USA > Washington DC > Washington DC > Washington : the capital city and its part in the history of the nation > Part 5
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the applause with which they were received had subsided, the second part of the concert was opened by the gifted Swede with " Hail Colum- bia." Deeply moved by this patriotic air, Web- ster, at the close of the first verse, arose and added his rich, sonorous voice to the chorus. His wife, who sat behind him, pulled at his coat- tail to make him sit down or stop singing, but at the close of each verse the volunteer basso joined in, and none could tell whether Lind, Webster, or the audience were most delighted. As the last notes of the song died away Webster arose, hat in hand, and made a profound bow to the singer. Jenny Lind, blushing at the honor, courtesied to the floor, while the au- dience applauded to the echo. Webster, not to be outdone in politeness, bowed again; Lind re-courtesied, the house applauded, and this was repeated nine times.
After Jenny Lind came Louis Kossuth. Dur- ing the latter days of December, 1852, and the first of the succeeding month, the whilom gov- ernor of Hungary was in Washington as the guest of the nation. He came upon an invi- tation from Congress, and was honored with every possible mark of respect and admiration.
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The Senate and House welcomed him in joint assembly, and he was given a public banquet, at which Senator King presided, with the great Magyar and the Speaker of the House at his right hand and Webster at his left. No foreigner, save only Lafayette, has received such a wel- come in the United States, and there can be no doubt that Kossuth was worthy of all the honor that was heaped upon him. His hand- some presence, the marble-like paleness of his complexion caused by hardship endured while in prison, and the picturesqueness of his foreign dress captivated the popular fancy, while, more than all, his wonderful eloquence and the fervor with which he pleaded his country's cause left an influence upon the hearts of those who heard them that nothing could destroy. He failed, however, in his attempt to secure recognition or material aid,-the errand which had brought him to the States,-and one respects him the more that in his lonely after-years he discreetly resented our effusive but barren sympathy.
Congress, when Kossuth visited Washington, had lately authorized the alterations and addi- tions to the Capitol which gave it its present size and form. The growing membership of
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the House and Senate having made an enlarge- ment of the structure necessary, it was decided in September, 1850, to build north and south wings, and Thomas W. Walter, a distinguished architect of Philadelphia, who had designed Girard College and other public buildings, was selected by the President to supervise the work. The design prepared by Walter provided for a white marble addition of one hundred and eighty-seven feet at each end of the old building, with porticos proportioned to those of the cen- tre structure. This plan was promptly approved by the President, and on July 4, 1851, the cor- ner-stone of the new south wing was laid with appropriate ceremonies. On this occasion Web- ster, then but a year distant from his death-bed and in feeble health, delivered an oration in which glowed much of the fire of his earlier days.
Before the close of the year the foundations of both wings were laid and the basement story finished. Late in December, 1851, the western front of the centre building was destroyed by fire, and in the following June its reconstruction was begun by Walter upon plans which formed part of a splendid and harmonious whole. At
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the close of 1854 the walls of the House and Senate halls had reached the height of the ceil- ings. In 1855 the old brick and wooden dome was removed and materials for a new iron one put in process of preparation. Both wings re- ceived their roofing in 1856, and the ceiling of the House and Senate chambers were com- pleted. In 1857 the Senate occupied the new chamber, and two years later the main body of the wings was completed.
In May, 1861, the government ordered work to be suspended, but patriotic contractors con- tinued placing the iron castings upon the dome at their own expense and risk, and the sound of the hammer upon the Capitol did not cease during the Civil War. Late in 1863 the exterior of the dome was completed and Crawford's statue of Freedom raised to crown it. In 1864 the eastern portico of the north wing was fin- ished, and the close of that year found the dome's exterior painted and the scaffolding re- moved. During 1865 both wings, with the porticos, entrances, and stairways, were com- pleted, and the interior of the dome was finished. Walter's long and exacting task was done, and he retired to his Pennsylvania home, leaving
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behind him a Capitol that, with all its minor faults, is a structure worthy of the republic.
The selection of Walter to remodel the Capi- tol came at the end of a contest in which the claims of party played a leading part. Promi- nent in this contest was Robert Mills, of South Carolina, for more than a score of years archi- tect to the government. A student of Latrobe, Mills supervised the construction of the post- office, patent-office, and treasury buildings, and his disappointment and chagrin when superseded by Walter are said to have materially hastened his death. But if he was not permitted to de- sign the remaking of the Capitol, Mills has left behind him a not less imposing memorial in the Washington Monument, the original plan of which was drawn by him. This plan, pre- pared upon the invitation of the Washington National Monument Association, which had for its object the erection of a fitting memorial to the first President at the capital, provided for a granite shaft faced with white marble, six hundred feet high, fifty-five feet square at the base, and thirty feet square at the top. Sub- scriptions were asked for from the country at large, and at the end of fifteen years some
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eighty-seven thousand dollars had been con- tributed. Then, a site having been selected in the government park known as the Mall, on the very spot chosen by Washington himself for a memorial of the American Revolution, the work of construction began, and on Inde- pendence Day, 1848, the corner-stone of the great shaft was laid, Robert C. Winthrop, then Speaker of the House, being orator of the day.
Thereafter the construction of the monument was continued until 1856, when, the funds of the society being exhausted and appeals for further contributions meeting with no response, the work was stopped. Nothing more was done until 1877, when the completion of the monu- ment was authorized by Congress, and Colonel Thomas L. Casey, of the Engineer Corps, placed in charge. Various changes of the original plan were made by him, including the building of an entire new base. On the completion of the memorial, early in 1885, Congress passed a resolution providing for suitable dedicatory cere- monies. These were appropriately held on Washington's Birthday at the base of the mont- ment, and later in the House of Representatives, the orator of the occasion, by an equally happy
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inspiration, being the now venerable Robert C. Winthrop, who more than a generation before ยท had performed a similar service at the laying of the corner-stone.
When work on the Washington Monument began the population of the capital city had risen to forty thousand, but the city itself still presented much the appearance of an overgrown village. Its houses were, as a rule, built of wood and destitute of architectural pretensions ; its avenues and walks were many of them un- paved and ill-kept, and there were few squares, or shades, or places of public resort. Yet slowly but surely it was growing in wealth and numbers, and there was not wanting abundant evidence of its material progress. One proof of growth was the erection during the period under discussion of a commodious hotel at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street. Ogle Tayloe built the new hostelry and leased it to Joseph and Henry Willard, a duo of keen-witted Vermonters, who were brought from Troy, New York, to keep it. Joseph in time became the owner of the hotel and gave it his name, while Henry Willard, joining hands with a younger brother, Caleb, bought and for
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many years conducted the Ebbitt House, not a stone's throw from the establishment of their kinsman. Willard's and the Ebbitt made their owners rich, and remained for years the leading hotels of the capital. It was at Willard's that Presidents-elect Pierce, Buchanan, and Lincoln slept when they first came to Washington, and it was past Willard's that unnumbered regiments marched down over the Long Bridge and into the Civil War. Old Washington had no more familiar landmark, and many a white-haired man rejoices that the new and more imposing struc- ture that has taken its place also bears the name of Willard's.
Fillmore's succession to the Presidency had a sinister meaning for some of the men promi- nent in the councils of his party. His nomina- tion as Vice-President had been distasteful to Seward and Weed, the Whig leaders in New York, who soon established such friendly re- lations with Taylor and his Cabinet that for months before the former's death Fillmore and his friends found themselves in danger of proscription under the opposing influence which dominated the White House. Thus it fell out that when Fillmore succeeded Taylor
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he found his personal opponents filling most of the important places in the government. Without delay he made many changes and drew about him an entirely new Cabinet, with Web- ster as Secretary of State and Corwin as Secre- tary the Treasury. John J. Crittenden suc- ceeded Reverdy Johnson as Attorney-General ; Charles M. Conrad, of Louisiana, became Sec- retary of War; Thomas Ewing relinquished the portfolio of the Interior to James A. Pearce, of Maryland, who at the end of a few months resigned the post to Alexander H. H. Stuart, of Virginia ; and William B. Preston made way as Secretary of the Navy for William A. Graham, of North Carolina, who at the end of two years retired in favor of John P. Ken- nedy, of Maryland. Nathan K. Hall, the Presi- dent's former law partner, became Postmaster- General, but subsequently was appointed to a seat on the federal bench, his place in the Cabinet being taken by Samuel D. Hubbard, a former member of the House from Connecticut. Two of the members of the retiring Cabinet, Clayton and Ewing, found seats in the Senate, but Meredith, Bates, and Preston fell back to private life.
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Webster was easily the masterful figure of the new Cabinet, and his ability and experience in public affairs did much to assure the success of the Fillmore Administration. The Hulse- mann incident also proved that his was still the power to stir the people's hearts. President Taylor having sent a confidential agent to Hun- gary to obtain reliable information concerning the true condition of affairs there, the Austrian government instructed its representative at Washington, the Chevalier Hulsemann, to pro- test against this interference in its internal af- fairs as offensive to the laws of propriety. This protest the chevalier communicated to Webster after the latter became Secretary of State, and in due time he received an answer which proudly justified the conduct of the government, pointed exultingly to the greatness of the republic, and vigorously vindicated the sympathies of Ameri- cans with every advance of free institutions.
The whole people applauded, but this was to Webster the last flash of popularity. His health had for some time been failing, and his end, as events proved, was close at hand. However, his great compeer, Clay, was destined to pre- cede him into the land of shadows. Clay re-
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turned to Washington in December, 1851, to take his seat in the Senate, but, far gone with consumption, appeared there only once during the winter. He grew steadily weaker as the days went by, and on June 29, 1852, he died in the National Hotel. His death was feelingly announced next day in both houses of Congress, and eloquent eulogies were pronounced upon him by several of his old associates, and by younger men, who, whether political friends or opponents, admired his genius, appreciated his long public services, and reverenced his patriotic devotion to the interest and glory of his country. The funeral took place the second day after his death. The body was placed in the rotunda of the Capitol for some hours, where it was viewed by thousands, and was removed to Ash- land by the way of Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Cin- cinnati, and Louisville, at each of which places, and along the whole route, it was received with demonstrations of the most profound respect and sorrow.
Clay had addressed the Senate for the last time on December 1. 1851. On the same day Charles Sumner and Ben Wade were sworn
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in as members of that body. Sumner, who had been elected by a coalition of anti-slavery men and Democrats in the Massachusetts Legislature, was then forty years of age, and an imposing example of mental and physical manhood. He had already won repute as a deep scholar and as an orator of signal force and eloquence, and it was as an open and avowed enemy of slavery that he took his seat in the Senate. For this reason he was at first refused a place on any of the committees, as being "outside of any healthy political organization," but his was a light that could not be hidden, and as time went on he came to exercise a controlling influ- ence upon the affairs of the Senate, an influence which made him chairman of its Committee on Foreign Affairs and ended only with his death. The question of slavery was his special task, but, in the spirit of Bacon, he proudly took all benevolent and intelligent legislation " for his province," and was never silent where jus- tice and humanity were concerned.
Moreover, in Sumner those who sought to suppress freedom of debate met their superior. He beat them not only in argument, but in sarcasm, invective, and prompt retort. Dull
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blades were of no avail before his keen one. He said neatly what most of his antagonists could only say coarsely, and they emerged from each fresh encounter vanquished and discom- fited. "The whole arsenal of God is ours," he wrote a friend, "and I will not renounce one of the weapons,-not one." This promise he kept to the letter. On many occasions-in- deed, on all prominent occasions of his career as an orator-he was called upon to exhibit courage of the rarest order, and never did the bravery in his will and heart fail to answer to that which was in his brain.
What has just been written of Sumner can be said, with equal truth, of Wade, another heroic son of New England, who came to the Senate by the way of the Ohio bench. Clear- visioned, hard-headed, and honest, with a plain, direct, and vigorous way of putting things, Wade was also as fearless as he was outspoken, and the champions of slavery soon grew to respect his resolute bravery and to fear the gift for sweeping and sarcastic retort which often embodied a speech in a single sentence. Never had the difference between the apologists and the assailants of slavery more incisive state-
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ment than in his famous rejoinder to Senator Badger during the debate on the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The North Carolina Senator had rehearsed the ancient argument for the dilution of slavery, and in a feeling manner asked, " Why, if some Southern gentle- man wishes to take the nurse who has charge of his little baby, or the old woman who nursed him in his childhood, and whom he called mammy until he returned from college, and perhaps afterwards too, and whom he wishes to take with him in his old age when he is moving into one of these new Territories for the betterment of the fortunes of the whole family,-why, in the name of God, should anybody prevent it?" To this question Wade made quick answer. " The Senator," he said, " entirely mistakes our position. We have not the least objection and would oppose no obstacle to the Senator's migrating to Kansas and taking his old mammy with him. We only insist that he shall not be empowered to sell her after taking her there."
Wade was hardly known beyond the bor- ders of his State when he began his eighteen years' service in the Senate, but the name of
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John C. Fremont had already become a house- hold word when chosen a Senator from the newly admitted State of California,-this by reason of his daring and energetic explorations in the West and the halo of romance that clung about his career. Drawing the short term and failing of re-election, Fremont sat in the Senate for less than a year; William M. Gwin, his colleague, continued to serve in that body until the opening of the Civil War. A citizen of the world in the broadest sense, Gwin had studied law and medicine in Tennessee, his native State; had been a member of the House from Mississippi, and had been one of the first of the army of gold-seekers who, in the spring of 18.49, flocked to California. There he quickly gained repute as an adroit political manager, and became the leader of the Southern wing of the Democracy. Though not an orator, Gwin was, nevertheless, a man of great ability and boundless ambition, and for ten years played a forceful part in the proceedings of the Senate. He joined the South when the Civil War broke out, but soon went to Mexico to help Maximilian establish his brief monarchy, being honored with the empty title of Duke of Sonora. After the
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collapse of the Maximilian monarchy and the Sonora dukedom Gwin returned to the United States, where the closing years of his life were passed in comparative obscurity.
Clay was succeeded in the Senate by Archi- bald Dixon, a States'-rights Whig, whose part in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was to give him enduring fame; New York at the same time replaced Daniel S. Dickinson with Hamilton Fish; Vermont promoted Solomon Foot from the House to the Senate, where he served until his death; and Florida furnished a Senator of mark in Stephen R. Mallory, des- tined a decade later to become Secretary of the Navy under the Confederacy. Another notable new-comer was James A. Bayard, twice re- elected Senator from Delaware, and who was for a long time chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary of the Senate.
The Democrats were largely in the majority in the House of the Thirty-second Congress, over which Linn Boyd, of Kentucky, was chosen to preside, and most of the new Representatives who had already gained repute or were to win distinction in after-years were members of that party. These included Humphrey Marshall,
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again a member of the Kentucky delegation; Thomas A. Hendricks, of Indiana, subsequently Senator, governor, and Vice-President ; Charles James Faulkner, of Virginia, who in 1859 left Congress to become minister to France, and during the Civil War served on the staff of " Stonewall" Jackson; Joseph Lane, of Ore- gon, a brilliant soldier in the Mexican War, whose political career ended in 1860, when he was a candidate for Vice-President on the ticket with Breckinridge; Rodman M. Price, of New Jersey, who, as an officer in the navy, had taken a prominent part in the conquest of California, and who was afterwards chosen governor of his State; Robert Rantoul, of Massachusetts, whom learning and eloquence marked for a wide measure of usefulness had not death in 1852 put an untimely period to his career; and Richard Yates, of Illinois, now best remembered as the patriotic and energetic governor of his State during the Civil War.
Yates was one of the youngest members when he took his seat in the House in Decem- ber, 1851, but he had even more youthful col- leagues in Galusha A. Grow, of Pennsylvania, and John C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky. Grow
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was born in Connecticut and reared in the State of his adoption. The youngest son of a widowed mother, his youth was one of toil and self- denial, but he managed to work his way through college, and was graduated with honor at Am- herst. Afterwards, having studied law, he be- came the partner of David Wilmot, and in 1851, at the age of twenty-eight, succeeded that emi- nent man in Congress. There he quickly be- came a leader, and from 1861 to 1863 was Speaker of the House. Then a reapportion- ment of his State robbed him of his seat in Congress in the flush of his fame and powers, and thereafter he held no public office until in 1894 he was called from an honored re- tirement and made Congressman-at-large from Pennsylvania, which post he continues ( 1901) to hold. Thus he has come back to public life from a vanished generation, and at the ripe age of seventy-eight has still the slender, up- right figure and the alert and quick ways of his youth.
Widely different was the career of Breckin- ridge. Born of one of the oldest and most celebrated families of Kentucky, he and his admirers were wont to boast that in him had
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been bred the blood of those families to a higher perfection than in any other of her sons then in public life. Indeed, in person he exhibited in a marked degree the points of his lineage, being over six feet in height, straight and lofty in his carriage, youthful and dashing,-" more like a Highland chief than a grave legislator." Though affable and kindly in his ordinary in- tercourse with his fellows, Breckinridge's im- petuosity of temper in debate often involved him in personalities which required settlement out- side of the House. This, however, did not pre- vent him from speedily becoming a general favorite and one of the most influential leaders of his party. After four years' service in the House he was appointed minister to Spain. He was elected Vice-President at thirty-five, was a' candidate for the Presidency at thirty-nine, and was chosen Senator at forty. In the Con- federacy, after his expulsion from the federal Senate, he was major-general the same year, and Secretary of War four years later. The downfall of that government was the downfall of all his ambitions. Thenceforth he dwelt in strict retirement, and his death at the early age of fifty-four but served to place the final seal
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of failure on a life of rare promise and ex- ceptional opportunities.
Yet Breckinridge's public career opened in a period of profound political calm. "The agitation," said President Fillmore in his annual message for 1851, " which for a time threatened to disturb the fraternal relations which made us one people is fast subsiding ;" and he dwelt at length upon the general acquiescence in the compromise measures which had "been ex- hibited in all parts of the country." The cam- paign of 1852 showed that Fillmore faithfully interpreted the prevailing trend of public opin- ion. Cass and Douglas were the leading candi- dates before the Democratic convention of that year, but the candidacy of the former was bur- dened with the stigma of defeat, and the envy and personal hatreds caused by his brilliant career as a leader in the Senate prevented the nomination of the latter. It has always been a mooted question whether or not Daniel S. Dickinson could have been nominated had he not peremptorily declined to permit his name to go before the convention. Connecticut poli- ticians used to assert that nothing but the ina- bility of the delegates from that State to agree II .- 8
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upon Ralph J. Ingersoll prevented his nomi- nation. The Southern delegates at last said to the New Hampshire delegation that any Granite State Democrat upon whom they could agree would be supported by the South, and so, after a protracted contest, Franklin Pierce was nominated. Pierce had been a member of both branches of Congress and a general in the Mexi- can War, but was practically unknown beyond the borders of his own State.
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Webster, Fillmore, and Scott were the can- didates before the Whig convention. Scott on the first ballot had one hundred and thirty-four votes, Fillmore one hundred and thirty-three, and Webster twenty-nine. The friends of the President had freely used in his favor the patronage of the government, effecting little at the North, but winning him many supporters at the South. All of Webster's slender follow- ing, on the other hand, came from the North, even the eloquence of Rufus Choate failing to secure the vote of a single Southern delegate for his friend. The balloting was continued for several days. Finally, on the fifteenth bal- lot Southern votes began to go to Scott, and on the forty-third he had enough of them to
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