With Americans of Past and Present Days - Jusserand Jean Jules - Страница 27

The chief object of wonder was the good ship Hamilton, presented by the ship-carpenters, mounted on wheels, a perfect frigate of thirty-two guns, with its crew, complete, firing salutes on its way. The confectioners surrounded an immense "Federal cake." The judges and lawyers were followed by "John Lawrence, John Cozine, and Robert Troup, bearing the new Constitution elegantly engrossed on vellum, and ten students of law followed, bearing in order the ratification of the ten States."[102] The tin-plate workers exhibited "the Federal tin warehouse, raised on ten pillars, with the motto:

When three more pillars rise,

Our Union will the world surprise."

—tin-plate poetry, for the tin warehouse. Then came learned men, physicians, clergymen, the regent and students of Columbia University, scholars, and among them Noah Webster, famous since as a lexicographer, and then as a professor and journalist, now admired by everybody, but, in those days of strife, only by Federalists—"a mere pedagogue," disdainfully wrote Jefferson later, "of very limited understanding and very strong prejudices," in saying which he himself, maybe, showed some prejudice, too.[103]

A grand banquet, at which, according to the New York Journal and Weekly Register,[104] bullocks were roasted whole for the "regale" of the guests, was held at the extreme point reached by the procession, called by the same paper the "parade des fetes champetres." The President and members of Congress sat under a dome devised by L'Enfant. It was "surmounted by a figure of Fame, with a trumpet proclaiming a new era, and holding a scroll emblematic of the three great epochs of the war: Independence—Alliance with France—Peace."[105]

This was greatly admired. "The committee," we read in a note printed by their order in the Imperial Gazetteer, "would be insensible of the zeal and merit of Major L'Enfant were they to omit expressing the obligation which they are under to him for the elegance of the design and the excellence of the execution of the pavilion and tables."[106]

The whole was a considerable success. "As it redounds much to the credit of the citizens, ..." another paper observes, "it ought to be remarked that there was not the least outrage, or even indecency, notwithstanding 6,000 or 7,000 people (as supposed, spectators included) had collected, and that the whole company was dismissed at half after five o'clock."[107]

Three days after the procession the vote was taken at Poughkeepsie, and if any influence at all could be attributed to the effect on public opinion of the quasi-medi?val pageant, its organizers must have felt proud, for in an assembly of fifty-seven the Constitution was actually voted by a majority of two.

III

The same year in which the New York Federal Hall had seen the inauguration of the first President, the chance of his life came to L'Enfant. He deserved it, because he not only availed himself of it, but went forth to meet it, giving up his abode in New York, "where I stood at the time," he wrote later, "able of commanding whatever business I liked." This was the founding of the federal city.

The impression was a general one among the French that those insurgents whom they had helped to become a free nation were to be a great one, too. Leaving England, where he was a refugee during our Revolution, Talleyrand decided to come to the United States, "desirous of seeing," he says in his memoirs, "that great country whose history begins." General Moreau, also a refugee, a few years later spoke with the same confidence of the future of the country: "I had pictured to myself the advantages of living under a free government; but I had conceived only in part what such happiness is: here it is enjoyed to the full.... It is impossible for men who have lived under such a government to allow themselves ever to be subjugated; they would be very great cowards if they did not perish to the last in order to defend it."[108]

L'Enfant, with his tendency to see things "en grand," could not fail to act accordingly, and the moment he heard that the federal city would be neither New York nor Philadelphia, nor any other already in existence, but one to be built expressly, he wrote to Washington a letter remarkable by his clear understanding of the opportunity offered to the country, and by his determined purpose to work not for the three million inhabitants of his day, but for the one hundred of ours, and for all the unborn millions that will come after us.

The letter is dated from New York, 11th of September, 1789. "Sir," he said, "the late determination of Congress to lay the foundation of a city which is to become the capital of this vast empire offers so great an occasion of acquiring reputation to whoever may be appointed to conduct the execution of the business that your Excellency will not be surprised that my ambition and the desire I have of becoming a useful citizen should lead me to wish a share in the undertaking.

"No nation, perhaps, had ever before the opportunity offered them of deliberately deciding on the spot where their capital city should be fixed.... And, although the means now within the power of the country are not such as to pursue the design to any great extent, it will be obvious that the plan should be drawn on such a scale as to leave room for that aggrandizement and embellishment which the increase of the wealth of the nation will permit it to pursue at any period, however remote. Viewing the matter in this light, I am fully sensible of the extent of the undertaking."[109]

Washington knew that L'Enfant was afflicted, to be sure, with an "untoward" temper, being haughty, proud, intractable, but that he was honest withal, sincere, loyal, full of ideas, and remarkably gifted. He decided to intrust him with the great task, thus justifying, a little later, his selection: "Since my first knowledge of the gentleman's abilities in the line of his profession, I have received him not only as a scientific man, but one who has added considerable taste to professional knowledge; and that, for such employment as he is now engaged in, for prosecuting public works and carrying them into effect, he was better qualified than any one who had come within my knowledge in this country."[110] The President informed L'Enfant that he was to set to work at once, and so bestir himself as to have at least a general plan to show a few months later, when he himself would return from a trip South. On March 2, 1791, Washington announced to Colonel Dickens, of Georgetown, the coming of the major: "An eminent French military engineer starts for Georgetown to examine and survey the site of the federal city." A few days later the arrival of "Major Longfont" was duly recorded by the Georgetown Weekly Ledger.[111]

L'Enfant's enthusiasm and his desire to do well and quickly had been raised to a high pitch. He reached the place a few days later and found it wrapped in mist, soaked in rain, but he would not wait. "I see no other way," he wrote to Jefferson on the 11th, "if by Monday next the weather does not change, but of making a rough draft as accurate as may be obtained by viewing the ground in riding over it on horseback, as I have already done yesterday through the rain, to obtain a knowledge of the whole.... As far as I was able to judge through a thick fog, I passed on many spots which appeared to me really beautiful, and which seem to dispute with each other [which] commands."[112]

When he could see the place to better advantage, his admiration knew no bounds. In an unpublished letter to Hamilton he says: "Now, when you may probably have heard that I am finally charged with delineating a plan for the city, I feel a sort of embarrassment how to speak to you as advantageously as I really think of the situation determined upon; for, as there is no doubt, I must feel highly interested in the success of the undertaking, I become apprehensive of being charged with partiality when I assure you that no position in America can be more susceptible of grand improvement than that between the eastern branch of the Potomac and Georgetown."[113]