THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
of their old German domestic customs and habits, though they had lost almost all memory of old Germany.
But far more was my political education furthered by a visit to the city of Washington in the early spring of 1854. The seeming apathy of the public conscience concerning the slavery question was at last broken by the introduction of Senator Douglas's Nebraska Bill, which was to overrule the Missouri Compromise and to open all the National Territories to the ingress of the “peculiar institution.” A sudden tremor shook the political atmosphere. While I could not take any interest in the perfunctory Democratic or Whig politics of the day, the slavery question, with all its social, political, and economic bearings, stirred me at once, and deeply. I could not resist the desire to go to Washington and witness the struggle in Congress. A student of medicine from Mississippi, Mr. Vaughn, whose acquaintance I had made in the Philadelphia boardinghouse, and whose intelligence and fine character had greatly attracted me, offered me a letter of introduction to a friend of his family, Mr. Jefferson Davis, who was then Secretary of War. I also obtained letters to Senator Brodhead of Pennsylvania, Senator Shields of Illinois, and Mr. Francis Grund, a journalist who furnished the Washington news to various newspapers.
My first impressions of the political capital of the great American Republic were rather dismal. Washington looked at that period like a big, sprawling village, consisting of scattered groups of houses which were overtopped by a few public buildings—the Capitol, only what is now the central part was occupied, as the two great wings in which the Senate and the House of Representatives now sit were still in process of construction; the Treasury, the two wings of which were still lacking; the White House; and the Patent Office, which also
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