The Capitol at Night: Scandals, Murder, Politics Adults Only Tour

After dark, Capitol Hill tells a very different story. On this adults-only evening walking tour, your guide takes you through the dramatic, outrageous, and often shocking history that unfolded in the shadow of Congress, from deadly duels and scandalous affairs to smuggling schemes and backdoor political deals. With the iconic dome glowing overhead and stops past the Supreme Court and Library of Congress, this is Washington at its most gloriously unfiltered.

The Library of Congress has burned more than once, and Congress managed to make it worse each time. After the British destroyed the original collection in 1814, a chimney fire in 1851 took out another 35,000 of the 55,000 volumes before legislators finally agreed to build a separate, fireproof building in 1864. The stunning Jefferson Building you see tonight is the result of Congress finally, reluctantly, deciding that the nation's books were worth protecting. We do not enter any buildings on this tour.

In 1884, Kentucky Congressman William Campbell Preston Breckinridge met seventeen-year-old Madeline Pollard on a train to Lexington and began a relationship that would last nearly a decade. When he married someone else instead of her after his wife died, Pollard sued him for breach of promise in a trial that became a national sensation, arguing not just for damages but for the principle that men and women should be held to the same standard when it came to matters of the heart. The jury agreed, she was awarded $15,000, and Breckinridge lost his seat in Congress shortly after.

Before this block held two of America's most iconic institutions, it was the site of a Civil War prison that held some of the Confederacy's most notorious figures. Rose Greenhow, a widowed Washington socialite turned Confederate spymaster, was imprisoned here after running a spy network out of her 16th Street home and passing intelligence that helped the South win the first Battle of Bull Run. Also held here was Henry Wirz, the commander of the Andersonville prison camp, who was executed on these grounds in 1865 after being convicted of war crimes for the deaths of thousands of Union prisoners.

The building at the center of it all has witnessed more than two centuries of drama within its own walls, and this tour barely scratches the surface. Tonight you will hear about senators beaten on the floor, vice presidents who died in the building's basement bathtubs, congressmen who collapsed mid-speech and mid-vote, a nationalist attack that sent thirty rounds raining down from the gallery onto the House floor, and the ghost of a black cat that generations of night watchmen swear still prowls the corridors before moments of national crisis. We do not enter any buildings on this tour.

The man immortalized in bronze above you was shot not far from where you are standing, and the story of how he actually died is not quite what most people expect. Tonight you will hear about the assassin, the motive, and the medical decisions that may have done more damage than the bullet itself.

The manicured grounds stretching out before you have been the setting for two of the tour's most unexpected stories, separated by nearly two centuries but equally difficult to believe actually happened. One involves a public execution that went spectacularly wrong before it even began, and the other involves a congressman's wife, a late-night session, and these very steps.