Pre-Civil War Physical Violence on the Floor of the US Congress

You could see the city’s rawness everywhere: in its sprawling dimensions and empty expanses; in its clusters of low wood houses and straggling rows of buildings pocked by vacant lots; in the odd isolated splendor of its scattered handful of large government buildings (as if “the British Museum . . . suddenly migrated to the centre of an exhausted brick- field”); in its broad unpaved avenues and its seemingly permanent blanket of dust from ongoing construction. The three men probably saw the White House and strolled down Pennsylvania Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare (known as “the Avenue”), with its array of houses, hotels, churches, saloons, small businesses, and newspaper offices. Not only was it an architectural anchor of the city—an enormous structure at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, in a permanent showdown with the White House at the other end—but it was also a national monument of sorts, open to the public and filled with commemorative works of art.

Source: fsgworkinprogress.com