Douglass and Lincoln by Paul Kendrick

Author:Paul Kendrick
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-07-16T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Tirst Meeting

August of 1863 was oppressively hot, with temperatures climbing to 104 degrees, streets steaming. There was no refuge from mosquitoes that found the filthy, odorous waterways to be an ideal home in Washington. The miasmic smell of sewage and garbage was thick in the air. The sewage draining into drinking water made many sick, including Willie Lincoln, who possibly died from typhoid fever. Along Pennsylvania Avenue, there were cheap saloons, slaughterhouses, and markets. Fish and oyster peddlers stood on the corners, geese and hogs roamed through the streets. Through the city wafted the stench of dead horses, cows, cats, and other animals decomposing in and around the canals that ran close alongside the city's blocks and within easy sight of the White House.

The wounded and dying soldiers in the makeshift hospitals all over the city reinforced the overpowering stench of death, making it impossible to forget that the nation was at war.l Wounded men lay in unsanitary quarters in what had been mansions, schools, federal buildings, churches, and hotels from Judiciary Square to Washington Circle. Crippled men hobbled on their new crutches, adjusting to a life without limbs. They were the lucky ones. For many of their companions, these sweltering, putrid spaces would be their last images of life. The profession of undertaker burgeoned everywhere; Dr. Hutton & Co. on E Street between Eleventh and Twelfth bragged, "Bodies Embalmed by us NEVER TURN BLACK!"2

Journalist Noah Brooks estimated that Washington was the dirtiest city in America. He thought the moral sleaze rivaled the physical filth. Drunks and scoundrels of every kind overran what was virtually an urban military encampment. In the month before Douglass arrived, there were seven murders in one week. Going out at night in Washington, which had a feeble police force, was not recommended. The most frequented whorehouses were close to the White House, in mansions around Lafayette Square and the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue. A city official estimated that there were 450 brothels and five thousand prostitutes.3

Charles Dickens, visiting twenty years earlier, mockingly wrote that Washington had "spacious avenues that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete." Washington was then the fourteenth largest American city, with just over sixty thousand residents. Before the war, congressmen had felt they were living in a village with half-built markers of a great city. One could find a good baseball game near the Potomac River, but not the sophisticated entertainments of New York, though perhaps John Ford's new theater would bring some cultural development.4

Slavery had ended in the city only a year ago. Under the "black code," if white authorities caught a free black person without a residence permit, they could sell them into slavery. Offenses as trivial as bathing in the canals or flying a kite in the wrong place could be met with lashes. For black soldiers who passed through, rocks and the fists of civilians were hard realities.

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