Part 6

When the partition from England was completed, and the Colony became a State, he was chosen to be its first Governor, an office he filled for three terms. He was an ardent supporter of the Federal Constitution, and was one of those instrumental in making Washington our first President. The portfolio of Secretary of State and the District Judgeship were earnestly and affectionately urged upon him by his old friend, who finally persuaded him to accept a seat upon the Supreme Bench. This he soon resigned, by reason of delicate health. Together with Daniel Carroll and Dr. Stewart he selected the sites for the Capitol, the President’s mansion and various other public buildings of the new seat of government, after which he retired to private life; his one subsequent public appearance being on the occasion of a commemorative funeral service after the death of Washington, when he pronounced a beautiful eulogy. His own life drew to its earthly close in 1819, and his dust rests in All Saints’ burying-ground, surrounded by the ancient tombstones of his friends and neighbors, overgrown with wild grasses and myrtle, swept by the pure mountain winds and brooded by the deep peace of the valley he loved so well. His best eulogy was the few words spoken by John Adams in which he said that “but for such men as Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Chase and Thomas Johnson there would have been no Revolution.”

[Illustration: GOVERNOR THOMAS JOHNSON AND FAMILY.

FROM THE PAINTING BY CHARLES WILSON PEALE.]

After the peace the town grew steadily in wealth, comfort and luxury. The road which is called the National Pike, the great artery between East and West, was also the main street of Frederick, and was the scene of much life. Inns of great excellence divided the journeys into pleasant stages, wagons and coaches dashed out and in to a great snapping of whips, jangling of bells and blowing of horns, and while the horses were changed many a glimpse was had of the men who were talked about early in the nineteenth century.

In 1797, Frederick College was founded. The church on the hill was outgrown. The older gentry had worshipped there; Bishop Claggett had held there in 1793 the first Confirmation in the State, and the grassy churchyard was sacred with much holy dust,--but it was too small and remote for the growing congregation. Partly by gift, and partly by the curious aid of a lottery, a second church was built in 1814, still used and loved as All Saints’ Chapel. It had a ceiling of singular beauty, high-backed pews, a gallery for servants, and in 1826 the “new organ,” yet in daily use, was placed therein.

[Illustration: FRANCIS SCOTT KEY.]

One of the faithful worshippers in the church was Francis Scott Key, who was born in the upper part of the county in 1780, but who spent some years of his early manhood practising at the Frederick Bar. Of his quiet, lovely life, but little is known, comparatively, although a few persons yet linger who remember him. A good citizen, a good master, a good lawyer, a poet of very sweet and true, if limited, powers, the deep spirituality of whose few hymns can never sound elsewhere as in the old church, he would probably have passed through and out of life as many other good men do, but for the strain of one September night in 1814, when his eager eyes watched for the first ray of dawn, if haply they might yet see the Star Spangled Banner afloat over Fort McHenry, and a nation’s love and loyalty found everlasting voice through his.

To Frederick, in 1801, came Mr. Key’s close friend, soon to be his sister’s husband, Roger Brooke Taney, for many years Chief Justice of the United States. For twenty-one years he lived there, and returned, his long life, full of work and of honors, over, to sleep beside his mother in the little burial-place of the Jesuits at the Novitiate.

[Illustration: CHIEF JUSTICE ROGER B. TANEY.]

May a brief pause be made in this hasty chronicle to look at the great Roman Catholic foundations of Frederick which lend such an unusual aspect to the part of the town in which they stand. The long, dull façade of the Novitiate fronts the school and the beautiful church, and next that the great walls of the convent arise, shutting out the world from the still, cloistered life within. Many men eminent in the order have been part of the place--none of them more interesting, perhaps, than Father John Du Bois, who came thither in 1792. He was an _émigré_ of the French Revolution, in which his old classmates at the College of Louis-le-Grand, Camille Desmoulins and Robespierre, figured so largely, and he afterwards wore a mitre.

In 1824, Lafayette included Frederick in his great tour of rejoicing, and was accorded the usual welcoming parades, speeches, dinner and ball. Only a few years ago a beautiful, blind old lady, who had been a beautiful, bright-eyed young wife, used to tell of her noble guest. She was a favorite granddaughter of Governor Johnson, and in her girlhood had helped Louisa Johnson, the wife of John Quincy Adams, to dispense the unpretentious hospitality of the White House. Mr. Adams, she said, got up and built his hearth-fire of a morning himself! It was a chapter from an old romance to listen to her kindly talk of “the old times and the days that were before us,” and when she “went away,” almost the last of the perfect breeding and high simplicity of the old, old days left Maryland forever.

So much must be left out that hardly a word can be given to the Civil War, which found the old town alive with the old fervor. Not that all its sons thought alike. Sometimes the gray uniforms thronged the streets; sometimes the blue; once there was even a skirmish on the main street. In the terrible Battle Autumn of 1862, Frederick was the heart of the war. Dr. Holmes came down, after Antietam battle, to make his famous “Hunt after the Captain,” and even the sad, gaunt face of President Lincoln was seen among the rows of wounded and dying men that filled convent and church--every available space. The roads for miles in every direction were crowded with the paraphernalia of war--of hurt and of healing.

[Illustration: THE OLD REFORMED CHURCH.]

In the early September days, Generals Lee and Stonewall Jackson were both here with the armies, gathering for the fearful struggles of South Mountain and Antietam. On the night of the 7th General Jackson drove into town in an ambulance, to attend divine service in the Reformed Church, where, as he wrote to his wife, and as is told of him by many who saw him, he fell asleep. On the morning of the 10th, the camps breaking, and the march over the mountain beginning, General Jackson, with Major H. Kyd Douglass of his staff, rode to the Presbyterian manse on Second Street, to pay his respects to his friends, the Rev. Dr. and Mrs. Ross. As they had not yet arisen, the General pencilled a line of greeting and farewell, with military precision noting the hour, “5¹⁄₄ A.M.,” and remounting his horse under the great silver-poplar rode down Mill Alley, a narrow lane which crosses Carroll Creek by a ford and a high foot-bridge, and so on to the Pike, or Patrick Street, where he rejoined his command, and led them westward.

[Illustration: BARBARA FRITCHIE.]

A few hundred yards to the east of Mill Alley, and again across a winding of Carroll Creek, lived a very old and intensely loyal woman, Barbara Fritchie, who was no myth, but a figure familiar to Frederick from time immemorial. Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on December 3, 1766, she had come, as Barbara Hauer, to Frederick so many years before that on the occasion of the visit of General Washington in 1791 and a ball given in his honor, she loaned some of her choice china to adorn the table, and his Excellency drank a cup of tea poured from her yet carefully cherished teapot. She and her husband, John Fritchie, a glover, had long lived in a small house adjoining the creek which was demolished after one of the perilous floods to which the stream was formerly subject. On the opposite side of the creek is a tiny park, with a deep, cool spring which is often called by her name, and from which many a weary soldier drank. She was of the Reformed faith, and her devotion to the Union cause was almost passionate. Small hospitality had she for the tired Confederate who sometimes dropped for a moment’s rest upon her “stoop.” Such visitors were shown her cane, and in most vigorous Saxon were invited to “move on.” It was said that just before the battle of South Mountain, as the Union troops were passing her house, General Reno, seeing her venerable welcoming face, asked her age.

[Illustration: HOME OF BARBARA FRITCHIE.]

“Ninety-six! Boys, give three cheers for ninety-six!” he cried, and so rode on to his death. Perhaps she waved a small flag at him, but this one thing we know, that until Barbara Fritchie, who died on the 18th of December of that year, and Stonewall Jackson met in Whittier’s stirring ballad, they never met at all. Those who honor the memory of a brave Christian soldier are glad that the story is not true; those who see in the poem an incident too picturesque to be willingly lost from the story of the war, are sorry that it is not; but all who have seen the valley will be for ever grateful for the perfect picture of its loveliness.

Clinging to its old faiths, its old churches, its old traditions, its old customs; clinging to its old houses, its old mahogany and china and portraits, its sweet old gardens and its sweeter friendliness and helpfulness and loyalty, the generations come and go.

“And ever the stars above look down On the stars below in Frederick town.”

[Illustration: THE HATED BRITISH TAX-STAMP, 1765-1766.]

[Illustration]

WASHINGTON

THE NATION’S CAPITAL

BY FRANK A. VANDERLIP

Many generations before George Washington, as the New World Romulus, paced off in person the metes and bounds of the Federal City, the powerful Algonquin tribe of American Indians had established their capital within the confines of what is now the District of Columbia. Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas, conducted, with his eighty painted chiefs, his savage councils of war, or peaceably smoked his calumet within view of the hill destined to become the site of the forum of the Republic. Nacochtank, afterwards Latinized as Anacostan by the Jesuit fathers who accompanied Lord Baltimore to Maryland, and now called Anacostia, a suburb of Washington, was the precise location of Powhatan’s wigwam capital.

The first white man to approach the seat of government of these barbarian warriors was Captain John Smith, who sailed up the “Patawomeke” in 1608. The famous adventurer only partially explored the country, the principal item in the log-book of his voyage being that he found the river “full of luscious fish and its shores lined with ferocious savages.”

Sixteen years later there began to appear in British publications vivid recitals of adventure in the regions bordering the Patawomeke, and alluring descriptions of the “fair and fertile” domain surrounding the ancient capital of the Algonquins. These articles were written by Henry Fleet, a daring trader, who, in search of furs, and braving the perils of capture, had gone fearlessly as an uncommissioned ambassador to the council-seats of the Monahoacs, the Monacans and the Powhatans, had established trade relations with these crude inhabitants and had roamed at will through their wildernesses. “The most healthful and pleasantest region in all this country” was his characterization of that portion of Maryland embracing the district to be chosen nearly three centuries later as the seat of our national Government.

The description of this region sent to England by the intrepid fur trader attracted, in 1660, a party of emigrants who founded homes in the Maryland forests and meadows, fought or bargained for advantage with the Indians, and soon reduced to ruin the rude huts of their primitive capital. Husbandry invaded their domains and corn and wheat crops were grown. It looked as if romance had fled to remoter forests, and that henceforth that portion of the New World now the capital city of the United States would be given over to the “homely joys and destiny obscure” of emigrant farmers and their heirs.

For more than a hundred years the only record these humble settlers gave the outside world was that they had found the soil productive and that their farms were bordered by a majestic river on which white swan floated in innumerable flocks.

It was reserved for the father of the American Republic to discover that from the time of the original occupation of the region this simple colony of wood-choppers and ploughmen had cherished a reputed prophecy made in 1663 that this locality would, in the course of destiny, become the renowned capital of a great nation.

To Washington and Major L’Enfant, who in an antique tavern in Georgetown met the heirs and descendants of these pioneers to negotiate the transfer of property to the Government, the strange story was told that one, Francis Pope, in the year 1663, had had a vision wherein he beheld a stately house of parliament on what is now Capitol Hill. In pursuance of this dream he had purchased that eminence and had called it “Rome,” and in further keeping with his sense of divination had given to a sluggish yellow stream at the base of the hill the name of “Tiber.” Pope, it was asserted, died in the faith that the wooded hill he had christened would some day be crowned with a grand edifice devoted to the deliberations of a mighty empire. Some of the more irreverent settlers, dolefully observing the continued remoteness of Pope’s uninhabited “Rome” from any possible capital, derisively substituted, it was claimed, the name Goose Creek for the Tiber and denied the hill the dignity of even a colloquial title.

The Tiber still flows on, but in the obscurity of a modern sewer.

The poet, Tom Moore, who stumbled through the bogs and over the “magnificent distances” of what pretended to be a capital city in 1804, turned the story around and pictured the founders of the city reveling in burlesque dreams concerning the future of the capital, and attempting to mimic the glory of Rome and give absurd dignity to Goose Creek by naming it the Tiber.

[Illustration: PIERRE CHARLES L’ENFANT.]

The original maps of the city, drawn by Major L’Enfant in 1790, give both names to the stream, and there has come to light a much older document, proving the groundlessness of the poet’s lampoon, and giving substance to the romantic tale concerning Francis Pope and his prophecy. It is his original abstract of title and reads as follows:

“June the 5th, 1663. Layd out for Francis Pope of this Province Gentleman a parcel of land in Charles County called Rome lying on the East side of the Anacostian River beginning at a marked oak standing by the river side, the bounded tree of Captain Robert Troop and running north by the river for breadth the length 200 perches to a bounded oak standing at the mouth of a bay or inlet called Tiber ... and now laid out for 400 acres more or less.”

Whether this nomenclature in the title attests the dream of this pioneer or was adopted by him in a spirit of whimsical humor may be left to the fancy of the reader, but the fact that 237 years ago Capitol Hill was called Rome, and a stream at its base the Tiber, gives dramatic interest to the reputed prophecy. It is one of the several beautiful traditions that impart a romantic interest to the genesis of Washington.

The record of the complicated circumstances resulting in the final location of a site for the capital is one of the most fascinating chapters in American history. The Continental Congress was a migratory body. It had no abiding capital, the exigencies of war forcing it from city to city. During the stress of the Revolution it convened its sessions at Philadelphia, Baltimore, Lancaster, York, Princeton, Annapolis, Trenton and New York City.

For four years prior to the capitulation of Cornwallis, Congress had held its sessions in Philadelphia, and the city seemed destined to become the permanent capital. Public sentiment favored such selection, for the Quaker City was identified with most of the great and far-reaching acts of the American colonies. There a document of human rights, unparalleled since Magna Charta, had been signed by a company of immortals, and there the Liberty Bell had pealed forth its joyous tones for freedom.

Notwithstanding the splendid sentiments favoring the retention of Philadelphia as the capital, there were statesmen in that day who opposed selecting a city whose immediate interests and political strength might influence and perhaps dominate the legislation that should be national. Paris had not yet risen to override France, but London had at times shown its mastery over Parliament and the King. Some of the public men, therefore, hopeful of establishing the capital remote from the concentrated power of a great city, favored the creation of a city that should be wholly under the control of the nation.

The project might never have been accomplished but for the mutinous uprising of a body of unpaid soldiers who attempted to compel Congress by force of arms to settle their arrears. In this extremity, the Executive Council of Pennsylvania was appealed to, but declined to interfere, claiming that the State militia could not be relied upon, as its members were largely in sympathy with the revolters. In the bankrupt condition of the Treasury, however, Congress had a sure defence, and the hopelessness of further sedition served to disarm the insurrectionary band. But Congress had learned its lesson and sought a more peaceful session at Trenton.

From this time, with Congress sitting in various cities until 1790, the question of selecting a permanent site for the capital became one of the most engrossing issues before the American people. New York offered public buildings free; Virginia and Maryland offered to cede districts ten miles square and to furnish additional subsidies as an inducement. The advantages of Philadelphia and Baltimore were ably advanced, while Germantown, Conogocheague, Wright’s Ferry, Peach Bottom and other ambitious centres sent persuasive orators into the acrimonious forum to plead their respective claims.

Contumacy, satire, hatred, envy and unreason struggled with wisdom and patriotism for nearly a decade. It was conceded by all that the American capital should be fixed as near as possible to what would remain the centre of population, but as to the location destined to enjoy the distinction there was the greatest possible conflict of conjecture. Goodhue declared that it would remain in the North for countless ages, and that when it did shift it would travel toward the manufacturing districts of New England.

Stone of Maryland argued that as the tides of humanity followed the lines of least resistance, they would flow into the warm and fertile South.

The vast domain to the westward was not taken into the calculations of statesmen predicting the course of empire. The profoundest philosophers of the latter part of the eighteenth century were unable to grasp the transformations soon to be wrought by the application of steam. They could not dream that subsequent generations would establish a teeming civilization in the distant and unmeasured solitudes. A century later, when the eleventh census was taken, the centre of population was five hundred and twenty miles westward of the spot Congress had fixed upon as the unchanging focus of our growth. Madison alone caught a glimpse of continental possibilities, and believed that America might “speedily behold an astonishing mass of people on the western waters;” and although for that reason it might be impossible to select a site for the capital that would remain central as regards population, it was of the utmost importance to choose a point whence the knowledge of new enactments could be the most quickly disseminated throughout the land. If it were possible, he contended, to promulgate the proceedings of Congress by some simultaneous operation, it would be of less consequence where the seat of government might be established. A site along the Potomac began to be favored, as the then projected canal, now paralleling the Potomac from Georgetown to Cumberland, would afford the most convenient and rapid means of conveying to waiting citizens beyond the Alleghanies the documentary decrees of the Congress of the United States.

Could Washington and his colleagues have imagined that in a later age the tidings of the deliberations of Congress, instead of depending for transmission upon canal-boats, would be flashed instantly, by the clicking of mysterious keys, to the distant shores of the continent, and even to possessions beyond the seas, the Potomac to-day would probably not be graced by the beautiful city of Washington.

Nearly all the members agreed that the capital should be located on some waterway communicating with the Atlantic and connected with the territory of the West. The Delaware, the Susquehanna, the Potomac, and even Codorus Creek, were urged.

In the midst of the diatribes which these debates created, the unconscious comedian of the House, Thomas Vining of Maryland, delivered a speech in favor of the Potomac which became famous not for its lucidity or logic, but for the absurdities of its bombast.

Charles Dickens’s comment concerning Congressional debate of a later day, that the constituents of American statesmen boasted not of what their representatives said, but of the length of time they talked, would have fittingly described the attitude of the popular mind toward the fight for the capital. Every member of both Houses had won the plaudits of his respective followers by almost endless speeches championing some locality, or devoted to arraignment of the sinister motives of opponents.

Mr. Vining’s speech was a decided relief. In the first place, it was brief, and secondly, its freedom from malevolence together with its bizarre humor gave it a distinction unique in the famous controversy.

“Though the interest of the State I represent is involved in it,” said he, “I am yet to learn of the Committee whether Congress are to tickle the trout on the stream of the Codorus, to build their sumptuous palaces on the banks of the Potomac, or to admire commerce with her expanded wings on the waters of the Delaware. I have, on this occasion, educated my mind to impartiality and have endeavored to chastise its prejudices. I confess to the House and to the world, that viewing the subject with all its circumstances, I am in favor of the Potomac. I wish the seat of government to be fixed there, because I think the interest, the honor and the greatness of the country require it. I look on it as the centre from which those streams are to flow that are to animate and invigorate the body politic. From thence, it appears to me, the rays of government will most naturally diverge to the extremities of the Union. I declare that I look on the western territory in an awful and striking point of view. To that region the unpolished sons of earth are flowing from all quarters, men to whom the protection of the laws, and the controlling force of the government are equally necessary; from this great consideration I conclude that the banks of the Potomac are the proper station.”