American Notes for General Circulation

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Again, by slow degrees, these horrible fancies depart from him one
by one: returning sometimes, unexpectedly, but at longer
intervals, and in less alarming shapes. He has talked upon
religious matters with the gentleman who visits him, and has read
his Bible, and has written a prayer upon his slate, and hung it up
as a kind of protection, and an assurance of Heavenly
companionship. He dreams now, sometimes, of his children or his
wife, but is sure that they are dead, or have deserted him. He is
easily moved to tears; is gentle, submissive, and broken-spirited.
Occasionally, the old agony comes back: a very little thing will
revive it; even a familiar sound, or the scent of summer flowers in
the air; but it does not last long, now: for the world without,
has come to be the vision, and this solitary life, the sad reality.

If his term of imprisonment be short - I mean comparatively, for
short it cannot be - the last half year is almost worse than all;
for then he thinks the prison will take fire and he be burnt in the
ruins, or that he is doomed to die within the walls, or that he
will be detained on some false charge and sentenced for another
term: or that something, no matter what, must happen to prevent
his going at large. And this is natural, and impossible to be
reasoned against, because, after his long separation from human
life, and his great suffering, any event will appear to him more
probable in the contemplation, than the being restored to liberty
and his fellow-creatures.

If his period of confinement have been very long, the prospect of
release bewilders and confuses him. His broken heart may flutter
for a moment, when he thinks of the world outside, and what it
might have been to him in all those lonely years, but that is all.
The cell-door has been closed too long on all its hopes and cares.
Better to have hanged him in the beginning than bring him to this
pass, and send him forth to mingle with his kind, who are his kind
no more.

On the haggard face of every man among these prisoners, the same
expression sat. I know not what to liken it to. It had something
of that strained attention which we see upon the faces of the blind
and deaf, mingled with a kind of horror, as though they had all
been secretly terrified. In every little chamber that I entered,
and at every grate through which I looked, I seemed to see the same
appalling countenance. It lives in my memory, with the fascination
of a remarkable picture. Parade before my eyes, a hundred men,
with one among them newly released from this solitary suffering,
and I would point him out.

The faces of the women, as I have said, it humanises and refines.
Whether this be because of their better nature, which is elicited
in solitude, or because of their being gentler creatures, of
greater patience and longer suffering, I do not know; but so it is.
That the punishment is nevertheless, to my thinking, fully as cruel
and as wrong in their case, as in that of the men, I need scarcely
add.

My firm conviction is that, independent of the mental anguish it
occasions - an anguish so acute and so tremendous, that all
imagination of it must fall far short of the reality - it wears the
mind into a morbid state, which renders it unfit for the rough
contact and busy action of the world. It is my fixed opinion that
those who have undergone this punishment, MUST pass into society
again morally unhealthy and diseased. There are many instances on
record, of men who have chosen, or have been condemned, to lives of
perfect solitude, but I scarcely remember one, even among sages of
strong and vigorous intellect, where its effect has not become
apparent, in some disordered train of thought, or some gloomy
hallucination. What monstrous phantoms, bred of despondency and
doubt, and born and reared in solitude, have stalked upon the
earth, making creation ugly, and darkening the face of Heaven!

Suicides are rare among these prisoners: are almost, indeed,
unknown. But no argument in favour of the system, can reasonably
be deduced from this circumstance, although it is very often urged.
All men who have made diseases of the mind their study, know
perfectly well that such extreme depression and despair as will
change the whole character, and beat down all its powers of
elasticity and self-resistance, may be at work within a man, and
yet stop short of self-destruction. This is a common case.

That it makes the senses dull, and by degrees impairs the bodily
faculties, I am quite sure. I remarked to those who were with me
in this very establishment at Philadelphia, that the criminals who
had been there long, were deaf. They, who were in the habit of
seeing these men constantly, were perfectly amazed at the idea,
which they regarded as groundless and fanciful. And yet the very
first prisoner to whom they appealed - one of their own selection
confirmed my impression (which was unknown to him) instantly, and
said, with a genuine air it was impossible to doubt, that he
couldn't think how it happened, but he WAS growing very dull of
hearing.

That it is a singularly unequal punishment, and affects the worst
man least, there is no doubt. In its superior efficiency as a
means of reformation, compared with that other code of regulations
which allows the prisoners to work in company without communicating
together, I have not the smallest faith. All the instances of
reformation that were mentioned to me, were of a kind that might
have been - and I have no doubt whatever, in my own mind, would
have been - equally well brought about by the Silent System. With
regard to such men as the negro burglar and the English thief, even
the most enthusiastic have scarcely any hope of their conversion.

It seems to me that the objection that nothing wholesome or good
has ever had its growth in such unnatural solitude, and that even a
dog or any of the more intelligent among beasts, would pine, and
mope, and rust away, beneath its influence, would be in itself a
sufficient argument against this system. But when we recollect, in
addition, how very cruel and severe it is, and that a solitary life
is always liable to peculiar and distinct objections of a most
deplorable nature, which have arisen here, and call to mind,
moreover, that the choice is not between this system, and a bad or
ill-considered one, but between it and another which has worked
well, and is, in its whole design and practice, excellent; there is
surely more than sufficient reason for abandoning a mode of
punishment attended by so little hope or promise, and fraught,
beyond dispute, with such a host of evils.

As a relief to its contemplation, I will close this chapter with a
curious story arising out of the same theme, which was related to
me, on the occasion of this visit, by some of the gentlemen
concerned.

At one of the periodical meetings of the inspectors of this prison,
a working man of Philadelphia presented himself before the Board,
and earnestly requested to be placed in solitary confinement. On
being asked what motive could possibly prompt him to make this
strange demand, he answered that he had an irresistible propensity
to get drunk; that he was constantly indulging it, to his great
misery and ruin; that he had no power of resistance; that he wished
to be put beyond the reach of temptation; and that he could think
of no better way than this. It was pointed out to him, in reply,
that the prison was for criminals who had been tried and sentenced
by the law, and could not be made available for any such fanciful
purposes; he was exhorted to abstain from intoxicating drinks, as
he surely might if he would; and received other very good advice,
with which he retired, exceedingly dissatisfied with the result of
his application.

He came again, and again, and again, and was so very earnest and
importunate, that at last they took counsel together, and said, 'He
will certainly qualify himself for admission, if we reject him any
more. Let us shut him up. He will soon be glad to go away, and
then we shall get rid of him.' So they made him sign a statement
which would prevent his ever sustaining an action for false
imprisonment, to the effect that his incarceration was voluntary,
and of his own seeking; they requested him to take notice that the
officer in attendance had orders to release him at any hour of the
day or night, when he might knock upon his door for that purpose;
but desired him to understand, that once going out, he would not be
admitted any more. These conditions agreed upon, and he still
remaining in the same mind, he was conducted to the prison, and
shut up in one of the cells.

In this cell, the man, who had not the firmness to leave a glass of
liquor standing untasted on a table before him - in this cell, in
solitary confinement, and working every day at his trade of
shoemaking, this man remained nearly two years. His health
beginning to fail at the expiration of that time, the surgeon
recommended that he should work occasionally in the garden; and as
he liked the notion very much, he went about this new occupation
with great cheerfulness.

He was digging here, one summer day, very industriously, when the
wicket in the outer gate chanced to be left open: showing, beyond,
the well-remembered dusty road and sunburnt fields. The way was as
free to him as to any man living, but he no sooner raised his head
and caught sight of it, all shining in the light, than, with the
involuntary instinct of a prisoner, he cast away his spade,
scampered off as fast as his legs would carry him, and never once
looked back.

CHAPTER VIII - WASHINGTON. THE LEGISLATURE. AND THE PRESIDENT'S
HOUSE

WE left Philadelphia by steamboat, at six o'clock one very cold
morning, and turned our faces towards Washington.

In the course of this day's journey, as on subsequent occasions, we
encountered some Englishmen (small farmers, perhaps, or country
publicans at home) who were settled in America, and were travelling
on their own affairs. Of all grades and kinds of men that jostle
one in the public conveyances of the States, these are often the
most intolerable and the most insufferable companions. United to
every disagreeable characteristic that the worst kind of American
travellers possess, these countrymen of ours display an amount of
insolent conceit and cool assumption of superiority, quite
monstrous to behold. In the coarse familiarity of their approach,
and the effrontery of their inquisitiveness (which they are in
great haste to assert, as if they panted to revenge themselves upon
the decent old restraints of home), they surpass any native
specimens that came within my range of observation: and I often
grew so patriotic when I saw and heard them, that I would
cheerfully have submitted to a reasonable fine, if I could have
given any other country in the whole world, the honour of claiming
them for its children.

As Washington may be called the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured
saliva, the time is come when I must confess, without any disguise,
that the prevalence of those two odious practices of chewing and
expectorating began about this time to be anything but agreeable,
and soon became most offensive and sickening. In all the public
places of America, this filthy custom is recognised. In the courts
of law, the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his,
and the prisoner his; while the jurymen and spectators are provided
for, as so many men who in the course of nature must desire to spit
incessantly. In the hospitals, the students of medicine are
requested, by notices upon the wall, to eject their tobacco juice
into the boxes provided for that purpose, and not to discolour the
stairs. In public buildings, visitors are implored, through the
same agency, to squirt the essence of their quids, or 'plugs,' as I
have heard them called by gentlemen learned in this kind of
sweetmeat, into the national spittoons, and not about the bases of
the marble columns. But in some parts, this custom is inseparably
mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the
transactions of social life. The stranger, who follows in the
track I took myself, will find it in its full bloom and glory,
luxuriant in all its alarming recklessness, at Washington. And let
him not persuade himself (as I once did, to my shame) that previous
tourists have exaggerated its extent. The thing itself is an
exaggeration of nastiness, which cannot be outdone.

On board this steamboat, there were two young gentlemen, with
shirt-collars reversed as usual, and armed with very big walking-
sticks; who planted two seats in the middle of the deck, at a
distance of some four paces apart; took out their tobacco-boxes;
and sat down opposite each other, to chew. In less than a quarter
of an hour's time, these hopeful youths had shed about them on the
clean boards, a copious shower of yellow rain; clearing, by that
means, a kind of magic circle, within whose limits no intruders
dared to come, and which they never failed to refresh and re-
refresh before a spot was dry. This being before breakfast, rather
disposed me, I confess, to nausea; but looking attentively at one
of the expectorators, I plainly saw that he was young in chewing,
and felt inwardly uneasy, himself. A glow of delight came over me
at this discovery; and as I marked his face turn paler and paler,
and saw the ball of tobacco in his left cheek, quiver with his
suppressed agony, while yet he spat, and chewed, and spat again, in
emulation of his older friend, I could have fallen on his neck and
implored him to go on for hours.

We all sat down to a comfortable breakfast in the cabin below,
where there was no more hurry or confusion than at such a meal in
England, and where there was certainly greater politeness exhibited
than at most of our stage-coach banquets. At about nine o'clock we
arrived at the railroad station, and went on by the cars. At noon
we turned out again, to cross a wide river in another steamboat;
landed at a continuation of the railroad on the opposite shore; and
went on by other cars; in which, in the course of the next hour or
so, we crossed by wooden bridges, each a mile in length, two
creeks, called respectively Great and Little Gunpowder. The water
in both was blackened with flights of canvas-backed ducks, which
are most delicious eating, and abound hereabouts at that season of
the year.

These bridges are of wood, have no parapet, and are only just wide
enough for the passage of the trains; which, in the event of the
smallest accident, wound inevitably be plunged into the river.
They are startling contrivances, and are most agreeable when
passed.

We stopped to dine at Baltimore, and being now in Maryland, were
waited on, for the first time, by slaves. The sensation of
exacting any service from human creatures who are bought and sold,
and being, for the time, a party as it were to their condition, is
not an enviable one. The institution exists, perhaps, in its least
repulsive and most mitigated form in such a town as this; but it IS
slavery; and though I was, with respect to it, an innocent man, its
presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach.

After dinner, we went down to the railroad again, and took our
seats in the cars for Washington. Being rather early, those men
and boys who happened to have nothing particular to do, and were
curious in foreigners, came (according to custom) round the
carriage in which I sat; let down all the windows; thrust in their
heads and shoulders; hooked themselves on conveniently, by their
elbows; and fell to comparing notes on the subject of my personal
appearance, with as much indifference as if I were a stuffed
figure. I never gained so much uncompromising information with
reference to my own nose and eyes, and various impressions wrought
by my mouth and chin on different minds, and how my head looks when
it is viewed from behind, as on these occasions. Some gentlemen
were only satisfied by exercising their sense of touch; and the
boys (who are surprisingly precocious in America) were seldom
satisfied, even by that, but would return to the charge over and
over again. Many a budding president has walked into my room with
his cap on his head and his hands in his pockets, and stared at me
for two whole hours: occasionally refreshing himself with a tweak
of his nose, or a draught from the water-jug; or by walking to the
windows and inviting other boys in the street below, to come up and
do likewise: crying, 'Here he is!' 'Come on!' 'Bring all your
brothers!' with other hospitable entreaties of that nature.

We reached Washington at about half-past six that evening, and had
upon the way a beautiful view of the Capitol, which is a fine
building of the Corinthian order, placed upon a noble and
commanding eminence. Arrived at the hotel; I saw no more of the
place that night; being very tired, and glad to get to bed.

Breakfast over next morning, I walk about the streets for an hour
or two, and, coming home, throw up the window in the front and
back, and look out. Here is Washington, fresh in my mind and under
my eye.

Take the worst parts of the City Road and Pentonville, or the
straggling outskirts of Paris, where the houses are smallest,
preserving all their oddities, but especially the small shops and
dwellings, occupied in Pentonville (but not in Washington) by
furniture-brokers, keepers of poor eating-houses, and fanciers of
birds. Burn the whole down; build it up again in wood and plaster;
widen it a little; throw in part of St. John's Wood; put green
blinds outside all the private houses, with a red curtain and a
white one in every window; plough up all the roads; plant a great
deal of coarse turf in every place where it ought NOT to be; erect
three handsome buildings in stone and marble, anywhere, but the
more entirely out of everybody's way the better; call one the Post
Office; one the Patent Office, and one the Treasury; make it
scorching hot in the morning, and freezing cold in the afternoon,
with an occasional tornado of wind and dust; leave a brick-field
without the bricks, in all central places where a street may
naturally be expected: and that's Washington.

The hotel in which we live, is a long row of small houses fronting
on the street, and opening at the back upon a common yard, in which
hangs a great triangle. Whenever a servant is wanted, somebody
beats on this triangle from one stroke up to seven, according to
the number of the house in which his presence is required; and as
all the servants are always being wanted, and none of them ever
come, this enlivening engine is in full performance the whole day
through. Clothes are drying in the same yard; female slaves, with
cotton handkerchiefs twisted round their heads are running to and
fro on the hotel business; black waiters cross and recross with
dishes in their hands; two great dogs are playing upon a mound of
loose bricks in the centre of the little square; a pig is turning
up his stomach to the sun, and grunting 'that's comfortable!'; and
neither the men, nor the women, nor the dogs, nor the pig, nor any
created creature, takes the smallest notice of the triangle, which
is tingling madly all the time.

I walk to the front window, and look across the road upon a long,
straggling row of houses, one story high, terminating, nearly
opposite, but a little to the left, in a melancholy piece of waste
ground with frowzy grass, which looks like a small piece of country
that has taken to drinking, and has quite lost itself. Standing
anyhow and all wrong, upon this open space, like something meteoric
that has fallen down from the moon, is an odd, lop-sided, one-eyed
kind of wooden building, that looks like a church, with a flag-
staff as long as itself sticking out of a steeple something larger
than a tea-chest. Under the window is a small stand of coaches,
whose slave-drivers are sunning themselves on the steps of our
door, and talking idly together. The three most obtrusive houses
near at hand are the three meanest. On one - a shop, which never
has anything in the window, and never has the door open - is
painted in large characters, 'THE CITY LUNCH.' At another, which
looks like a backway to somewhere else, but is an independent
building in itself, oysters are procurable in every style. At the
third, which is a very, very little tailor's shop, pants are fixed
to order; or in other words, pantaloons are made to measure. And
that is our street in Washington.

It is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances, but it
might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent
Intentions; for it is only on taking a bird's-eye view of it from
the top of the Capitol, that one can at all comprehend the vast
designs of its projector, an aspiring Frenchman. 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; and ornaments of great thoroughfares,
which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament - are its leading
features. One might fancy the season over, and most of the houses
gone out of town for ever with their masters. To the admirers of
cities it is a Barmecide Feast: a pleasant field for the
imagination to rove in; a monument raised to a deceased project,
with not even a legible inscription to record its departed
greatness.

Such as it is, it is likely to remain. It was originally chosen
for the seat of Government, as a means of averting the conflicting
jealousies and interests of the different States; and very
probably, too, as being remote from mobs: a consideration not to
be slighted, even in America. It has no trade or commerce of its
own: having little or no population beyond the President and his
establishment; the members of the legislature who reside there
during the session; the Government clerks and officers employed in
the various departments; the keepers of the hotels and boarding-
houses; and the tradesmen who supply their tables. It is very
unhealthy. Few people would live in Washington, I take it, who
were not obliged to reside there; and the tides of emigration and
speculation, those rapid and regardless currents, are little likely
to flow at any time towards such dull and sluggish water.

The principal features of the Capitol, are, of course, the two
houses of Assembly. But there is, besides, in the centre of the
building, a fine rotunda, ninety-six feet in diameter, and ninety-
six high, whose circular wall is divided into compartments,
ornamented by historical pictures. Four of these have for their
subjects prominent events in the revolutionary struggle. They were
painted by Colonel Trumbull, himself a member of Washington's staff
at the time of their occurrence; from which circumstance they
derive a peculiar interest of their own. In this same hall Mr.
Greenough's large statue of Washington has been lately placed. It
has great merits of course, but it struck me as being rather
strained and violent for its subject. I could wish, however, to
have seen it in a better light than it can ever be viewed in, where
it stands.

There is a very pleasant and commodious library in the Capitol; and
from a balcony in front, the bird's-eye view, of which I have just
spoken, may be had, together with a beautiful prospect of the
adjacent country. In one of the ornamented portions of the
building, there is a figure of Justice; whereunto the Guide Book
says, 'the artist at first contemplated giving more of nudity, but
he was warned that the public sentiment in this country would not
admit of it, and in his caution he has gone, perhaps, into the
opposite extreme.' Poor Justice! she has been made to wear much
stranger garments in America than those she pines in, in the
Capitol. Let us hope that she has changed her dress-maker since
they were fashioned, and that the public sentiment of the country
did not cut out the clothes she hides her lovely figure in, just
now.

The House of Representatives is a beautiful and spacious hall, of
semicircular shape, supported by handsome pillars. One part of the
gallery is appropriated to the ladies, and there they sit in front
rows, and come in, and go out, as at a play or concert. The chair
is canopied, and raised considerably above the floor of the House;
and every member has an easy chair and a writing desk to himself:
which is denounced by some people out of doors as a most
unfortunate and injudicious arrangement, tending to long sittings
and prosaic speeches. It is an elegant chamber to look at, but a
singularly bad one for all purposes of hearing. The Senate, which
is smaller, is free from this objection, and is exceedingly well
adapted to the uses for which it is designed. The sittings, I need
hardly add, take place in the day; and the parliamentary forms are
modelled on those of the old country.

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