As leisure was possible to me, and because of Dorothy’s somewhat frail health, we decided to give up the Chicago house this winter and spend the season in Washington.  We would take Mother Clayton, of course, and Mammy and Jenny.  I would thus have the chance to watch the contests in Congress in which I was so profoundly interested.  I wished to witness Douglas’ part in these great affairs.  Some of the old giants were still there:  Calhoun, Webster.  How would Douglas face these great men?  Above all, the shreds of a decaying past were stretching themselves forward to enter the texture of the new weaving.  How would the two pieces be connected?  Would it be a patchwork?

Douglas had come to me offering an appointment in Illinois.  When I declined this, he suggested a consulship on the continent, or in London.  But I could not see my way clear to leave America.  I had too many interests now, and I wished to see the unfolding of events here.

CHAPTER XXXVII

We found Washington much as Dickens had described it seven years before.  The avenues were broad.  They began in great open spaces and faded into commons equally unbounded.  They seemed to lead nowhere.  There were numerous streets without houses.  There were public buildings without a public.  There were thoroughfares that had no markings but ornaments.  The residences had green blinds and red and white curtains at the windows almost without an exception.  Grass grew in the avenues.  The distances were great, separating the new public buildings from easy access.  Brickyards were in the center of the city, from which all the bricks had been taken, leaving only dust, which was stirred by gusts of wind filling the air at times to suffocation.  Pennsylvania Avenue was grotesque with its big and little buildings, its small and impoverished shops set between the more splendid windows of jewelry and fabrics.  It was in such sharp contrast with Chicago.  No noise here.  No smell.  Instead of lumbering drays, many carriages; instead of bustle, leisure; instead of commercial haste, languid strolling along Pennsylvania Avenue.  And there at its head stood the unfinished Capitol; and at its other end the executive mansion now occupied by President Polk, and soon to be the residence of the hero of the Mexican War, Zachary Taylor; and soon of Millard Fillmore.

Dorothy and I and Mother Clayton visited the places of interest at once.  We went to the Patent Office and saw the model of the Morse telegraph.  We looked at the Declaration of Independence displayed in a glass case at the Department of State.  We stood before Trumbull’s pictures of the celebrated men of an earlier day.  We went to the room of the Spring Court, saw the judges in their black robes, the thin intellectual Chief Justice Taney at the center.  We went to the slave market, where the capital of the republic trafficked in human flesh for itself and the surrounding country.  Lottery tickets were openly sold.  Negroes thronged the streets.  They were the domestic servants, the laborers, the hackmen.  A raggedness, a poverty, a shiftlessness, characterized external Washington.  Washington was not Chicago.