Volume III Part 1 (2/2)

My thanks are also owing to the staff of The Riverside Press, and particularly to Mr. Lanius D. Evans, to whose keen interest and watchful care in the production of this work I am indebted for much of whatever exact.i.tude it may possess.

The ma.n.u.script sources have been acknowledged, in all instances, in the footnotes where references to them have been made, except in the case of the letters of Marshall to his relatives, for which I again thank those descendants and connections of the Chief Justice named in the preface to Volumes One and Two. The Hopkinson ma.n.u.scripts are in the possession of Mr. Edward Hopkinson of Philadelphia, to whom I am indebted for the privilege of inspecting this valuable source and for furnis.h.i.+ng me with copies of important letters.

In preparing these volumes, Mr. A. P. C. Griffin, a.s.sistant Librarian, and Mr. John Clement Fitzpatrick, of the Ma.n.u.script Division of the Library of Congress, have been even more obliging, if possible, than they were in the preparation of the first part of this work. The officers and their a.s.sistants of the Boston Public Library, the Boston Athenaeum, the Ma.s.sachusetts State Library, the Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society, the Pennsylvania Historical Society, the Virginia State Library, the Indiana State Library, and the Indianapolis City Library, have a.s.sisted whole-heartedly in the performance of my labors; and I am glad of the opportunity to thank all of them for their interest and help.

ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE

CHAPTER I

DEMOCRACY: JUDICIARY

Rigorous law is often rigorous injustice. (Terence.)

The Federalists have retired into the Judiciary as a stronghold, and from that battery all the works of republicanism are to be battered down. (Jefferson.)

There will be neither justice nor stability in any system, if some material parts of it are not independent of popular control. (George Cabot.)

A strange sight met the eye of the traveler who, aboard one of the little river sailboats of the time, reached the stretches of the sleepy Potomac separating Alexandria and Georgetown. A wide swamp extended inland from a modest hill on the east to a still lower elevation of land about a mile to the west.[1] Between the river and mora.s.s a long flat tract bore clumps of great trees, mostly tulip poplars, giving, when seen from a distance, the appearance of ”a fine park.”[2]

Upon the hill stood a partly constructed white stone building, mammoth in plan. The slight elevation north of the wide slough was the site of an apparently finished edifice of the same material, n.o.ble in its dimensions and with beautiful, simple lines,[3] but ”surrounded with a rough rail fence 5 or 6 feet high unfit for a decent barnyard.”[4] From the river nothing could be seen beyond the groves near the banks of the stream except the two great buildings and the splendid trees which thickened into a seemingly dense forest upon the higher ground to the northward.[5]

On landing and making one's way through the underbrush to the foot of the eastern hill, and up the gullies that seamed its sides thick with trees and tangled wild grapevines,[6] one finally reached the immense unfinished structure that attracted attention from the river. Upon its walls laborers were languidly at work.

Cl.u.s.tered around it were fifteen or sixteen wooden houses. Seven or eight of these were boarding-houses, each having as many as ten or a dozen rooms all told. The others were little affairs of rough lumber, some of them hardly better than shanties. One was a tailor shop; in another a shoemaker plied his trade; a third contained a printer with his hand press and types, while a washerwoman occupied another; and in the others there was a grocery shop, a pamphlets-and-stationery shop, a little dry-goods shop, and an oyster shop. No other human habitation of any kind appeared for three quarters of a mile.[7]

A broad and perfectly straight clearing had been made across the swamp between the eastern hill and the big white house more than a mile away to the westward. In the middle of this long opening ran a roadway, full of stumps, broken by deep mud holes in the rainy season, and almost equally deep with dust when the days were dry. On either border was a path or ”walk” made firm at places by pieces of stone; though even this ”extended but a little way.” Alder bushes grew in the unused s.p.a.ces of this thoroughfare, and in the depressions stagnant water stood in malarial pools, breeding myriads of mosquitoes. A sluggish stream meandered across this avenue and broadened into the marsh.[8]

A few small houses, some of brick and some of wood, stood on the edge of this long, broad embryo street. Near the large stone building at its western end were four or five structures of red brick, looking much like ungainly warehouses. Farther westward on the Potomac hills was a small but pretentious town with its many capacious brick and stone residences, some of them excellent in their architecture and erected solidly by skilled workmen.[9]

Other openings in the forest had been cut at various places in the wide area east of the main highway that connected the two princ.i.p.al structures already described. Along these forest avenues were scattered houses of various materials, some finished and some in the process of erection.[10] Here and there unsightly gravel pits and an occasional brick kiln added to the raw unloveliness of the whole.

Such was the City of Was.h.i.+ngton, with Georgetown near by, when Thomas Jefferson became President and John Marshall Chief Justice of the United States--the Capitol, Pennsylvania Avenue, the ”Executive Mansion” or ”President's Palace,” the department buildings near it, the residences, shops, hostelries, and streets. It was a picture of sprawling aimlessness, confusion, inconvenience, and utter discomfort.

When considering the events that took place in the National Capital as narrated in these volumes,--the debates in Congress, the proclamations of Presidents, the opinions of judges, the intrigues of politicians,--when witnessing the scenes in which Marshall and Jefferson and Randolph and Burr and Pinckney and Webster were actors, we must think of Was.h.i.+ngton as a dismal place, where few and unattractive houses were scattered along muddy openings in the forests.

There was on paper a harmonious plan of a splendid city, but the realization of that plan had scarcely begun. As a situation for living, the Capital of the new Nation was, declared Gallatin, a ”hateful place.”[11] Most of the houses were ”small miserable huts” which, as Wolcott informed his wife, ”present an awful contrast to the public buildings.”[12]

Aside from an increase in the number of residences and shops, the ”Federal City” remained in this state for many years. ”The _Chuck_ holes were not _bad_,” wrote Otis of a journey out of Was.h.i.+ngton in 1815; ”that is to say they were none of them much deeper than the Hubs of the hinder wheels. They were however exceedingly frequent.”[13]

Pennsylvania Avenue was, at this time, merely a stretch of ”yellow, tenacious mud,”[14] or dust so deep and fine that, when stirred by the wind, it made near-by objects invisible.[15] And so this street remained for decades. Long after the National Government was removed to Was.h.i.+ngton, the carriage of a diplomat became mired up to the axles in the sticky clay within four blocks of the President's residence and its occupant had to abandon the vehicle.

John Quincy Adams records in his diary, April 4, 1818, that on returning from a dinner the street was in such condition that ”our carriage in coming for us ... was overset, the harness broken. We got home with difficulty, twice being on the point of oversetting, and at the Treasury Office corner we were both obliged to get out ... in the mud.... It was a mercy that we all got home with whole bones.”[16]

Fever and other malarial ills were universal at certain seasons of the year.[17] ”No one, from the North or from the high country of the South, can pa.s.s the months of August and September there without intermittent or bilious fever,” records King in 1803.[18] Provisions were scarce and Alexandria, across the river, was the princ.i.p.al source of supplies.[19]

”My G.o.d! What have I done to reside in such a city,” exclaimed a French diplomat.[20] Some months after the Chase impeachment[21] Senator Plumer described Was.h.i.+ngton as ”a little village in the midst of the woods.”[22] ”Here I am in the wilderness of Was.h.i.+ngton,” wrote Joseph Story in 1808.[23]

Except a small Catholic chapel there was only one church building in the entire city, and this tiny wooden sanctuary was attended by a congregation which seldom exceeded twenty persons.[24] This absence of churches was entirely in keeping with the inclination of people of fas.h.i.+on. The first Republican administration came, testifies Winfield Scott, in ”the spring tide of infidelity.... At school and college, most bright boys, of that day, affected to regard religion as base superst.i.tion or gross hypocricy.”[25]

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