In the days of Jackson, comparatively few families had a permanent residence in Washington, and to an English visitor the town had the appearance of a watering-place.[43] Many Senators and Representatives considered it so impossible that they left their families at home.[44] Attorney-General Butler at first refused to consider a position in the Cabinet because “Mrs. Butler did not like the idea of bringing her daughters up here.”[45] When the wives and daughters did accompany the statesmen to the capital, it was the custom, with such as could afford to maintain an establishment, to take a house. These usually purchased, albeit many of the more desirable residences that could be leased were not for sale. An establishment could be maintained at a surprisingly low cost. Houses “suitable for the purposes of genteel people” could be had for from $50 to $300 a year, and even the large mansions, many of them standing and still occupied by fashionable families after almost a century, could be had for from $500 to $800 a year.[46] The servant problem did not exist, for domestics could be employed in abundance for $4 a month.[47] The Southerners, bringing their slaves with them, or buying them in the slave market at Alexandria, were able to entertain with a lavish display which set the pace socially, and made the Southern dominance easy. Foreigners were impressed, after hearing a senatorial orator rhapsodize in the Senate over the blessings of American liberty, to see him driven from the Capitol after his oration by one of his family slaves.[48] Others, not wishing to be burdened with a house, lived in the hotels, where other people’s slaves waited upon them. In these, too, the cost of living was low, the leading hostelries taking guests at $1.75 a day, $10 a week, or $35 a month. Transients sat down to tables fairly groaning with food, and with decanters of brandy and whiskey at their elbows, free at these prices. The guest, in his room, could order real Madeira for $3 a bottle, sherry, brandy, and gin for $1.50, and Jamaica rum for $1. The statesman, leaving his hotel quarters for the Senate or the House, could, if he wished, pause at the bar of the hostelry for a toddy of unadulterated liquor and lump sugar for twelve and a half cents.[49] But the greater part of the public men lived in boarding-houses, and the “Intelligencer,” the “Globe,” and the “Telegraph” filled columns, at the beginning of congressional sessions, with the enticing advertisements of the landladies. Some few of these houses, such as Dawson’s, associated with celebrities, live in history, but the majority were small, shabby, and uncomfortable. In these, however, romances sometimes blossomed, and the barmaid of one presided for a time over the establishment of a Cabinet member, and the landlady of another over the household of a Senator who aspired to the Presidency.[50]