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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOL. VII.—JANUARY, 1861.—NO. XXXIX.
WASHINGTON CITY.
Washington is the paradise of paradoxes,—a city of magnificentdistances, but of still more magnificent discrepancies. Anything may beaffirmed of it, everything denied. What it seems to be it is not; andalthough it is getting to be what it never was, it must always remainwhat it now is. It might be called a city, if it were not alternatelypopulous and uninhabited; and it would be a wide-spread village, if itwere not a collection of hospitals for decayed or callow politicians. Itis the hybernating-place of fashion, of intelligence, of vice,—a resortwithout the attractions of waters either mineral or salt, where there isno bathing and no springs, but drinking in abundance and gambling inany quantity. Defenceless, as regards walls, redoubts, moats, or otherfortifications, it is nevertheless the Sevastopol of the Republic,against which the allied army of Contractors and Claim-Agentsincessantly lay siege. It is a great, little, splendid, mean,extravagant, poverty-stricken barrack for soldiers of fortune andvotaries of folly.
Scattered helter-skelter over an immense surface, cut up into scalenetriangles, the oddity of its plan makes Washington a succession ofsurprises which never fail to vex and astonish the stranger, be he everso highly endowed as to the phrenological bump of locality. Dependingupon the hap-hazard start the ignoramus may chance to make, anyparticular house or street is either nearer at hand or farther off thanthe ordinary human mind finds it agreeable to believe. The first duty ofthe new-comer is to teach his nether extremities to avoid instinctivelythe hypothenuse of the street-triangulation, and the last lesson theresident fails to learn is which of the shortcuts from point to pointis the least lengthy. Beyond a doubt, the corners of the streets wereconstructed upon a cold and brutal calculation of the greatest possibleamount of oral sin which disappointed haste and irritated anxiety arecapable of committing; nor is any relief to the tendency to profanitythus engendered afforded by the inexcusable nomenclature of the streetsand avenues,—a nomenclature in which the resources of the alphabet, thearithmetic, the names of all the States of the Union, and the Presidentsas well, are exhausted with the most unsystematic profligacy. A man notgifted with supernatural acuteness, in striving to get from Brown'sHotel to the General Post-Office, turns a corner and suddenly findshimself nowhere, simply because he is everywhere,—being at the instantupon three separate streets and two distinct avenues. And, as a furtherconsequence of the scalene arrangement of things, it happens that thestranger in Washington, however civic his birth and education may havebeen, is always unconsciously performing those military evolutionsstyled marching to the right or left oblique,—acquiring thereby, it issaid, that obliquity of the moral vision—which sooner or later afflictsevery human being who inhabits this strange, lop-sided city-village.
So queer, indeed, is Washington City in every aspect, that onenewly impressed by its incongruities is compelled to regard Swift'sdescription of Lilliputia and Sydney Smith's account of Australia aspoor attempts at fun. For, leaving out of view the pigmies of the formerplace, whose like we know is never found in Congress, what is there inthat Australian bird with the voice of a jackass to excite the feebl