Our civil war would have been three campaigns shorter—­Burnside’s, Hooker’s, and the stupid massacre of Pope—­to say nothing of the saving of untold treasure, had the political authorities abandoned a capital which must be defended for a secure seat like New York or Philadelphia.  The sagacious Lincoln, whose action in army matters was paralyzed by cliques, in the end saw through sham with an inspired clarity of vision, and proposed the measure, but the backwoods Mazarin, Seward, prepared such voluminous “considerations” in opposition that the good-natured President withdrew his suggestion, and, as a consequence, the dismal Ilium on the Potomac became the bone of a four years’ contention, whose vicissitudes exceed the incidents of the Iliad.  Great armies, created by an inspired commander, were wasted upon the defense of a capital that no one would have lamented had it been again burned, and of which to-day there is scarcely a remnant, save in the public buildings and the topographical charts.  A new race entered the sleepy city.  The astute, far-seeing Yankee divined the possibilities of the future, where the indolent, sentimental Southerner had never taken thought of a nation’s growth and a people’s pride!  The thrifty and shifty patriots sent from the North at once took a stake in the city, and thenceforward there was growth, if not grace, in the capital.

Lincoln’s Washington was to the capital of to-day what the Rome of Numa was to the imperial city of Augustus.  Never, in its best days, more imposing than a wild Western metropolis of to-day, the sudden inrush of armies and the wherewithal to supply and house them, soon gave the vast spaces laid out for the capital the uncouthness and incompleteness of an exaggerated mining town or series of towns.  Contrasted even with its rival on the James, Washington was raw, chaotic, squalid.

Long tenure of estates and little change in the people had given Richmond the venerableness we associate with age.  Many of her picturesque seven hills were transformed into blooming fields or umbrageous groves, under which vast villa-like edifices clustered in Grecian repose.  Save in the bustling main streets none of the edifices were new or raw, or wholly unlovely in design or fabric.  In Washington nothing of this could be seen.  Staring brick walls, buildings of unequal height and fatiguingly ugly designs, uprose here and there in morasses of mud that were meant for streets.  Disproportionate outline, sharp conjunctures of affluence and squalor, accented the disheartening hideousness of the scene.

But upon this uncouth stage a great drama was going on; great figures were in action; momentous events were hourly taking form and consequence; men, and women at their best and worst were working out the awful ends of Fate.  In the large mansion yonder, the wisest, greatest, simplest of mankind—­by times Diogenes and Cromwell, Lafayette and Robespierre was, in jest and joke, mirth and sadness, working out his own and a people’s sublime destiny.  It was to this curiously unequal personage that Mrs. Sprague, after fruitless pleading with her husband’s friends, came finally to secure action on behalf of her son.  There was little of the ceremonial needed to gain access to the Chief Magistrate which is now the fashion.