Picturesque Washington: pen and pencil sketches of its scenery, history, traditions, public and social life, with graphic descriptions of the Capitol and Congress, the White House, and the government departments .. . cretary of the Treasury Oliver Wol-cott, Jr., Secretary of War Samuel Dexter, Secretary of the NavyBenjamin Stoddart, and the other officials of the government took uptheir abode in the fall of 1800, twenty-four years after the Declaration OPPOSITION TO THE CAPITAL. 37 of Independence. Congress began its session a few weeks later, andmany and loud were the complaints of the new ca
Picturesque Washington: pen and pencil sketches of its scenery, history, traditions, public and social life, with graphic descriptions of the Capitol and Congress, the White House, and the government departments .. . cretary of the Treasury Oliver Wol-cott, Jr., Secretary of War Samuel Dexter, Secretary of the NavyBenjamin Stoddart, and the other officials of the government took uptheir abode in the fall of 1800, twenty-four years after the Declaration OPPOSITION TO THE CAPITAL. 37 of Independence. Congress began its session a few weeks later, andmany and loud were the complaints of the new capital uttered by allthe assembled statesmen. Newspapers in New York, Philadelphia, and New England, andsatirists everywhere, cracked many amusing jokes at the expenseof the infant city. The Capitol was called the palace in the wil-derness, and Pennsylvania Avenue the great Serbonian was declared a city of houses without streets ; Wash-ington, a city of streets without houses. Only one favorable thingseems to have been said, and that was, Washington is the happiestregion of flowers, and a garden here might be made to yield some-thing for the basket of Flora for nearly three-quarters of the FORDS OLD THEATRE, IN WHICH PRESIDENT LINCOLN WAS SHOT. {Now the Army Medical Museum.) 38 PICTURESQUE WASHINGTON. Thomas Moore, just coming into prominence as a poet, visited thecity in 1804, anc^ was hospitably entertained. He afterward usedhis splendid talent to compose this satire of Washington : In fancy now beneath the twilight gloom,Come, let me lead thee oer this modern Rome,Where tribunes rule, where dusky Davi bow,And what was Goose Creek is Tiber now. This famd metropolis, where fancy seesSquares ill morasses, obelisks in trees;Which traveling fools and gazetteers adornWith shrines unbuilt, and heroes yet unborn. The Abbe Correa de Serra, the witty Minister from Portugal, bestowedupon Washington the famous title of the city of magnificent dis-tances, referring t
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Keywords: ., bookauthormoorejos, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1880, bookyear1884
