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Chapter Eight “A Strong but Judicious Enemy to Slavery”: Congressman Lincoln (1847-1849) Lincoln's Entire Public Service O

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Chapter Eight “A Strong but Judicious Enemy to Slavery”: Congressman Lincoln (1847-1849) Lincoln's Entire Public Service O Chapter Eight “A Strong but Judicious Enemy to Slavery”: Congressman Lincoln (1847-1849) Lincoln’s entire public service on the national level before his election as president was a single term in the U. S. House. Though he had little chance to distinguish himself there, his experience proved a useful education in dealing with Congress and patronage. WASHINGTON, D.C. Arriving in Washington on December 2, 1847, the Lincolns found themselves in a “dark, narrow, unsightly” train depot, a building “literally buried in and surrounded with mud and filth of the most offensive kind.”1 A British traveler said he could scarcely imagine a “more miserable station.”2 Emerging from this “mere shed, of slight construction, designed for temporary use” which was considered “a disgrace” to the railroad company as well as “the city that tolerates it,”3 they beheld an “an ill-contrived, 1 Saturday Evening News (Washington), 14 August 1847. 2 Alexander MacKay, The Western World, or, Travels in the United States in 1846-47 (3 vols.; London: Richard Bentley, 1850), 1:162. 3 Letter by “Mercer,” n.d., Washington National Intelligencer, 16 November 1846. The author of this letter thought that the station was “in every respect bad: it is cramped in space, unsightly in appearance, inconvenient in its position, and ill adapted to minister to the comfort of travellers in the entire character of its arrangements.” Cf. Wilhelmus Bogart Bryan, A History of the National Capital from Its Foundation through the Period of the Adoption of the Organic Act (2 vols.; New York: Macmillan, 1914-16), 2:357. 750 Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Vol. 1, Chapter 8 ill-arranged, rambling, scrambling village” of approximately 40,000 souls.4 Charles Dickens described it as “the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva,” a “City of Magnificent Intentions,” with “spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, miles-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete.”5 Another eminent British novelist, Anthony Trollope, also found the capital unimpressive. In 1862, he wrote: “Of all places that I know it is the most ungainly,” the “most unsatisfactory,” and “the most presumptuous in its pretensions. There is a map of Washington accurately laid down; and taking that map with him in his journeyings a man may lose himself in the streets . as one does . in the deserts of the Holy Land, between Emmaus and Arimathea.” Trollope lamented that “no one knows where the places are, or is sure of their existence, and then between their presumed localities the country is wild, trackless, unbridged, uninhabited and desolate.” Trollope described a walk along one of the city’s main thoroughfares, Massachusetts Avenue: “Tucking your trousers up to your knees you will wade through the bogs, you will lose yourself among rude hillocks, you will be out of the reach of humanity.”6 Yet another Briton, Alexander MacKay, thought that “at best, Washington is but a small town, a fourth-rate community.”7 The Chevalier de Bacourt disparaged the “miserable, desolate look” of 4 Mrs. Winfield Scott, speaking in 1855, quoted in Marian Gouverneur, As I Remember: Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century (New York: D. Appleton, 1911), 170. A general description of the capital and its buildings can be found in George Watterston, New Guide to Washington (Washington: Robert Farnham, 1847-48). Also located within the District of Columbia was Georgetown, with a population of approximately 850. 5 Dickens, American Notes (1842; New York: Modern Library, 1996), 149, 154. 6 Anthony Trollope, North America, ed. Donald Smalley and Allen Booth (1862; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), 305. 7 MacKay, Western World, 1:177. 751 Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Vol. 1, Chapter 8 “the so-called city of Washington,” which in his view was “neither city nor village” but rather “a collection of houses put anywhere and everywhere with no regularity.”8 It enjoyed “the reputation of being by all odds the most slovenly, ill-built, forlorn seat of government in any civilized country.”9 Though Europeans held the American capital in low esteem, it appeared more splendid to Midwesterners like the Lincolns, despite its roaming livestock, noisome sewer system, and unpaved, unlit, garbage-strewn streets. In 1849, an Illinoisan praised Washington as “a great city as far as curiosity is concerned.” The “public buildings are superb,” he said, adding that “there is many now under the course of erection that will throw those built a few years ago entirely in the shade as regards architecture.” He especially admired the capitol, which afforded a view he considered “one of the finest that I have ever beheld,” for “you stand upon the western portico and far as the eye can reach is but one mass of buildings while away to the right is the beautiful residences of oppulent citizens with their parks and yards beautifully embellished, whilst to the left rolls the majestic potomac its waters covered with vessels conveying merchandise.”10 The main thoroughfare, Pennsylvania Avenue, which was paved with uneven cobblestones that made carriage rides disconcertingly bumpy, impressed Lincoln’s Illinois friend Jesse W. Fell, who described it in 1841: “Casting my eyes into the spacious avenue that fronts the room in which I am writing and what a buisey scene is ther[e] presented. – Thousands 8 Adolphe Fourier de Bacourt to an unidentified correspondent, Washington, [July 1840], in Bacourt, Souvenirs of a Diplomat: Private Letters from America during the Administrations of Presidents Van Buren, Harrison, and Tyler (New York: Holt, 1885), 72. 9 Charles Moore, chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, “Lincoln in Washington,” talk delivered in Washington, reproduced in an unidentified clipping, [ca. 1935], Lincoln Museum, Fort Wayne, Indiana. 10 Samuel D. Boyd to “dear cousin,” Martinsburg, [Illinois], 8 August 1849, Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield. See also a similar letter by Mrs. Herediah Horsford, [ca. December 1847?] in Paul Findley, A. Lincoln: The Crucible of Congress (New York: Crown, 1979), 95. 752 Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Vol. 1, Chapter 8 of persons of every age and sex – of every character and complexion – and from almost every part of the world – constitute the living, moving mass. Some brought here on business – some sent here by the sovereign people – some in search of office – some for pleasure – some for mischief – and all of them busily intent on the prosecution of their respective objects, make up this great, bustling bab[b]le.”11 Another Midwesterner, Ohio Senator Benjamin F. Wade, was less enchanted with Washington. An antislavery Radical who was to denounce Lincoln during the Civil War for his tardiness in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Wade found the city’s large black population objectionable.12 He observed upon arriving at the capital in 1851: “On the whole, this is a mean God forsaken Nigger rid[d]en place. The Niggers are certainly the most intelligent part of the population but the Nigger smell I cannot bear, yet it is in on and about every thing you see.” Wade lamented that the food was “cooked by Niggers, until I can smell & taste the Nigger.”13 In 1854, the German-born antislavery champion Carl Schurz reported that it “is a strange-looking city. Imagine a broad street lined on both sides with hotels and shops, then wide stretches of open country and again streets interrupted by vacant lots; groups of houses scattered about in apparent disorder, with here and there a marble palace which contains one of the Government Departments. This strange jumble leaves the spectator in doubt whether all this grandeur is in a state of development or is already approaching decay.”14 He thought that the capital “had 11 Jesse W. Fell to Hester V. Fell, Washington, 27 June 1841, Fell Papers, Library of Congress. 12 In 1850, 8158 free blacks and 2113 slaves lived in Washington. Constance M. Green, Washington (2 vols.; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962-63), 1:183. 13 Wade to his wife, Washington, 29 December 1851, Wade Papers, Library of Congress. See Hans L. Trefousse, “Ben Wade and the Negro,” Ohio Historical Quarterly 68 (1959): 161-76. 14 Carl Schurz to his wife, Washington, 15 March 1854, Frederic Bancroft, ed., Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz (6 vols.; New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1913), 1:9. 753 Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Vol. 1, Chapter 8 throughout a slouchy, unenterprising, unprogressive appearance.” 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 empty dreariness.” Few residences “had the appearance of refined, elegant, and comfortable homes. The streets, ill-paved, if paved at all, were constantly covered with mud or dust.” Along those streets “geese, chickens, pigs, and cows had still a scarcely disputed right of way.”15 (One day in 1858, while strolling about the city, Senator John P. Hale was sent sprawling to the pavement by “a great, dirty pig.”)16 For the political elite, social life in Washington was “a strange jumble of magnificence and squalor.” Mary Elizabeth Wilson Sherwood, daughter of a New Hampshire congressman and a social leader at the capital, found dinner parties “handsome and very social, the talk delightful,” but deplored the conduct of congressmen from the Southwest who “got fearfully drunk at dinners.”17 Decades later, Mrs. Sherwood exclaimed: “How primitive Washington was in those days!” The “small, straggling city, with very muddy streets,” she wrote, was “cold and dreary in winter then; the houses were insufficiently heated, the hotels abominable.” But in a capital noted for “the proud 15 Carl Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (3 vols.; New York: McClure, 1907-8), 2:20.
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