American Notes for General Circulation

by Dickens, Chales

  and of his own seeking; they requested him to take notice that the

  officer in attendance had orders to release him at any hour of the

  day or night, when he might knock upon his door for that purpose;

  but desired him to understand, that once going out, he would not be

  admitted any more. These conditions agreed upon, and he still

  remaining in the same mind, he was conducted to the prison, and

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  shut up in one of the cells.

  In this cell, the man, who had not the firmness to leave a glass of

  liquor standing untasted on a table before him - in this cell, in

  solitary confinement, and working every day at his trade of

  shoemaking, this man remained nearly two years. His health

  beginning to fail at the expiration of that time, the surgeon

  recommended that he should work occasionally in the garden; and as

  he liked the notion very much, he went about this new occupation

  with great cheerfulness.

  He was digging here, one summer day, very industriously, when the

  wicket in the outer gate chanced to be left open: showing, beyond,

  the well-remembered dusty road and sunburnt fields. The way was as

  free to him as to any man living, but he no sooner raised his head

  and caught sight of it, all shining in the light, than, with the

  involuntary instinct of a prisoner, he cast away his spade,

  scampered off as fast as his legs would carry him, and never once

  looked back.

  CHAPTER VIII - WASHINGTON. THE LEGISLATURE. AND THE PRESIDENT'S

  HOUSE

  WE left Philadelphia by steamboat, at six o'clock one very cold

  morning, and turned our faces towards Washington.

  In the course of this day's journey, as on subsequent occasions, we

  encountered some Englishmen (small farmers, perhaps, or country

  publicans at home) who were settled in America, and were travelling

  on their own affairs. Of all grades and kinds of men that jostle

  one in the public conveyances of the States, these are often the

  most intolerable and the most insufferable companions. United to

  every disagreeable characteristic that the worst kind of American

  travellers possess, these countrymen of ours display an amount of

  insolent conceit and cool assumption of superiority, quite

  monstrous to behold. In the coarse familiarity of their approach,

  and the effrontery of their inquisitiveness (which they are in

  great haste to assert, as if they panted to revenge themselves upon

  the decent old restraints of home), they surpass any native

  specimens that came within my range of observation: and I often

  grew so patriotic when I saw and heard them, that I would

  cheerfully have submitted to a reasonable fine, if I could have

  given any other country in the whole world, the honour of claiming

  them for its children.

  As Washington may be called the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured

  saliva, the time is come when I must confess, without any disguise,

  that the prevalence of those two odious practices of chewing and

  expectorating began about this time to be anything but agreeable,

  and soon became most offensive and sickening. In all the public

  places of America, this filthy custom is recognised. In the courts

  of law, the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his,

  and the prisoner his; while the jurymen and spectators are provided

  for, as so many men who in the course of nature must desire to spit

  incessantly. In the hospitals, the students of medicine are

  requested, by notices upon the wall, to eject their tobacco juice

  into the boxes provided for that purpose, and not to discolour the

  stairs. In public buildings, visitors are implored, through the

  same agency, to squirt the essence of their quids, or 'plugs,' as I

  have heard them called by gentlemen learned in this kind of

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  sweetmeat, into the national spittoons, and not about the bases of

  the marble columns. But in some parts, this custom is inseparably

  mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the

  transactions of social life. The stranger, who follows in the

  track I took myself, will find it in its full bloom and glory,

  luxuriant in all its alarming recklessness, at Washington. And let

  him not persuade himself (as I once did, to my shame) that previous

  tourists have exaggerated its extent. The thing itself is an

  exaggeration of nastiness, which cannot be outdone.

  On board this steamboat, there were two young gentlemen, with

  shirt-collars reversed as usual, and armed with very big walkingsticks;

  who planted two seats in the middle of the deck, at a

  distance of some four paces apart; took out their tobacco-boxes;

  and sat down opposite each other, to chew. In less than a quarter

  of an hour's time, these hopeful youths had shed about them on the

  clean boards, a copious shower of yellow rain; clearing, by that

  means, a kind of magic circle, within whose limits no intruders

  dared to come, and which they never failed to refresh and rerefresh

  before a spot was dry. This being before breakfast, rather

  disposed me, I confess, to nausea; but looking attentively at one

  of the expectorators, I plainly saw that he was young in chewing,

  and felt inwardly uneasy, himself. A glow of delight came over me

  at this discovery; and as I marked his face turn paler and paler,

  and saw the ball of tobacco in his left cheek, quiver with his

  suppressed agony, while yet he spat, and chewed, and spat again, in

  emulation of his older friend, I could have fallen on his neck and

  implored him to go on for hours.

  We all sat down to a comfortable breakfast in the cabin below,

  where there was no more hurry or confusion than at such a meal in

  England, and where there was certainly greater politeness exhibited

  than at most of our stage-coach banquets. At about nine o'clock we

  arrived at the railroad station, and went on by the cars. At noon

  we turned out again, to cross a wide river in another steamboat;

  landed at a continuation of the railroad on the opposite shore; and

  went on by other cars; in which, in the course of the next hour or

  so, we crossed by wooden bridges, each a mile in length, two

  creeks, called respectively Great and Little Gunpowder. The water

  in both was blackened with flights of canvas-backed ducks, which

  are most delicious eating, and abound hereabouts at that season of

  the year.

  These bridges are of wood, have no parapet, and are only just wide

  enough for the passage of the trains; which, in the event of the

  smallest accident, wound inevitably be plunged into the river.

  They are startling contrivances, and are most agreeable when

  passed.

  We stopped to dine at Baltimore, and being now in Maryland, were

  waited on, for the first time, by slaves. The sensation of

  exacting any service from human creatures who are bought and sold,

  and being, for the time, a party as it were to their condition, is

  not an enviable one. T
he institution exists, perhaps, in its least

  repulsive and most mitigated form in such a town as this; but it IS

  slavery; and though I was, with respect to it, an innocent man, its

  presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach.

  After dinner, we went down to the railroad again, and took our

  seats in the cars for Washington. Being rather early, those men

  and boys who happened to have nothing particular to do, and were

  curious in foreigners, came (according to custom) round the

  carriage in which I sat; let down all the windows; thrust in their

  heads and shoulders; hooked themselves on conveniently, by their

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  elbows; and fell to comparing notes on the subject of my personal

  appearance, with as much indifference as if I were a stuffed

  figure. I never gained so much uncompromising information with

  reference to my own nose and eyes, and various impressions wrought

  by my mouth and chin on different minds, and how my head looks when

  it is viewed from behind, as on these occasions. Some gentlemen

  were only satisfied by exercising their sense of touch; and the

  boys (who are surprisingly precocious in America) were seldom

  satisfied, even by that, but would return to the charge over and

  over again. Many a budding president has walked into my room with

  his cap on his head and his hands in his pockets, and stared at me

  for two whole hours: occasionally refreshing himself with a tweak

  of his nose, or a draught from the water-jug; or by walking to the

  windows and inviting other boys in the street below, to come up and

  do likewise: crying, 'Here he is!' 'Come on!' 'Bring all your

  brothers!' with other hospitable entreaties of that nature.

  We reached Washington at about half-past six that evening, and had

  upon the way a beautiful view of the Capitol, which is a fine

  building of the Corinthian order, placed upon a noble and

  commanding eminence. Arrived at the hotel; I saw no more of the

  place that night; being very tired, and glad to get to bed.

  Breakfast over next morning, I walk about the streets for an hour

  or two, and, coming home, throw up the window in the front and

  back, and look out. Here is Washington, fresh in my mind and under

  my eye.

  Take the worst parts of the City Road and Pentonville, or the

  straggling outskirts of Paris, where the houses are smallest,

  preserving all their oddities, but especially the small shops and

  dwellings, occupied in Pentonville (but not in Washington) by

  furniture-brokers, keepers of poor eating-houses, and fanciers of

  birds. Burn the whole down; build it up again in wood and plaster;

  widen it a little; throw in part of St. John's Wood; put green

  blinds outside all the private houses, with a red curtain and a

  white one in every window; plough up all the roads; plant a great

  deal of coarse turf in every place where it ought NOT to be; erect

  three handsome buildings in stone and marble, anywhere, but the

  more entirely out of everybody's way the better; call one the Post

  Office; one the Patent Office, and one the Treasury; make it

  scorching hot in the morning, and freezing cold in the afternoon,

  with an occasional tornado of wind and dust; leave a brick-field

  without the bricks, in all central places where a street may

  naturally be expected: and that's Washington.

  The hotel in which we live, is a long row of small houses fronting

  on the street, and opening at the back upon a common yard, in which

  hangs a great triangle. Whenever a servant is wanted, somebody

  beats on this triangle from one stroke up to seven, according to

  the number of the house in which his presence is required; and as

  all the servants are always being wanted, and none of them ever

  come, this enlivening engine is in full performance the whole day

  through. Clothes are drying in the same yard; female slaves, with

  cotton handkerchiefs twisted round their heads are running to and

  fro on the hotel business; black waiters cross and recross with

  dishes in their hands; two great dogs are playing upon a mound of

  loose bricks in the centre of the little square; a pig is turning

  up his stomach to the sun, and grunting 'that's comfortable!'; and

  neither the men, nor the women, nor the dogs, nor the pig, nor any

  created creature, takes the smallest notice of the triangle, which

  is tingling madly all the time.

  I walk to the front window, and look across the road upon a long,

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  straggling row of houses, one story high, terminating, nearly

  opposite, but a little to the left, in a melancholy piece of waste

  ground with frowzy grass, which looks like a small piece of country

  that has taken to drinking, and has quite lost itself. Standing

  anyhow and all wrong, upon this open space, like something meteoric

  that has fallen down from the moon, is an odd, lop-sided, one-eyed

  kind of wooden building, that looks like a church, with a flagstaff

  as long as itself sticking out of a steeple something larger

  than a tea-chest. Under the window is a small stand of coaches,

  whose slave-drivers are sunning themselves on the steps of our

  door, and talking idly together. The three most obtrusive houses

  near at hand are the three meanest. On one - a shop, which never

  has anything in the window, and never has the door open - is

  painted in large characters, 'THE CITY LUNCH.' At another, which

  looks like a backway to somewhere else, but is an independent

  building in itself, oysters are procurable in every style. At the

  third, which is a very, very little tailor's shop, pants are fixed

  to order; or in other words, pantaloons are made to measure. And

  that is our street in Washington.

  It is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances, but it

  might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent

  Intentions; for it is only on taking a bird's-eye view of it from

  the top of the Capitol, that one can at all comprehend the vast

  designs of its projector, an aspiring Frenchman. Spacious avenues,

  that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that

  only want houses, roads and inhabitants; public buildings that need

  but a public to be complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares,

  which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament - are its leading

  features. One might fancy the season over, and most of the houses

  gone out of town for ever with their masters. To the admirers of

  cities it is a Barmecide Feast: a pleasant field for the

  imagination to rove in; a monument raised to a deceased project,

  with not even a legible inscription to record its departed

  greatness.

  Such as it is, it is likely to remain. It was originally chosen

  for the seat of Government, as a means of averting the conflicting

  jealousies and interests of the different States; and very

  probably, too, as being remote from mobs: a consideration not to

  be slighted, even in America. It has no trade or c
ommerce of its

  own: having little or no population beyond the President and his

  establishment; the members of the legislature who reside there

  during the session; the Government clerks and officers employed in

  the various departments; the keepers of the hotels and boardinghouses;

  and the tradesmen who supply their tables. It is very

  unhealthy. Few people would live in Washington, I take it, who

  were not obliged to reside there; and the tides of emigration and

  speculation, those rapid and regardless currents, are little likely

  to flow at any time towards such dull and sluggish water.

  The principal features of the Capitol, are, of course, the two

  houses of Assembly. But there is, besides, in the centre of the

  building, a fine rotunda, ninety-six feet in diameter, and ninetysix

  high, whose circular wall is divided into compartments,

  ornamented by historical pictures. Four of these have for their

  subjects prominent events in the revolutionary struggle. They were

  painted by Colonel Trumbull, himself a member of Washington's staff

  at the time of their occurrence; from which circumstance they

  derive a peculiar interest of their own. In this same hall Mr.

  Greenough's large statue of Washington has been lately placed. It

  has great merits of course, but it struck me as being rather

  strained and violent for its subject. I could wish, however, to

  have seen it in a better light than it can ever be viewed in, where

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  it stands.

  There is a very pleasant and commodious library in the Capitol; and

  from a balcony in front, the bird's-eye view, of which I have just

  spoken, may be had, together with a beautiful prospect of the

  adjacent country. In one of the ornamented portions of the

  building, there is a figure of Justice; whereunto the Guide Book

  says, 'the artist at first contemplated giving more of nudity, but

  he was warned that the public sentiment in this country would not

  admit of it, and in his caution he has gone, perhaps, into the

  opposite extreme.' Poor Justice! she has been made to wear much

  stranger garments in America than those she pines in, in the

  Capitol. Let us hope that she has changed her dress-maker since

  they were fashioned, and that the public sentiment of the country

  did not cut out the clothes she hides her lovely figure in, just