The tourist traveling from Philadelphia to Washington in the Thirties anticipated few pleasures and no comforts from the trip that had to be made by coach from Baltimore, over roads intolerably wretched under the best conditions, and all but impassable and not without dangers in inclement weather. The journey from Philadelphia to Baltimore was usually made by boat through the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, and the entire trip, in winter one of exposure, required the greater part of two days.[1] The fare from Baltimore to Washington was four dollars. Sometimes the ruts in the winter roads would overturn the coach, throwing the passengers into the mire, and occasionally resulting in sprains and broken bones.[2] Later in Jackson’s time, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was built, with a branch into Washington, and when the first cars, drawn by horses, reached the country-town capital, the enthusiastic statesmen felt that the problem of transportation had been solved. Urging Butler to accept the attorney-generalship, and stressing the fact that acceptance would not preclude his appearance in personal cases in New York and Albany, Van Buren made much of the fact that “to the former place you will next season be able to go in fifteen hours, and to the latter in a day and a night.”[3] Blair, of the “Globe,” boasted after the election of 1832 that “in eight days and nights after the closing of the polls in Ohio, the result was known in the city of Washington from all the organized counties except three.” This, he declared, “is an instance of rapid communication from the West unparalleled in this country.”[4] The foreigner, expecting a national capital more or less pretentious and compact, was invariably shocked on entering the environs over miserable mud roads, to find only an occasional drab hut or cottage at wide intervals. Usually, until the Capitol attracted his attention, he was wholly unconscious of his arrival at his destination. One of these, who has left a record of his visit, relates that he was “looking from the window of his coach in a sort of brown study, at fields covered with snow,” when a fellow passenger startled him with the inquiry as to how he liked Washington. “I will tell you when I see it,” he replied. “Why, you have been in Washington the last quarter of an hour,” was the rejoinder.[5] Another famous visitor “was taken by surprise” on finding herself within the shadow of the hall of the lawmakers, “so sordid are the enclosures and houses on its very verge.”[6] But as the coach wound round the Capitol, and swung with a merry clatter into Pennsylvania Avenue, the houses at more frequent intervals and connected shops disclosed the town. With a characteristic “clatter and clamp,”[7] with a gay cracking of whips, the coach would splash and rumble up to one of the leading hotels, and the cramped and weary tourist would joyously take leave of the conveyance and seek lodgment within.