Existing comment:
Washington in the 1860s:
Lincoln would recognize much about the capital to which he was returning a dozen years after his single term in Congress. Washington City, home to 61,000 inhabitants in February 1861, was a raw, unsanitary place. Southern sympathies predominated, and separate legal codes governed people of different races.
From the White House, the new president could look across the malarial Potomac Flats to the marble stump of the Washington Monument, abandoned in 1854 for lack of funds. Worse, he could smell the rotting City Canal, an open sewer running along the line of today's Constitution Avenue, into which local residents tossed dead animals.
Pigs, Mud -- and Politicians:
Flocks of geese and roaming pigs slowed traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue, the city's main thoroughfare, and one of only two paved streets in Washington. This did not prevent clouds of dust from enveloping pedestrians in the dry season; when it rained the Avenue was transformed into a sea of mud, equally menacing to ladies' skirts and the gold lace favored by the capital's diplomatic corps -- all 44 members. |