HARRIET MARTINEAU ARRIVED in Washington in the aftermath of the nullification crisis. She didn’t think much of the city or its inhabitants. “Washington is no place for persons of domestic tastes,” she wrote. “Persons who love dissipation, persons who love to watch the game of politics, and those who make a study of strong minds under strong excitements, like a season at Washington; but it is dreary to those whose pursuits and affections are domestic. I spent five weeks there and was heartily glad when it was over.”
Martineau was an English writer who visited the United States to see if the extravagant things she had heard about America’s system of popular government were true. She had the advantage over Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman whose visit and purposes overlapped hers, of being English, which lowered the language barrier between her and the objects of her study; of being a non-aristocrat, which rendered America’s emerging democratic culture less foreign to her own sensibilities; and of being a woman, which made her seem harmless to most of those she encountered.
She sailed from Liverpool in August 1834. Steamboats now plied the rivers and coastal waters of Europe and North America, but sailing ships still carried passengers across the ocean. Martineau’s seven-week journey was longer than most, due to unfavorable winds, yet it was otherwise ordinary. The voyage gave her time to get to know the other cabin passengers—that is, the first-class travelers who had accommodations to themselves. Some of these were merchants who commuted back and forth across the ocean. She and the other cabin passengers had little contact with the larger number of men, women and children in steerage, who were not allowed free run of the deck and lived communally below.
She sojourned in New York City before heading up the Hudson to Albany and then west via the Erie Canal to Buffalo and then Niagara Falls, the single must-see stop on every European’s tour of America. She turned south to Philadelphia, which she found charming, and Washington, which she did not.
“The approach to the city is striking to all strangers from its oddness,” she wrote. “I saw the dome of the Capitol from a considerable distance, at the end of a straight road; but though I was prepared by the descriptions of preceding travellers, I was taken by surprise on finding myself beneath the splendid building, so sordid are the enclosures and houses on its very verge. We wound round its base, and entered Pennsylvania Avenue, the only one of the grand avenues, intended to centre in the Capitol, which has been built up with any completeness.” The boardinghouse where Martineau stayed, with some traveling companions, was on Pennsylvania Avenue, a short walk from the Capitol and a mile from the White House. The British legation was nearby, as were the residences of various cabinet secretaries.
Apart from the government buildings, Washington seemed a frontier village. “The city is unlike any other that ever was seen—straggling out hither and thither—with a small house or two, a quarter of a mile from any other; so that in making calls ‘in the city,’ we had to cross ditches and stiles, and walk alternately on grass and pavements, and strike across a field to reach a street.”
Washington’s weather flummoxed one accustomed to England’s predictability. “The weather was so strange, sometimes so cold that the only way I could get any comfort was by stretching on the sofa drawn before the fire, up to the very fender (on which days every person who went in and out of the house was sure to leave the front door wide open); then the next morning, perhaps, if we went out muffled in furs, we had to turn back and exchange our wraps for a light shawl.”
The people of Washington were all that made the city worth seeing, Martineau concluded. “Foreign ambassadors; the American government; members of Congress, from Clay and Webster down to Davy Crockett, Benton from Missouri, and Cuthbert, with the freshest Irish brogue, from Georgia; flippant young belles; ‘pious’ wives dutifully attending their husbands and groaning over the frivolities of the place; grave judges; saucy travellers; pert newspaper reporters; melancholy Indian chiefs; and timid New England ladies trembling on the vortex—all this was wholly unlike any thing that is to be seen in any other city in the world, for all these are mixed up together in daily intercourse, like the higher circle of a little village, and there is nothing else. You have this or nothing; you pass your days among these people or you spend them alone.”
Martineau learned to distinguish among the members of Congress by their region. She was drawn to the Southerners, despite being adamantly opposed to slavery. “The Southerners appear to the most advantage, and the New Englanders to the least: the ease and frank courtesy of the gentry of the South (with an occasional touch of arrogance, however), contrasting favourably with the cautious, somewhat gauche, and too deferential air of the members from the North. One fancies one can tell a New England member in the open air by his deprecatory walk. He seems to bear in mind perpetually that he cannot fight a duel, while other people can. The odd mortals that wander in from the Western border cannot be described as a class, for no one is like anybody else. One has a neck like a crane, making an interval of inches between stock and chin. Another wears no cravat, apparently because there is no room for one. A third has his lank black hair parted accurately down the middle and disposed in bands in front, so that he is taken for a woman when only the head is seen in a crowd. A fourth puts an arm round the neck of a neighbor on either side as he stands, seeming afraid of his tall wire-hung frame dropping to pieces if he tries to stand alone. A fifth makes something between a bow and a curtsey to every body who comes near, and proses with a knowing air—all having shrewd faces and being probably very fit for the business they come upon.”
Martineau discovered a quirk in the American Constitution through conversations with a senator who shared meals at the boardinghouse with her. “The senator happened, from a peculiar set of circumstances, to be an idle man just now,” she recorded. The Senate was in session, but he had nothing to do. “This gentleman’s peculiar and not very agreeable position arose out of the troublesome question of Instructions to Representatives. Senators are chosen for a term of six years, one third of the body going out every two years, the term being made thus long in order to ensure some stability of policy in the Senate. If the government of the state from which the senator is sent”—that is, the legislature that chose the senator—“changes its politics during his term, he may be annoyed by instructions to vote contrary to his principles, and, if he refuses, by a call to resign, on the ground of his representing the opinions of the minority.” Martineau’s companion had experienced such a turnaround and call to resign. In this new age of democracy, he had taken his case to the people of his state. He ran for governor, without resigning his Senate seat. He lost. “No course then remained but resigning, which he did immediately, when his Senate term was within half a session of its close.” The former senator was closing out his affairs in Washington when he met Martineau. He would soon head home.
MARTINEAU’S QUARTERS ATTRACTED the most powerful men in Congress, who spent evenings at the fireside. The celebrated trio of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John Calhoun were pointed out to her, and she paid particular attention. “Mr. Clay, sitting upright on the sofa, with his snuff-box ever in his hand, would discourse for many an hour, in his even, soft, deliberate tone, on any one of the great subjects of American policy which we might happen to start, always amazing us with the moderation of estimate and speech which so impetuous a nature has been able to obtain,” she wrote. “Mr. Webster, leaning back at his ease, telling stories, cracking jokes, shaking the sofa with burst after burst of laughter, or smoothly discoursing to the perfect felicity of the logical part of one’s constitution, would illuminate an evening.”
Martineau found less to admire in the third member of the trio. “Mr. Calhoun, the cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born and never could be extinguished, would come in sometimes to keep our understandings upon a painful stretch for a short while, and leave us to take to pieces close, rapid, theoretical, illustrated talk, and see what we could make of it. We found it usually more worth retaining as a curiosity than as either very just or useful. His speech abounds in figures, truly illustrative, if that which they illustrate were but true also. But his theories of government (almost the only subject on which his thoughts are employed), the squarest and compactest theories that ever were made, are composed out of limited elements, and are not therefore likely to stand service very well.”
Martineau wished Calhoun had devoted his talents to policies more to her liking. “It is at first extremely interesting to hear Mr. Calhoun talk, and there is a never-failing evidence of power in all he says and does, which commands intellectual reverence. But the admiration is too soon turned into regret—into absolute melancholy. It is impossible to resist the conviction that all this force can be at best but useless, and is but too likely to be very mischievous. His mind has long lost all power of communicating with any other. I know no man who lives in such utter intellectual solitude. He meets men and harangues them by the fireside as in the Senate; he is wrought, like a piece of machinery, set a-going vehemently by a weight, and stops while you answer. He either passes by what you say, or twists it into a suitability with what is in his head, and begins to lecture again.”
Her acquaintance with the three senators inspired Martineau to visit their place of business. “The American Senate is a most imposing assemblage,” she recorded. “When I first entered it, I thought I never saw a finer set of heads than the forty-six before my eyes—two only being absent, and the Union then consisting of twenty-four states. Mr. Calhoun’s countenance first fixed my attention: the splendid eye; the straight forehead surmounted by a load of stiff, upright, dark hair; the stern brow; the inflexible mouth. It is one of the most remarkable heads in the country. Next him sat his colleague, Mr. Preston, in singular contrast: stout in person, with a round, ruddy, good-humoured face, large blue eyes, and wig, orange today, brown yesterday, and golden tomorrow. Near them sat Colonel Benton, a temporary people’s man, remarkable chiefly for his pomposity. He sat swelling amidst his piles of papers and books, looking like a being designed by nature to be a good-humoured barber or innkeeper, but forced by fate to make himself into a mock-heroic senator. Opposite sat the transcendent Webster, with his square forehead and cavernous eyes; and behind him sat the homely Clay, with the face and figure of a farmer, but something of the air of a divine, from his hair being combed straight back from the temples.”
Martineau couldn’t get over the variety. “All these and many others were striking, and for nothing more than for their total unlikeness to each other. No English person who has not travelled over half the world can form an idea of such differences among men forming one assembly for the same purposes and speaking the same language. Some were descended from Dutch farmers, some from French Huguenots, some from Scotch Puritans, some from English cavaliers, some from Irish chieftains. They were brought together out of law courts, sugar fields, merchants’ stores, mountain farms, forests and prairies. The stamp of originality was impressed on every one, and inspired a deep, involuntary respect. I have seen no assembly of chosen men, and no company of the high-born, invested with the antique dignities of an antique realm, half so imposing to the imagination as this collection of stout-souled, full-grown, original men, brought together on the ground of their supposed sufficiency to work out the will of their diverse constituencies.”
She got to know her favorites better. “Mr. Webster owes his rise to the institutions under which he lives—institutions which open the race to the swift and the battle to the strong; but there is little in him that is congenial with them. He is aristocratic in his tastes and habits, and but little republican simplicity is to be recognized in him. Neither his private conversation nor his public transactions usually convey an impression that he is in earnest. When he is so, his power is majestic, irresistible; but his ambition for office and for the good opinion of those who surround him is seen too often in alternation with his love of ease and luxury to allow of his being confided in as he is admired. If it had been otherwise, if his moral had equaled his intellectual supremacy, if his aims had been as single as his reason is unclouded, he would long ago have carried all before him and been the virtual monarch of the United States. But to have expected this would have been unreasonable. The very best men of any society are rarely or never to be found among its eminent statesmen; and it is not fair to look for them in offices which, in the present condition of human affairs, would yield to such no other choice than of speedy failure or protracted martyrdom.”
She knew Webster’s reputation as an orator. She noted what made him effective. “Mr. Webster speaks seldom in the Senate. When he does, it is generally on some constitutional question, where his reasoning powers and knowledge are brought into play, and where his authority is considered so high that he has the glorious satisfaction of knowing that he is listened to as an oracle by an assemblage of the first men in the country. Previous to such an exercise, he may be seen leaning back in his chair, not, as usual, biting the top of his pen, or twirling his thumbs, or bursting into sudden and transient laughter at Colonel Benton’s oratorical absurdities, but absent and thoughtful, making notes and seeing nothing that is before his eyes. When he rises, his voice is moderate and his manner quiet, with the slightest possible mixture of embarrassment; his right hand rests upon his desk and the left hangs by his side. Before his first head is finished, however, his voice has risen so as to fill the chamber and ring again, and he has fallen into his favorite attitude, with his left hand under his coat-tail and the right in full action. At this moment, the eye rests upon him as upon one under the true inspiration of seeing the invisible and grasping the impalpable. When the vision has passed away, the change is astonishing. He sits at his desk, writing letters or dreaming, so that he does not always discover when the Senate is going to a division. Some one of his party has not seldom to jog his elbow and tell him that his vote is wanted.”
Henry Clay was quite different. “His appearance is plain in the extreme, being that of a mere west-country farmer,” Martineau wrote. “He is tall and thin, with a weather-beaten complexion, small grey eyes, which convey an idea of something more than his well-known sagacity—even of slyness. It is only after much intercourse that Mr. Clay’s personal appearance can be discovered to do him any justice at all. All attempts to take his likeness have been in vain, though upwards of thirty portraits of him, by different artists, were in existence when I was in America. No one has succeeded in catching the subtle expression of placid kindness, mingled with astuteness, which becomes visible to the eyes of those who are in daily intercourse with him. His mode of talking, deliberate and somewhat formal, including sometimes a grave humour, and sometimes a gentle sentiment, very touching from the lips of a sagacious man of ambition, has but one fault: its obvious adaptation to the supposed state of mind of the person to whom it is addressed. Mr. Clay is a man of an irritable and impetuous nature, over which he has attained a truly noble mastery. His moderation is now his most striking characteristic, obtained, no doubt, at the cost of prodigious self-denial, on his own part, and on that of his friends, of some of the ease, naturalness and self-forgetfulness of his manners and discourse. But his conversation is rich in information and full charged with the spirit of justice and kindliness, rising, on occasion, to a moving magnanimity. By chances, of some of which he was totally unaware, I became acquainted with several acts of his life, political and private, which prove that his moderation is not the mere diffusion of oil upon the waves, but the true stilling of the storm of passion and selfishness.”
Martineau heard that Clay was going to speak against the Jackson administration’s Indian policy. Congress had approved the Indian Removal Act, compelling relocation of the Eastern tribes to the West, but the lawmakers still wanted to hear what Clay had to say. The House suspended proceedings, with members abandoning their chamber for the aisles of the Senate. The gallery was jammed, with visitors hanging over the balustrade. The substance of the speech was largely lost on Martineau, but not its effects. “I never saw so deep a moral impression produced by a speech,” she recounted. “The chief characteristic of his eloquence is its earnestness. Every tone of his voice, every fibre of his frame bears testimony to this. His attitudes are, from the beginning to the close, very graceful. His first sentences are homely, and given with a little hesitation and repetition, and with an agitation shown by a frequent putting on and taking off of spectacles, and a trembling of the hands among the documents on the desk. Then, as the speaker becomes possessed with his subject, the agitation changes its character, but does not subside. His utterance is still deliberate, but his voice becomes deliciously winning. Its higher tones disappointed me at first, but the lower ones, trembling with emotion, swelling and falling with the earnestness of the speaker, are very moving, and his whole manner becomes irresistibly persuasive. I saw tears, of which I am sure he was wholly unconscious, falling upon his papers, as he vividly described the woes and injuries of the aborigines. I saw Webster draw his hand across his eyes.”