A “Western Palmyra”

The historian Henry Adams first visited Washington in 1850. As he ventured out from his aunt's house, “he found himself on an earth-road or village street, with wheel tracks meandering from the colonnade of the Treasury hard by, to the white marble columns and fronts of the Post Office and Patent Office, which faced each other in the distance, like white Greek temples in the abandoned gravel pits of a deserted Syrian city.” Returning to the city ten years later, he discovered “the same rude colony…camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for workrooms and sloughs for roads.” Although recollected at some distance and marked with the author's special brand of ironic detachment, Adams's reaction mirrored that of many other visitors to the nation's capital before the Civil War. The “City of Magnificent Intentions,” as Charles Dickens dubbed it, presented a startling juxtaposition of monumental splendor and miserable squalor. Public buildings in the classical style had arisen at key points in Pierre Charles L’Enfant's original plan for the capital, including the White House, the State Department and Treasury Department buildings, the Post Office, the Patent Office, and, of course, the Capitol. The Capitol had been massively extended over the previous decade, but in 1860, the dome remained to be completed, and only a few of the Corinthian columns designed to embellish the porticoes were in place. Piles of masonry, scaffolding, and workmen's huts gave Capitol Hill the appearance of a builders’ yard. The Mall, intended as an important celebratory and processional space, was little better than a “cow pasture,” and the mighty obelisk designed to glorify the memory of the Father of His Country had stood unfinished for several years, an oddly abbreviated shaft of masonry that seemed to symbolize the uncompleted and unfulfilled character of the capital city.