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But far more was my political education furthered by a visit to the city of Washington in the early spring of 1854. The seeming apathy of the public conscience concerning the slavery question was at last broken by the introduction of Senator Douglas's Nebraska Bill, which was to overrule the Missouri Compromise and to open all the national Territories to the ingress of the "peculiar institution." A sudden tremor shook the political atmosphere. While I could not take any interest in the perfunctory . . . [party] politics of the day, the slavery question, with all its social, political, and economic bearings, stirred me at once, and deeply. I could not resist the desire to go to Washington and witness the struggle in Congress. . . . My first impressions of the political capital of the great American Republic were rather dismal. Washington looked at that period like a big, sprawling village, consisting of scattered groups of houses which were overtopped by a few public buildings-the Capitol, only what is now the central part was occupied, as the two great wings in which the Senate and the House of Representatives now sit were still in process of construction; the Treasury, the two wings of which were still lacking; the White House; and the Patent Office, which also harbored the Department of the Interior. The departments of State, of War, and of the Navy were quartered in small, very insignificant-looking houses which might have been the dwellings of some well-to-do shopkeepers who did not care for show. There was not one solidly built-up street in the whole city-scarcely a block without gaps of dreary emptiness. The houses were not yet numbered. The way there were designated was by calling them "the first of the five" or the "fifth of the seven" on Pennsylvania Avenue, or on Seventh Street, as the case might be. Pennsylvania Avenue, not far from the Capitol, was crossed by a brook called Goosecreek, alias "the Tiber," which was spanned by a wooden bridge; and I was told-perhaps falsely-that congressmen in a fuddled state, going home in the dark after an animated night-session, would sometimes miss the bridge and fall into the water, to be fished out with difficulty by the sergeants-at-arms and their assistants. The hotel at which I stopped, the "National," [located on the northeast corner of 6th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW,] the same in which Henry Clay had died less than two years before, was dingy beyond description, and there were hardly half a dozen residences, if as many, in the whole town, that had the appearance of refined, elegant , and comfortable homes. The streets, ill-paved, if paved at all, were constantly covered with mud or dust. But very few of the members of congress "kept house." Most of them took their meals in "messes," having clubbed together for that purpose. Washington was called "the city of magnificent distances." But there was nothing at the ends of those distances, and, excepting the few public buildings, very little that was in any way interesting or pleasing. In many of the streets, geese, chickens, pigs, and cows had still a scarcely disputed right of way. The city had throughout a slouchy, unenterprising, unprogressive appearance, giving extremely little promise of becoming the beautiful capital it now is. -Carl Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz, Volume Two: 1852-1863, New York: The McClure Company, 1907, pp. 19-21. |
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