[5]The name of a small flower, common in Ireland.
[5]
The name of a small flower, common in Ireland.
CLOSING SCENES OF THE SESSION ATWASHINGTON.
The paradox of “the more one does, the more one can do,” is resolved in life at Washington with more success than I have seen it elsewhere. The inexorable bell at the hotel or boarding-house pronounces the irrevocable and swift transit of breakfast to all sleepers after eight. The elastic depths of the pillow have scarcely yielded their last feather to the sleeper’s head before the drowse is rudely shaken from his eyelids, and with an alacrity which surprises himself, he finds his toilet achieved, his breakfast over, and himself abroad to lounge in the sunshine till the flag waves on the capitol. He would retire to his chamber to read during these two or three vacant hours, but the one chair in his pigeon-hole creaks, or has no back or bottom, or his anthracite fire is out, or, is too hot for the size of the room; or, in short, Washington, from whatever cause, is a place where none read except those who stand up to a padlocked newspaper. The stars and stripes, moving over the two wings of the capitol at eleven announce that the two chambers of legislation are in session, and the hard working idler makes his way to the senate or the house. He lingers in the lobby awhile, amused with the button-hole seizers plying the unwilling ears of members with their claims, or enters the library, where ladies turn over prints, and enfilade, with their battery of truant eyes the comers in at the green door. He then gropes up the dark staircase to the senate gallery, and stifles in the pressure of a hot gallery, forgetting, like listeners at a crowded opera, that bodily discomfort will unlink the finest harmonies of song or oratory. Thence he descends to the rotunda to draw breath and listen to the more practical, but quite as earnest eloquence of candidates for patents; and passes, after a while to the crowded gallery of the house, where, by some acoustic phenomena in the construction of the building, the voices of the speakers come to his ears as articulate as water from a narrow-necked bottle. “Small blame to them!” he thinks, however; for behind the brexia columns are grouped all the fair forms of Washington; and in making his bow to two hundred despotic lawgivers in feathers and velvet, he is readily consoled that the duller legislators who yield to their sway are inaudible and forgotten. To this upper house drop in, occasionally, the younger or gayer members of the lower, bringing, if not political scandal, at least some slightresumerof what Mr. Somebody is beating his desk about below; and thus, crammed with the day’s trifles or the day’s business, and fatigued from heel to eyelid, our idler goes home at five to dress for dinner and the night’s campaign, having been up and on his legs for ten mortal hours.
Cold water and a little silence in his own room have rather refreshed him, and he dines at six with a party of from fifteen to twenty-five persons. He discusses the vital interests of fourteen millions of people over a glass of wine with the man whose vote, possibly, will decide their destiny, and thence hurries to a ball-room crammed like a perigord pie, where he pants, elbows, eats supper, and waltzes till three in the morning. How human constitutions stand this, and stand it daily and nightly, from the beginning to the end of a session, may well puzzle the philosophy of those who rise and breakfast in comfortable leisure.
I joined the crowd on the twenty-second of February, to pay my respects to the President, and seethe cheese. Whatever veneration existed in the minds of the people toward the former, their curiosity in reference to the latter predominated, unquestionably. The circularpavé, extending from the gate to the White House, was thronged with citizens of all classes, those coming away having each a small brown paper parcel and a very strong smell; those advancing manifesting, by shakings of the head and frequent exclamations, that there may be too much of a good thing, and particularly of a cheese. The beautiful portico was thronged with boys and coach-drivers, and the odor strengthened with every step. We forced our way over the threshold, and encountered an atmosphere, to which the mephitic gas floating over Avernus must be faint and innocuous. On the side of the hall hung a rough likeness of the general, emblazoned with eagle and stars, forming a background to the huge tub in which the cheese had been packed; and in the centre of the vestibule stood the “fragrant gift,” surrounded with a dense crowd, who, without crackers, or even “malt to their cheese,” had, in two hours, eaten and purveyed awayfourteen hundred pounds! The small segment reserved for the President’s use counted for nothing in the abstractions.
Glad to compromise for a breath of cheeseless air, we desisted from the struggle to obtain a sight of the table, and mingled with the crowd in the east room. Here were diplomates in their gold coats and officers in uniform, ladies of secretaries and other ladies, soldiers on volunteer duty, and Indians in war-dress and paint. Bonnets, feathers, uniforms, and all—it was rather a gay assemblage. I remembered the descriptions in travellers’ books, and looked out for millers and blacksmiths in their working gear, and for rudeness and vulgarity in all. The offer of a mammoth cheese to the public was likely to attract to the presidential mansion more of the lower class than would throng to a common levee. Great-coats there were, and not a few of them, for the day was raw, and unless they were hung on the palings outside, they must remain on the owners’ shoulders; but, with a single exception (a fellow with his coat torn down his back, possibly in getting at the cheese,) I saw no man in a dress that was not respectable and clean of its kind, and abundantly fit for a tradesman out of his shop. Those who were much pressed by the crowd put their hats on; but there was a general air of decorum which would surprise any one who had pinned his faith on travellers. An intelligent Englishman, very much inclined to take a disgust to mobocracy, expressed to me great surprise at the decency and proper behavior of the people. The same experiment in England, he thought, would result in as pretty a riot as a paragraph-monger would desire to see.
The President was down stairs in the oval reception room, and, though his health would not permit him to stand, he sat in his chair for two or three hours, and received his friends with his usual bland and dignified courtesy. By his side stood the lady of the mansion, dressed in full court costume, and doing the honors of her place with a grace and amenity which every one felt, and which threw a bloom over the hour. General Jackson retired, after awhile, to his chamber, and the President elect remained to support his relative, and present to her the still thronging multitude, and by four o’clock the guests were gone, and the “banquet hall” was deserted. Not to leave a wrong impression of the cheese, I dined afterward at a table to which the President had sent a piece of it, and found it of excellent quality. It is like many other things, more agreeable in small qualities.
Some eccentric mechanic has presented to the President a sulkey, made entirely (except the wheels) of rough-cut hickory, with the bark on. It looks rough enough, but has very much the everlasting look of old Hickory himself; and if he could be seen driving a high-stepping, bony old iron-gray steed in it, any passer-by would see that there was as much fitness in the whole thing as in the chariot of Bacchus and his reeling leopards. Some curiously twisted and gnarled branches have been very ingeniously turned into handles and whip-box, and the vehicle is compact and strong. The President has left it to Mr. Van Buren.
In very strong contrast to the sulkey, stood close by, the elegant phæton, made of the wood of the old frigate Constitution. It has a seat for two, with a driver’s box, covered with a superb hammercloth, and set up rather high in front; the wheels and body are low, and there are bars for baggage behind; altogether, for lightness and elegance, it would be a turn out for Long Acre. The material is excessively beautiful—a fine-grained oak, polished to a very high degree, with its colors delicately brought out by a coat of varnish. The wheels are very slender and light, but strong, and, with all its finish, it looks a vehicle capable of a great deal of service. A portrait of the Constitution, under full sail, is painted on the panels.
THE INAUGURATION.
While the votes for president were being counted in the senate, Mr. Clay remarked to Mr. Van Buren with courteous significance:—
“It is a cloudy day, sir!”
“The sun will shine on the fourth of March!” was the confident reply.
True to his augury, the sun shone out of heaven without a cloud on the inaugural morning. The air was cold, but clear and life-giving; and the broad avenues of Washington for once seemed not too large for the thronging population. The crowds who had been pouring in from every direction for several days before, ransacking the town for but a shelter from the night, were apparent on the spacious sidewalks; and the old campaigners of the winter seemed but a thin sprinkling among the thousands of new and strange faces. The sun shone alike on the friends and opponents of the new Administration, and, as far as one might observe in a walk to the capitol, all were made cheerful alike by its brightness. It was another augury, perhaps, and may foretell a more extended fusion under the light of the luminary new risen. In a whole day passed in a crowd composed of all classes and parties, I heard no remark that the president would have been unwilling to hear.
I was at the capitol a half hour before the procession arrived, and had leisure to study a scene for which I was not at all prepared. The noble staircase of the east front of the building leaps over three arches, under one of which carriages pass to the basement-door; and, as you approach from the gate, the eye cuts the ascent at right angles, and the sky, broken by a small spire at a short distance, is visible beneath. Broad stairs occur at equal distances, with corresponding projections; and from the upper platform rise the outer columns of the portico, with ranges of columns three deep extending back to the pilasters. I had often admired this front with its many graceful columns, and its superb flight of stairs, as one of the finest things I had seen in the world. Like the effect of the assembled population of Rome waiting to receive the blessing before the font of St. Peter’s, however, the assembled crowd on the steps and at the base of the capitol heightened inconceivably the grandeur of the design. They were piled up like the people on the temples of Babylon, in one of Martin’s sublime pictures—every projection covered, and an inexpressible soul and character given by their presence to the architecture. Boys climbed about the base of the columns, single figures stood on the posts of the surrounding railings in the boldest relief against the sky; and the whole thing was exactly what Paul Veronese would have delighted to draw. I stood near an accomplished artist who is commissioned to fill one of the panels of the rotunda, and I can not but hope he may have chosen this magnificent scene for his subject.
The republican procession, consisting of the Presidents and their families, escorted by a small volunteer corps, arrived soon after twelve. The General and Mr. Van Buren were in the “constitution phæton,” drawn by four grays, and as it entered the gate, they both rode uncovered. Descending from the carriage at the foot of the steps, a passage was made for them through the dense crowd, and the tall white head of the old Chieftain, still uncovered, went steadily up through the agitated mass, marked by its peculiarity from all around it.
I was in the crowd thronging the opposite side of the court, and lost sight of the principal actors in this imposing drama, till they returned from the Senate Chamber. A temporary platform had been laid, and railed in on the broad stair which supports the portico, and, for all preparation to one of the most important and most meaning and solemn ceremonies on earth—for the inauguration of a chief magistrate over a republic of fifteen millions of freemen—the whole addition to the open air, and the presence of the people, was a volume of holy writ. In comparing the impressive simplicity of this consummation of the wishes of a mighty people, with the tricked-out ceremonial, and hollow show, which embarrass a corresponding event in other lands, it was impossible not to feel that the moral sublime was here—that a transaction so important, and of such extended and weighty import, could borrow nothing from drapery or decoration, and that the simple presence of the sacred volume, consecrating the act, spoke more thrillingly to the heart than the trumpets of a thousand heralds.
The crowd of diplomatists and senators in the rear of the columns made way, and the Ex-President and Mr. Van Buren advanced with uncovered heads. A murmur of feeling rose up from the moving mass below, and the infirm old man, emerged from a sick-chamber, which his physician had thought it impossible he should leave, bowed to the people, and, still uncovered in the cold air, took his seat beneath the portico. Mr. Van Buren then advanced, and with a voice remarkably distinct, and with great dignity, read his address to the people. The air was elastic, and the day still; and it is supposed that near twenty thousand persons heard him from his elevated position distinctly. I stood myself on the outer limit of the crowd, and though I lost occasionally a sentence from the interruption near by, his words came clearly articulated to my ear.
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 thedemocratic corps. The representatives of the crowned heads of Europe stood rather uneasily under the epithet, till it was suggested that he possibly meant to saydiplomatic.
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 muchsui generisas 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, averypleasant 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.
There is no city, probably no village in America, where the female society is not refined, cultivated, and elegant. With or without regular advantages, woman attains the refinements and tact necessary to polite intercourse. No traveller ever ventured to complain of this part of American society. The great deficiency is that of agreeable, highly-cultivated men, whose pursuits have been elevated, and whose minds are pliable to the grace and changing spirit of conversation. Every man of talents possesses these qualities naturally, and hence the great advantage which Washington enjoys over every other city in our country. None but a shallow observer, or a malicious book-maker, would ever sneer at the exteriors or talk of the ill-breeding of such men as form, in great numbers, the agreeable society of this place—for a man of great talents never could be vulgar; and there is a superiority about most of these which raises them above the petty standard which regulates the outside of a coxcomb. Even compared with the dress and address of men of similar positions and pursuits in Europe, however (members of the house of commons, for example, or of the chamber of deputies in France,) it is positively the fact that the senators and representatives of the United States have a decided advantage. It is all very well for Mr. Hamilton, and other scribblers whose books must be spiced to go down, to ridicule a Washingtonsoiréefor English readers; but if the observation of one who has seen assemblies of legislators and diplomatists in all the countries of Europe may be fairly placed against his and Mrs. Trollope’s, I may assert, upon my own authority, that they will not find, out of May Fair in England, so well-dressed and dignified a body of men. I have seen as yet no specimen of the rough animal described by them and others as the “western member;” and if David Crockett, (whom I was never so fortunate as to see) was of that description, the race must have died with him. It is a thing I have learned since I have been in Washington, to feel a wish that foreigners should see Congress in session. We are so humbugged, one way and another, by travellers’ lies.
I have heard the observation once or twice from strangers since I have been here, and it struck myself on my first arrival, that I had never seen within the same limit before, so many of what may be called “men of mark.” You will scarce meet a gentleman on the sidewalk in Washington, who would not attract your notice, seen elsewhere, as an individual possessing in his eye or general features a certain superiority. Never having seen most of the celebrated speakers of the senate, I busied myself for the first day or two in examining the faces that passed me in the street, in the hope of knowing them by the outward stamp which, we are apt to suppose, belongs to greatness. I gave it up at last, simply from the great number I met who might be (for all that features had to do with it) the remarkable men I sought.
There is a very simple reason why a Congress of the United States should be, as they certainly are, a much more marked body of men than the English house of commons or lords, or the chamber of peers or deputies in France. I refer to the mere means by which, in either case, they come to their honors. In England and France the lords and peers are legislators by hereditary right, and the members of the commons and deputies from the possession of extensive property or family influence, or some other cause, arguing, in most cases, no great personal talent in the individual. They are legislators, but they are devoted very often much more heartily to other pursuits—hunting or farming, racing, driving, and similar out-of-door passions common to English gentlemen and lords, or the correspondingpenchantsof French peers and deputies. It is only the few great leaders and orators who devote themselves to politics exclusively. With us every one knows it is quite the contrary. An American politician delivers himself, body and soul, to his pursuit. He never sleeps, eats, walks, or dreams, but in subservience to his aim. He cannot afford to have another passion of any kind till he has reached the point of his ambition—and then it has become a mordent necessity from habit. The consequence is, that no man can be found in an elevated sphere in our country, who has not had occasion for more than ordinary talent to arrive there. He inherited nothing of his distinction, and has made himself. Such ordeals leave their marks, and they who have thought, and watched, and struggled, and contended with the passions of men as an American politician inevitably must, cannot well escape the traces of such work. It usually elevates the character of the face—it always strongly marks it.
A-proposof “men of mark;” the dress-circle of the theatre at Power’s benefit, not long since, was graced by three Indians in full costume, the chief of the Foxes, the chief of the Ioways, and a celebrated warrior of the latter tribe, called the Sioux-killer. The Fox is an old man of apparently fifty, with a heavy, aquiline nose, a treacherous eye, sharp as an eagle’s, and a person rather small in proportion to his head and features. He was dressed in a bright scarlet blanket, and a crown of feathers, with an eagle’s plume, standing erect on the top of his head, all dyed in the same deep hue. His face was painted to match, except his lips, which looked of a most ghastly sallow, in contrast with his fiery nose, forehead, and cheeks. His tomahawk lay in the hollow of his arm, decked with feathers of the same brilliant color with the rest of his drapery. Next him sat the Sioux-killer, in a dingy blanket, with a crown made of a great quantity of the feathers of a pea-hen, which fell over his face, and concealed his features almost entirely. He is very small, but is famous for his personal feats, having, among other things, walked one hundred and thirty miles in thirty successive hours, and killed three Sioux (hence his name) in one battle with that nation. He is but twenty-three, but very compact and wiry-looking, and his eye glowed through his veil of hen feathers like a coal of fire.
Next to the Sioux-killer sat “White Cloud,” the chief of the Ioways. His face was the least warlike of the three, and expressed a good nature and freedom from guile, remarkable in an Indian. He is about twenty-four, has very large features, and a fine, erect person, with broad shoulders and chest. He was painted less than the Fox chief, but of nearly the same color, and carried, in the hollow of his arm, a small, glittering tomahawk, ornamented with blue feathers. His head was encircled by a kind of turban of silver-fringed cloth, with some metallic pendents for earrings, and his blanket, not particularly clean or handsome, was partly open on the breast, and disclosed a calico shirt, which was probably sold to him by a trader in the west. They were all very attentive to the play, but the Fox chief and White Cloud departed from the traditionary dignity of Indians, and laughed a great deal at some of Power’s fun. The Sioux-killer sat between them, as motionless and grim as a marble knight on a tombstone.
The next day I had the pleasure of dining with Mr. Power, who lived at the same hotel with the Indian delegation; and while at dinner he received a message from the Ioways, expressing a wish to call on him. We were sitting over our wine when White Cloud and the Sioux-killer came in with their interpreter. There were several gentlemen present, one of them in the naval undress uniform, whose face the Sioux-killer scrutinized very sharply. They smiled in bowing to Power, but made very grave inclinations to the rest of us. The chief took his seat, assuming a very erect and dignified attitude, which he preserved immovable during the interview; but the Sioux-killer drew up his legs, resting them on the round of the chair, and, with his head and body bent forward, seemed to forget himself, and give his undivided attention to the study of Power and his naval friend.
Tumblers of champagne were given them, which they drank with great relish, though the Sioux-killer provoked a little ridicule from White Cloud, by coughing as he swallowed it. The interpreter was a half-breed between an Indian and a negro, and a most intelligent fellow. He had been reared in the Ioway tribe, but had been among the whites a great deal for the last few years, and had picked up English very fairly. He told us that White Cloud was the son of old White Cloud, who died three years since, and that the young chief had acquired entire command over the tribe by his mildness and dignity. He had paid the debts of the Ioways to the traders, very much against the will of the tribe; but he commenced by declaring firmly that he would be just, and had carried his point. He had come to Washington to receive a great deal of money from the sale of the lands of the tribe, and the distribution of it lay entirely in his own power. Only one old warrior had ventured to rise in council and object to his measures; but when White Cloud spoke, he had dropped his head on his bosom and submitted. This information and that which followed was given in English, of which neither of the Ioways understood a word.
Mr. Power expressed a surprise that the Sioux-killer should have known him in his citizen’s dress. The interpreter translated it, and the Indian said in answer:—
“The dress is very different, but when I see a man’s eye I know him again.”
He then told Power that he wished, in the theatre, to raise his war-cry and help him fight the three bad-looking men who were his enemies (referring to the three bailiffs in the scene in Paddy Carey.) Power asked what part of the play he liked best. He said that part where he seized the girl in his arms and ran off the stage with her (at the close of an Irish jig in the same play).
The interpreter informed us that this was the first time the Sioux-killer had come among the whites. He had disliked them always till now, but he said he had seen enough to keep him telling tales all the rest of his life. Power offered them cigars, which they refused. We expressed our surprise; and the Sioux-killer said that the Indians who smoked gave out soonest in the chase; and White Cloud added, very gravely, that the young women of his tribe did not like the breaths of the smokers. In answer to an enquiry I made about the comparative size of Indians and white men, the chief said that the old men of the whites were larger than old Indians, but the young whites were not so tall and straight as the youths of his tribe. We were struck with the smallness of the chief’s hands and feet; but he seemed very much mortified when the interpreter translated our remark to him. He turned the little sallow fingers over and over, and said that old White Cloud, his father, who had been a great warrior, had small hands like his. The young chief, we were told by the interpreter, has never yet been in an engagement, and is always spared from the heavier fatigues undergone by the rest of the tribe.
They showed great good nature in allowing us to look at their ornaments, tomahawks, &c. White Cloud wore a collar of bear’s claws, which marked him for a chief; and the Sioux-killer carried a great cluster of brass bells on the end of his tomahawk, of which he explained the use very energetically. It was to shake when he stood over his fallen enemy in the fight, to let the tribe know he had killed him. After another tumbler of champagne each, they rose to take their leave, and White Cloud gave us his hand, gently, with a friendly nod. We were all amused, however, with the Sioux-killer’s more characteristic adieu. He looked us in the eye like a hawk, and gave us each a grip of his iron fist, that made the blood tingle under our nails. He would be an awkward customer in a fight, or his fixed lips and keen eye very much belie him.
WASHINGTON AFTER THE SESSION.
The leaf that is lodged in some sunny dell, after drifting on the whirlwind—the Indian’s canoe, after it has shot the rapids—the drop of water that has struggled out from the phlegethon of Niagara, and sleeps on the tranquil bosom of Ontario—are faint images of contrast and repose, compared with a Washingtonian after the session. I have read somewhere, in an oriental tale, that a lover, having agreed to share his life with his dying mistress, took her place in the grave six months in the year. In Bagdad it might have been a sacrifice. In Washington I could conceive such an arrangement to make very little difference.
Nothing is done leisurely in our country; and, by the haste with which everybody rushes to the rail-road the morning after the rising of Congress, you would fancy that the cars, like Cinderella’s coach would be changed into pumpkins at the stroke of twelve. The town was evacuatedin a day. On the fifth of March a placard was sent back by the inn-keepers at Baltimore, declaring that there was not so much as a garret to be had in that city, and imploring gentlemen and ladies to remain quietly at Washington for twenty-four hours. The railroad engine twice a day, tugged and puffed away through the hills, drawing after it, on its sinuous course, a train of brick colored cars, that resembled the fabulous red dragon trailing its slimy length through the valley of Crete. The gentlemen who sit by the fire in the bar-room at Gadsby’s, like Theodore Hook’s secretary, who could hear his master write “Yours faithfully” in the next room, learned to distinguish “Received payment,” from “Sundries,” by listening to the ceaseless scratch of the book-keeper. The ticket-office at the depot was a scene of struggle and confusion between those who wanted places; while, looking their last on these vanishing paymasters, stood hundreds of tatterdemalions, white, yellow, and black, with their hands in their pockets, and (if sincere regret at their departure could have wrung it forth) a tear in their eye. The bell rang, and the six hundred departures flocked to their places—young ladies, with long faces, leaving the delights of Washington for the dull repose of the country—their lovers, with longer faces, trying, in vain, to solve the X quantity expressed by the aforesaid “Sundries” in their bill—and members of congress with long faces, too—for not one in twenty has “made the impression” he expected; and he is moralizing on the decline of the taste for eloquence, and on the want of “golden opportunity” for the display of indignant virtue!
Nothing but an army, or such a concourse of people as collects to witness an inauguration, could ever make Washington look populous. But when Congress, and its train of ten thousand casual visiters are gone, and only the official and indigenous inhabitants remain, Balbec, or Palmyra, with a dozen Arabs scattered among its ruins, has less a look of desolation. The few stragglers in the streets add to its loneliness—producing exactly the effect sometimes given to a woodland solitude by the presence of a single bird. The vast streets seem grown vaster and more disproportionate—the houses seem straggling to greater distances—the walk from the President’s house to the capitol seems twice as long—and new faces are seen here and there, at the doors and windows—for cooks and inn-keepers that had never time to lounge, lounge now, and their families take quiet possession of the unrented front parlor. He who would be reminded of his departed friends should walk down on the avenue. The carpet, associated with so many pleasant recollections—which has been pressed by the dainty feet of wits and beauties—to tread on which was a privilege and a delight—is displayed on a heap of old furniture, and while its sacred defects are rudely scanned by the curious, is knocked down, with all its memories, under the hammer of the auctioneer. Tables, chairs, ottomans—all linked with the same glowing recollections—go—for most unworthy prices; and while, humiliated with the sight, you wonder at the artificial value given to things by their possessors, you begin to wonder whether your friends themselves, subjected to the same searching valuation, would not be depreciated too! Ten to one, if their characters were displayed like their carpets, there would come to light defects as unsuspected!
The person to whom this desolation is the “unkindest cut” is the hackney-coachman. “His vocation” is emphaticallygone!Goneis the dollar made every successive half hour!Goneis the pleasant sum in compound addition, done “in the head,” while waiting at the doors of the public offices!Goneare the short, but profitable trips to the theatre!Gonethe four or five families, all taken the same evening to parties, and each paying the item of “carriage from nine till twelve!”Gonethe absorbed politician, who would rather give the five-dollar bill than wait for his change! the lady who sends the driver to be paid at “the bar;” the uplifted fingers, hither and thither, which embarrass his choice of a fare—gone, all! The chop-fallen coachy drives to the stand in the morning and drives home at noon; he creeps up to Fuller’s at a snail-pace, and, in very mockery of hope, asks the homeward-bound clerk from the department if he wants a coach! Night comes on, and his horses begin to believe in the millennium—and the cobwebs are wove over his whip-socket.
These changes, however, affect not unpleasantly the diplomatic and official colony extending westward from the president’s. The inhabitants of this thin sprinkled settlement are away from the great thoroughfare, and do not miss its crowds. The cessation of parties is to them a relief from night journeys, colds, card-leavings, and much wear and tear of carriage-horses. They live now in dressing-gowns and slippers, read the reviews and the French papers, get their dinners comfortably from therestaurateurs, and thank Heaven that the capitol is locked up. Theattachésgrow fat, and the despatches grow thin.
There are several reasons why Washington, till the month of May, spite of all the drawbacks in the picture delineated above, is a more agreeable residence than the northern cities. In the first place, its climate is at least a month earlier than that of New York, and, in the spring, is delightful. The trees are at this moment (the last week in March) bursting into buds; open carriages are everywhere in use; walking in the sun is oppressive; and for the last fortnight, this has been a fair chronicle of the weather. Boston and New York have been corroded with east winds, meantime, and even so near as Baltimore, they are still wrapped in cloaks and shawls. To those who, in reckoning the comforts of life, agree with me in making climate stand for nine-tenths, this is powerful attraction.
Then the country about Washington, the drives and rides, are among the most lovely in the world. The banks of Rock creek are a little wilderness of beauty. More bright waters, more secluded bridle-paths, more sunny and sheltered hill-sides, or finer mingling of rock, hill, and valley, I never rode among. Within a half-hour’s gallop, you have a sylvan retreat of every variety of beauty, and in almost any direction; and from this you come home (and this is not the case with most sylvan rides) to an excellent French dinner and agreeable society, if you like it. You have all the seclusion of a rural town, and none of its petty politics and scandal—all the means and appliances of a large metropolis, and none of its exactions and limitations. That which makes the charm of a city, and that for which we seek the country, are equally here, and the penalties of both are removed.
Until the reflux of population from the Rocky mountains, I suppose Washington will never be a metropolis of residence. But if it were an object with the inhabitants to make it more so, the advantages I have just enumerated, and a little outlay of capital and enterprise would certainly, in some degree, effect it. People especially who come from Europe, or have been accustomed to foreign modes of living, would be glad to live near a society composed of such attractive materials as the official and diplomatic persons at the seat of government. That which keeps them away is, principally, want of accommodation, and, in a less degree, it is want of comfortable accommodation in the other cities which drives them back to Europe. In Washington you must either live at an hotel or a boarding-house. In either case, the mode of life is only endurable for the shortest possible period, and the moment Congress rises, every sufferer in these detestable places is off for relief. The hotels are crowded to suffocation; there is an utter want of privacy in the arrangement of the suites of apartments; the service is ill ordered, and the prices out of all sense or reason. You pay for that which you have not, and you can not get by paying for it that which you want.
The boarding-house system is worse yet. To possess but one room in privacy, and that opening on a common passage; to be obliged to come to meals at certain hours, with chance table companions, and no place for a friend, and to live entirely in your bedroom or in a public parlor, may truly be called as abominable a routine as a gentleman could well suffer. Yet the great majority of those who come to Washington are in one or the other of these two categories.
The use oflodgingsfor strangers or transient residents in the city does not, after all the descriptions in books, seem at all understood in our country. This is what Washington wants, but it is what every city in the country wants generally. Let us describe it as if it was never before heard of, and perhaps some enlightened speculator may advance us half a century in some of the cities, by creating this luxury.
Lodgings of the ordinary kind in Europe generally consist of the apartments on one floor. The house, we will suppose, consists of three stories above the basement, and each floor contains a parlor, bedroom, and dressing-room, with a small antechamber. (This arrangement of rooms varies, of course, and a larger family occupies two floors.) These three suites of apartments are neatly furnished; bed-clothes, table-linen, and plate, if required, are found by the proprietor, and in the basement story usually lives a man and his wife, who attend to the service of the lodgers;i. e., bring water, answer the doorbell, take in letters, keep the rooms in order, make the fires, and, if it is wished, do any little cookery in case of sickness. These people are paid by the proprietor, but receive a fee for extra service, and a small gratuity, at departure, from the lodger. It should be added to this, that it is notinfra. dig.to live in the second or third story.
In connexion with lodgings, there must be of course a cook orrestaurateurwithin a quarter of a mile. The stranger agrees with him for his dinner, to consist of so many dishes, and to be sent to him at a certain hour. He gives notice in the morning if he dines out, buys his own wine of the wine-merchant, and thus saves two heavy items of overcharge in the hotel or boarding-house. His own servant makes his tea or coffee (and for this purpose has access to the fire in the basement,) and does all personal service, such as brushing clothes, waiting at table, going on errands, &c., &c. The stranger comes in, in short, at a moment’s warning, brings nothing but his servant and baggage, and finds himself in five minutes at home, his apartments private, and every comfort and convenience as completely about him as if he had lived there for years.
At from ten to fourteen dollars a week, such apartments would pay the proprietor handsomely, and afford a reasonable luxury to the lodger. A cook would make a good thing of sending in a plain dinner for a dollar a head (or more if the dinner were more expensive,) and at this rate, a family of two or more persons might have a hundred times the comfort now enjoyed at hotels, at certainly half the cost.
We have been seduced into a very unsentimental chapter of “ways and means,” but we trust the suggestions, though containing nothing new, may not be altogether without use. The want of some such thing as we have recommended is daily and hourly felt and complained of.
ARTICLES FROM THE JOURNAL,OF WHICH THE AUTHOR WAS EDITOR,PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK.
ARTICLES FROM THE JOURNAL,
OF WHICH THE AUTHOR WAS EDITOR,
PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK.
LETTERS FROM ENGLAND AND THE CONTINENT IN 1845–’46.
LETTER I.
WHAT THE WRITER HAS SEEN OF THIS WORLD FOR TWENTY-FOUR DAYS.—THE PASSENGERS OF THE BRITANNIA.—THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE AMERICAN AND ENGLISH CUSTOM-HOUSE OFFICERS.—THE WORKING CLASSES.—FEMALE DRESS.—BUSTLES.—WRITING AGAINST THE DOCTOR’S ORDERS, ETC.
My Dear Morris.—All I have seen of England for the last twelve days, has been the four walls of a bedroom, and, as all I saw of the world for the twelve days previous, was the interior of a packet’s state-room, I may fairly claim, like the razor-grinder, to have “no story to tell.” You shall have, however, what cobwebs I picked from the corners.
If the ‘Britannia’ had burnt on the passage, and a phœnix had arisen from its ashes, the phœnix would have been a well compounded cosmopolite, for—did you ever see such variety of nation in one ship’s company as this?
Of the Germans, 2 were from Hanover, 2 from Hamburgh, 1 from Baden, 1 from Lubec, 2 from Bremen, and 1 from Heinault. Mr. Robert Owen was one of the Scotchmen, and he was the only one on board, I fancy, for whom fame had made any great outlay of trumpeting. Six clergymen (!!) served as our protection against the icebergs. I doubt whether the Atlantic, had, ever before such a broadwake of divinity drawn across it. Probably, the true faith was in some one of their keepings!
I wish to ask a personal favor of all the friends of the Journal who are in the offices of the American Custom Houses, viz: that they would retaliate upon Englishmen in the most vexatious manner possible, the silly and useless impediments thrown in the way of passengers landing at Liverpool. We dropped anchor with a Custom House steamer alongside, and our baggage lay on deck two hours, (time enough to be examined twice over) before it was transferred to the government vessel. We and our baggage were then taken ashore and landed at a Custom House. But not to be examined there! Oh, no! It must be put into carts, and carrieda mile and a half to another Custom House, and there it would be delivered to us if we were there to see it examined! We landed at ten o’clock in the morning, and with my utmost exertions, I did not get my baggage till three. The cost to me, of porterage, fees, etc., was three dollars and a half, besides the theft of two or three small articles belonging to my child. I was too ill to laugh, and I therefore passed the matter over to my resentments.
During the four or five hours that I was playing the hanger-on to a vulgar and saucy custom house officer at Liverpool, one or two contrasts crept in at my dull eyes—contrasts between what I had left, and what was before me. The most striking was theutter want of hopein the countenances of the working classes—the look of dogged submission and animal endurance of their condition of life. They act like horses and cows. A showy equipage goes by, and they have not the curiosity to look up. Their gait is that of tired donkeys, saving as much trouble at leg-lifting as possible. Their mouths and eyes are wholly sensual, expressing no capability of a want above food. Their dress is without a thought of more than warmth and covering, drab covered with dirt. Their voices are a half-note above a grunt. Indeed, comparing their condition with the horse, I would prefer being an English horse to being an English working-man. And you will easily see the very strong contrast there is, between this picture, and that of the ambitious and lively working-men of our country.
Another contrast strikes, probably, all Americans on first landing—that of female dress. The entire absence of the ornamental—of any thing indeed, except decent covering—in all classes below the wealthy, is particularly English and particularly un-American. I do not believe you would find ten female servants in New-York without (pardon my naming it) a “bustle.” Yet I saw as many as two hundred women in the streets of Liverpool, and not one with a bustle! I saw some ladies get out of carriages who wore them, so that it is not because it is not the fashion, but simply because the pride (of those whose backs form but one line) does not outweigh the price of the bran. They wore thick shoes, such as scarcely a man would wear with us, no gloves of course, and their whole appearance was that of females in whose minds never entered the thought of ornament on week days. This trifling exponent of the condition of women in England, has a large field of speculation within and around it, and the result of philosophizing on it would be vastly in favor of our side of the water.
As this letter is written on my first day of sitting up, and directly against the doctor’s orders, you will give my invalid brain the credit of coming cheerfully into harness.