We started the day outside Ford Theatre where Lincoln was shot and the Petersen house where he actually died. We were following a walk around Penn Quarter and China Town which was interesting although Washington possibly has the smallest china town we have ever been to, no more than 4 blocks. In fact the friendship arch is probably bigger than the Chinese area! All the same it was interesting and the walk overlapped with a historic Washington walk which identified a few houses that were used by John Booth and his co-conspirators. The end of the walk saw us on 6th street so we walked down to the archives museum which contains the original copies of The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and The Bill of Rights. These are all held in the rotunda and laid out in such a way that it shows the logical progression / production of each of these documents, I don’t think I had realised how much Lincoln was willing to compromise to create the union.
From there we were going to go to the Basilica of the national shrine of the immaculate conception which is actually the largest Roman Catholic Church in the Western Hemisphere but there were problems with the underground and I wanted to see Lincoln’s cottage so we changed tube lines and set off for there, it was actually a good thing we did as you can only go round with a guide and a tour was just starting. The cottage is 3 miles outside of Washington (in Lincoln’s time) and it is in the grounds of the veterans hospital that had been created during the war with the English and the subsequent civil war. Lincoln was offered use of the house by the military and he tended to use it during the summer and after relocating his family from the White House when his son died of cholera picked up from the water supply to the White House.
It was obviously very different to the White House as they only had a staff of 3, a maid, a cook and a butler and almost to demonstrate Lincoln’s view on things the maid was from Ireland, the cook was a freed slave and the butler was a free born African American. Unfortunately there is virtually no furniture in the house, and because it is owned and managed by an education fund it is all a bit scholarly in approach, but interesting none the less. By the time we had finished at the cottage it was after 3pm so we set off back downtown to grab lunch – a wonderful pizza before heading back to the apartment as we had planed to have a rest then go out again to do a nighttime walk around Washington, but in the end we had an evening watching the Washington Nationals play baseball again
