EARLY MANHOOD -1851-1857 79 



either in the galleries or on the floor was almost an 

 impossibility. 



The Supreme Court, though sitting in a wretched 

 room in the basement, made a far deeper impression 

 upon me. The judges, seated in a row, and wearing 

 their simple, silken gowns, seemed to me, in their quiet 

 dignity, what the highest court of a great republic ought 

 to be; though I looked at Chief Justice Taney and his 

 pro-slavery associates much as a Hindoo regards his 

 destructive gods. 



The general impression made upon me at Washington 

 was discouraging. It drove out from my mind the last 

 lingering desire to take any part in politics. The whole 

 life there was repulsive to me, and when I reflected that 

 a stay of a few years in that forlorn, decaying, reeking 

 city was the goal of political ambition, the whole thing 

 seemed to me utterly worthless. The whole life there 

 bore the impress of the slipshod habits engendered by 

 slavery, and it seemed a civilization rotting before ripe- 

 ness. The city was certainly, at that time, the most 

 wretched capital in Christendom. Pennsylvania Avenue 

 was a sort of Slough of Despond, with ruts and mud- 

 holes from the unfinished Capitol, at one end, to the un- 

 finished Treasury building, at the other, and bounded 

 on both sides with cheap brick tenements. The exten- 

 sive new residence quarter and better hotels of these 

 days had not been dreamed of. The "National," where 

 we were living, was esteemed the best hotel, and it was 

 abominable. Just before we arrived, what was known 

 as the "National Hotel Disease " had broken out in it; 

 by some imputed to an attempt to poison the incoming 

 President, in order to bring the Vice-President into his 

 place. But that was the mere wild surmise of a polit- 

 ical pessimist. The fact clearly was that the wretched 

 sewage of Washington, in those days, which was betrayed 

 in all parts of the hotel by every kind of noisome odor, 

 had at last begun to do its work. Curiously enough there 

 was an interregnum in the reign of sickness and death, 



