Chapter 28

A CORRESPONDENT ONCE MORE.

Again on the way to Washington! I have made the trip more than sixty times. I saw the Gunpowder Bridge in flames when Baltimore was in arms and the Capital cut off from the North. I saw from Perryville the State flag of Maryland waving at Havre de Grace across the Susquehanna. I saw at the Washington Navy Yard the blackened body of Ellsworth, manipulated by the surgeons. I moved through the city with McClellan's onward army toward the transports which were to carry it to the Peninsula. The awful tidings of the seven days' retreat came first through the Capital in my haversack, and before Stonewall Jackson fell upon the flank of Pope, I crossed the Long Bridge with the story of the disaster of Cedar Mountain. In like manner the crowning glory of Five Forks made me its earliest emissary, and the murder of the President brought me hot from Richmond to participate in the pursuit of Booth and chronicle his midnight expiation.

Again am I on the way to the city of centralization, to paint by electricity the closing scenes of the conspirators, and, as I pass the Pennsylvania line, the recollection of those frequent pilgrimages--pray God this be the last!--comes upon me like the sequences of delirium.

As I look abroad upon the thrifty fields and the rich glebe of the ploughman, I wonder if the revolutions of peace are not as sweeping and sudden as those of war. He who wrote the certain downfall of this Nation, did not keep his eye upon the steadily ascending dome of the capitol, nor remark, during the thunders of Gettysburg, the as energetic stroke of the pile-drivers upon the piers of the great Susquehanna bridge. We built while we desolated. No fatalist convert to Mohammed had so sure faith in the eternity of his institutions. More masonry has been laid along the border during the war than in any five previous years. We have finished the Treasury, raised the bronze gates on the Capitol, double-railed all the roads between New York and the Potomac, and gone on as if architecture were imperishable, while thrice the Rebels swept down toward the Relay.

And we have done one strategic thing, which, I think, will compare with the passing of Vicksburg or the raid of Sherman; we have turned Philadelphia.

This modern Pompeii used to be the stumbling-block on the great highway. It was to the direct Washington route what Hell-gate was to the Sound Channel. We were forbidden the right of way through it, on the ground that by retarding travel Philadelphia would gain trade, and had to cross the Delaware on a scow, or lay up in some inn over night. New Jerseymen, I hear, pray every morning for their daily stranger; Philadelphia has much sinned to entrap its daily customer. But Maillefert--by which name I designate the inevitable sledge which spares the grand and pulverizes the little--has built a road around the Quaker City. It is a very curious road, going by two hypothenuses of about fifteen miles to make a base of three or four, so that we lose an hour on the way to the Capital, all because of Philadelphia's overnight toil.

The bridge at Perryville will be one of the staunchest upon our continent: the forts around Baltimore make the outlying landscapes scarcely recognizable to the returning Maryland Rebels. At last,--woe be the necessity! we have garrisoned our cities. The Relay House is the most picturesque spot between the two foci of the country. Wandering through the woods, I see the dirty blouses of the remnant of "the boys" and the old abatis on the height looks sunburnt and rusty; away through the gorge thunders the Baltimore and Ohio train, over what ruins and resurrections, torn up a hundred times, and as obstinately relaid, until all its engineers are veteran officers, and can stand fire both of the furnace and the musket. Everybody in the country is a veteran; the contractor, who ran his schooner of fodder past the Rebel batteries; the correspondent, whose lean horse slipped through the crevices of dropping shells; the teamster, who whipped his mule out of the mud-hole, while his ammunition wagon behind grew hot with the heaviness of battle; the old farmer, who took to his cellar while the fight raged in his chimneys, but ventured out between the bayonet charges to secure his fatted calf.

Annapolis Junction has still the sterile guise of the campaign, where the hills are bare around the hospitals, and the railway taverns are whittled to skeletons. I have really seen whole houses, little more than shells, reduced to meagreness by the pocket-knife. The name of almost everybody on the continent is cut somewhere in the South; Virginia has more than enough names carved over her fireside altars to inscribe upon all her multitudinous graves.

There are close to the city fine bits of landscape, where the fields dip gracefully into fertile basins, and rise in swells of tilled fields and orchard to some knoll, enthroning a porticoed home. Two years ago all these fields were quagmires, where stranded wheels and the carcasses of hybrids, looked as if a mud-geyser had opened near by. The grass has spread its covering, as the birds spread their leaves over the poor babes in the wood, and we walk we know not where, nor over what struggles, and shadows, and sorrows.

I pity the army mule, though he never asked me for sympathy. Who ever loved a mule? You can love a lion, and make him lick your hand: some people love parrots, and owls; and I once knew a person who could catch black snakes and carry them lovingly in his bosom; but I never knew a beloved mule. Yet this war has been fought and won by hybrids. They have pulled us out of ruts and fed us, and starved for us. The mule is the great quartermaster. See him and his brethren yonder in corral,--miserable veterans of no particular race, slab-sided, and capable of holding ink between their ribs. They mounch, and mounch, and wear the same stolid eye which you have seen under the driver's lash, and in the vaulting moment of victory. No stunning receptions greet them, no cheers and banquets when Muley comes marching home; over at _Giesboro_ they come in crippled, die by the musket without a murmur, and are immediately boiled down and forgotten.

I was once beaten by a rival correspondent upon a prominent battle, by riding a mule with my despatches. He walked into a mud-puddle just half way between the field and the post-office, and stopped there till morning.

Here we are, at Washington. I have been in most of the cities of Europe: some of them have dirty suburbs, but the first impression of the Capitol City is dreary in the extreme; a number of the lost tribes have established booths contiguous to the terminus, wherein the filthiest people in the world eat the filthiest dishes; a man's sense of cleanliness vanishes when he enters the District of Columbia. I have been astonished to remark how greatness loses its stature here. Mr. Charles Sumner is a handsome man on Broadway or Beacon Street, but eating dinner at Thompson's, his shoulders seem to narrow and his fine face to grow commonplace.

Above the squalid wideness of ungraded streets and the waste of shanties propped upon poles above abysses of vacant lots, where two drunken soldiers are pummelling each other, towers the marvellous dome with its airy genius firmly planted above, like the ruins of Palmyra above contemporary meanness. Moving up the streets, in dust and mud-puddle, you see shabbily ambitious churches, with wooden towers; hotels, the curbs whereof are speckled with human blemishes, sustaining like hip-shotten caryatides the sandstone-wooden columns. Within there is a pandemonium of legs in the air, and an agglomeration of saliva, ending with an impertinent clerk and two crescents of lazy waiters, who shy whisks, and are ambitious to run superfluous errands, for the warrant to rob you. Of people, you see squads; of residents, none. The public edifices have not picked their company, neither have the public functionaries. There is a quantity of vulgar statuary lying around, horses standing on their tails, and impossible Washingtons imbedded in arm-chairs; but the noble facade of the treasury always suggests to me Couture's great picture of the Decadence, where, under a pure colonnade, some tipplers are carousing. If we are to have statues at the Capital, let us make them with uplifted hands, and shame upon their grave, contemplative faces.

Shall we ever make Washington the representative Capital of the country?

Certainly all efforts to improve the site worthy of the seat of gigantic legislation have hitherto failed. The sword and the malaria have attacked it. Every year sees the President driven from his Mansion by pestilential vapors, and the sanitary condition of the city is extraordinarily bad. The carcasses of slain horses at Giesboro send their effluvia straight into Washington on the wind, and the "Island," or that part of the city between the river and the canal, is dangerous almost all the year.

Moreover, the entire river front of the city seems to be untenable, except for negroes; the Washington monument stands on the yielding plain in the rear of the Chief Magistrate's, a stunted ruin, finding no foundation; and much of the great Capital reserve near by, would be a dead weight, if any effort were made to dispose it of, as building lots. The small portion of Washington lying upon Capitol Hill, is the most salubrious and covetable; but it is a lonesome journey by night around the Capitol grounds to the city. The finest residences lie north of the President's house, but the number of these grows apace, and the quantity of capital invested in private real estate, remains almost stationary.

We recall but two or three citizens of Washington who have spent their money on the spot where they have made it. Corcoran was the most generous; he erected a museum of art, and Government has made it a Commissary depot! But how few of the illustrious Senators, Chief Justices, Generals, etc., who draw their sustenance from the Capital, care a penny to decorate it? Compare the home of Governor Sprague on 6th Street, to his splendid mansion at Providence, or the Club House of the Secretary of State, to his place at Auburn. Washington has power, but it cannot attract. It is the solitary monarch, at whose feet all kneel, but by none beloved. Strangers repair to it, grow rich, and quit it with their earnings. Government works nobly to imitate the Palaces of the Cæsars, and the public edifices leave our municipal structures far beneath, but these marble and granite piles seem to mock the littleness of individual ambition. Two hotels have been built during the war, both of the caravansary class, but the city, for four years, has been miserably incompetent to entertain its guests, or to command their respect.

Washington, to be a city, lacks three elements--commerce, representation, health; the environs are picturesque, and the new forts on the hill-tops little injure the landscape.

But the question is not premature, whether Washington city will ever answer the purposes of a stable seat of government, and reflect the enterprise, patriotism, and taste of the American people.

I have sometimes thought that these huge public buildings,--now inadequate to accommodate the machinery of the Government,--would, at some future day, be the nucleus of a great _lycee_, and that Washington would become the Padua of the Republic, its University and Louvre, while legislation and administration, despairing of giving dignity to the place, would depart for a more congenial locality.

At any rate, the old Federal theory of a sylvan seat of government has failed.

For a sequestered and virtuous retreat of legislation, we have corruption augmented by dirt, and business stagnation aggravated by disease. There are virtues in the town; but these must be searched for, and the vices are obvious.