The Capital City (And its Part in the History of our Nation) E-Book

Rufus Rockwell Wilson

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 704

Beschreibung

The writer who undertakes to tell the story of Washington confronts a task the like of which is presented by none of its sister cities. The federal capital during its first hundred years of existence has been - and is today - the political center of the republic, the birthplace of parties and legislation, the training-ground and forum of one generation after another of public men. Indeed, from its founding until the present time it has been the brain and heart of the nation. This fact has been kept constantly in mind in the writing of the present work, and, while sketching the rise of Washington from a wilderness hamlet to one of the most beautiful capitals in the world, the author has also attempted adequately to portray the political growth and development of the republic. Washington, Jackson, and Lincoln, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, Seward, Chase, and Sumner are an inseparable and vital part of the history of the capital which they endeared to their countrymen and have in the following pages the place that by right belongs to them. Liberal use, at the same time, has been made of anecdote, in the hopeful belief that our great men can be thus brought closer to a later generation than is possible in any other way. No pains have been spared to assure accuracy of detail; though in a work intended primarily for popular reading it has not been thought necessary to quote authorities which are within the reach of every student. Years of preparation and many months of exacting labor have helped to the making of a book which it is hoped will awaken in its readers a new interest and a new pride in the history of their capital and common country.

Leseprobe

The Capital City

And its Part in the History of the Nation

RUFUS ROCKWELL WILSON

The Capital City, Rufus Rockwell Wilson

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

ISBN: 9783849663223

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

CONTENTS:

VOL. I.1

FOREWORD... 1

CHAPTER I. A CAPITAL BUILT TO ORDER.. 2

CHAPTER II. THE DAY OF SMALL THINGS. 13

CHAPTER III. THE JEFFERSONIAN EPOCH.. 25

CHAPTER IV. THE OLD ORDER CHANGES. 37

CHAPTER V. WASHINGTON IN ALIEN HANDS. 47

CHAPTER VI. THE RETURN OF PEACE.. 58

CHAPTER VII. HOW SLAVERY CAME INTO POLITICS. 68

CHAPTER VIII. AN ERA OF GOOD FEELING.. 79

CHAPTER IX. THE YOUNGER ADAMS. 89

CHAPTER X. THE REIGN OF JACKSON... 99

CHAPTER XI. BATTLES BETWEEN GIANTS. 110

CHAPTER XII. A DAY OF FIRST THINGS. 120

CHAPTER XIII. THE DEMOCRACY IN ECLIPSE.. 130

CHAPTER XIV. THE WHIGS' BARREN TRIUMPH.. 141

CHAPTER XV. A PRESIDENT WITHOUT A PARTY.. 152

VOL. II.162

CHAPTER I. A NEW ISSUE AND NEW LEADERS. 162

CHAPTER II. FOUR EVENTFUL YEARS. 173

CHAPTER III. TAYLOR'S BRIEF TERM... 184

CHAPTER IV. THE PASSING OF THE WHIGS. 195

CHAPTER V. ENTRANCE OF THE REPUBLICANS. 206

CHAPTER VI. THE END OF AN ERA.. 217

CHAPTER VII. THE APPEAL TO ARMS. 228

CHAPTER VIII. CAMPS AND HOSPITALS. 238

CHAPTER IX. LINCOLN IN THE WHITE HOUSE.. 249

CHAPTER X. LAST DAYS OF THE WAR.. 260

CHAPTER XI. LINCOLN'S DEATH AND AFTER.. 271

CHAPTER XII. REBUILDING A NATION.. 282

CHAPTER XIII. THE PRESIDENCY OF GRANT.. 294

CHAPTER XIV. A NEW ERA AND A NEW CITY.. 306

VOL. I.

FOREWORD

The writer who undertakes to tell the story of Washington confronts a task the like of which is presented by none of its sister cities. The federal capital during its hundred years of existence has been the political center of the republic, the birthplace of parties and legislation, the training-ground and forum of one generation after another of public men. Indeed, from its founding until the present time it has been the brain and heart of the nation.

This fact has been kept constantly in mind in the writing of the present work, and, while sketching the rise of Washington from a wilderness hamlet to one of the most beautiful capitals in the world, the author has also attempted adequately to portray the political growth and development of the republic. Washington, Jackson, and Lincoln, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun, Seward, Chase, and Sumner are an inseparable and vital part of the history of the capital which they endeared to their countrymen and have in the following pages the place that by right belongs to them. Liberal use, at the same time, has been made of anecdote, in the hopeful belief that our great men can be thus brought closer to a later generation than is possible in any other way.

No pains have been spared to assure accuracy of detail; though in a work intended primarily for popular reading it has not been thought necessary to quote authorities which are within the reach of every student. Years of preparation and many months of exacting labor have helped to the making of a book which it is hoped will awaken in its readers a new interest and a new pride in the history of their capital and common country. Should this hope be confirmed, the author will count his reward an ample one. His thanks are especially due to James F. Hood, Esq., of Washington, who kindly furnished from his collection the originals of five of the illustrations, and to Messrs. H. Virtue & Company, Limited, of London, for permission to reproduce several early views.

R. R. W.

CHAPTER I. A CAPITAL BUILT TO ORDER

WASHINGTON during its first century of existence has become one of the great capitals of the world. It has also grown to be the most beautiful city in our country. Among centers of authority and pleasure, only Paris equals it in beauty and charm, and Paris has behind it a thousand years of history. The reason for this lies partly in the fact that Washington is a city planned and built solely for the purposes of government. It is, perhaps, the only capital which has had such an origin; which is named after a nation's first leader, laid out according to his individual views, and beautified, in the main, according to his ideas of beauty. Indeed, Washington, as it stands to-day, may be said to express George Washington's intention and personal taste.

The selection of a site for a permanent capital was one of the tasks which fell to the First Congress. A settlement was reached only after a long and bitter contest, for sectional jealousies were strong and members of Congress from the New England States and from New York inclined to the belief that those from the South might gain undue advantage over them. Thus, the judgment of Congress often changed, and as its favor shifted from site to site — now the Susquehanna, then the falls of the Delaware, again the Potomac, — warmly favored by Washington, as his correspondence shows, — and later Germantown — the country was thrown into a turmoil of conflicting opinion and interests. A bill at one time passed both the House and Senate locating the capital at Germantown, now a suburb of Philadelphia, but delay ensuing, reconsideration was had, and Germantown lost its opportunity.

So stubborn grew the contest that it was feared that the union of States, as yet none too strongly welded, would be shattered ere a settlement was reached, and save for the political sagacity of Alexander Hamilton, these fears might have had confirmation. Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treasury, had proposed to Congress, as an essential feature of his plans for placing the federal finances on a solvent and enduring basis, the assumption by the general government of the debts contracted by the several States while prosecuting the War of Independence. Members from the Southern States, whose war debts were proportionately much smaller than those of the New England and other Northern States, influenced less by financial interests than by local pride, and fearful also of a too great central power, stoutly opposed the measure, while the Northern members almost to a man were resolved upon its adoption. Debated for weeks, it finally failed of passage in the House by a slender margin of two votes. The minority, however, refused to accept this decision, declining to transact any business whatsoever until it had been reversed, and day after day the House met only to adjourn. Again, as in the dispute over a site for the projected capital, there were whispered threats of secession and a dissolution of the Union. Then it was that Hamilton, by using Thomas Jefferson, lately come from France to take the chief place in Washington's Cabinet, and still a stranger to partisan and sectional differences, as an instrument to put an end to both disputes, showed how consummate a politician he could be in support of his statesmanship. The Southern members, eagerly seconding Washington's fondly cherished desire, had asked that the seat of the federal government be established on the banks of the Potomac, and when Congress refused this request, their anger had rivalled that of the Northern men upon the question of the State debts. Might it not be, Hamilton asked Jefferson, at a chance meeting in front of the President's house in New York, that the Southern men would agree to vote for the assumption of the State debts if the Northern members promised to support a bill for a capital on the Potomac, and would not the Secretary of State exert his good offices to bring such a result about? The suggestion came as if upon the thought of the moment, but was so earnestly and eloquently urged by Hamilton that Jefferson declared that " although a stranger to the whole subject," he would be glad to lend what aid he could. Jefferson writes, —

" I proposed to him to dine with me next day, and I would invite another friend or two, bring them into conference together, and I thought it impossible that reasonable men, consulting together coolly, could fail, by some mutual sacrifices of opinion, to form a compromise which was to save the Union. The discussion took place. ... It was finally agreed" — so healing was the influence of good wine and good fellowship — " that whatever importance had been attached to the rejection of this proposition, the preservation of the Union and of concord among the States was more important; and that, therefore, it would be better that the vote of rejection should be rescinded, to effect which some members should change their votes. But it was observed that this pill would be peculiarly bitter to the Southern States, and that some concomitant measure should be adopted to sweeten it a little to them. There had been propositions to fix the seat of government either at Philadelphia or at Georgetown on the Potomac; and it was thought that by giving it to Philadelphia for ten years, and to Georgetown permanently afterwards, this might, as an anodyne, calm in some degree the ferment which might be excited by the other measure alone. So two of the Potomac members . . . agreed to change their votes, and Hamilton undertook to carry the other point."

Thus the assumption bill secured the sanction of Congress, and in the same manner an act was adopted, which received executive approval on July 16, 1790, giving the sole power to the President to select a federal territory " not exceeding ten miles square on the river Potomac at some space between the mouths of the Eastern Branch and the Conongocheague for the permanent seat of the government of the United States." A later act, at Washington's suggestion, changed these boundaries so as to include, besides the village of Georgetown in Maryland, a portion of Virginia with the town of Alexandria. Maryland and Virginia promptly ceded to the United States the territory required, but, in 1846, all that portion of the district lying on the west bank of the Potomac was retroceded by Congress to the State of Virginia, so that the federal territory now comprises sixty-four miles, bounded on three sides by the State of Maryland and on the fourth by the Potomac.

The site of the present city, covering the lower portion of the district, was selected by Washington in January, 1791, but had been seen and admired by him many years before. When a boy he saw it while riding the country on horseback, and he spoke of it when as a young man he camped with Braddock on the hill where now stands the Naval Observatory. Then all that met the eye were wooded slopes partly tilled by two or three farmers; hill-tops thickly sprinkled with scrub-oaks, and lowlands covered with underbrush of alder; but between the Potomac, slow widening to meet the sea, the bluffs, a mile and a half away, and the heights of Rock Creek at Georgetown and of the Eastern Branch, five miles apart, there lay a spacious amphitheater of such gentle slopes and useful levels that the attention of the young surveyor was quickly attracted to it.

Washington, always more of a merchant and an engineer than an artist, had thoughts of a great commercial city here, with the navigable Potomac, reaching to the sea, to help it in the race for supremacy. The site of this future city he often passed on his way to and from Georgetown, and later, when occupied with public cares, while travelling from the North to his home at Mount Vernon. The Indians for generations used this site as a meeting-place, holding there many council-fires, and this legislative and governmental use of the ground by the red men, traditions of which survived all through Washington's life, may have suggested to him a similar use by the new possessors of the soil.

However this may have been, there is no doubt that Washington was the first and foremost champion of the location of the federal capital on the banks of the Potomac; and his letters offer abundant evidence that it was with more than his usual zeal and hopefulness that, early in 1791, he set about the work of transforming an isolated tract of farm land into a center of legislation for half a continent. The private owners of the land proved a source of vexation and of slight delay. These, for the most part, were the descendants of a little band of Scotch and Irish, settled on the land for a hundred years or more, who had inherited from their fathers habits of thrift and the ability, on occasion, to drive a hard bargain.

Aged David Burnes, a justice of the peace and a tobacco planter in a small way, proved the most stubborn and grasping of all. Even Washington was at first unable to do anything with "obstinate Mr. Burnes," who did not want a capital at his front door and did not care whether or not the seat of government came to the banks of the Potomac. Washington argued with him for several days, explaining to him the advantages he was resisting; to all of which, so the tradition runs, Burnes made reply, —

'' I suppose you think people here are going to take every grist that comes from you as pure grain; but what would you have been if you had not married the widow Custis?"

Small wonder that Washington, losing patience in the face of this ill-tempered rejoinder, bluntly informed crusty David that the government wanted his land and proposed getting it in one way or another. Burnes, thereupon, capitulated, and on March 30, 1791, joined the other owners of the site in an agreement to convey to the government, out of their farms, all the land which was needed for streets, avenues, and public reservations, free of cost. The owners also agreed to sell the land needed for public buildings and improvements for one hundred and twenty-five dollars per acre. All the rest the government divided into building lots and apportioned between itself and the owners. The small lots were to be sold by the government, and out of the proceeds payment was to be made for the large ones. In this way, without advancing a dollar and at a total cost of thirty-six thousand dollars, the government acquired a tract of six hundred acres in the heart of the city. The ten thousand one hundred and thirty-six building lots assigned to it ultimately proved to be worth eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and now represent a value of seventy million dollars. Shrewd financier as he was, it is doubtful if Washington ever made another so good a bargain as that with Burnes and his neighbors. Burnes in parting with the acres which he did not want to see spoiled for a good farm to make a poor capital, stipulated that the modest house in which he lived should not be interfered with in the laying out of the city. This condition was agreed to by Washington, and Burnes's cottage stood until a few years ago, one of the historical curiosities of the capital.

After David Burnes, the most considerable owners of the land taken for the federal city were Samuel Davidson, Notley Young, and Daniel Carroll. Young, who held nearly all of the property in the center of the city and on the river front between Seventh and Eleventh Streets, acquired wealth from sales and leases of his property, and erected a substantial residence on G Street, South, overlooking the Potomac, where he lived in comfort until his death in the closing years of the first quarter of the last century. Worse luck attended Carroll, who owned the land to the east of Young. This gentleman, brother of the first Catholic bishop of Baltimore, cousin of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and himself a member of the convention that framed the Constitution and of the First Congress, was so firm a believer in the future greatness of the federal city that when Stephen Girard offered him two hundred thousand dollars for a portion of his estate, he refused the offer, demanding five times that sum. Carroll's greed, however, soon wrought his undoing; the high price placed upon the lots held by him compelled many who wished land for the erection of houses and business structures to settle in the northern and western parts of the city, and the tide of population turning permanently to the north and west decided the fate of the eastern quarter. Thus Carroll's dream of great wealth came to a luckless ending. All that he could leave his heirs when he died was a heavily encumbered estate, and so late as 1873 six acres of the Carroll tract, upon which his descendants, during a period of eighty years, had paid sixteen thousand dollars in taxes, — this in the hope of a profitable sale, — were finally disposed of for three thousand six hundred dollars.

Carroll's splendid confidence in the value of his holdings may have been due in part to the pride which the pioneer always takes in his work, for he was one of the three commissioners selected by Washington to have entire charge of the surveying and laying out of the district and the erection of the necessary public buildings. The other two were Thomas Johnson, of Maryland, and David Stuart, of Virginia, and on April 15, 1791, with impressive Masonic ceremony, and in the presence of a goodly assemblage, they laid the first boundary-stone of the district at Jones's Point, on the Virginia side of the Potomac. Early in the following September the commissioners decided to call the federal district the Territory of Columbia, — a title changed some years later to the District of Columbia; and the city to be established on the river bank the City of Washington,— this without the knowledge of the President, but with the hearty approval of Congress and the people. Meanwhile, Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant had been selected by Washington and Jefferson to draw the plan of "the new federal town." L'Enfant, a Frenchman and a kinsman of D'Estaing, was a skillful military engineer who had come to America in April, 1777, in the train of Lafayette. Although then but twenty-two years of age, his skill as a designer of fortifications — it was he who planned Fort Mifflin, on the Delaware, famous for its gallant and successful resistance to the most resolutely vigorous assault of the Revolution — speedily attracted the attention of Washington, and L'Enfant was made chief of engineers under the direct command of the commander-in-chief, with the brevet of major of engineers. When the French contingent, who had so nobly served the American cause, sailed for home, in 1783, L'Enfant remained behind. Later, at the instance of Washington, he designed the insignia of the Society of the Cincinnati. The remodeling of the city hall in New York was also his work, and in other ways he clearly proved his fitness for the task now assigned him.

Major L'Enfant devoted the spring and summer of 1791 to elaborating his plans for the projected city. One point he quickly settled, — he would not plan for thirteen States and three millions of people, but for a republic of fifty States and five hundred millions; not for a single century, but for a thousand years. Dominated by this thought, he built better and wiser than any one in his lifetime was willing to acknowledge, for truth compels the statement that the chief men of his day, meagerly educated and reared, for the most part, in the practice of the strictest private economy, were provincial and narrow in their ideas of art and government expenditure. Jefferson was the only man then conspicuous in public life who had any considerable art culture, and even Jefferson wanted the city laid out in a regularity of squares with all the streets intersecting at right angles, as in Philadelphia, and, unfortunately, in most other American cities. L'Enfant made the regular chess-board squares as Jefferson wanted, but he also put in so many avenues running at acute angles that the monotonous effect was happily destroyed, and the opportunity presented for making of the capital the magnificent city it has since become.

Washington desired that the building in which Congress was to hold its meetings should be located at a distance from the Executive Mansion and the other public buildings. Accordingly, L'Enfant, fixing upon the broad plateau in the eastern section as a site for the Capitol, located the other public buildings in the western section, more than a mile distant. To this arrangement John Adams, then Vice-President, entered his objection, insisting with vigor that the Capitol or Congress house should be placed in the center of a great square of public buildings; but Washington came promptly to the defense of his own and his engineer's plans, giving as a reason for the disposition decided upon — and Washington always had an excellent reason for whatever he did — that if Congress and the executive officers were located close together, the latter would be so annoyed by the former that they would have to take their business home in order to keep up with it.

Other details determined upon by L'Enfant met with sharp criticism, but his plan as a whole was accepted without delay by Washington, and the author engaged to superintend its execution. L'Enfant had as assistant Andrew Ellicott, a self-educated Pennsylvania Quaker, who later in life became professor of mathematics at West Point. The streets and squares of the city were chiefly laid out by Ellicott, and before the erection of any building was permitted a survey was made and recorded, to which all subsequent building operations had to conform.

The States of Maryland and Virginia, prompted by the location of the federal capital within their borders, voted one hundred and ninety-two thousand dollars to the United States to aid in the erection of the projected public buildings, and in March, 1792, shortly after the completion of the preliminary survey of the city, Carroll and his fellow-commissioners advertised for designs for the Capitol and for " the President's House," offering in each instance a premium of five hundred dollars and a building lot to the author of the accepted design. Among the submitted designs for the Executive Mansion was one by James Hoban, a young architect of Charleston, South Carolina. This design, which followed that of the palace of the Duke of Leinster in Dublin, being approved, Hoban was awarded the premium and engaged at a yearly salary of a hundred pounds to superintend the construction of the mansion, which was soon given the name of White House. Tradition has it that this name was prompted by the popular regard for Martha Washington, whose early home on the Pamunky River, in Virginia, was so called. The cornerstone of the White House having been laid on October 13, 1792, in accordance with the rites of Masonry, the work of construction was begun at once, but the building was not entirely completed until ten years later.

For the Capitol sixteen designs were submitted by as many architects, but all, after careful examination, were counted unworthy of serious consideration. Soon, however, Stephen L. Hallett, a French architect residing in New York, forwarded to the commissioners a sketch of a design which met with favor, and he was invited to perfect it. Hallett had not completed his labors when Dr. William Thornton, a clever native of the West Indies, who had lately taken up his residence in the United States, submitted a design to Washington and Jefferson which so pleased them that the President requested its adoption, suggesting that, as Thornton had no practical knowledge of architecture, the execution of his design be entrusted to Hallett.

This was done, Thornton's design being accepted by the commissioners, and Hallett appointed supervising architect with a salary of four hundred pounds a year. The corner-stone of what was to be the north wing of the Capitol was laid on September 18, 1793, on which occasion Washington delivered an oration and the Grand Master of the Maryland Masons an appropriate address. " After the ceremony," to quote a contemporary account of the affair, " the assemblage retired to an extensive booth, where they enjoyed a barbecue feast."

Ill-timed and unseemly bickerings followed this jocund and peaceful incident. Hallett, the architect, quarreled with Thornton, who had now become one of the commissioners of the district, and when requested to surrender his various drawings and designs, peremptorily declined to do so. He was, therefore, dismissed, and his place given to George Hadfield, an Englishman vouched for by Benjamin West. When Hadfield in his turn quarreled with the commissioners and resigned, work on the Capitol was continued by Hoban, the architect of the White House, and the north wing completed in 1800. Hoban resided in Washington until his death in 1833 and accumulated a large estate by the practice of his profession.

Major L'Enfant, the designer of the city, was not so fortunate as Hoban, for before work began on either the White House or the Capitol he was dismissed from his office by order of Washington. L'Enfant was not wholly at fault in the matter. Daniel Carroll, without regard for the plans of the engineer, had begun the erection of a large brick house in the middle of New Jersey Avenue, whereupon L'Enfant, who considered himself as a military officer responsible only to the government, had his assistants attack it and raze it to the ground. This threw Carroll into a violent rage and brought a letter from Washington warning L'Enfant that he and everybody were subordinate to the common law. Furthermore, the President ordered the rebuilding of Carroll's house precisely as it was before, but, very wisely, not in the middle of New Jersey Avenue.

L'Enfant after that had at least one resolute enemy among the commissioners of the district, and soon another unfortunate incident placed him at odds with the other two. The commissioners, to secure much-needed funds, advertised a public sale of lots to take place in October, 1791, but L'Enfant, when asked to do so, refused to give up his plans to be examined by prospective purchasers that they might buy lands wherever they wished, claiming that if his maps were published speculators would at once leap upon the best lands in his vistas and public squares and raise huddles of shanties, which would permanently disfigure the city.

This contention, viewed in the light of experience, does not seem an unreasonable one, but to Washington it smacked dangerously of insubordination, and in a letter to the commissioners he authorized them to dismiss L'Enfant. " Men who possess talents which fit them for peculiar purposes," wrote the President, " are almost invariably under the influence of untoward dispositions, or a sottish pride, or possessed of some other disqualification by which they plague all those with whom they are concerned. But I did not expect to meet with such perverseness in Major L'Enfant as his late conduct exhibited."

A curious instance of the poverty and economy of L'Enfant's time is found in the fact that for planning the federal city and giving his personal attention for many months to the survey and preliminary operations he was paid the small sum of two thousand five hundred dollars. Ellicott, who succeeded him, was accused of greediness because he desired to be paid five dollars per day and expenses and was finally induced by Jefferson to forego reimbursement. L'Enfant continued to live in the city he had planned and was long a familiar figure on its streets, clad usually in " blue military coat, buttoned close to the chin, broadcloth breeches, cavalry boots, a napless, bell-crowned hat upon his head, and swinging as he walked a hickory cane with a silver top." Towards the close of his life, he became a petitioner before Congress for a redress of his real and fancied wrongs, but little heed was paid to his appeals, and in June 1825, he died, a disappointed and broken old man.

Differences with L'Enfant, Hallett, and the rest were not the only obstacles with which the builders of the federal city were compelled to contend. Most serious and embarrassing of all was the ever-present need of money. It had been hoped that before the sums subscribed by Virginia and Maryland were expended the sales of lots would supply the balance needed to complete the public buildings. This expectation, however, was only partly realized. After the first influx of speculators — among whom none bought more largely and lost more heavily than Robert Morris, the " superintendent of finance" and friend of the government in the dark days of 1781 — the sale of real estate languished. Foreigners had more confidence than natives in the success of the experiment. Engraved plans of the city were widely distributed abroad; Congress passed a law allowing aliens to hold land in the city; and for a time, lots brought absurdly high prices in London. The home trade, however, ceased almost entirely after 1794, while many of the earlier contracts for lots were repudiated by buyers unable to fulfil their agreements, or who had taken alarm from the hurtful rumor, industriously spread, that Congress would never remove to the Potomac but would remain at Philadelphia.

Before the walls of the Capitol and the White House had reached the roofline the commissioners were obliged, in 1796, to ask Congress for an appropriation of money. Congress responded to this request by authorizing them to negotiate a loan of eight hundred thousand dollars. This loan was guaranteed by the government, but the money was not to be had on the terms proposed. However, after some delay, the State of Maryland, at Washington's urgent personal request, took two-thirds of the loan, stipulating that the commissioners, two of whom were men of means, should add their individual guarantee to that of the government. Congress, in 1798, again appealed to by the commissioners, voted an appropriation of one hundred thousand dollars, and in the following year the State of Maryland lent them half that sum, requiring, as before, private security for its repayment.

Work on the Capitol and the White House made fair progress as a result of these efforts, and two other public buildings were begun and pushed towards completion. The last named, brick structures, two stories high and containing thirty rooms each, were erected at the corners of the twenty-acre plot set down on L'Enfant's design as " the President's Grounds." One, known as the Treasury Department building, occupied a portion of the site of the present Treasury building. The War Office, as the other building was called, occupied the site of the central portion of the present State, War, and Navy buildings. This latter building, enlarged by the addition of a third story and a wing, was known in later years as the Navy Department building, being removed in 1871 to make room for the new building.

When Washington last beheld the city which bears his name, shortly before his death in 1799, it was a straggling settlement in the woods, almost wholly devoid of streets, with thirty or forty residences, — these, for the most part, small and uncomfortable, — and an unfinished Capitol and President's House. John Cotton Smith, then a member of Congress from Connecticut, has left a lively record of his impressions of the Capitol when he saw it for the first time, a few months after Washington's death. Smith writes:

" Our approach to the city was accompanied with sensations not easily described. One wing of the Capitol only had been erected, which, with the President's House, a mile distant from it, both constructed with white sandstone, were shining objects in dismal contrast with the scene around them. Instead of recognizing the avenues and streets portrayed on the plan of the city, not one was visible, unless we except a road, with two buildings on each side of it, called New Jersey Avenue. The Pennsylvania, leading, as laid down on paper, from the Capitol to the Presidential mansion, was then nearly the whole distance a deep morass covered with alder-bushes, which were cut through the intended avenue during the ensuing winter. Between the President's House and Georgetown a block of houses had been erected, which bore the name of the Six Buildings. There were also two other blocks, consisting of two or three dwellinghouses, in different directions, and now and then an isolated wooden habitation; the intervening spaces, and, indeed, the surface of the city generally, being covered with scrub-oak bushes on the higher grounds, and on the marshy soil either trees or some sort of shrubbery. Nor was the desolate aspect of the place augmented by a number of unfinished edifices at Greenleaf's Point, and on an eminence a short distance from it, commenced by an individual whose name they bore, but the state of whose funds compelled him to abandon them, not only unfinished, but in a ruinous condition."

Indeed, for more than half a century Washington remained a sparse-built, unsightly city and a comfortless place of residence. Its growth for upward of a generation was less than six hundred a year, a rate of increase that would now put to shame the capital of a single American State, and so late as 1840 De Bacourt, the French minister, could write that Washington was " neither a city, nor a village, nor the country," but " a building-yard placed in a desolate spot, wherein living is unbearable." From 1804 to 1846, and especially after the second war with England, there were intermittent efforts in Congress to secure the removal of the capital to some other part of the Union, but during the decade in which the latter year fell a general renewal of the public buildings was projected and begun upon a scale which barred from the minds of all reasonable men the idea that they would ever be abandoned; and the several federal buildings were made fitting abodes for the representatives of a great and enduring government.

The result of this activity told at once upon the capital. Its annual growth trebled, and the opening of the Civil War found it, with its sixty-two thousand population, '' a big, sprawling city, magnificent in some parts, dilapidated and dirty in others." The struggle for the Union did many things for Washington. It doubled the population and brought in freedom and Northern enterprise, but more important still, by a thousand moving and glorious associations, it endeared the capital to the people of the whole country. Then came its remaking by Shepherd and his associates. Now it is a truly imperial city, and the judgment of Washington and the genius of L'Enfant have been amply vindicated.

Almost within sight of the capital which he called into being lie the remains of Washington, guarded by a grateful people with reverence and care, but no stone marks L'Enfant's grave at Bladensburg, where he died in the house of the only friend of his last days. None is needed, for the city that he planned remains his monument and epitaph.

CHAPTER II. THE DAY OF SMALL THINGS

IMAGINE the laborious transfer of the present seat of government to some point in the Middle West, this in contrast with the removal of the capital from Philadelphia to the banks of the Potomac, and a fair idea will be gained of the wide gulf which separates the republic of to-day from that of a hundred years ago. May 1800, the time of the transfer, fell in a day of small things, and two or three sloops of modest size, though some of them made more than one voyage, sufficed to convey to Washington the archives of all the departments, while the officials concerned in the removal numbered seven score, including the heads of bureaus and the various clerks. The vessels arrived at their destination during the first days of June, and one can readily picture the entire population, white and black, trooping down to the river to witness the discharge of the precious cargoes. Doubtless President Adams, himself, was in the crowd, for he had left Philadelphia on May 27, and, travelling by way of Lancaster and York, in Pennsylvania, and Frederick and Rockville, in Maryland, on June 3 lodged at the Union Tavern in Georgetown. His visit, however, was one of inspection only, and at the end of ten days he left for his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was to spend the summer.

The President's lot for the moment was a source of envy to the Cabinet and other officials whom he left behind him. Work on and about the new seat of government had been in progress for the better part of a decade, but nothing was finished, and, contrasted with the pleasant quarters at command in Philadelphia, the crude discomfort of Washington bred a feeling of surprise and disgust. " I do not perceive," Secretary Wolcott wrote to his wife, " how the members of Congress can possibly secure lodgings, unless they wall consent to live like scholars in a college, or monks in a monastery, crowded ten or twenty in one house, and utterly secluded from society. ... I have made every exertion to secure good lodgings near the office but shall be compelled to take them at a distance of more than half a mile. There are, in fact, but few houses in any one place, and most of them small, miserable huts, which present an awful contrast to the public buildings. The people are poor, and, as far as I can judge, they live like fishes, by eating each other."

President Adams returned to Washington in the opening days of November, and he was joined at the end of a fortnight by his wife, the famous Abigail Adams. " I arrived here on Sunday last," runs a letter from Mrs. Adams to her daughter, one of the first written in the White House, "and without meeting any accident worth noticing, except losing ourselves when we left Baltimore, and going eight or nine miles on the Frederick road, by which means we were obliged to go the other eight through the woods, where we wandered for two hours, without finding a guide or the path. Fortunately, a straggling black came up with us, and we engaged him as a guide to extricate us out of our difficulty; but woods are all you see from Baltimore until you reach the city, which is only so in name. Here and there is a small cot, without a glass window, interspersed among the forests, through which you travel miles without seeing any human being. In the city there are buildings enough, if they were compact and finished, to accommodate Congress and those attached to it, but as they are, and scattered as they are, I see no great comfort in them."

How meagre was the degree of comfort which they afforded is, perhaps, best illustrated by an account set down in after-years by John Cotton Smith, a member of the House from Connecticut. " Our little party," he says, " took lodging with a Mr. Peacock, in one of the houses on the New Jersey Avenue. . . . Speaker Sedgwick was allowed a room to himself; the rest of us in pairs." The President and his family fared little better. " To assist us in this great castle," writes Mrs. Adams in the letter already quoted, " and render less attendance necessary bells are wholly wanting, — -not one single one being hung through the whole house, and promises are all you can obtain. If they will put me up some bells and let me have wood enough to keep fires, I design to be pleased. . . . But, surrounded with forests, can you believe that wood is not to be had, because people cannot be found to cut and cart it? The house is made habitable, but there is not a single apartment finished. We have not the least fence, yard, or other convenience without, and the great, unfinished audience-room [now known as the East Room] I make a drying room of to hang up the clothes in. The principal stairs are not up and will not be this winter."

So difficult was it to secure lodgings near the Capitol that many of the members of Congress when they assembled in November took refuge in Georgetown, reached only after a toilsome journey over execrable roads, but where, as partial compensation for the social poverty and material discomfort of the infant city, there was a society which called itself eminently  polite. Indeed, society centered for years in Georgetown; and from thence, at the price of many mishaps on the way, came most of the guests who attended the President's levees and state dinners.

Abigail Adams was easily the most conspicuous woman of her day, whether by position or by character; in person distinguished and noble rather than beautiful. The social rites at the White House were conducted with great formality during her brief period of residence there. Ceremonious intercourse was demanded, and the rules of precedence were rigorously obeyed.

The President and Mrs. Adams gave their first public reception on New Year's Day, 1801, receiving their guests in the second-story apartment which is now the library of the Executive Mansion. The rules established by Mrs. Washington had been continued by her successor, and the roster of Mrs. Adams's guests included only persons of official station and established reputation, or who came with suitable introduction. Full dress was exacted from all, and at the New Year's reception of which I am writing President Adams, his round, ruddy face framed by a powdered wig, wore a black velvet suit, white vest, knee-breeches, yellow gloves, silk stockings, and silver knee- and shoe-buckles. The guests formed in a circle, when the President went around and conversed with each one, after which they came up, bowed and retired.

Few unofficial personages frequented Mrs. Adams's drawing-rooms. The most considerable of these were Thomas Law, an Englishman, and Samuel Harrison Smith, editor of the newly born National Intelligencer. Law, a younger brother of Lord Ellenborough, had formerly held high office in British India, and had come to the United States, so the story ran, to avoid being called as a witness against Warren Hastings. He brought with him half a million dollars in gold and letters of introduction to Washington, who advised him to invest his money in real estate in the new federal city, and when this advice had been followed, consented to his marriage to Annie Custis, the granddaughter of Mrs. Washington.

The investment neither of Law's affections nor of his money proved satisfactory, for he quarreled with his wife, and his real estate, when sold after his death, did not bring one quarter of what he had paid for it. A very eccentric man, such was his habitual absence of mind that on asking, one day, at the post-office if there were any letters for him, he was obliged to confess that he did not remember his name; but when, a moment afterwards, a friend greeted him as "Mr. Law," he hurried back, gave the address, and received his mail. An inveterate gambler. Law once sent a man to Paris with a programme for breaking the banks of the gambling-houses in that city; but the unlucky agent, instead of accomplishing his errand, lost his all, and was compelled to work his passage home, there to be reproached by his principal for his want of success.

Washington's first editor, Samuel Harrison Smith, was the son of Jonathan Smith, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant, who had taken an active and patriotic part in the Revolution. The younger Smith, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, first attracted attention as the editor of the New World of Philadelphia. He settled in Washington, when the capital was removed to the Potomac, and on October 31, 1800, issued the first number of the National Intelligencer, which became, a few months later, the mouthpiece of the administration of Thomas Jefferson. The credit belongs to Smith of being the first American editor who essayed to be a moulder of public opinion as well as a chronicler of facts. " Over a faithful and comprehensive detail of facts," he wrote in his first issue, " will preside a spirit of investigation and desire to enlighten not only by fact but by reason. The tendency of public measures and the conduct of public men will be examined with candor and truth." This modest promise marked the birth of the editorial page, the beginning of a new epoch in journalism, and the ability and intelligence with which it was kept made the Intelligencer a tremendous influence in the republic, — an influence which is yet much more than a memory. About the same time that Smith set up his press at the capital the Washington Federalist was issued, so that from the first the two parties which then divided public patronage and attention had their newspaper organs at the federal city. Smith remained editor of the Intelligencer until 1818, when he connected himself with the United States Bank as manager of its branch at Washington. He died in 1845.

A man of pith and vigor, and of extraordinary sense and courage, John Adams while President surrounded himself with men of like qualities. Oliver Wolcott, his Secretary of the Treasury, was a shrewd New Englander whom half a lifetime of office-holding had not robbed of independence of thought and action. Angered by the slanderers of his political opponents, Wolcott peremptorily resigned his post in November 1800, and was succeeded by Samuel Dexter, who previously had been Secretary of War. Dexter, one of the really great constitutional lawyers of his day, remained until his death a familiar figure in Washington, appearing every winter in important cases before the Supreme Court. Benjamin Stoddert, Secretary of the Navy, had been a dashing captain of cavalry under Washington, and later a successful merchant and ship-owner in Georgetown. No man held in fuller measure the confidence and friendship of Adams. Joseph Habersham, Postmaster-General, had served as colonel in the Continental army, and remained during life one of the foremost men in Georgia. Theophilus Parsons, Attorney-General, was a profound and learned jurist, no less famous for his acrid wit than for his extraordinary attainments as a scholar and lawyer.

The dominant, masterful figure in the Cabinet of Adams, however, was John Marshall, Secretary of State. Six years an officer of foot in the patriot army and leader at forty of the Virginia bar, it was only at the urgent instance of Washington and much against his inclination that Marshall had become an office-holder, first as envoy to France, later as one of the Federalist leaders in Congress, and finally as Secretary of State under Adams. This office he filled with ability and credit, but was eagerly awaiting an early return to private life, when in January 1801, Adams named him chief justice of the Supreme Court, which office he held until his death, thirty-four years later.

An agreeable tradition attaches to Marshall's appointment as chief justice, a post which of all men then living he was the one best fitted to fill. Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth, broken in health by winter voyages to and from France, whence he had been sent as envoy, resigned his seat on the bench in November 1800. The President, after offering the place to John Jay, who declined it, decided to confer it upon his Secretary of State. After Adams had had the matter under consideration for some time, Marshall chanced one day to suggest a new name for the place, when the President promptly said, —

"You need not give yourself further trouble, for I have made up my mind about that matter."

"I am happy to hear it," said Marshall. May I ask whom you have fixed upon?"

"Certainly," said Adams. " I have concluded to nominate a person whom it may surprise you to hear mentioned. It is a Virginia lawyer, a plain man by the name of John Marshall."

President Adams spoke truly when he referred to Marshall as "a plain man.". Tall, gaunt, awkward, and always ill-dressed, the great chief justice is, perhaps, best described by Judge Story, who sat upon the bench with him for many years. " His body," writes Story, " seemed as ill as his mind was well compacted; he was not only without proportion, but of members singularly knit, that dangled from each other and looked half dislocated. Habitually he dressed very carelessly in the garb, but I would not dare to say in the mode, of the last century. You would have thought he had on the old clothes of a former generation, not made for him by even some superannuated tailor of that period but gotten from the wardrobe of some antiquated slop-shop of second-hand raiment. Shapeless as he was, he would probably have defied all fitting by whatever skill of the shears; judge, then, how the vestments of an age when apparently coats and breeches were cut for nobody in particular, and waistcoats were almost dressing-gowns, sat upon him."

Story writes, in another place, that Marshall's hair was black, his eyes small and twinkling, his forehead rather low, but his features generally harmonious; and he speaks of his chiefs laugh, " too hearty for an intriguer," and of his good temper and unwearied patience on the bench and in the study. Marshall's uncouth garb and awkward bearing were, in truth, but the rough covering of a moral and mental diamond of the first water. Gentle, warm-hearted, and simple as a child, in the exercise of his chosen calling, nature had endowed him with an almost marvelous faculty of developing a subject by a single glance of his mind, and detecting the very point upon which every controversy depended. He comprehended the whole ground at once, and wasted no time on unessential features. Marshall as chief justice established the power of the Supreme Court as it is recognized to-day; completed the work of the Constitution in welding a loose league of States into a compact nationality, and smothered, for many years, the dangerous doctrine of State sovereignty, which, a quarter of a century after his death, convulsed the country with civil war.

The Supreme Court, when Marshall became its head, and, indeed, for nearly sixty years afterwards, held its sessions in the low-vaulted room in the basement of the Capitol, now occupied as a law library. It then had for associate justices Samuel Chase, William Cushing, Alfred Moore, William Paterson, and Bushrod Washington. Justice Chase had been a member of the Continental Congress and had signed the Declaration of Independence. Later he had been chief justice of the Baltimore criminal court, and in the discharge of his duties had displayed the vigor, irascibility, and readiness to express his political opinions, even on the bench, which a dozen years later were to lead to his impeachment by the House of Representatives. Two popular men, arrested as leaders of a riot in Baltimore, refused to give bail, and the sheriff feared a rescue should he take them to prison. " Call out the posse comitatus, then," said Judge Chase. " Sir, no one will serve," replied the sheriff. " Summon me, then; I will be the posse comitatus; I will take them to jail." And the judge kept his word.

Justice Cushing was descended from a family of jurists, — his father had presided over the trial of British soldiers for the Boston massacre of 1770, — and prior to taking his seat on the supreme bench had been the first chief justice of Massachusetts under the State constitution. Justice Moore was also a judge's son, and before becoming a lawyer had been a captain of North Carolina dragoons during the Revolution. Justice Paterson had been brought from Ireland by his parents when a child in arms, and, reared in New Jersey, had been a member both of the Continental Congress and of the convention which framed the Constitution. Afterwards he had been United States Senator from and governor of New Jersey, Washington naming him as a justice of the Supreme Court in 1793.

The most striking figure among Marshall's associates, however, was Justice Washington. The favorite nephew of the first President, appointed by Adams in 1798, he sat on the supreme bench for thirty-one years, and was the subject of many a piquant anecdote long current at the capital. Small and thin, and deprived by excessive study of the sight of one eye, he was a rigid disciplinarian and a great stickler for etiquette. But he had also the saving gift of humor. One day, as the justices were disrobing, after having heard Senator Isham Talbot, of Kentucky, argue a case with extraordinary rapidity of utterance, Washington dryly remarked, " Well, a person of moderate wishes could hardly desire to live longer than the time it would take Brother Talbot to repeat moderately that four hours' speech we have just heard."

Congress met for the first time in Washington on November 17, 1800, and five days later President Adams, having driven to the Capitol in his coach of state, appeared before the two houses in joint session, and made the customary '' annual speech." Both House and Senate, the latter then a leisurely body, given to short hours and frequent adjournments, found their original meeting-places ill-constructed and uncomfortable, but after the rebuilding of the Capitol in 1817 they were amply accommodated in fine halls. The present hall of the House was occupied on December 16, 1857, and the present Senate chamber on January 4, 1859, since which time the old Senate chamber has been the home of the Supreme Court.

Here and there in the memoirs and diaries of a hundred years ago one catches glimpses of curious legislative customs long since abandoned and now well-nigh forgotten. Members of the House sat with covered heads, and the practice was not discontinued until 1828. Many of the legislators being habitual snuff-takers, urns filled with a choice quality of the article were placed in each house, and officials were charged with the duty of keeping them replenished. Until steel pens came into use there was an official pen-maker in each house, whose duty it was to mend the goose-quills of the members; and there were also official sealers, who were entrusted with the sealing of letters and packages with red wax.

The Senators and Representatives of 1800 were, for the most part, a beardless but bewigged and bepowdered lot. The barber and hairdresser was, therefore, an important individual, and many of the shops which soon began to dot Pennsylvania Avenue were devoted to the practice of his art, — each a morning rendezvous for persons holding congenial political views. In large cupboards with glass doors there were freshly dressed wigs in readiness for the daily visit of their owners, who would exchange them for others which needed the comb and hair powder. " When every high-backed chair was occupied by someone in the hands of a barber, and the seats around the shop were filled with patient waiters, newcomers were greeted with cordial assurances that their turns would soon come, while the freshest bits of gossip were narrated to secure good humor."

The Senate in 1800 contained among its thirty-two members a generous sprinkling of Revolutionary veterans. Thomas Jefferson, who as Vice-President presided over its deliberations, had written the Declaration of Independence, and borne a weighty part in the events that followed. John Langdon, of New Hampshire, now near the close of his second and last term, had fought with Sullivan, and had pledged his last dollar to equip the brigade with which John Stark won the battle of Bennington. Samuel Livermore, Langdon's colleague, had been a useful member of the Continental Congress. James Hillhouse, of Connecticut, for ten years to come one of the most forceful of the Federalist leaders in the Senate, had served as a captain of foot-guards against the British general Tryon.

Gouverneur Morris, of New York, who, so his friends declared, bore a close physical resemblance to Washington, had been a leader in the Continental Congress. John Armstrong, Morris's colleague, had doffed his student's gown to put on a patriot uniform, and had carried from Princeton battlefield the body of the dying Mercer. Another youthful hero was Jonathan Trumbull, of New Jersey, who had entered service in 1776, a stripling of sixteen, to be mustered out seven years later with a captain's commission and a dozen campaigns to his credit. Henry Lattimer, of Delaware, had been a surgeon of the flying hospital, while brave and brainful John Eager Howard, of Maryland, the foremost member of his family in this country, had participated in almost all of the important campaigns of the Revolution, and at the battle of Cowpens had led the desperate bayonet charge which assured a patriot victory.

Stevens T. Mason, Virginia's witty and sarcastic Senator, had served as a volunteer aide to Washington at Yorktown. Wilson Gary Nicholas, of the same State, stanch friend of Jefferson and worthy member of a family '' powerful in talents, in probity, and in their numbers and union," had commanded Washington's lifeguard from the opening of the Revolution until its close. Jesse Franklin, of North Carolina, had served as a major under Greene; and Charles Pinckney, of South Carolina, one of Jefferson's most active lieutenants, had been taken prisoner at the capture of Charleston, remaining such until the close of the war. Pinckney's fellow, Jacob Read, sometime major of South Carolina volunteers, also had been long a prisoner in the hands of the enemy.

Abraham Baldwin, a transplanted New Englander who was to represent Georgia in the Senate until his death, had been a chaplain under Greene, and the latter's friend and confidant. John Brown, a bronzed and wiry Indian fighter, and Kentucky's first Senator, had left school to become a member of Washington's army in the darkest hour of the Revolution, while eloquent and masterful Humphrey Marshall, of the same State, had fought his way from the ranks to a captain's commission. And finally, there was Joseph Anderson, of Tennessee, who had been a captain of the New Jersey line, and who, after eighteen years in the Senate, was to end his days as First Comptroller of the Treasury.

Three other Senators of the period demand a word. Jonathan Mason, of Massachusetts, had been a student in the law-office of John Adams, and was now his tutor's foremost defender in the Senate. Pennsylvania's senior Senator was James Ross, one of the most amply endowed but least remembered men of his time. The other was rich and stately William Bingham, husband of the famous beauty, Anne Willing, and father of a not less beautiful daughter, who was to become in after-years wife of the founder of the great banking house of Baring.

Not less noteworthy than their fellows of the Senate were the Revolutionary veterans of the House. Speaker Theodore Sedgwick, dignified and elegant, had upheld the patriot cause both in the field and in the halls of Congress. Nathaniel Macon, of North Carolina, for more than a score of years the most influential member on the floor of the House, described by John Randolph in his will as " the wisest, purest, and best man" he had ever known, had refused to accept a cent of pay for serving during the entire war; nor, though high commissions had been frequently offered him, could he be induced to serve anywhere save in the ranks.

More conspicuous still, by reason of their brilliant work in the field, were the venerable General Thomas Sumter, of South Carolina, now a zealous Federalist and soon to become a Senator from his State, and General Peter Muhlenberg, of Pennsylvania. Muhlenberg, whose services in the House dated from the adoption of the Constitution, had been a clergyman in Virginia when the Revolution opened, and he was induced by Washington to accept a colonel's commission. Members of his congregation never forgot his last sermon. " There is a time," he told them, '' for all things, — a time to preach and a time to pray; but there is also a time to fight, and that time has now come." Then, pronouncing the benediction, he threw off his gown, displaying his colonel's uniform, and, striding to the door, ordered the drums to beat for recruits. A priest of this sort was sure to make a good soldier, and, by continuous hard fighting, Muhlenberg rose before the war's close to the rank of major-general.

Joseph B. Varnum, of Massachusetts, '' a man of uncommon talents and most brilliant eloquence," had been among the first in his State to take the field when the Revolution opened. John Davenport, for eighteen years a member of the House from Connecticut, had been a major in the Continental army. Philip Van Cortlandt, as colonel of the Second New York Regiment, had proved his bravery in a score of battles. From Pennsylvania came James Smilie, long chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, who had served during the war in both military and civil capacities; and homespun Joseph Hiester, one of the surviving heroes of the dreaded " Jersey" prisonship, who, as a colonel in the Pennsylvania line, had fought at Long Island and Germantown with all the stubborn valor of his Dutch ancestors.

Virginia was represented by Colonel Levin Powell, Washington's old comrade in arms, and by Benjamin Taliaferro, a grizzled veteran of Morgan's rifle corps, who was to serve in Congress for nearly twoscore years. Robert Williams, of North Carolina, the son of a redoubtable partisan leader, had served as adjutant-general of his State during the war. Thomas Pinckney, of South Carolina, had been aide-decamp to Lincoln and D'Estaing. And Robert Goodloe Harper, of the same State, just now the ardent and soon to become the successful suitor of the daughter of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, could tell of much hard fighting and hard riding when a fifteen-year-old trooper under Greene.

These were not the only men of mark in the House. Winning and courtly Harrison Gray Otis, gifted son of a gifted sire, then had few equals among orators. Samuel W. Dana, of Connecticut, had lately begun a period of congressional service which, first in the House and later in the Senate, was to cover a round quarter-century. Connecticut had not less capable Representatives in Roger Griswold, a Federalist of the Federalists, the peer in eloquence and political sagacity of the strongest men of his time, and in John Cotton Smith, a lawyer and orator of no mean rank, beloved by his associates and respected by his foes. From New York came still youthful Edward Livingston, and from New Jersey stout Aaron Mitchell, whose broad shoulders and brawny arms were wholesome reminders of early labor at the forge and anvil.

Pennsylvania was represented by Robert Wain, Philadelphia's Quaker merchant prince; by sturdy Andrew Gregg, later to become a member of the Senate; and by Albert Gallatin, Swiss by birth but American by choice and adoption, whose strength in debate and wisdom in council were admitted by friend and foe.

Delaware's Representative was James A. Bayard, whose ability had made him at the early age of thirty-four the leader of the Federalists in the House. South Carolina sent the son and namesake of patriot John Rutledge, and prominent in the Virginia delegation was Littleton Tazewell, who, though still under thirty, had already given proof of the impracticability and the extraordinary talent which were to color every stage of his public career.

Virginia also furnished one of the two members of the House most talked about by their fellows. These were John Randolph and Matthew Lyon. Randolph, now in the first year of his quarter-century of Congressional service, had already, by his poetic eloquence, his absolute honesty, and his scathing wit, made himself the Republican leader of the House, a title confirmed a few months later by his appointment as chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means. To member and visitor, he presented an unmistakable figure and one not easily forgotten. Above six feet in height, with long limbs, an ill-proportioned body, and a small, round head, his descent from the Indian maiden Pocahontas appeared in the shock of coarse black hair, which he wore long, parted in the middle, and combed down on either side of his sallow face. His small black eyes, always expressive in their rapid glances, became doubly so in debate, and when fully aroused his " thin, high-toned voice rang through the chamber of the House like the shrill scream of an angry vixen."