Correspondence

DC Area readers will find this passage that I received via email interesting. Yes, I'm cutting and pasting from email. I'm fucking tired dammit.

From Paul Johnson's A History of the American People, page 339...

From every one of the twenty-four states his followers congregated on the capital, a 10,000 strong army of the poor, the outlandish, the needy, above all the hopeful. Washingtonians were appalled as these people assembled, many in dirty leather clothes, the 'inundation of the northern barbarians into Rome.' They drank the city dry of whiskey within days, they crammed the hotels, which tripled their prices to $20 a week, they slept five in a bed, then on the floors, spilling over into Georgetown and Alexandria, finally into the fields. Daniel Webster wrote: 'I never saw such a crowd here before. Persons have come 500 miles to see General Jackson and they really seem to think the country has been rescued from some general disaster.