty houses in the course of the day. A short drive would take him to the end of the macadamized pavement of the Avenue, and thereafter for hours, pitching and plunging, over the ruts and the mud-holes, through miry lanes, and across vacant lots, shaken in body, and sore in spirit, he would find by evening that he had reached six or seven of the forty houses, and was charged by the coachman at a rate “which would keep a chariot and two posters for twice the time in London.”[14] In the course of a week he would find that he had spent as much as thirty dollars for coach hire--by odds, the most expensive feature of his Washington sojourn. An English visitor, startled at the cost of travel, contracted with a coachman for services from five o’clock to daylight for twenty dollars, but after having attended five parties on the first evening, the morose driver repudiated his contract, and it was necessary to add five dollars to retain his services.[15] “I should imagine [Washington] to be the very paradise of hackney coachmen,” wrote one disgusted visitor. “If these men do not get rich it must be owing to some culpable extravagance, for their vehicles are in continual demand from the hour of dinner[16] till five in the morning, and long distances and heavy charges are all in their favor.”[17]

As the visitor drove about the town he found nothing in the physical aspects of the country-town capital to indicate that L’Enfant ever had a vision or produced a plan for a city beautiful. Because real estate dealers had quarreled over the location of public buildings, the selection of the hill for the Capitol had led to the location of the White House a mile or more to the west, and for three decades the problem of building a compact city between the two had failed. The streets were all unpaved when Jackson was first inaugurated, and only Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the President’s Mansion had been rescued from the mire when he left office. Hub-deep in mud in inclement weather, these country roads sent forth great clouds of dust on dry and sunny days. With the exception of the Avenue, not a single street approached compactness, the houses on all other streets being occasionally grouped, but generally widely separated, and in some instances so much so as to suggest country houses with their shade trees and vegetable gardens.[18] “It looks as if it had rained naked buildings upon an open plain, and every man had made a street in reference to his own door,” wrote Nathaniel P. Willis, who knew his Washington.[19] Another writer of the day who was impressed with “the houses scattered in straggling groups, three in one quarter, and half a dozen in another,” was moved to compassion for “some disconsolate dwelling, the first or last born of a square or crescent, yet in nebulous suffering like an ancient maiden in the mournful solitude of single blessedness.”[20] Still another contemporary word painter tells us that even on the Avenue “the buildings were standing with wide spaces between, like the teeth of some superannuated crone.”[21]

At the foot of the Capitol, itself beautiful even then, were desolate waste lands being reserved for some ultimate Botanical Gardens, and a few miserable shack-like boarding-houses.[22] “Everybody knows that Washington has a capitol,” wrote a satirical English observer, “but the misfortune is that the capitol wants a city. There it stands, reminding you of a general without an army, only surrounded and followed by a parcel of ragged little dirty boys; for such is the appearance of the dirty, straggling, ill-built houses which lie at the foot of it.”[23] Where the Smithsonian Institution has long stood were innumerable quagmires reeking with miasma.[24] About the President’s Mansion, a few pretentious houses, several still handsome homes after almost a century, had been built, and in this section, and in Georgetown, lived the people of fashion and the diplomats. “The Co’t end,” it was called. At the four corners of the Mansion of the Presidents stood the plain brick buildings occupied by the State, Treasury, War, and Navy Departments. On Capitol Hill a few good houses had been erected, especially on North A and New Jersey Avenue, South. Other than these, and those west of the White House, there was little but pastures and enclosed fields in the eastern, southeastern, and northeastern sections of the town.[25] East of Fourteenth Street, on the north side, but few houses had been built beyond F Street, and the “country home” of William H. Crawford, at the northeast corner of Fourteenth Street and Massachusetts Avenue, was still considered as remote from town as on that winter day after his defeat for the Presidency when no callers were expected because of the heavy snow.[26]

Looking down upon the little town from the skylight of the Capitol, Harriet Martineau could plainly discern the “seven theoretical avenues,” but with the exception of Pennsylvania, all were “bare and forlorn,” and the city which has become one of the most beautiful and impressive in the world could then present to the naked eye only “a few mean houses dotted about, the sheds of the navy yard on one bank of the Potomac, and three or four villas on the other.”[27] With the streets full of ruts, the sidewalks dotted with pools of muddy water, or in places overgrown with grass, with cows pasturing on many of the streets now lined with elegant homes, and challenging the right of way with Marshall or Clay or Jackson, it is not surprising that foreigners, even as late as the Thirties, were moved to imitate the sarcasm of Tom Moore. The difficulties of locomotion kept the pedestrian’s eyes upon the ground, and the inconveniences, in making calls, of crossing ditches and stiles, and walking alternately upon grass and pavement, and striking across fields to reach a street, were more noticeable than the noble trees that lined the avenues.[28] Wretched enough in the daytime, the poorly lighted streets at night were utterly impossible. “As for lights,” wrote a contemporary, “if the pedestrian did not provide and carry his own, he was in danger of discovering every mud-hole and sounding its depths.”[29] More nearly possible to the fastidious were the narrower streets of Georgetown, with its more imposing and interesting houses, and more select society, where many of the statesmen lived, and not a few of the Government clerks, who rode horseback to the departments in the morning.

Even in the Thirties there were many beautiful drives and walks in the vicinity of Washington, and a few houses that were impressive to even the most critical English visitor. Visible for many miles, and easily seen from the town, loomed the pillared white mansion of Arlington, then the home of George Washington Custis, to which many of the aristocrats of the capital frequently found their way. There, during the Jacksonian period, Robert E. Lee, standing in the room, whence, across the river, he could see the Capitol building, was united in marriage to the daughter of the house.[30] Within the city the most imposing mansions were those of John Tayloe, at Eighteenth Street and New York Avenue, designed by Thornton, and even then rich in political and social memories,[31] and the handsome residence of John Van Ness, the work of Latrobe, built at a cost of sixty thousand dollars to make a fit setting for the charm and beauty of Marcia Burns, at the foot of Seventeenth Street, on the banks of the Potomac. From the doorstep the master and his guests could watch the ships from across the sea mooring to the docks of Alexandria, and the merchantmen, bound for the port of Georgetown, laden with the riches of the West Indies.

The tourist in the Washington of the Thirties did not have the opportunity for sight-seeing that means so much to the capital visitor of to-day. Aside from the Capitol and the White House, there were no public buildings of architectural distinction. The churches had “nothing about them to attract attention,” and while St. John’s on Lafayette Square was then summoning to worship, it did not at that time have the virtue of quaintness or the mellowness of historical memories. A visit to the Patent Office was customarily made, and most tourists found something to interest them in the museum of the State Department, with its portraits of the Indian chiefs who had visited Washington.[32] Occasionally the venturesome would ascend to the skylight of the Capitol to survey the straggling and dreary town from the height.[33] But always there was the dignified and stately white building of the lawmakers and of the Supreme Court, and thither tourists and citizens, men and women, daily found their way for the entertainment that never failed. Surrounded by its terraces, its well-kept lawns, its profusion of shrubbery, the visitor reached the entrance over its “beautifully gravelled walks,”[34] and entered the rotunda with its four Trumbull paintings of Revolutionary scenes, to be more impressed with the vacant spaces for four more, and the explanation that “Congress cannot decide on what artist to confer the honor.”[35] He would not fail to be delighted with the classic little Senate Chamber, redolent of the genius of Latrobe, and with the ease with which he might ignore the tiny gallery to find a hearty welcome on the floor. If a foreigner, he would be surprised to find a constant stream of fashionable ladies entering the chamber, crowding the Senators, accepting their seats, and attracting attention with their “waving plumes glittering with all the colors of the rainbow, and causing no little bustle.”[36] There he would see Van Buren or Calhoun in the chair, and on the floor he would want to have Webster, Clay, Benton, Forsyth, Preston, and Ewing pointed out. And perhaps, like Miss Martineau, he would leave with the impression that he had “seen no assembly of chosen men and no company of the high born, invested with the antique dignities of an antique realm, half so imposing to the imagination as this collection of stout-souled, full-grown, original men brought together on the ground of their supposed sufficiency, to work out the will of their diverse constituencies.”[37]

Having seen the Senate, he would seek the House of Representatives. Inquiring his way to the Strangers’ Gallery from the rotunda, he would be directed to a narrow stairs, and, on ascending, would find himself in a large room of many columns, the work of the architect of the Senate, looking down upon the seats of members arranged in concentric rows. Thence he would look down upon the bald head of the venerable Adams, the anæmic figure of Polk, the handsome form of Binney, and the ludicrous conglomeration of garbs representing the diverse tastes of the tailors of New York and the wilderness. If acquainted with one of the members, the visitor might be invited to the corridor behind the Speaker’s desk, fitted with seats and sofas drawn about the fireplace at either end, where members and their guests were wont to lounge and smoke.[38] Having satisfied himself with the chambers of the lawmakers, the visitor would want to see the tribunal of interpretation, said by some to have more power in determining the law of the land than the members of Congress, and to observe the famous Marshall on the Supreme Bench. Descending to the basement of the Capitol, immediately under the Senate, he would be shown into a small plain room with low ceiling, and “a certain cellar-like aspect which is not pleasant,”[39] and would probably be a little shocked at the figure of Justice, “a wooden figure with the eyes unfilleted, and grasping the scales like a groceress.”[40] On cushioned sofas, on either side of the room, he might, if a favorite orator were making an argument, see gayly dressed ladies--for, like the Senate Chamber, the court was one of the fashionable resorts of the Thirties. But there, he would find dignity and quiet and decorum, in striking contrast with most of the American courts of that generation.[41] If fortunate, he might listen to the reading of a decision by Marshall, and observe Butler, the Attorney-General, “his fingers playing among his papers, his thick black eyes and thin, tremulous lips for once fixed, his small face pale with thought,” contrasting with the more composed countenances of Clay and Webster.[42]

In the days of Jackson, comparatively few families had a permanent residence in Washington, and to an English visitor the town had the appearance of a watering-place.[43] Many Senators and Representatives considered it so impossible that they left their families at home.[44] Attorney-General Butler at first refused to consider a position in the Cabinet because “Mrs. Butler did not like the idea of bringing her daughters up here.”[45] When the wives and daughters did accompany the statesmen to the capital, it was the custom, with such as could afford to maintain an establishment, to take a house. These usually purchased, albeit many of the more desirable residences that could be leased were not for sale. An establishment could be maintained at a surprisingly low cost. Houses “suitable for the purposes of genteel people” could be had for from $50 to $300 a year, and even the large mansions, many of them standing and still occupied by fashionable families after almost a century, could be had for from $500 to $800 a year.[46] The servant problem did not exist, for domestics could be employed in abundance for $4 a month.[47] The Southerners, bringing their slaves with them, or buying them in the slave market at Alexandria, were able to entertain with a lavish display which set the pace socially, and made the Southern dominance easy. Foreigners were impressed, after hearing a senatorial orator rhapsodize in the Senate over the blessings of American liberty, to see him driven from the Capitol after his oration by one of his family slaves.[48] Others, not wishing to be burdened with a house, lived in the hotels, where other people’s slaves waited upon them. In these, too, the cost of living was low, the leading hostelries taking guests at $1.75 a day, $10 a week, or $35 a month. Transients sat down to tables fairly groaning with food, and with decanters of brandy and whiskey at their elbows, free at these prices. The guest, in his room, could order real Madeira for $3 a bottle, sherry, brandy, and gin for $1.50, and Jamaica rum for $1. The statesman, leaving his hotel quarters for the Senate or the House, could, if he wished, pause at the bar of the hostelry for a toddy of unadulterated liquor and lump sugar for twelve and a half cents.[49] But the greater part of the public men lived in boarding-houses, and the “Intelligencer,” the “Globe,” and the “Telegraph” filled columns, at the beginning of congressional sessions, with the enticing advertisements of the landladies. Some few of these houses, such as Dawson’s, associated with celebrities, live in history, but the majority were small, shabby, and uncomfortable. In these, however, romances sometimes blossomed, and the barmaid of one presided for a time over the establishment of a Cabinet member, and the landlady of another over the household of a Senator who aspired to the Presidency.[50]

Out of this life in hotels and boarding-houses, during the Jacksonian period, came the custom of statesmen forming themselves and families into “messes,” each “mess” having a table to itself and contracting with the landlady or landlord for a caterer. In this way the lawgivers were socially grouped according to their intellectual and financial standing, and some of these “messes” were famous in their day. Friendships were formed that survived all the vicissitudes of time and political change. One of these, known as the “Woodbury mess,” consisted of such a notable coterie of brilliancy and genius as Calhoun, John Randolph, Tazewell, Burges, and Verplanck. About the table many celebrated measures were conceived and the strategy of many a fight was planned.[51] According to the law of the “mess” a member might invite a guest only with the consent of all the others, and it was understood that a failure to get unanimous consent should not be resented. Occasionally the guests were permitted to contribute something to the usual outlay. Daniel Webster was glad enough to pay his way on such occasions. The venerable Adams, who had a comfortable home on F Street[52] and was not considered a notably social animal, delighted to join his most interesting colleagues at the boarding-house or hotel table. “I dined with John C. Calhoun at Dawson’s,” he recorded. “Mr. Preston, the other Senator from South Carolina, and his wife were there, and Mangum, Southard, Sprague of Maine. Company sat late at table and the conversation was chiefly upon politics. The company was, at this time, adversaries of the present Administration--most of them were adversaries to the last.”[53] Three days later: “Dined with Benj. Gorham and Edward Everett. Calhoun, Preston, Clay, and others were there.”[54] The next evening: “Dined with Colonel Robert B. Campbell of S.C. at his lodgings at Gadsby’s”; thirty people, including Calhoun and Preston, in attendance.[55]

It was inevitable that in a little city of twenty thousand, consisting in part of the cleverest men and women in the Republic, and devoted wholly to politics and society, celebrated sojourners should be fêted and lionized. Foreigners visiting America in the Thirties, and recording their impressions, have all paid tribute to the hospitality and brilliance of the capital, as compared with other and larger cities. The most famous of the visitors was Harriet Martineau, who arrived in the summer of 1834, in her thirty-second year, and in the full flush of her literary fame. Introduced to the President and the Senate leaders by the British Minister, it was the rumor at the time that six hundred people called upon her the day after her arrival.[56] “The drollest part of the whole,” wrote a lady of fashion, “is that these crowds, at least in Washington, go to see the lion and nothing else. I have not met with an individual, except Mrs. Seaton and her mother,[57] who have read any of her works, or know for what she is celebrated. Our most fashionable exclusive,[58] Mrs. Tayloe, said she intended to call, and asked what were the novels she had written, and if they were pretty. The gentlemen laugh at a woman’s writing on political economy. Not one of them has the least idea of her work.”[59] But the fluency of the lioness captivated the men. Among her constant visitors were Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Preston, and Justice Story. When she entered the Senate Chamber or the Supreme Court room, the leading men of the Nation left their seats to pay her homage. Calhoun’s “mess” gave her a dinner. Clay insisted that at Lexington she should occupy his house at Ashland, and that she should be the guest of his daughter in New Orleans. Calhoun assured her triumph in Charleston through letters to his friends. “No stranger except Lafayette ever received such universal and marked testimonies of regard,” wrote a sympathetic observer of her reception.[60] When Thomas Hamilton, the English writer, author of “Men and Manners in America,” reached Washington, a member of Congress escorted him, uninvited, to a ball on the evening of his arrival, with the assurance that the “intrusion would be welcome.” After passing “through a formidable array of introductions to distinguished persons, and after four hours of almost unbroken conversation, much of which could not be carried on without considerable expenditure of thought,” the weary tourist, at three o’clock in the morning, rejoiced to find himself “stretched in a comfortable bed at Gadsby’s.”[61] The experiences of Hamilton and Miss Martineau were not exceptional.

Nor were American literary celebrities left in doubt as to the cordiality of their welcome in the best social circles of the capital. The winter of 1833 found Washington Irving in Washington, where he was not unfamiliar with the leading houses, living “in the neighborhood of the McLanes” and making “use of a quiet corner and a little interval of leisure to exercise a long neglected pen.”[62] Despite the flood of invitations, he found time to report to Van Buren the attitude of McLane, and the hostilities, in select circles, to Kendall. “Washington Irving is here now,” wrote John Tyler to his daughter. “He stands at the head of our literati. His productions are numerous and well spoken of in Europe.”[63] Nor did society in those days lack their chronicler, for the first society letters from Washington were those of Nathaniel P. Willis written for the “New York Mirror.” At that time he was “a foppish, slender young man, with a profusion of curly light hair, and was always dressed in the height of fashion.”[64] The doors of the most exclusive homes were thrown open to this elegant youth, who, having traveled in Europe, affected a contempt for the masses. He became the faithful Pepys of the period, describing society people and events with liveliness and fancy, and imparting a strange interest to the most insignificant occurrences through the art of the telling. It was during this period, too, that the political letters of Washington correspondents were introduced into American journalism. Matthew L. Davis, famous as the “Genevese Traveller” of the London “Times,” and as the capital correspondent of the “New York Courier and Enquirer,” was for years the confidant and companion of Senators, Justices, and Presidents. And James Gordon Bennett, young and clever, appeared upon the scene to give a new and spicy touch to reporting with his Walpolean letters of wit, sarcasm, and personalities, for the New York paper of James Watson Webb. Along with the democratization of politics in the Thirties went a popularization of the methods of the press.

The amusements of the Washington of this time were, for the most part, crude. The theater featured players scarcely celebrated in their own day, and most of the plays presented have happily been long since forgotten. Even these were interspersed with songs and farce acts. In 1820 the Washington Theater had been built, and hither, at long intervals, came celebrated artists, but they came “like angels, few and far between.” From his rustic retreat in Maryland the elder Booth, half mad, all genius, occasionally emerged to curdle the blood of the statesmen and their families with his intense interpretations of the Shakesperian tragedies. From a Booth night Jackson was seldom absent. But of all the artists who played in the capital none created such a furor as Fanny Kemble. The elder statesmen were captivated by her art and charm. John Marshall and Justice Story were regular attendants, and the Chief Justice was lustily cheered as he entered the box. When she played Mrs. Haller in “The Stranger,” and the audience was moved to tears, “the Chief Justice shed them in common with the younger eyes.”[65] Inspiring audiences--those of the Thirties, with Marshall, Jackson, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun in the boxes or the pit. Great, not only in genius, but in their fresh capacity to enjoy, and when one of the most learned Justices of the Supreme Court could be moved to poesy in paying tribute to an actress’s art.[66]

But even with a Kemble playing, the haughty little country capital refused to abandon its parties, and we have the record of a New Yorker finding “Fanny Kemble in the Washington Theater like a canary bird in a mouse trap,” leaving the theater in the midst of a performance to attend “a delightful party at Mrs. Tayloe’s,” where he “met many distinguished people and all the Washington belles.”[67] In those days the theater-goer purchased his tickets between ten and one o’clock, and the doors were thrown open at six, with the curtain rising promptly at seven. For the usual performances the boxes were seventy-five cents, the pit twenty-five. When the rain converted the streets into ribbons of sticky black mud, or the bitter cold made an invitation to the people from the “magnificent distances” unprofitable, the papers would announce a postponement, with an explanation.[68] The pleasure-seekers were not restricted, however, to the players of the Washington Theater, and occasionally a show would appear advertising “the Great Anaconda of Java,” and the “Boa Constrictor of Ceylon,” both “so docile that the most timid lady or child may view them with safety and pleasure.”[69] Such were the amusements offered for the entertainment of Jackson, Webster, Marshall, Calhoun, and Clay.

But for the men there were other forms of amusement, popular in their day. The racing on the National Course near the city made it difficult to maintain a quorum in Congress, and the statesmen mounted their horses to ride to the track to cheer their favorites and to bet their money. Even the President entered his horses and lost heavily on his wagers. There Jackson and a goodly portion of the Cabinet, and a formidable sprinkling of the leaders of the Opposition from Clay to Letcher, might be seen backing their judgment as to horseflesh with their purses. And when it was not horse-racing, it was cockfighting, with the President entering his own birds from the Hermitage, and riding with his friends to Bladensburg to witness the humiliation of his entries. It was a day of gambling, when statesmen, whose names children are now taught to reverence, played for heavy stakes for days and nights at a time, with Clay and Poindexter losing fortunes, and an occasional victim of the lure blowing out his brains. While most of the celebrities played in private houses, they could, if they preferred, find the notorious gambling-houses along the Avenue. Along with racing, cockfighting, and gambling went heavy drinking. “Since I have been here,” wrote Horace Binney, after two years in Congress, “one man, an habitual drunkard, blew out his brains; two have died notorious drunkards, and one of them shamefully immoral. The honors are given to all, with equal eulogy and ceremonial.”[70] The statesman of the Thirties who did not drink heavily was a rarity. Just as whiskey, brandy, gin, and wine were served in great decanters on the tables at hotels, “at the boarding-houses every guest had his bottle or interest in a bottle.”[71] On the way to the Capitol, the statesman could quench his thirst at numerous bars--and often did. And in the basement of the Capitol building whiskey could be had. Never in American history have so many promising careers been wrecked by drunkenness as during the third decade. Frequently national celebrities would appear upon the floor of the House or Senate in a state of intoxication, and on at least one occasion the greater part of the house was hilariously drunk.[72] Thus, despite the miry streets, the drabness and rusticity, the Washington of the Jacksonian period was easily the gayest, the most brilliant and dissipated community in the country. A penetrating observer found, in its recklessness and extravagance, a striking similarity to the spirit of the eighteenth century in England, as portrayed in Thackeray’s “Humorists,” with “laxity of morals and the coolest disregard possible.”[73] Its superior social charm was due to the fact that it was “the only place in the Union where people consider it necessary to be agreeable--where pleasing, as in the Old World, becomes a sort of business, and the enjoyments of social intercourse enter into the habitual calculations of every one.”[74] A goodly portion of the women of good society, and other sojourners, were apt to contemplate a Washington season as “a sort of annual lark,” which offered the most promising solution of the problem of a weary winter in the country. Willis explained the attractions of the country capital on the ground that “the great deficiency in all our cities, the company of highly cultivated and superior men, is here supplied.”[75] Even the supercilious and scolding Captain Marryat of England found it “an agreeable city, full of pleasant, clever people, who come here to amuse and be amused,” and he observed “much more _usage du monde_ and Continental ease than in any other parts of the States.”[76]

After spending several crowded weeks in the social and political heart of the town, Harriet Martineau concluded that, while life there would be “dreary” to women who loved domesticity, “persons who love dissipation, who love to watch the game of politics, and those who make a study of strong minds under strong excitement, like a season in Washington.”[77] Ludicrous as it was in its incongruities, the little city bravely assumed the pose of a real capital, plumed itself on the superiority of its society, and made much of the fashions. At the crowded receptions the wondering visitor might very easily be jostled against Webster or Sam Houston, dandies like Willis or frontiersmen in boots and soiled linen, flirtatious belles and matrons, beauties and beasts. But there were many leaders of fashion who imitated the frivolities of European capitals, ordered their dresses from Paris or London, and regularly summoned coiffeurs to their homes to dress their hair for balls and receptions.[78] When Congress was in session fashionable women from every section flocked to the seat of government bringing their daughters for a Washington season. One of the resident society leaders, commenting on their coming, dolefully complained that they were “coming in such ton and expensive fashions, that the poor citizens cannot pretend to vie with them and absolutely shrink into insignificance.”[79] The shops made much of their Paris finery. Mrs. Coursault announced “to the ladies of the metropolis that she has just returned from Paris with a most splendid assortment of millinery and goods, to be seen at the store of Mrs. Lamplier on the Avenue.”[80] Mr. Palmieri advertised that he had “just received from Paris an elegant assortment of caps and pelerines direct from Mademoiselle Minette’s, the first Milliner of Paris, and a beautiful assortment of satin shoes.”[81] Another announced “French dresses for balls,” and still another, “the arrival from Paris of an elegant assortment of French jewelry.”

The daily life of the fashionable ladies of the time began with breakfast at nine, when they amused themselves by comparing the conflicting descriptions of scenes they had witnessed the day before in the “Intelligencer” and the “Globe.” By eleven they were apt to be on their way to the Capitol to enliven the solemnity of the Senate Chamber or the Supreme Court, unless a neglected call, an appointment with an artist, or an excursion interfered. Dinner was served from four to six, and soon afterwards milady retired to her boudoir to dress for some ball, rout, levee, or masquerade. Long drives through the mud--late hours with the breaking dawn greeting her return--and the weary lady would relax and warm awhile at the drawing-room fire before retiring for the night.[82] Contrary to the popular belief, there was much social brilliance during the Jackson Administrations. Nor is the prevailing impression that all the elegance, cleverness, and charm was confined to the drawing-rooms of the Whig aristocracy borne out by the facts. In truth, among the women of the Jacksonian circle there were two or three who were easily superior to the best the Whigs could offer, in intellect, culture, and beauty. Such was the bigotry of the times that there was a tendency for society to segregate into camps, but it was impossible to draw the party line on a number of the fascinating and brilliant women who presided over the households of Jacksonian Senators and Cabinet Ministers. While the Whigs generally remained severely aloof from the house of the President, they were unable to resist the invitations of the President’s friends.

Among all the women of the period none approached Mrs. Edward Livingston in brilliance, charm, and elegance, nor did any of the ladies of the Whig circle, not even Mrs. Tayloe, who wondered if Miss Martineau’s novels were “pretty,” approach her in the lavishness and taste of her dinners and parties. “Mrs. Livingston takes the lead in the fashionable world,” wrote Mrs. Smith, who found it hard to concede the virtues of the Jacksonians.[83] “I know that Mr. Livingston gives elegant dinners and his wines are the best in the city,” recorded a press correspondent of the time.[84] “We dined by invitation with Mr. Secretary Livingston,” wrote Justice Story, an enemy of the Jacksonians. “The dinner was superb and unequalled by anything I have seen in Washington except at some of the foreign ministers’, and was served exclusively in the French style.”[85] This captivating woman, of French descent, had known a childhood of romance in a marble palace by the sea in St. Domingo, had miraculously escaped the servile insurrection, and reached New Orleans to become the wife of Livingston. Wonderfully vivacious, eloquent in conversation, intelligently interested in politics, steeped in the literature of the ages, witty and spirited, her home in Lafayette Square more nearly resembled a salon than anything the capital has ever known. Even the most bigoted Whigs of the day were glad to lay aside their partisanship at her threshold, and leaders, still flushed with a verbal duel in the Senate, smiled amicably upon each other in her drawing-room. Here one might meet John Marshall, Joseph Story, and Bushrod Washington of the Supreme Court, Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Wirt, or Randolph. About her, too, she gathered a coterie of cultured women, and Mrs. John Quincy Adams and Mrs. Andrew Stevenson came and went in the house on the Square with as little ceremony as members of the household. The charm of the house was enhanced by the exquisite Cora, the daughter, who reigned as the belle and toast of the town until her marriage, captivating, among others, the impressionable young Josiah Quincy, who thought her “undoubtedly the greatest belle in the U.S.,” and, if not “transcendently handsome,” possessed of a “fine figure, a pretty face.” Finding it “the height of the ton to be her admirer,” the young Bostonian followed the fashion with all his heart.[86]

Intimately identified with Mrs. Livingston was Mrs. Stevenson, to whom the years had been kind since the days when, as Sally Coles, she was a protégée of Dolly Madison.[87] At this time she was the wife of the Jacksonian Speaker of the House, soon to become the hostess of the American Legation in London, and to witness, in that rôle, the coronation of Victoria. Strikingly handsome, tall and commanding, she resembled her friend in an ineffable graciousness of manner and an extraordinary conversational ability. Among the most famous hostesses of the Jacksonian circle were Mrs. Louis McLane, “a gay, frank, communicative woman” whose “self-complacence is united with so much good humor in others that it is not offensive,” who gave popular weekly dinners and parties;[88] Mrs. Levi Woodbury, beautiful of form and feature, who resembled Dolly Madison in her suavity, ease of manner, and infinite tact, and presided over her many dinners and dances with dignity and grace, and made a practice of featuring the most dashing belles of Baltimore, Alexandria, and Georgetown;[89] and Mrs. John Forsyth, more conventional and retiring than the others, but yielding to none in culture and elegance, and having a certain advantage in her “group of graces.”[90] Among the hostesses of the Opposition, Mrs. Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, a woman of grace and beauty, but lacking in the intellectual sparkle of Mrs. Livingston, maintained the most elegant establishment.

But these were only the most brilliant leaders, for the Jacksonian period was one of hectic social activity, with foreign ministers and Cabinet members entertaining constantly and lavishly, and the official underlings desperately bent on a ruinous and riotous imitation. It was a day of much pretense and pose, of ceremonious intercourse, and it was not easy to determine from the swallow-tails and the buff waistcoats whether the wearer were a Senator or a clerk.[91] It was a conversational period, and seldom has the American capital contained at one time so many excellent talkers. Nor was the talk mere chat and gossip. Even the women, especially from the South, were clever conversationalists, able keenly to discuss the politics of the day and the measures of the hour.[92] Even the busiest and greatest party leaders had the time and inclination for calls on bright women when they could enjoy the Johnsonian luxury of having their talk out. We have a picture of Clay “sitting upright on the sofa, with a snuff box ever in his hand,” discoursing “for many hours in his even, soft, deliberative tone”; of Webster, “leaning back at his ease, telling stories, cracking jokes, shaking the sofa with burst after burst of laughter, or smoothly discoursing to the perfect felicity of the logical part of one’s constitution”; of Calhoun, the “cast iron man,” who “looked as if he had never been born,” no longer capable of mental relaxation, meeting men and haranguing them by the fireside as in the Senate; of Justice Story, talking gushingly for hours, “his face all the while, notwithstanding his gray hair, showing all the nobility and ingenuousness of a child’s.”[93] The talk about the firesides and at the receptions, that were given over entirely to conversation, was by no means confined to art, eloquence, and poetry, for the Mother Grundys of gossip were numerous among the women seeking to amuse and be amused. There were personalities as well as personages in the years that Jackson directed a triumphant party and Clay led a brilliant and militant opposition.[94] The little town of twenty thousand was not so large that the ladies could not know, from observation or deduction, when Adams dined with Calhoun, when Webster called on Mrs. Livingston, and what Mrs. Tayloe served her guests at her last reception.

“Did you have candied oranges at Mrs. Woodbury’s?” asked a lady who had dined with Mrs. Cass, of a friend who had dined with the wife of the Secretary of the Navy.

“No.”

“Then they had candied oranges at the Attorney-General’s,” was the deduction.

“How do you know?”

“Oh, as we were on the way, I saw a dish carried; and as we had none at Cass’s, I knew they were either for the Woodburys or the Attorney-General’s.”[95]

It was the golden age of gallantry as well as gossip, some flirtatious, some courtly. If the admirer of John Forsyth’s daughter proposed in a Valentine Day verse[96] throbbing with adolescent passion, the more staid and sober-minded Francis Scott Key wrote, in a fine hand, religious hymns for the pleasure of her mother.[97]

The evening parties were the most popular form of entertainment, and the hostesses of the Cabinet circle set the pace. The invitations were sent out nine days in advance. Because of the exigencies of politics, and the exactions of an awakened “Democracy,” these could be neither small nor exclusive in character, and from seven to nine hundred invitations were usually extended. Between nine and ten o’clock all the apartments would be thrown open. The muddy streets in front would be congested with carriages. The host and hostess, standing in the drawing-room, would receive their guests, and then the more serious would withdraw to quiet corners for conversation, the gay and frivolous would swing into the dance, and the devotees of chance would seek and find a remote corner for cards. Servants would gingerly thread their way through the throng with light refreshments until eleven o’clock when an elaborate supper would be served. By three o’clock the company would begin to retire, and usually, at daybreak, the lights would be extinguished.[98]

It was a day of social novelties. Ice-cream as a refreshment first made its appearance in the country capital at the home of the widow of Alexander Hamilton. Introduced at the White House immediately afterwards by Jackson, it took society by storm,[99] and Kinchy, the confectioner on the Avenue, who had a monopoly on ice-cream and ices, became as indispensable socially as the chef and the fiddler.[100] Of the dances, the most popular was the waltz, introduced two years before Jackson’s inauguration, and, considered at first of questionable modesty, it soon won its way, and the matrons found it as alluring as the débutantes. Even then there were censorious people to see in the dreamy glide an example of the moral degeneracy of the age.[101] To accentuate their pessimism, the crowds were invariably so dense that the dancers could scarcely move, reminding an amused Kentuckian “of a Kentucky fight when the crowd draws the circle so close that the combatants have no room to use their limbs.” But despite the crowded quarters, the twenty-four fiddlers in a row bravely sought “by dint of loud music to put the amateurs in motion,” until they jumped “up and down in a hole, and nobody sees more of them than their heads.”[102] Queer, conglomerate crowds packed the balls and receptions of men in public life, forced to accept official society as they found it, and if members of Congress appeared at the dance in their morning habiliments and in unpolished boots, in worsted stockings and in garments fashioned by a backwoods tailor, they were not conspicuous.[103] All, or most, entered with zest into the social activities of the time. On the night of a big ball “the rolling of carriages sounded like continual peals of thunder, or roaring of the wind.” In the dark, dismal streets, the lamps on the vehicles alone were visible, and these, moving rapidly in the blackness, “appeared like brilliant meteors in the air.”[104] Sometimes, in the case of the more pretentious entertainers, like the foreign ministers, the streets in front of the houses were light as day from the line of flaming torches along the pavement. Fox, the British Minister, a relative of the great orator; Baron von Roenne, the Prussian, a brilliant jurist and publicist; and Baron Bodisco, the Russian, made great displays of equipages and appointments, and were noted for their wines and exotic entertainments. At the legations of Fox and Bodisco, great sums passed over the card table, the most famous statesmen of the time among the players, and the British Minister so seldom saw the sun that on the occasion of a funeral, while seated beside the wife of the Spanish Minister, he turned a puzzled look upon her with the comment, “How strange we all look by daylight!” Both ministers contributed not a little to the gayety of gossip, Bodisco, by his squat ugliness and courtliness, and Fox, by his whimsical refusal at dinners to go to the table until the dishes had cooled.[105] During the period the most celebrated functions were given at Carusi’s Assembly rooms which could accommodate great numbers. Leaders of fashion and the socially ambitious of Baltimore and Alexandria, wishing to make an impression in introducing a débutante or to repay social obligations, found these rooms suited to their purpose. It was in these rooms that Washington society had its first presentation of the “Barber of Seville,” and “John of Paris” in the winter of 1833.[106] The same year a Washington birthday party was given there, both rooms thrown open, “decorated and illuminated and with a band in each,” and diplomats admitted without an entrance fee.[107] Hither all the ladies of the capital, unfamiliar with the dances, or wishing to learn new ones, found their way to learn from the popular Louis, only the inclemency of the weather and the impossible mire of the streets interfering with his profits.[108] Thus the fashionables of the Thirties managed to create the illusion of living in the great world, chattering in the Senate, bustling into the Supreme Court chamber, dining, dancing, flirting, gossiping, attending the theater to see a Booth or a Kemble, going to the circus to see the animals fed at eight o’clock, “in the presence of the audience,”[109] or riding to the National Course near town to witness the races, or attending an exhibit of the paintings of John G. Chapman on the Avenue.[110] Only on Sundays did the capital become quiet and sedate, for, after a pious morning pilgrimage to church, the ladies carrying a hymn or a prayer book and leaning on the arms of their escorts, they retired to the seclusion of their homes and the streets were deserted or given over to the promenades of the colored folks.[111]

In this Washington, where men were feverishly fighting for place and prestige, and women were engaged in a hectic struggle for social leadership, Death lurked always, for a less healthful spot could not easily have been found. Built originally in a swamp reeking with malaria, surrounded with morasses, and with not a few of these in the heart of the town, with sanitation poor and water wretched, the residents were constantly menaced by disease. With the gradual disappearance of the forests immediately surrounding it, the conditions became worse. The death-rate was as high as one in fifty-three, with August claiming the heaviest toll from fevers.[112] Between the fevers of the summers and the influenza of the winters, the residents had to be constantly on guard. Whiskey and quinine were taken with the regularity of bread and meat, and tourists were wont to sit late at their quarters “sipping gently a medicine which the doctors of the capital thought destructive of the influenza germs which were lying in wait for the unwary.”[113] Fevers, pneumonia, influenza, and the cholera made the swampy capital of the Thirties as profitable to the doctors as to the coachmen.

Such, in brief, was the scene of the most dramatic and significant political battles that were staged in America between the foundation of the Republic and the Administration of Woodrow Wilson. Such was the day-by-day life of the men, now steel engravings, who played the leading rôles. And by bearing in mind the sordidness and pettiness of the environment, and of the men and women with whom they daily and nightly gossiped and dined and danced, it may be less of a shock to discover, in the unfolding of the story of these eight crowded years, that even the greatest were men of moral weaknesses and limitations.