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chapter four STAR OF GLORY Although many of the monuments, statues, and buildings would have been ornaments in any European capital, and although the promise of its future now seemed secure, by the spring of 1865 Washington , D.C., still remained a backward, rambling, shameless embarrassment on the world political map. Like a bejeweled but besotted harlot, the nation’s capital was at once both beautiful and ugly—desirable, yet repellent. From a pre-war population of sixty thousand, Washington had burst its seams in four years of war, nearly doubling in size to over one hundred thousand souls. Far from keeping pace with growth, city services had fallen well behind. The hideous smells from rotting animal carcasses, as well as the festering remains from the municipal and military slaughter yards, mingled day and night with the smoke from thousands of fires and furnaces. Stagnant, motionless canals and the sluggish Potomac served as sewage dumps where all manner of offal and filth fed the stench. Hogs wandered and wallowed in the city “as freely as dogs.” In the malignant Washington air, said one of those with a sensitive nose, there were “70 separate and distinct stinks.”1 “The capital of the nation, is probably the dirtiest and most ill-kept borough in the United States,” commented the well-traveled newsman Noah Brooks.2 Into this stifling, stinking stew were tossed some of the best, and many of the worst, people in America. Lobbyists, lawyers, clergymen, foreign ambassadors, and well-bred wives of politicians and military men jostled and elbowed for the same bit of sidewalk on Pennsylvania Avenue as prostitutes, pimps, pickpockets, thieves, thugs, thimbleriggers, drunkards , and deserters. Hundreds of saloons, bordellos, and other “dens of infamy” fed the public demand. 23 24 the darkest dawn “Everybody has heard of the great corruption of the city of Washington ,” continued Noah Brooks, “but I will venture to say that its moral corruption is far exceeded by the physical rottenness of its streets.”3 During the dry season, the byways of the capital were swirling storms of blinding, choking dust; in wet weather, they were almost bottomless quagmires. When it rained, said one man, Washington streets were “literally nothing but canals in which earth and water were mixed together for depths varying from six inches to three feet.”4 Any vehicle that foundered and sank in the yellow ooze was said to be “shipwrecked.”5 All in all, John Hay could only laugh at those smug individuals in the capital who somehow felt sophisticated and superior simply because they resided in a populous city that was the seat of power. “This miserable sprawling village imagines itself a city because it is wicked, as a boy thinks he is a man when he smokes and swears,” sneered Lincoln’s proper secretary.6 Nevertheless, on the night of April 13, 1865, all the wrinkles and warts and flaws of the bedizened lady along the Potomac were hidden by her dazzling display of jewels. Although the fall of Richmond and Lee’s surrender were glorious, earthshaking events in Washington, the grand end-of-war jubilation was saved for this night. Soon after dark, the great celebration began. While cannons thundered from every part of the city and bands marched through the streets, steam fire engines, with bells clanging and whistles screaming, sent up a deafening din. Giant bonfires blazed on every corner. From virtually every home and building, candles—sometimes as many as sixty per window—sent a shower of light below, turning night into day. An estimated one million candles alone burned for the illumination.7 “Every tower, turret, every window in the city, from the dizzy height of the dome of the capitol, all over the immense structure; from the stairs of the Smithsonian, from every house and hovel, flashed a flood of light,” wrote a reporter for the Wilmington Delaware Republican. “Tens of thousands of rockets were constantly mounting heavenward, with hissing sound and dazzling brightness and falling again like a rain of jewels.”8 From the city parks, huge mortars fired enormous pyrotechnic shells into the darkness above, which, upon exploding in a grand burst, fell shimmering to earth in a shower of blue, green, and crimson stars.9 Wrote a dazzled Julia Shepard to her father in upstate New York: All along our route the city was one blaze of glorious light. From the humble cabin of the contraband to the brilliant White [3.149.229.253] Project MUSE (2024...

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