(Pages 442-3)
Sam arrived in Washington on November 22, shortly before the Fortieth Congress adjourned for the holidays. Stewart lived in a rooming house on F Street NW near the White House. “I was seated at my window one morning when a very disreputable-looking person slouched into the room,” Stewart remembered.
He was arrayed in a seedy suit, which hung upon his lean frame in bunches with no style worth mentioning, A sheaf of scraggy black hair leaked out of a battered old slouch hat, like stuffing from an ancient Colonial sofa, and an evil-smelling cigar butt, very much frazzled, protruded from the corner of his mouth. He had a very sinister appearance. He was a man I had known around the Nevada mining camps several years before, and his name was Samuel L. Clemens.
The ruffian “became a member of my family and my clerk” at a salary of six dollars a day, though Sam later admitted that “a capabler man did the work" —no doubt another Smiggy McGlural—who was paid a hundred dollars a month.
With a government sinecure in hand, Sam buckled down to writing. As an occasional reporter for the New York Tribune, Territorial Enterprise, Alta California, Packard’s Monthly, and soon the New York Herald and Chicago Republican, he slept at Stewart's rooming house, boarded at the luxurious Willard Hotel, scribbled on his book about the Quaker City excursion by night, observed congressional debates by day, and nursed his ambition. As one of the forty-nine accredited D.C. press correspondents he was, he wrote his family, “pretty well known now—intend to be better known.” He visited “the Capitol, several times, to look at it—almost to worship it; for surely it must be the most exquisitely beautiful edifice that exists on earth to-day.” Still, as in 1853, Sam was generally unimpressed by the caliber of American politicians. “Every morning, after breakfast,” he joked, “Congress passes a brand-new Reconstruction Act; after luncheon they amend it and put some Constitution in it; when it is time to go to dinner, they repeal it, and get ready to start fresh in the morning.” He quipped in his notebook that whiskey was “taken into Com|[mittee] rooms in demijohns & carried out in demagogues.” With Congress awash in various forms of public corruption, he concluded that the federal legislators constituted the only “distinctly native American criminal class.” He even disparaged in his journal the ignorance of the lawmakers: “There are some pitiful intellects in this Congress! There isn’t one man in Washington in civil office who has the brains of Anson Burlingame.” In the halls of the Capitol, he asserted, “rascality achieves its highest perfection.” Despite his own efforts to find Orion a patronage job, he was outspoken in his critique of the spoils system. “The heads of Departments are harassed by Congressmen to give clerkships to their constituents until they are fairly obliged to consent in order to get a little peace,” he carped. “What a rotten, rotten, and unspeakable nasty concern this nest of departments is,” he wrote the Enterprise, “with its brainless battalions of Congressional poor-relation-clerks and their book-keeping, pencil-sharpening strumpets.” He compared the government bureaucracy to the Circumlocution Office in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit. It is no wonder that a generation later Sam became a proponent of civil service reform.
(Page 458-9)
In late February, the Alta people raised the ante, announcing plans to reprint all of his Quaker City letters to the paper in a cheap paperback edition, preempting his revision of them, Sam was predictably outraged. “A day or two ago I found out that the Alta people meant to publish my letters in book form in San Francisco,” he complained to Mother Fairbanks on March 10. Bliss had suggested that he simply “write the book all over new, & not mind what the Alta does—but that won't do.” If the Alta reprinted “those wretched, slangy letters unrevised, I should be utterly ruined.” So he decided to take decisive measures: to hurry to California and negotiate face-to-face with John McComb and Frederick MacCrellish for the rights to his work. Besides, three months of winter weather in New York and Washington “had begun to make me restive, and I almost wished for a good excuse to try a change of scene,” he wrote, “It came about the eighth of March—a business call to California.” Sam touched Bliss for a thousand-dollar advance on royalties to cover his expenses and left Washington immediately.”