246 SPOFFORD 



Robert Sutcliff, an intelligent English Qviaker, visited Wash- 

 ington in 1804, and wrote: "The situation is one of the most 

 eligible spots for a city that I have ever seen ; it bids fair to be 

 one of the most elegant and regularly-built cities in the world." 

 Visiting a family in Alexandria, where a hundred slaves were 

 employed (at least ostensibly), he remarked that the more slaves 

 there were kept about a plantation, the more disorder appeared. 

 He passed through Piscataway to Port Tobacco in Maryland, 

 and found the people mostly black, and the sandy road tracked 

 with feet immoderately large, which he attributed to the slaves 

 going always barefoot. On Sunday, he met fair white girls 

 riding to church on horseback, with a negro boy mounted be- 

 hind, and jumping off to open gates, while the horse trotted on, 

 and the boy nimbly running after his mistress, jumped up again 

 behind her. At Alexandria, he saw negro girls ten or twelve 

 years of age walking the streets with baskets of fruit and vege- 

 tables on their heads, without any clothing whatever. 



Another traveller, who came to Washington in 1796, was 

 Thomas Twining. He wished to go from his tavern in George- 

 town to his friend Thomas Law's residence at Greenleaf 's Point, 

 but could get no conveyance for a whole da3^ At last a horse 

 was found, and he proceeded in the saddle, through what he terms 

 ' a silent wilderness,' or a thick wood pierced with avenues, 

 toward the south. He remarks of the Americans that they are 

 far more ready in speech than Englishmen, and that they speak 

 the English language with all the volubility of Frenchmen. 

 This characteristic has not apparently failed them in the cen- 

 tury since he wrote. 



A Swiss, named Charles Pictet, whose two volumes on the 

 United States appeared in 1795, '■Tableaux des Etats-Unis 

 d' Amerique' describes Washington as a city laid out on a plan 

 proportioned to the majesty of the enterprise, and which " will 

 secure to the capital of America advantages which no city before 

 it will have possessed." 



Charles W. Janson was in Washington in 1806, and he gave 

 a graphic and far from cheerful account of its aspect, headed 

 ♦Failure of the City of Washington.' He wrote "The en- 

 trance, or avenues, as they are pompously called, which lead 



