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By Root 6675 0

Congress is not sitting it is a deserted village.”18 The original political and strategic reasons for building the nation’s capital by the Potomac River had been obsolete for decades. The War of 1812 between Britain and America had demonstrated that the city could be invaded just as easily as New York. The Potomac had seemed to promise a thriving water trade, but the river proved too shallow for modern transports. Washington had been the geographic center when the Union consisted of only thirteen states; the country’s expansion to thirty-three now placed it on the periphery.

Washington lacked the literary salons, studios, universities, and conservatories that distinguished the capitals of Europe. The theaters relied on touring productions from New York; the shops were small and understocked. There was no commercial or manufacturing district such as those found in the new industrial cities, though the levels of violence, drunkenness, and corruption were not dissimilar. There were few cultural amenities save for the Smithsonian Institution, which had been established in 1846 with a bequest from the British scientist James Smithson. (Strangely, Smithson had never even visited the United States, let alone Washington.) The majority of the city’s permanent residents were civil servants, lawyers, or saloon keepers. When Charles Dickens traveled to the capital in 1842, he thought the city had “Magnificent Intentions” but little else. It had “spacious avenues, that begin in nothing and lead to nowhere” and “streets [a] mile long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants.”19

Fifteen years later, these intentions remained unfulfilled. “Most members of Congress live in hotels or furnished lodgings,” wrote an English tourist. “In consequence, there is no style about the mode of living.… The whole place looks run up in a night, like the cardboard cities which Potemkin erected.”20 The boundaries of Washington were still ragged and ill defined. A disagreement between the government and a local landowner had stranded the unfinished Capitol on top of a steep hill at the edge of town, facing the wrong way. Washington’s smart district lay two miles in the opposite direction, across marshland and noisome swamps that were breeding grounds for malaria in the summer. Elsewhere, the roads were still dirt tracks that frequently ended in piles of rubble or were interrupted by pastures. A pedestrian was in danger not only from one of the city’s unregulated hackney cabs, but also from being run over by wandering livestock. “On nine days out of every ten, the climate of Washington is simply detestable,” complained a British journalist. “When it rains, the streets are sloughs of liquid mud. In a couple of hours from the time the rain ceases, the same streets are enveloped in clouds of dust.”21

The real political center of the city was Willard’s Hotel. Just a five-minute walk from the White House, this was where the “wire pullers,” the information seekers (and sellers), and those looking for employment seized the opportunity to mix with the temporary occupants of the Capitol. Here, on an average day, twenty-five hundred people passed through its doors. “Heavy persons, whom you have never seen before, with moist hands, eyes luminous with intoxicating beverages, break through the crowd and wildly shake your hand,” observed an anonymous journalist. “They convict you of having met them before somewhere. You say you have been there, whereupon you are instantly saddled with an acquaintance who grasps your hand fifty times a day, and whom you heartily wish at the—Antipodes.”22 The hotel’s regulars downed cocktails in one of its many saloons or puffed themselves hoarse in the cigar bar, rendering real tourists appalled. “The tumult,” complained one English traveler, “the miscellaneous nature of the company, the heated, muggy rooms,” the revolting globs of tobacco spat on every surface, “despite a most liberal provision of spittoons,” made it “by no means agreeable to a European.”23

Ill.2 The arrival of President Lincoln at Willard’s Hotel, February