The Gilded Age - Mark Twain [3]
They made for an odd couple of inside-the-Carriageway experts— on the surface, at least. Warner was a literary critic and writer of whimsical suburban essays and books along the lines of My Summer in a Garden. As co-owner of the Hartford Courant, he kept a close eye on the nation’s increasingly corrupt capital; what he observed outraged his reformist soul. Yet his considerable passion for social justice was muted under a rigidly Victorian syntax, which one reviewer had described as “dainty.”
No one would ever accuse Warner’s host of being dainty. Only six years removed from his freewheeling years as a jackleg journalist in Nevada and California, Sam Clemens had fashioned a rough-and-tumble, sharply mimetic voice to deliver his biting newspaper satire. Sam Clemens’s outrage was far less constrained than his partner’s by any “polite” instinct; and it was informed by observation incalculably more intense and intimate than Warner’s or any of his contemporaries, save perhaps for Walt Whitman. In certain important ways—ways enabled by those working-journalist “tools” of his—the provincial Clemens knew Washington far more intimately than did his urbane eastern friend.
The acute observing had begun when young Sam Clemens first hit Washington as a rustic eighteen-year-old in February 1854. This generally unknown visit was a stop in his astonishing two-thousand-mile odyssey outward from the Hannibal of his boyhood and then back to the Mississippi Valley. The rustic boy had negotiated several railroad connections, a stagecoach ride, a twenty-six-hour layover in Chicago, and a steamship voyage eastward across Lake Erie. He’d picked up printing jobs in New York and Philadelphia while touring the landmarks of those cities and writing letters about them to the home folks. These letters are astonishingly descriptive and knowledgeable—and authoritative—for a semi-schooled vagabond scarcely out of his mid-adolescence.
On arrival in Washington, in a snowstorm, he’d made a beeline for the seat of American government. “The public buildings of Washington are all fine specimens of architecture, and would add greatly to the embellishment of a city such as New York,” he pronounced starchily, “—but here they are sadly out of place looking like so many palaces in a Hottentot village.”2 The boy found his way to the nerve center of the Capitol: the small, Victorian arena on the second floor of the North Wing.
I passed into the Senate Chamber to see the men who give the people the benefit of their wisdom and learning for a little glory and eight dollars a day. The Senate is now composed of a different material from what it once was. Its glory hath departed. Its halls no longer echo the words of a Clay, or Webster, or Calhoun . . . the void is felt. The Senators dress very plainly as they should, and . . . do not speak unless they have something to say—and that cannot be said of the Representatives. Mr. Cass [Sen. Lewis Cass, Democrat from Michigan] is a fine looking old man; Mr. Douglas, or “Young America” [Sen. Stephen Douglas, Democrat from Illinois] looks like a lawyer’s clerk, and Mr. Seward [Sen. William H. Seward, Whig from New York] is a slim, dark, bony individual, and looks like a respectable wind would blow him out of the country.3
Astounding stuff ! Especially given that the writer was not a seasoned journalist, but a kid less than ten years removed from playing hooky on the Mississippi River islands off the Hannibal shoreline.
What young Sam could not know, of course, was that the figures he described were just then wrestling with the destiny of the Union. Cass was soon to be secretary of state under President Buchanan. Douglas would become legendary as Abraham Lincoln’s rival for the presidency and in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Seward would also run for president