WASHINGTON, D.C.

As a city that was planned from scratch to be a great capital, "a city of magnificent distances," Washington was considered to be quite a story and something to see. The city itself was a monument to George Washington, the man most responsible for the city's site and design. On their American tours, the British authors Frances Trollope (in 1832), Charles Dickens (in 1842), and Anthony Trollope (in 1861) made sure to visit the capital and the grave at nearby Mount Vernon of the "great man" behind it. In her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), Frances Trollope (1780–1863) praised the capital above everything else in America while her son Anthony (1815–1882), in North America (1862), deemed it a "failure." The Atlantic Monthly of January 1861 called the capital a "paradise of paradoxes": "the city of magnificent distances but of still more magnificent discrepancies"; a city whose great avenues were unpaved fields of mud, and whose ideal statesmen traded political favors as avidly as they traded bets at the gaming tables. "Blessed with the name of the purest of men, [the city] has the reputation of Sodom" ("Washington City," pp. 1–8). Most embarrassing and obnoxious to many was the fact that slavery was legal in the District of Columbia until 1850 (the cheap labor of slaves had in fact made it possible to build such expensive monumental buildings as the Capitol). William Wells Brown (c. 1814–1884), a leading abolitionist lecturer and writer, dramatized the shameful juxtaposition of slavery in the capital of political freedom in his novel Clotel (1853), the first African American novel. By 1861 the city's exposé of the nation's troubles gained a new dimension as it became the central hospital for the Union army during the Civil War.

Washington was understood as an emblem of the nation, offering proof of the viability or fragility of the American political experiment. Joseph P. Varnum, in an essay that first appeared in Hunts Merchants' Magazine in 1848, argued that as the nation expanded westward so too the capital city's neighborhoods would expand, giving hope that George Washington's ambitious plan would eventually be filled in. As the nation thrived, so did its capital; as it struggled, its capital struggled too. Anthony Trollope arrived in time to see a nation "splitting into pieces" and a capital overrun by carts filled with wounded men. If George Washington could look down upon his capital, filled by soldiers now that the North and the South were "concentrated on the art of killing," how, Trollope asked, would the view "address the city of his hopes?" (pp. 322, 316).

AN IDEAL CITY?

Much Washington, D.C., literature describes Washington as an exceptional and even ideal space. The author Margaret Bayard Smith (1778–1844) was one of the first Washingtonians, moving to the city when it officially became the capital in 1800. Her letters, published in a posthumous collection, The First Forty Years of Washington Society (1906), describe the capital in glowing terms. Smith was the close friend of many of the nation's political elite. During the hotly contested presidential election of 1824, one of the four candidates, William Crawford, played chess with Mrs. Smith while waiting to hear the results of the vote. Smith describes busy days from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., living the drama of the national scene and exercising not insignificant power through the capital's already established custom of doing political business over private suppers. If someone noteworthy was speaking in Congress she made a point to attend, Congress being open, unlike England's Parliament, to ladies. As Smith writes, "Washington possesses a peculiar interest and to an active, reflective, and ambitious mind, has more attractions than any other place in America" (p. 94).

After being shocked by the lack of manners she found in America, Frances Trollope viewed Washington with relief. Here was a city both cosmopolitan and refined; it was the best American city and destined to be an elegant success. Trollope particularly approved of the freedom from commercial life in a city whose main business was conversation: "instead of the busy bustling hustle of men . . . you see very well-dressed personages lounging leisurely up and down Pennsylvania Avenue"; congressmen were paid handsomely to simply sit around and "talk a little" (p. 169). Trollope's and Smith's appreciation of Washington's uniqueness would later be echoed by Henry James, who dubbed the capital the "city of conversation" (The American Scene, p. 341).

Yet idealized Washington images of lofty debate among eloquent, heroic statesmen were often contrasted by the actual congressmen on display. Noting some impressive political performances, Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens spend even more time being shocked by the rough and vulgar behavior of many congressman, their obsessive tobacco chewing most of all. Dickens starts his Washington portrait with withering descriptions of men spitting, expensive carpets soaked, spittoons everywhere and everywhere missed. This view contributed to the popular view of Washington as largely a man's town. Congressional sessions were so short (lasting only two months) that many wives did not accompany their husbands, and this made for the sort of freedom from decorum that might be enjoyed in a frontier town. Frances Trollope was appalled by the general lack of manners, men sprawling, "legs above their heads," swearing, gambling, and of course, spitting (p. 175). Later scholarship has revised this image of antebellum Washington to show that women had a very marked presence in the capital from its beginnings and were a real political force.

CAPITAL OF FREEDOM, CAPITAL OF SLAVERY

Washington had many promoters, but perhaps the most idealistic view of the city was voiced by freedmen. In her memoir Behind the Scenes (1868), Elizabeth Keckley (c. 1818–1907), dressmaker to Mary Todd Lincoln, reports the magnet Washington had become for freedmen. Washington was the mid-century city on a hill, Lincoln's city, the city of Emancipation. Many blacks shared the belief of one woman that "Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln" were "Mister and Missus government" and would take care of them. But as Keckley reports, they received no organized assistance but instead a harsh introduction to "northern" manners and disdain. Forced to live in makeshift camps with no amenities, some complained that slavery was no worse.

That slavery and slave auctions had existed in the nation's capital up until 1850 was perhaps the paradox that received the most comment and complaint. William Wells Brown dramatized the irony of slavery at the center of political freedom in Clotel. The irony begins with the novel's heroine, Clotel, who is the daughter Thomas Jefferson had by one of his slaves. At the novel's climax Clotel makes a mad dash toward freedom from a slave prison in Washington. Brown uses the ironies of the capital's actual landscape to dramatic effect. The prison is the one that existed on Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the White House. Clotel runs to the Potomac River and starts across Long Bridge (which was just below today's Memorial Bridge) toward the Virginia shore and a deep wood where she hopes to hide from her pursuers. The wood Clotel seeks is part of the estate of George Washington's descendant George Washington Custis, whose mansion, Arlington House, still overlooks the capital. For Brown the house also oversees the city's faithfulness to its founder's vision. Just as Clotel believes she will succeed, she sees men on the Virginia side. "True to their Virginian instincts," they respond to her jailers' cry for aid and wait to catch her at the end of the bridge. As Thomas Jefferson loved liberty, so does his slave daughter. She jumps into the river to her death. Brown's factual setting exposes the weakness of George Washington's legacy (Washington freed most of his slaves upon his death) and the shortsightedness of his vision. Clotel's "appalling tragedy" takes place "within plain sight of the President's house and the capital of the Union" (pp. 205–207).

Brown's account revises an earlier version of this tale published as a poem in 1851 by the Washington author Grace Greenwood (Sarah Jane Clarke, 1823–1904), who claimed it was based on an actual event. Brown's scene still more notably revises the famous successful escape of the slave Eliza in Harriet Beecher Stowe's (1811–1896) Uncle Tom's Cabin, serialized in 1851–1852 in the Washington antislavery newspaper the National Era. Clotel runs not from Kentucky to the free state of Ohio, as Eliza does, but from the nation's capital to the slave state of Virginia. Instead of the friendly man who lends Eliza a helping hand on the Ohio shore, Clotel meets only more slave catchers. Eliza's Ohio River becomes the River Jordan, but the Potomac River offers no such passage to freedom. The Long Bridge, which joins the Maryland side of the Potomac to the Virginia side, rather gives physical proof that the nation's union is held together by its support of slavery.

Washington emerges from such accounts as a promise betrayed. Contemplating the capital's paltry fulfillment of its grand design, Anthony Trollope argued that "nothing but disappointment is felt" (p. 305). Many authors treated the city with Dickens's disdain: "To the admirer of cities, [Washington] is a monument raised to a deceased project" (p. 154). Henry Adams (1838–1918) offered his version: "As in 1800 and 1850, so in 1860, the same rude colony camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads" (p. 810). At the heart of such accounts lay Congress, soulless and corrupt, in Dickens's words, "The meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought" (p. 159).

WAR AND REDEMPTION

The Civil War brought the capital's rocky career to a head. Once again the city's physical situation provided all the irony a critic might seek and made the capital an accurate emblem of its beleaguered nation. Due to its proximity to the front, Washington became the hospital headquarters for the Union. As Walt Whitman (1819–1892) wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson, here was "America already brought to Hospital in her fair youth—brought and deposited here in this great whited sepulcher of Washington itself " (Correspondence, p. 69). Whitman served as a nurse in the capital's hospitals and gathered material that he turned into newspaper pieces, poems, and sketches, later published in his collection Specimen Days (1882). For Whitman, Washington provided a revealing, behind-the-scenes view of the war, one that featured the quiet heroism of men not on the battlefield but in the sad and moving hospitals. The capital in crisis became the ultimate test of Whitman's vision of the Union as the fraternal affection possible among the widest range of rugged men. Whitman's romanticized Washington generates an irresistible poetry in the unimaginable scenes that are part of its everyday life—the moonlit stillness of the White House guarded by sentries, the drowsy perseverance of congressmen up all hours in the gaslit chambers of the Capitol, and the "curious" scene at the Patent Office, where, for lack of anyplace else to put them, stricken soldiers were housed in its museum of inventions, the men's sad "cases" wedged between the glass "cases" holding the objects on display. The Patent Office Hospital documents the cold wastefulness of the national leadership—young men sacrificed and displayed in the cold marble halls that Congress built. "Strange" too is the fact that in those very halls, when the men have finally been moved to newly built hospitals, Lincoln would hold his second inaugural ball. Yet Whitman's use of words such as "curious" and "strange" shows the restraint in many of his descriptions of Washington during the war. He does not accuse Lincoln and his party of dancing on the graves of the dead but simply gives the scene its jaw-dropping sense of weird coincidence. Ultimately the ironies of Washington that others found so much fault with served to deepen Whitman's ever-ready faith in the Union, and the loss it required to sustain and redeem itself made it only more profound.

As the nation's internal struggle was registered so fully on the face of its capital, so too the nation's reconstruction was marked in what came to be called the "new Washington." Washington's infamous muddy streets were paved. As the Union now became an established permanent fact, its capital began the long road toward looking less like a precarious settlement. Many of its improvements were achieved, however, through the corrupt practices of its new mayor, "Boss Shepherd." In a few years, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner would publish The Gilded Age (1873), their scathing satire of the capital's sublime mixture of idealism and corruption, and argue thus that the new Washington was not very different from the old.

See alsoCivil War; Clotel;Democracy; English Literature; Female Authorship; Slavery; Tourism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. 1907. In Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education, edited by Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels. New York: Library of America, 1983.

Brown, William Wells. Clotel. 1853. Edited by Robert S. Levine. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000.

Dickens, Charles. American Notes. 1842. New York: Modern Library, 1996. James, Henry. The American Scene. 1907. New York: Scribners, 1946.

Keckley, Elizabeth, Behind the Scenes. 1868. Edited by Frances Smith Foster. Chicago: Donnelley and Sons, 1998.

Smith, Margaret Bayard. The First Forty Years of WashingtonSociety. 1906. Edited by Gailard Hunt. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965.

Trollope, Anthony. North America. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1862.

Trollope, Frances. Domestic Manners of the Americans. 1832. Barre, Mass. Imprint Society, 1969.

Twain, Mark, and Charles Dudley Warner. The Gilded Age. 1873. New York: Meridian, 1994.

Varnum, Joseph B., Jr. The Seat of Government of the UnitedStates of America. New York: Press of Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, 1848.

"Washington City." Atlantic Monthly (January 1861): 1–8.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence of Walt Whitman. Vol. 1. Edited by Edwin Haviland Miller. New York: New York University Press, 1961.

Whitman, Walt. Memoranda during the War [&] Death ofAbraham Lincoln. 1875. Facsimile edition with an introduction by Roy P. Basler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962.

Whitman, Walt. Specimen Days. 1882. In Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. Edited by Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1982.

Secondary Works

Allgor, Catherine. Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies ofWashington Help Build a City and a Government. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000.

Carson, Barbara. Ambitious Appetites: Dining, Behavior, andPatterns of Consumption in Federal Washington. Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects, 1990.

Earman, Cynthia D. "Remembering the Ladies: Women, Etiquette, and Diversions in Washington City, 1800–1814." Washington History (spring–summer 2000): 102–117.

Kinney, Katherine. "Making Capital: War, Labor, and Whitman in Washington, D.C." In Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies, edited by Betsy Erkkila and Jay Grossman, pp. 174–189. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Sarah Luria