Book: Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861



THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. VII.--JANUARY, 1861.--NO. XXXIX.







WASHINGTON CITY.


Washington is the paradise of paradoxes,--a city of magnificent
distances, but of still more magnificent discrepancies. Anything may be
affirmed of it, everything denied. What it seems to be it is not; and
although it is getting to be what it never was, it must always remain
what it now is. It might be called a city, if it were not alternately
populous and uninhabited; and it would be a wide-spread village, if it
were not a collection of hospitals for decayed or callow politicians. It
is the hybernating-place of fashion, of intelligence, of vice,--a resort
without the attractions of waters either mineral or salt, where there is
no bathing and no springs, but drinking in abundance and gambling in
any quantity. Defenceless, as regards walls, redoubts, moats, or other
fortifications, it is nevertheless the Sevastopol of the Republic,
against which the allied army of Contractors and Claim-Agents
incessantly lay siege. It is a great, little, splendid, mean,
extravagant, poverty-stricken barrack for soldiers of fortune and
votaries of folly.

Scattered helter-skelter over an immense surface, cut up into scalene
triangles, the oddity of its plan makes Washington a succession of
surprises which never fail to vex and astonish the stranger, be he ever
so highly endowed as to the phrenological bump of locality. Depending
upon the hap-hazard start the ignoramus may chance to make, any
particular house or street is either nearer at hand or farther off than
the ordinary human mind finds it agreeable to believe. The first duty of
the new-comer is to teach his nether extremities to avoid instinctively
the hypothenuse of the street-triangulation, and the last lesson the
resident fails to learn is which of the shortcuts from point to point
is the least lengthy. Beyond a doubt, the corners of the streets were
constructed upon a cold and brutal calculation of the greatest possible
amount of oral sin which disappointed haste and irritated anxiety are
capable of committing; nor is any relief to the tendency to profanity
thus engendered afforded by the inexcusable nomenclature of the streets
and avenues,--a nomenclature in which the resources of the alphabet, the
arithmetic, the names of all the States of the Union, and the Presidents
as well, are exhausted with the most unsystematic profligacy. A man not
gifted with supernatural acuteness, in striving to get from Brown's
Hotel to the General Post-Office, turns a corner and suddenly finds
himself nowhere, simply because he is everywhere,--being at the instant
upon three separate streets and two distinct avenues. And, as a further
consequence of the scalene arrangement of things, it happens that the
stranger in Washington, however civic his birth and education may have
been, is always unconsciously performing those military evolutions
styled marching to the right or left oblique,--acquiring thereby, it is
said, that obliquity of the moral vision--which sooner or later afflicts
every human being who inhabits this strange, lop-sided city-village.

So queer, indeed, is Washington City in every aspect, that one
newly impressed by its incongruities is compelled to regard Swift's
description of Lilliputia and Sydney Smith's account of Australia as
poor attempts at fun. For, leaving out of view the pigmies of the former
place, whose like we know is never found in Congress, what is there in
that Australian bird with the voice of a jackass to excite the feeblest
interest in the mind of a man who has listened to the debates on Kansas?
or what marvel is an amphibian with the bill of a duck to him who has
gazed aghast at the intricate anatomy of the bill of English? It is true
that the ignorant Antipodes, with a total disregard of all theories of
projectiles, throw their boomerangs behind their backs in order to kill
an animal that stands or runs before their faces, or skim them along
the ground when they would destroy an object flying overhead. And these
feats seem curious. But an accomplished "Constitutional Adviser" can
perform feats far more surprising with a few lumps of coal or a number
of ships-knees, which are but boomerangs of a larger growth. Another has
invented the deadliest of political missiles, (in their recoil,) shaped
like mules and dismantled forts, while a third has demolished the
Treasury with a simple miscalculation. Still more astonishing are the
performances of an eminent functionary who encourages polygamy by
intimidation, purchases redress for national insult by intercepting his
armies and fleets with an apology in the mouth of a Commissioner, and
elevates the Republic in the eyes of mankind by conquering at Ostend
even less than he has lost at the Executive Mansion.

In truth, the list of Washington anomalies is so extensive and so
various, that no writer with a proper regard for his own reputation or
his readers' credulity would dare enumerate them one by one. Without
material injury to the common understanding, a few may be mentioned; but
respect for public opinion would urge that the enormous whole be summed
up in the comparatively safe and respectful assertion, that the one only
absolutely certain thing in Washington is the absence of everything
that is at all permanent. The following are some of the more obnoxious
astonishments of the place.

Traversing a rocky prairie inflated with hacks, you arrive late in the
afternoon at a curbed boundary, too fatigued in body and too suffocated
with dust to resent the insult to your common-sense implied in the
announcement that you have merely crossed what is called an Avenue.
Recovered from your fatigue, you ascend the steps of a marble palace,
and enter but to find it garrisoned by shabby regiments armed with
quills and steel pens. The cells they inhabit are gloomy as dungeons,
but furnished like parlors. Their business is to keep everybody's
accounts but their own. They are of all ages, but of a uniformly
dejected aspect. Do not underrate their value. Mr. Bulwer has said,
that, in the hands of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the
sword. Suffer yourself to be astonished at their numbers, but permit
yourself to withdraw from their vicinity without questioning too closely
their present utility or future destination. No personal affront to the
public or the nineteenth century is intended by the superfluity of their
numbers or the inadequacy of their capacities. Their rapid increase is
attributable not to any incestuous breeding in-and-in among themselves,
but to a violent seduction of the President and the Heads of Department
by importunate Congressmen; and you may rest assured that this criminal
multiplication fills nobody with half so much righteous indignation and
virtuous sorrow as the clerks themselves. Emerging from the palace of
quill-drivers, a new surprise awaits you. The palace is surmounted by
what appear to be gigantic masts and booms, economically, but strongly
rigged, and without any sails. In the distance, you see other palaces
rigged in the same manner. The effect of this spectacle is painful in
the extreme. Standing dry-shod as the Israelites were while crossing the
Red Sea, you nevertheless seem to be in the midst of a small fleet of
unaccountable sloops of the Saurian period. You question whether these
are not the fabulous "Ships of State" so often mentioned in the elegant
oratory of your country. You observe that these ships are anchored in an
ocean of pavement, and your no longer trustworthy eyes search vainly
for their helms. The nearest approach to a rudder is a chimney or an
unfinished pillar; the closest resemblance to a pilot is a hod-carrying
workman clambering up a gangway. Dismissing the nautical hypothesis,
your next effort to relieve your perplexity results in the conjecture
that the prodigious masts and booms may be nothing more than curious
gibbets, the cross-pieces to which, conforming rigidly to the Washington
rule of contrariety, are fastened to the bottom instead of the top of
the upright. Your theory is, that the destinies of the nation are to be
hanged on these monstrous gibbets, and you wonder whether the laws of
gravitation will be complaisant enough to turn upside down for the
accommodation of the hangman, whoever he may be. It is not without
pain that you are forced at last to the commonplace belief that these
remarkable mountings of the Public Buildings are neither masts nor
booms, but simply derricks,--mechanical contrivances for the lifting of
very heavy weights. It is some consolation, however, to be told that
the weakness of these derricks has never been proved by the endeavor
to elevate by means of them the moral character of the inhabitants of
Washington. Content yourself, after a reasonable delay for natural
wonderment, to leave the strange scene. This shipping-like aspect of the
incomplete Departments is only a nice architectural tribute to the fact
that the population of Washington is a floating population. This you
will not be long in finding out. The oldest inhabitants are here to-day
and gone tomorrow, as punctually, if not as poetically, as the Arabs of
Mr. Longfellow. A few remain,--parasitic growths, clinging tenaciously
to the old haunts. Like tartar on the teeth, they are proof against the
hardest rubs of the tooth-brush of Fortune.

As with the people, so with the houses. Though they retain their
positions, seldom abandoning the ground on which they were originally
built, they change almost hourly their appearance and their
uses,--insomuch that the very solids of the city seem fluid, and even
the stables are mutable,--the horse-house of last week being an office
for the sale of patents, or periodicals, or lottery-tickets, this week,
with every probability of becoming an oyster-cellar, a billiard-saloon,
a cigar-store, a barber's shop, a bar-room, or a faro-bank, next week.
And here is another astonishment. You will observe that the palatial
museums for the temporary preservation of fossil or fungous penmen join
walls, virtually, with habitations whose architecture would reflect
no credit on the most curious hamlet in tide-water Virginia. To your
amazement, you learn that all these houses, thousands in number, are
boarding-houses. Of course, where everybody is a stranger, nobody
keeps house. It would be pardonable to suppose, that, out of so many
boarding-houses, some would be in reality what they are in name. Nothing
can be farther from the fact. These houses contain apartments more or
less cheerless and badly furnished, according to the price (always
exorbitant, however small it may be) demanded for them, and are devoted
exclusively to the storage of empty bottles and demijohns, to large
boxes of vegetable- and flower-seeds, to great piles of books, speeches,
and documents not yet directed to people who will never read them, and
to an abominable odor of boiling cabbages. This odor steals in from
a number of pitch-dark tunnels and shafts, misnamed passages and
staircases, in which there are more books, documents, and speeches,
other boxes of seeds, and a still stronger odor of cabbages. The piles
of books are traps set here for the benefit of the setters of broken
legs and the patchers of skinless shins, and the noisome odors are
propagated for the advantage of gentlemen who treat diseases of the
larynx and lungs.

It would appear, then, that the so-called boarding-houses are, in point
of fact, private gift-book stores, or rather, commission-houses for the
receiving and forwarding of a profusion of undesirable documents and
vegetations. You may view them also in the light of establishments for
the manufacture and distribution of domestic perfumery, payment for
which is never exacted at the moment of its involuntary purchase, but is
left to be collected by a doctor,--who calls upon you during the winter,
levies on you with a lancet, and distrains upon your viscera with a
compound cathartic pill.

It is claimed, that, in addition to the victims who pay egregious rents
for boarding-house beds in order that they may have a place to store
their documents and demi-johns, there are other permanent occupants of
these houses. As, for example, Irish chambermaids, who subtract a few
moments from the morning half-hour given to drinking the remnants of
your whiskey, and devote them to cleaning up your room. Also a very
strange being, peculiar to Washington boarding-houses, who is never
visible at any time, and is only heard stumbling up-stairs about four
o'clock in the morning. Also beldames of incalculable antiquity,--a
regular allowance of one to each boarding-house,--who flit noiselessly
and unceasingly about the passages and up and down the stairways,
admonishing you of their presence by a ghostly sniffle, which always
frightens you, and prevents you from running into them and knocking them
down. For these people, it is believed, a table is set in the houses
where the boarders proper flatter their acquaintances that they sleep.
It must be so, for the entire male population is constantly eating in
the oyster-cellars. Indeed, if ocular evidence may be relied on, the
best energies of the metropolis are given to the incessant consumption
of "half a dozen raw," or "four fried and a glass of ale." The bar-rooms
and eating-houses are always full or in the act of becoming full. By a
fatality so unerring that it has ceased to be wonderful, it happens that
you can never enter a Washington restaurant and find it partially empty,
without being instantly followed by a dozen or two of bipeds as hungry
and thirsty as yourself, who crowd up to the bar and destroy half the
comfort you derive from your lunch or your toddy.

But, although, everybody is forever eating oysters and drinking ale in
myriads of subterranean holes and corners, nobody fails to eat at other
places more surprising and original than any you have yet seen. In all
other cities, people eat at home or at a hotel or an eating-house; in
Washington they eat at bank. But they do not eat money,--at least, not
in the form of bullion, or specie, or notes. These Washington banks,
unlike those of London, Paris, and New York, are open mainly at night
and all night long, are situated invariably in the second story, guarded
as jealously as any seraglio, and admit nobody but strangers,--that is
to say, everybody in Washington. This is singular. Still more singular
is the fact, that the best food, served in the most exquisite manner,
and (with sometimes a slight variation) the choicest wines and cigars,
may be had at these banks free of cost, except to those who choose
voluntarily to remunerate the banker by purchasing a commodity as costly
and almost as worthless as the articles sold at ladies' fairs,--upon
which principle, indeed, the Washington banks are conducted. The
commodity alluded to is in the form of small discs of ivory, called
"chips" or "cheeks" or "shad" or "skad," and the price varies from
twenty-five cents to a hundred dollars per "skad."

It is expected that every person who opens an account at bank by eating
a supper there shall buy a number of "shad," but not with the view of
taking them home to show to his wife and children. Yet it is not an
uncommon thing for persons of a stingy and ungrateful disposition to
spend most of their time in these benevolent institutions without ever
spending so much as a dollar for "shad," but eating, drinking, and
smoking, and particularly drinking, to the best of their ability. This
reprehensible practice is known familiarly in Washington as "bucking
ag'inst the sideboard," and is thought by some to be the safest mode of
doing business at bank.

The presiding officer is never called President. He is called
"Dealer,"--perhaps from the circumstance of his dealing in ivory,--and
is not looked up to and worshipped as the influential man of
banking-houses is generally. On. the contrary, he is for the most part
condemned by his best customers, whose heart's desire and prayer are to
break his bank and ruin him utterly.

Seeing the multitude of boarding-houses, oyster-cellars, and
ivory-banks, you may suppose there are no hotels in Washington. You are
mistaken. There are plenty of hotels, many of them got up on the scale
of magnificent distances that prevails everywhere, and somewhat on the
maritime plan of the Departments. Outwardly, they look like colossal
docks, erected for the benefit of hacks, large fleets of which you will
always find moored under their lee, safe from the monsoon that prevails
on the open sea of the Avenue. Inwardly, they are labyrinths, through
whose gloomy mazes it is impossible to thread your way without the
assistance of an Ariadne's clue in the shape of an Irishman panting
under a trunk. So obscure and involved are the hotel-interiors, that it
would be madness for a stranger to venture in search of his room without
the guidance of some one far more familiar with the devious course of
the narrow clearings through the forest of apartments than the landlord
himself. Now and then a reckless and adventurous proprietor undertakes
to make a day's journey alone through his establishment. He is never
heard of afterwards,--or, if found, is discovered in a remote angle or
loft, in a state of insensibility from bewilderment and starvation.
If it were not for an occasional negro, who, instigated by charitable
motives or love of money, slouches about from room to room with an empty
coal-scuttle as an excuse for his intrusions, a gentleman stopping at a
Washington hotel would be doomed to certain death. In fact, the lives of
all the guests hang upon a thread, or rather, a wire; for, if the bell
should fail to answer, there would be no earthly chance of getting into
daylight again. It is but reasonable to suppose that the wires to many
rooms have been broken in times past, and it is well known in Washington
that these rooms are now tenanted by skeletons of hapless travellers
whose relatives and friends never doubted that they had been kidnapped
or had gone down in the Arctic.

The differential calculus by which all Washington is computed obtains at
the hotels as elsewhere, with this peculiarity,--that the differences
are infinitely great, instead of infinitely small. While the fronts are
very fine, showy, and youthful as the Lecompton Constitution, the rears
are coarse, common, and old as the Missouri Compromise. The furniture in
the rooms that look upon Pennsylvania Avenue is as fresh as the dogma
of Squatter Sovereignty; that in all other rooms dates back to the
Ordinance of '87. Some of the apartments exhibit a glaring splendor; the
rest show beds, bureaus, and washstands which hard and long usage has
polished to a sort of newness. Specimens of ancient pottery found on
these washstands are now in the British Museum, and are reckoned among
the finest of Layard's collections at Nineveh.

The dining rooms are admirable examples of magnificent distance. The
room is long, the tables are long, the kitchen is a long way off, and
the waiters a long time going and coming. The meals are long,--so
long that there is literally no end to them; they are eternal. It is
customary to mark certain points in the endless route of appetite with
mile-stones named breakfast, dinner, and supper; but these points have
no more positive existence than the imaginary lines and angles of the
geometrician. Breakfast runs entirely through dinner into supper, and
dinner ends with coffee, the beginning of breakfast. Estimating the
duration of dinner by the speed of an ordinary railroad-train, it is
twenty miles from soup to fish, and fifty from turkey to nuts. But
distance, however magnificent, does not lend enchantment to a meal. The
wonder is that the knives and forks are not made to correspond in length
with the repasts,--in which case the latter would be pitchforks, and the
former John-Brown pikes.

The people of Washington are as various, mixed, dissimilar, and
contrasted as the edifices they inhabit. Within the like area, which is
by no means a small one, the same number of dignitaries can be found
nowhere else on the face of the globe,--nor so many characters of
doubtful reputation. If the beggars of Dublin, the cripples of
Constantinople, and the lepers of Damascus should assemble in
Baden-Baden during a Congress of Kings, then Baden-Baden would resemble
Washington. Presidents, Senators, Honorables, Judges, Generals,
Commodores, Governors, and the Ex's of all these, congregate here as
thick as pick-pockets at a horse-race or women at a wedding in church.
Add Ambassadors, Plenipotentiaries, Lords, Counts, Barons, Chevaliers,
the great and small fry of the Legations, Captains, Lieutenants,
Claim-Agents, Negroes, Perpetual-Motion-Men, Fire-Eaters, Irishmen,
Plug-Uglies, Hoosiers, Gamblers, Californians, Mexicans, Japanese,
Indians, and Organ-Grinders, together with females to match all
varieties of males, and you have vague notion of the people of
Washington.

It is an axiom in physics, that a part cannot be greater than the whole;
and it will be recollected, that, after Epistemon had his head sewed on,
he related a tough story about the occupations of the mighty dead, and
swore, that, in the course of his wanderings among the damned, he found
Cicero kindling fires, Hannibal selling egg-shells, and Julius Caesar
cleaning stoves. The story holds good in regard to the mighty personages
in Washington, but the axiom does not. Men whose fame fills the
land, when they are at home or spouting about the country, sink into
insignificance when they get to Washington. The sun is but a small
potato in the midst of the countless systems of the sidereal heavens.
In like manner, the majestic orbs of the political firmament undergo
a cruel lessening of diameter as they approach the Federal City. The
greatest of men ceases to be great in the presence of hundreds of his
peers, and the multitude of the illustrious dwindle into individual
littleness by reason of their superabundance. And when it comes to
occupations, it will hardly be denied that the stranger who beholds a
Senator "coppering on the ace," or a Congressman standing in a bar-room
with a lump of mouldy cheese in one hand and a glass of "pony whiskey"
in the other, or a Judge of the Supreme Court wriggling an ugly woman
through the ridiculous movements of the polka in a hotel-parlor, must
experience sensations quite as confounding as any Epistemon felt in
Kingdom Come.

In spite of numberless receptions, levees, balls, hops, parties,
dinners, and other reunions, there is, properly speaking, no society in
Washington. Circles are said to exist, but, like that in the vortex of
the whirlpool, they are incessantly changing. Divisions purely arbitrary
may be made in any community. Hence the circles of Washington society
may be represented sciagraphically in the following diagram.

[Illustration]

The Circle of the Mudsill includes Negroes, Clerks, Irish Laborers,
Patent and other Agents, Hackmen, Faro-Dealers, Washerwomen, and
Newspaper-Correspondents. In the Hotel Circle, the Newest Strangers,
Harpists, Members of Congress, Concertina-Men, Provincial Judges,
Card-Writers, College-Students, Unprotected Females, "Star" and "States"
Boys, Stool-Pigeons, Contractors, Sellers of Toothpicks, and Beau
Hickman, are found. The Circle of the White House embraces the
President, the Cabinet, the Chiefs of Bureaus, the Embassies, Corcoran
and Riggs, formerly Mr. Forney, and until recently George Sanders and
Isaiah Rynders. The little innermost circle is intended to represent a
select body of residents, intense exclusives, who keep aloof from the
other circles and hold them all in equal contempt. This circle is known
only by report; in all probability it is a myth. It is worthy of remark
that the circles of the White House and the Hotels rise higher and sink
lower than that of the Mudsill, but whether this is a fact or a mere
necessity of the diagram is not known.

Society, such as it is, in the metropolis, is indulgent to itself. It
intermeddles not, asks no impertinent questions, and transacts
its little affairs in perfect peace and quietude. Vigilant as the
Inquisition in matters political, it is deaf and blind, but not dumb, as
to all others. It dresses as it pleases, drinks as much as it chooses,
eats indiscriminately, sleeps promiscuously, gets up at all hours of
the day, and does as little work as possible. Its only trouble is that
"incomparable grief" to which Panurge was subject, and "which at that
time they called lack of money." In truth, the normal condition of
Washington society is, to use a vernacular term, "busted." It is not an
isolated complaint. Everybody is "busted." No matter what may be the
state of a man's funds when he gets to Washington, no matter how long he
stays or how soon he leaves, to this "busted" complexion must he come at
last. He is in Rome; he must take the consequences. Shall he insult the
whole city with his solvency? Certainly not. He abandons his purse and
his conscience to the madness of the hour, and, in generous emulation of
the prevailing recklessness and immorality, dismisses every scruple and
squanders his last cent. Then, and not till then, does he feel himself
truly a Washington-man, able to look anybody in the face with the serene
pride of an equal, and without the mortification of being accused or
even suspected of having in all the earth a dollar that he can call his
own.

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