CHAPTER VI FASHIONS OF THE FIFTIES To estimate at anything like their value ante-bellum days at the capital, it must be borne in mind that the period was one of general prosperity and competitive expenditure. While a life-and-death struggle raged between political parties, and oratorical battles of ominous import were fought daily in Senate Chamber and House, a very reckless gaiety was everywhere apparent in social circles. Especially was this to be observed in the predominant and hospitable Southern division in the capital; for predominant Southern society was, as even such deliberately partisan historians as Messrs. Nicolay and Hay admit; and, what these gentlemen designate as “the blandishments of Southern hospitality,” lent a charm to life in the Government circles of that day which lifted the capital to the very apex of its social glory. Writing of these phases of life in the capital, in a letter dated March, 1858, I said to Governor Clay: “People are mad with rivalry and vanity. It is said that Gwin is spending money at the rate of $75,000 a year, and Brown and Thompson quite the same. Mrs. Thompson (of Mississippi) is a great favourite here. Mrs. Toombs, who is sober, and has but one daughter, Sally, who is quite a belle, says _they_ spend $1,800 per month, or $21,000 per annum.” The four years’ war, which began in ’1, changed these social conditions. As the result of that strife poverty spread both North and South. The social world at Washington, which but an administration before had been scarcely less fascinating and brilliant than the Court of Louis Napoleon, underwent a radical change; and the White House itself, within a month after it went into the hands of the new Black Republican party, became degraded to a point where even Northern men recoiled at the sight of the metamorphosed conditions.[9] In the days of Presidents Pierce and Buchanan, Washington was a city of statesmen, and in the foreground, relieving the solemnity of their deliberations in that decade which preceded the Nation’s great disaster, were fashion and mirth, beauty and wit. It was then, as the government city of a Republic must ever be, a place of continuous novelty, of perpetual changes, of new faces. The fashionable world comes and goes in the Federal City with each Presidential term of four and Senatorial term of six years, and its longer or shorter stays of the army and navy contingent, and always it gathers its personnel from as many points as there are States in the Union, and as many parts of the world as those to which our diplomatic relations extend.