01a0001

Creating ffie Federal City, 177~18OO:

Potomac Fever

Kenneth R. Bowling

Octagon Museum

Kym S. Rice, Guest Exhibition Curator

July 11-September 25, 1988

The American Institute of Architects Press

Washington, D.C., 1988

Kenneth R. Bowling, a native of Baltimore, Maryland, received his Ph.D. in American history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1968. He is an authority on American politics in the years immediately following the War of Independence and serves as co-editor of the multivolume Documentary History of the First Federal Congress, a project based at George Washington University.

The American Institute of Architects Press

1735 New York Avenue, NW., Washington, D.C. 20006

ISBN 1-55835-011-X

Library of Congress Cataloging-i n-Publication Data

Bowling, Kenneth R.

Creating the federal city, 1 77~1 800: Potomac fever / Kenneth R. Bowling.

p.cm.

Bibliography:p.

1.United States Capitol (Washington, D.C.~History.

2.United States-Capital and capitol-History-I 8th century. 3. Washington ( D.C.)-Politics and

government-To 1878. 1. Title. F204.C2B66 1988

975.3'01~cl9

88-16810

CIP

Cover:"View of the Capitol" by William Birch. Watercolor, 1800. Collection of the Library of Congress.

Contents

Illustrations

Foreword

Introduction

I.Exclusive Jurisdiction: The Idea of an American Capital

II.Hudson, Delaware, and Susquehanna River Competitors

III.George Washington and Potomac Fever

Iv.Congress Debates the Issue, 1783-90

V.Implementation of the Residence Act, 1790-1800 Select Bibliography

This publication and exhibition were made possible by grants from the AlA College of Fellows, the D.C. Community Humanities Council, and the Kiplinger Foundation.

Ill

Illustrations

View of the Capitol, by William Birchcover

Plan and Perspective View of a House . . . belonging to

Edwd. Langley, by Nicholas Kingfrontispiece

George Town and Federal City, by T. Cartwright after George Beck2

East Elevation of the United States Capitol, by William Thornton8

Portrait of George Washington, by unknown10

The State House in Philadelphia, by James Trenchard after

Charles Willson Peale13

Portrait of Alexander Hamilton, by James Sharples13

Nassau-Hall, by Henry Dawkins18

Portrait of James Madison, by unknown18

Map of Virginia, by Bishop James Madison24

Georgetown College, by Augustus K6llner27

House Intended for the President . . . in Philadelphia,

by William and Thomas Birch29

Stephens's Plan of the City of Philadelphia, by Theodore

Leonhardt & Son after Thomas Stephens31

Ferry Scene on the Susquehanna, by Pavel Petrovich Svinin33

Lancaster County Courthouse, by Benjamin Henry Latrobe33

Portrait of Thomas Hartley, attributed to Edward Green Malbone35

View at Havre de Grace, by Benjamin Henry Latrobe36

Plan of the Town of Baltimore, by A. P. Folie after James Poupard38

East Branch of the Potomac River, by Augustus K~llner40

Falls of the Potomac, by William Russell Birch43

Duddington Plan of Washington, by Nicholas King46

Portrait of Thomas Jefferson, by Michel Sokolnicki after

Thaddeus Kosciusko46

Description of plan of Washington, by George Walker52

View of Georgetown, by George Isham Parkyns54

Washington, by George Isham Parkyns57

Permanent Residence of Congress, by David Stuart58

Portrait of Elbridge Gerry, by James Barton Longacre after

John Vanderlyn62

The State House at Annapolis, by James Trenchard64

View of New York City from Long Island, attributed to

John Montresor66

Portrait of Robert Morris, by Robert Edge Pine70

Portrait of Daniel Carroll of Rock Creek, by John Wollaston74

Congress Embarked Onboard the Ship Constitution, by unknown77

ÿÿÿEÂ_ _Terms of sale of lots in Washington

Portrait of Thomas Corcoran, by Charles Peale Polk

Portrait of Hannah Lemmon Corcoran, by Charles Peale Polk

View of the Federal Edifice in New York, by unknown

Planof the City of Washington, by James Thackara and John Vallance after Andrew Ellicott after Pierre-Charles LEnfi~nt

Map of Notley Young's property, by Nicholas King

Federal District boundary stone

Portrait of Dr. William Thornton, by Charles Balthazar Julien Fe'vret de Saint-Memin

West Elevation of the Capitol, by Stephen Hallet

View of Washington, by Nicholas King

The Six Buildings, by unknown

View of the Capitol from My Shop, by Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Portrait of the Washington Family, by Edward Savage

Map, territory of Columbia, by Andrew Ellicott

Plan of the White House Grounds, by unknown

I 0 1

101

103

105

107

E_Fore word

The American Architectural Foundation, the publicly oriented arm of The American Institute of Architects, is pleased to make our contribution, Creatmg the Federal City, to the bicentennial celebration of Washington, D.C. This excellent study, the first in a series of five exhibitions, encompasses the creation of the entire city. The impetus for this work, however, originates from a desire to better understand The Octagon, a structure rich in history and unique in its relationship to the early federal city. Through an appreciation of Washington's late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century geography, topography, and development, we will be able to fully appreciate the national treasure this house is.

We particularly appreciate our sponsors who gave generous support to the project. The D.C. Community Humanities Council, the Kiplinger Foundation, and the AlA College of Fellows provided major grants. Their enthusiasm for the project has encouraged us and has made this exhibition and book possible. The Octagon Society, chaired by Winthrop W. Faulkner, FAIA, provided additional financial assistance.

Many people have given generously of their time and expertise in the research and preparation of Creating the Federal City. We thank Nancy Davis, Director of the Octagon, who has been the driving force behind the exhibition. We also wish to express special appreciation to guest exhibition curator Kym Rice and guest research associate Ellen Kirven Donald.

The project owes a great deal to others who have given so much of their talent and devotion. We wish to gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Sherry Birk, Barbara Carson, Paula Dravec, Anthony Dyson, Edward Kelsey, Sherri Lee, Marilyn Montgomery, Betty Musselman, Ann Parenteau, Judith Schultz, and Pamela Scott. Thanks go to the members of the Octagon Committee, chaired by Maureen Quimby. Also, Janet Rumbarger deserves recognition for her editorial assistance, interest, and valuable suggestions.

We are an organization blessed with imaginative people furthering our mission to serve the public. We are grateful to our Board of Trustees under the leadership of Ted P. Pappas, FAIA, and Benjamin E. Brewer Jr., FAIA. Also, the Chairman of the Board of Regents, Thomas J. Eyerman, FAIA, RIBA, provided advice, counsel, and encouragement.

Finally, we thank our colleagues, friends, and, above all, our museum patrons who generously give of their time to participate, read, and give us suggestions for future programs and exhibitions.

James Perry Cramer

President, American Architectural Foundation

ÿÿÿiÂ_ _Introduction

The Octagon Research Series:

Studies in the History of the Early

Federal City

The Octagon Research Series focuses both on the larger realm of the early federal city and the precise history of the creation of one of its most renowned residences. The Octagon, one of the last surviving buildings of the early city, is a rich resource for such study. Concealed in its history lie questions and possibly many answers regarding the life of the early Republic. The house, as amaterial artifi~ct, waits to be well scrutinized by architectural historians and scholars of material culture.

Three years were spent in fund-raising to support this research. We are grateful to the following sponsors for realizing the potential of this project and for providing their much-appreciated financial backing: AlA College of Fellows, a member of the Octagon Committee, and the Eva Gebhard-Gourgaud Foundation. With their support, sufficient research was completed to reveal that great treasures were at hand.

Preparations for the series included enlisting the help of Barbara Carson, who assisted in developing a comprehensive five-year research plan that is now in effect. The plan was reviewed by prominent scholars who divided the work into five topics, each of which will be addressed in an annual exhibition and catalog. By sharing the results of the research process with the public, each exhibition will broaden our understanding of the architectural, social, political, and cultural history of the early Republic.

The first exhibition, Creating the Federal City: Potomac Fever, funded by the AlA College of Fellows, D.C. Community Humanities Council, and the Kiplinger Foundation, provides a physical and geographical context for the Octagon. The physical evidence of the city's formation is presented in the exhibition. Such evidence was difficult to locate because portions of the eighteenth-century city are now incorporated into Maryland and Virginia; therefore, early records are scattered in all three jurisdictions. Moreover, many artilacts were lost when the city was burned during the War of 18 12. The objects seen in the exhibition today, however, do represent a large portion of available material. Kym Rice, exhibition curator, masterfully met the chal3

¹Ã_ _lenge of locating those artifi~cts and installing the exhibition. Kenneth Bowling's essay on the political maneuverings of the Founding Fathers complements the exhibit's display of physical evidence of the new city.

\½\¼

ffi

It is planned that each exhibition will develop in similar flishion. Building the Octagon (1989) will explore the technology of the early building trades; the relationship among craftsmen, designers, and builders; and the development of the town house form in other American cities with respect to the Octagon. These concepts will be examined through Octagon construction records found in the Taybe papers.

LjI+LUU

YWe anticipate that the third exhibition, Furnishing the Octagon (1990), will examine surviving material evidence of the Tayloes' city household. It will investigate such issues as public versus private space as reflected in room usage, changes in the traditional gentry value systems, and consequent patterns of consumption and transmission of style.

7L]L

The Cultural Environment in Early Washington (1991) will consider Taybe's residency at the Octagon and the growing complexity of the city's economic and cultural life in the early years of the Republic.

Cou~~ D'vis~~otPol~£tcalHIstQry Sm:th~ontanInst~1~:on

2}In 1992 the exhibition and catalog will focus on Domestic Lift in the Early Federal City. Family life, work, the roles of women, slaves, and servants in the household, food preparation and preferences, and routines of daily life will be examined.

The significance of these exhibitions and catalogs lies in their cumulative effect: a complete reinterpretation of the Octagon for the public, an accurate refurnishing plan, an outreach program for local schools, and a scholarly contribution to the study of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This commitment to long-range goals and objectives will benefit every aspect of the museum-its restoration, collections, exhibitions, and public programs-and, thereby, move the Octagon into its third century with grace.

Nancy Davis

Director, The Octagon

3'_I. Exclusive Jurisdiction:

The Idea of an American Capital

The fight over the location of the United States capital caused more political turmoil than any other issue during the seven years Congress debated it. The issue threatened the very existence of the Union, as Revolutionary leaders sought to achieve a location in the best interest of themselves and their constituents. Despite their rhetoric, no one made the interest of the nation their predominant concern, for the idea of the Union was too new to outweigh loyalty to section, state, and locale. George Washington of Fair~x County, Virginia, had the interest of the Union more at heart than anyone because his place in its history, which motivated his actions throughout the Revolution, wed him to the Union's success. Nevertheless, the widely respected Washington behaved no less politically about the issue than the often vilified Robert Morris of Philadelphia. The Revolutionary generation wrote much less about the implications and role of a capital for a republican empire than they did about its location. In large part this reflects the tact that Americans understood so well the benefits connected with the location of a capital. They had fought over the sites for county seats and colonial and state capitals dozens oftimes before the struggle over the site of the federal capital.

From a political and economic standpoint, proximity to the seat of government meant access to federal offices and officials as well as the opportunity to take quick advantage of federal information, legislation, contracts, and jobs. Land and stock speculators considered such access of special importance. Hard money would emanate from and circulate about the capital. The construction of federal buildings offered empJoyment and government-funded contracts for local residents. Property values in and about the site would rise. The federal government would pay for transportation improvements and the necessary military installations for defense. Profits to be realized from serving the needs of federal officeholders appeared as unlimited as the potential for government growth. Even ~rmers distant from proposed capital sites expected to reap benefits. If the capital became a commercial, manutacturing, an&or financial center-Amsterdam as well as Hague-it would generate vast economic growth. In 1783 congressmen estimated the annual value of the capital to a local econ7

]Ã_ _omy at $100,000 to $150,000; five years later the estimate ran as high as $250,000; and in 1 789James Madison set it at halfa million. By 1790, when agreement on the location was finally reached, Thomas Jefferson put its worth at approximately a million dollars a year.

Regional supremacy within the Union and control of western resources were also at stake. The river on which the capital sat presumably would be the chosen route for penetration of the continent and the wealth that lay to the west. Throughout the latter part of the Revolution, sectional consciousness, sectional power within the Union, and the threat of dissolution of the Union influenced politics, just as they did during the nineteenth century. Such a sectionally divided society clearly understood that the power and prestige associated with the capital would provide political leverage to the section in which it was located.

Congressmen from all regions knew keenly the value of residing close enough to the seat of government to arrive early and remain throughout the session. During the 178 Os the four southern states (generally considered to be Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia) remained convinced that they were a minority in the Union and that their interests were threatened by a combination of the five Middle states (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland) and the four New England states. But the South also believed that it would soon become the dominant influence in the Union. It predicted population expansion in the South and West and that new agricultural states in the West would ally themselves with the South. In the meantime southerners seldom neglected an opportunity to cite their minority status as reason for a more southern residence for Congress. The South saw the advantages of a southern exposure for providing the proper hue to government. Given the right location, southern views on any issue-including slavery-would be more readily heard than northern ones.

For those few Americans who considered the needs of the whole as well as the needs of the parts, the location of the capital had an additional role. Properly situated, it would cement the North, South, and West, thus ensuring the Union's survival and the prestige and respect Congress so desperately sought to establish for itself at home and abroad. The capital's site would reflect national pride and such American ideals as liberty, union, and republican empire. By 1789 some Americans expected their capi9

_Ã_ _tal to become a new Rome, "the mistress of the western world, the patroness of science and of arts, the dispenser of freedom, justice and peace to unborn millions," or a new Byzantium, "the seat of science, manu~ctures and commerce for ages yet to come. " Six years later the author of an "Essay on the City ofWashington " saw the capital as the means of confirming forever a union that would one day rule all of North America. To such a capital would flock those Americans who sought to participate in, or witness, the theater of American political, economic, and cultural life and who had enough wealth to reside there. The United States capital would, he predicted, outshine Rome, London, and all the capitals of ancient and modern civilization.

Could such a capital be compatible with republicanism? Simply put, republicanism was an institutionally expressed political and social philosophy which rested on the belief that, although people were self-interested and power seeking, they were capable of self-government. People delegated sovereignty to popularly elected legislatures, supreme over executives. Representation was indirect, social distinctions but not aristocracy acceptable, and the interests of minorities protected. The goal of republicanism was to balance individual liberty with the good of the whole.

To those Americans who worried about the survival of republicanism, the dangers of a magnificent capital seemed immense, particularly if it became a commercial as well as political city. Mercy Warren of Massachusetts feared mobs, the introduction of monarchical ideas, the parade and trappings ofaristocratic courts, and the arrival of European manners and the younger sons ofEuropean nobility. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania questioned the wisdom of locating the seat of government of a free people in any part of its territory that allowed black slavery. Patrick Henry of Virginia believed that the effect of proximity to the capital would be positive only if the federal government remained virtuous; if it, however, evolved into a tyranny, a citizen would be better off living on the frontier, distant from its influence. On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, blinded by the vision of a commercial capital situated on the Potomac, which he shared with George Washington, argued that the Republic could remain virtuous and that its capital, even were it to become a commercial center, need not suffer from the intrigue, luxury, dissipation, servility, and vices of the body so inherent to Tom Jones's cosmopolitan London.

¹Â_ _Few Americans had specific notions about what cultural institutions should exist at the capital. As early as 1783, Rev. Jeremy Belknap of Boston proposed that Congress provide a room at "Columbia " to display trophies taken from the British during the War for Independence, since the sight of them would ~n the flame of liberty. Various men later made proposals for a botanical garden and a scientific society at the seat of government, or an agricultural experimental litrm outside of it. Charles Willson Peale of Philadelphia hoped to settle near Congress and place his museum under its patronage. The only cultural institution that found any serious support, albeit minimal, was a national university. George Washington, who encouraged the idea, believed such an institution would allow young men from the North and South to mix, thereby breaking down sectional prejudice.

Whatever institutions the capital housed, one American knew its growth would not occur quickly. Pierre-Charles LEn~nt, a French-born artist, architect, and engineer who had served in the Continental army, observed to Congress in 1784 that it would take decades, considering the financial situation, to build a town "in such a manner as to give an idea of the greatness of the empire as well as to engrave in every mind that sense of respect that is due to a place which is the seat of a supreme sovereignty." Five years later he elaborated on these thoughts to President Washington:

No Nation perhaps had ever before the opportunity offered them of deliberately deciding on the spot where their Capital City should be fixed, or of combining every necessary consideration in the choice of the situation-and although the means now within the power of the country are not such as to pursue the design to any great extent it will be obvious that the plan should be drawn on such a scale as to leave room for that aggrandizement and embellishment which the increase of the wealth of the Nation will permit it to pursue at any period however remote.

UEnIsnt's long-range view of a capital of magnificent buildings and landscapes reflected Americ~s optimistic outlook for the survival of the Union and the establishment of a republican empire, and his admirer, George Washington, became deeply wedded to his vision.

In 1774 Virginia called for an intercolonial Congress to meet "at such place annually as shall be thought most convenient." New York and Annapolis were mentioned as possible sites, but the colonies chose commodious Philadelphia, capital of centrally located Pennsylvania. Except when the British army forced a removal to Baltimore in 1776 and York, Pennsylvania, a year later (Congress spent a day at Lancaster before deciding on York), Congress

ÿÿÿéÁ_ _sat at Philadelphia throughout the Revolutionary War. Washing-ton considered the most populous city in the colonies an improper place for Congress. He opposed meeting in Philadelphia because many of its inhabitants would be antagonistic to the American cause and its port would provide easy entry and cover for British spies and other troublemakers. He may have feared that Congress could not maintain secrecy and autonomy in a politically and socially alive commercial city, where influences of all sorts would affect even the most circumspect delegates. In addition, Congress, lacking jurisdiction over any part of Philadelphia, would be in effect the guest of Pennsylvania.

Despite the accommodations, urban amenities, and financial resources of Philadelphia, such concerns proved prophetic. Pennsylvania provided Congress space in the State House (known today as Independence Hall) but continued to use the largest portion of the building for itself. The two governments shared the state Capitol with little problem; however, they engaged in jurisdictional disputes over prerogatives in the capital. Congressmen interfered in state affiurs, while the politically sophisticated Philadelphians involved themselves in congressional politics. In addition to rocky relations between the two governments, the cosmopolitan nature of the city caused problems. The closest that the United States came to the Paris of the French Revolution was Philadelphia in 1778-79, and the city's mobs and social protests raised questions in Congress about remaining there.

Early in December 1779 Congress resolved to leave Philadelphia in the spring. Some members talked about going to NewJersey, where Congress might purchase a few square miles of territory near Princeton. This is the earliest known mention of a district for Congress, but the degree of jurisdiction Congress would exercise, if any, was not specified. In March 1780 southern delegates, fearful ofbeing hauled northward, lai led to rescind

the removal resolution but succeeded in blocking the decision on where to go. The decision to remove having been made, the impossibility ofdeciding where to go proved an embarrassment, and Congress referred the matter to a committee, which never reported back to it.

By June 1783, Philadelphia provided the centralists-those political leaders who advocated a strong federal government-with a sustaining environment. Financial resources, commercial information, and European news were readily available, and a

ÿÿñÂ_ _new and more conservative Pennsylvania government proved increasi ngly supportive. Congressmen enjoyed spacious accommodations, hearty cuisine (including Asian), elysian pleasures, and stimulating intellectual dialogue. For the decentralists-those who saw danger in increasing the power of the federal government-Philadelphia had become synonymous with grasping central government, wealth, and decadence. No one complained more vigorously than Virginia Congressman Arthur Lee, who in May 1 783 insisted that Congress remove to a spot where it could act independently. Much to his delight, Congress left Philadelphia a month later.

The event that brought about the unanimous vote to leave the city where Congress had resided since 1774 begs for explanation; nothing else in the Revolutionary era more profoundly influenced the history ofWashington, D.C. The circumstances under which Congress left the city explain why Congress established exclusive jurisdiction over the District of Columbia and why certain voting rights and representation have been long delayed or denied its citizens.

Not long after news of the preliminary articles of peace reached the United States and Congress had begun to demobilize its troops, Continental army soldiers with fixed bayonets surrounded the State House to demand that their financial accounts be settled. Knowing Congress to be insolvent and dependent on the states for both money and authority, and having earlier unsuccessfully appealed to it, the soldiers sought redress from the Executive Council of Pennsylvania. The angry demonstrators had carefully chosen a Saturday (2 1 June 1783) for their demonstration because they knew that Congress' first floor chamber would be empty during its customary weekend recess and that the council would be in session on the second floor of the State House.

As the troops assembled for their march on the State House, New York Congressman Alexander Hamilton urged Elias Boudinot of New Jersey, president of Congress, to call an emergency session on the grounds that the soldiers might rob the federally incorporated Bank of North America that night. Boudinot agreed and issued the call immediately. The two centralists feared the precedent of Continental soldiers attempting to settle their claims against Congress with a state government. If Pennsylvania agreed to the demands, other states might follow. The result would be the loss of one of the few things that, in the absence of

_Ã_ _I

the British threat, held the loose union of states together: the federal debt. Centralists believed it must remain the responsibility of the federal government for the new nation to survive. Given the antimilitary bias of Americans and the historical threat posed to republics by revolutionary armies, the incident might also stimulate desperately needed public sympathy and support if Congress appeared to be the object of the soldiers' wrath. The political sparring match between Pennsylvania and the United States, which Hamilton thereby brought about, became a debate over federalism, specifically the authority and dignity due Congress by the states.

While the Pennsylvania Council deliberated its response to the armed soldiers who surrounded the State House, congressmen began arriving for the emergency session. The soldiers allowed them to enter the building, and the delegates waited impatiently for a final member (who never arrived) to make a quorum. Without a quorum, the constitutional entity known as Congress was not in session and had no authority to act, but the congressmen within the building nevertheless urged the council to call up the Philadelphia militia to drive the soldiers away. The council refused to do so because it doubted that the citizen militia would take up arms against the long-suffering men who had fought to secure Americ~s independence, at least not until an outrage against persons or property had been committed.

In the classic American dilemma over the line between the right of protest on the one hand and law and order on the other, Pennsylvania acted to preserve the right to assembly. At the same time, it unanimously rejected the soldiers' demands and agreed to hold a conference with a committee of their officers. The armed demonstration broke up. By then the congressmen, having given their blessing to the council's solution, had safely left the building and were on their way to using the incident for their own p0litical ends.

Boudinot called a second special session that evening. This time a quorum of seven states formed and unanimously adopted secret resolutions asserting that the authority of the United States had been grossly insulted by the soldiers who had appeared "about the place within which Congress were assembled." The resolutions demanded that Pennsylvania take measures to suppress the revolt and maintain the dignity and authority of the United States. If the state did not act adequately and promptly, Boudinot

ÿÿmÂ_ _was authorized to convene Congress at either Trenton or Princeton.

On Sunday and Monday a committee chaired by Hamilton held several meetings with the council. The council considered the promised conference with the soldiers preferable to a display of force, especially because the soldiers themselves had taken no action since their nonviolent demonstration on Saturday. Hamilton, who viewed Pennsylvani~s conduct as weak and disgusting, told Boudinot that nothing could be expected from the state. Boudinot consequently adjourned Congress to Princeton with a proclamation, written by Hamilton, that placed the blame for the removal completely upon Pennsylvania.

The unanimity with which Congress acted arose from the uniqueness of the circumstance. Decentralists such as Arthur Lee saw their opportunity to escape from a city they had long considered an unfit seat. They succeeded at last because of the centralists' desire to assert the dignity and authority of Congress at a moment when the very existence of meaningful union stood at stake. Most centralists nevertheless intended to return to their stronghold once order had been restored. By 30 June, when Congress achieved a quorum, the mutiny had long since subsided. The soldiers had returned to their officers, not a shot had been fired, not a person injured, not a piece of property destroyed. But much to the chagrin of the centralists, decentralists controlled enough state delegations to prevent Congress from returning to Philadelphia. The centralists' attempt to use the soldiers' demonstration as a means of enhancing federal authority had backfired-but only for the moment.

The demonstration dramatically called attention to a critical political issue of the American Revolution-the balance of power between the states and the central government-and brought for-ward the question of the proper jurisdiction of Congress over the place where it would meet. Those who sought a federal government supreme over the states seized on the soldiers' demonstration as the reason why Congress must exercise exclusive jurisdiction at its capital, a novel American concept molded by Congress' tenure at Philadelphia and a deliberate misinterpretation of the events that caused Congress to leave in June 1783. Most public comment, often referring to the demonstration, supported granting Congress "supreme local jurisdiction in the spot" where it sat.

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Soon after reaching Princeton, Congress appointed a committee to recommend the degree ofjurisdiction it should have over its seat. The issue involved two questions: What should be the line between the authority of Congress and that of a locality or state over the seat of federal government ; and what should be the relationship between the federal government and the residents of its seat? With no precedent to follow, Congress had only its experience at Philadelphia for guidance. The matter proved puzzling even to Congressman James Madison who sought advice from fellow Virginians. His request prompted Thomas Jefferson to draft a series of proposed congressional resolutions that rejected both federal ownership of the land and the idea of an exclusive jurisdiction for Congress on the grounds that both meant unnecessary and time-consuming problems.

Emboldened by the escalating offers ofjurisdiction from several states and by the public discussion of the issue in the aftermath ofthe Philadelphia demonstration, the centralist-dominated jurisdiction committee reported in September 1783 that Congress should have exclusive jurisdiction over a district not more than six miles square (thirty-six square miles) nor less than three miles square (nine square miles). The report mentioned nothing of the rights of the inhabitants of such a district, but Madison expected them to join with Congress in administering the powers that the federal government would exercise over them. Congressman Lee argued that they should be governed by their own elected representatives. Decentralists considered exclusive jurisdiction dangerous, and in light of their growing political strength, the committee report never came up for debate.

In May 1787 the Federal Convention to revise the Articles of Confederation, which centralists had sought since even before the Articles was ratified in 178 1, convened at Philadelphia. Several members of the 1783 congressional committee on jurisdiction attended and heard Madison offer the proposition that would become paragraph 17, section 8, Article I, of the U.S.

Constitution: Congress had "exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such district (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptances of Congress, become the seat of government of the United States." "Exclusive legislation " was perhaps a less threatening phrase than "exclusive jurisdiction," but the two differed little if at all in meaning. Decentralists George Mason of Virginia and Elbridge

ÿÿ©Â_ _7

Gerry of Massachusetts questioned the breadth ofjurisdiction but lacked the support to prevent adoption of Madison's proposition.

One Antifederalist, Samuel Osgood, claimed to have spent many a sleepless night trying to discover the most obnoxious part of the proposed Constitution, and he finally fixed on Congress' exclusive legislation over its capital. Beginning in the press in November 1787 and climaxing at the Virginia Ratification Convention in June 1788, Antifederalist leaders publicly attacked what they saw as the inexorable result of a yet-to-be-located district under the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress and distant from the eyes of the people.

Antifederalists envisioned a city-before 1787 Americans had referred to their future federal seat as a town-larger and potentially more corrupt than Philadelphia, or even London. One hundred square miles was an enormous area to an agrarian people whose largest city, thirty-six-square-mile Philadelphia, had a settled area of less than two square miles, and whose second largest city, New York, lay a mile south of Greenwich Village. Anti-federalists projected the federal city's population at perhaps two or even four million people, di~ctly attendant on the federal government as employees and lobbyists or their lamily members. They would be subject to a legislature that had absolute authority over them but in which they would have no representation.

Because the Constitution had no Bill of Rights, district residents would be guaranteed none of the traditional English and American civil liberties protected by most state constitutions. Nor would residents have common law protections. Anti-federalists did not believe that the absence of state taxes in the federal district would compensate for the lack of republican liberties and protections of the law. How easy it would be, they thought, for the federal government to corrupt a population so dependent upon it. Residents of the capital would compose a readily motivated mass of support for federal programs and for political pressure on Congress. On the other hand, residents annoyed at the federal government might subject Congress to mob action.

Because the Constitution only provided for extradition between states, Antifederalists saw a federal district as a sanctuary for the states' criminals, debtors, and escaped slaves. They feared that the judiciary centered at the federal city would try Americans without the benefit ofjuries or with juries composed of men dependent upon the federal government. All but the rich would be

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denied justice there. Congress would exercise powers at its place of residence that were implicitly or explicitly denied it in the states. Moreover, Congress could possibly reroute into its coffers at the federal city all the wealth of the nation, for it would surely find the ways and means to spend as much money as could be raised by taxes.

Some Antifederalists viewed the president, with a large military establishment under his command, as the fetus of monarchy and envisioned an aristocracy rising about him. The federal city would become the cultural and social center of the United States, a "dazzling centre, the mistress of ft~shion." To it would flock those who adulated wealth and power, and it would soon become the residence of the great and mighty. The "base, the idle, the avaricious and the ambitious" would turn the federal city into a "happy place, where men are to live, without labor, upon the fruit of the labors of others," or into a "political hive, where all the drones of society are to be collected to feed on the honey of the land." The American people would be taxed to pay for all this.

For Federalists, the issue of Congress' exclusive jurisdiction over its residence played an important role in the constitutional revolution of 1787-90. It symbolized the kind of government they hoped to establish for the American Empire, and they employed their superior journalistic and financial resources to counter Anti federalist charges in the press and at ratification conventions. Federalists, however, recognized that empires were measured by the grandeur of their capitals, and they did not deny the Antifederalist claim that the city would become the focus of American politics, wealth, and society.

To justify the necessity ofexclusive federal jurisdiction over the district, Federalists pointed to the soldiers' demonstration at Philadelphia as evidence that Congress must be independent of any state jurisdiction in order to protect its members and its dignity from insult and violence. Madison stressed the necessity of protecting the federal government and its archives from being the creature of any state, a condition that could outrage other states and destroy the Union.

Federalists argued that the liberties of federal city residents would not be infringed. The state acts of cession would protect the liberties, common law rights, and other interests of people who thereby became residents of the district. Madison assumed that Congress would provide for a popularly elected municipal legis

ÿaÂ_ _I

lature for the district. A newspaper commentator argued that Congress needed exclusive jurisdiction particularly because ofthe foreign community and other special interests that would locate at the seat of federal government. He nonetheless recognized the problem of disfranchisement and suggested an amendment to the Constitution to provide district residents congressional representation once their population reached forty or fifty thousand.

Finally, Federalists insisted that the federal district would not become a place of exclusive privilege or a refuge from justice. How absurd, argued Madison, to imagine that congressmen would provide exclusive advantages over commerce to one small area of the Union at the expense of the communities that had elected them. Edmund Pendleton of Virginia claimed that Congress would never degrade the federal government by allowing the district to become an asylum for villains or other disreputable types. On the issue of the federal district, Antifederalist James Monroe of Vi rginia sided with the Federalists. He predicted that Americans would be delighted to live in a city flourishing in population and wealth, and under the government of an enlightened Congress.

When they ratified the Constitution, several states proposed an amendment to limit the exclusive legislation of Congress to regulations respecting police and good government. No state recommended an amendment to give the residents of the district representation in Congress, although Alexander Hamilton moved that the New York Ratification Convention do just that. Nor did any state propose to restrict the district to three or five miles square (nine or twenty-five square miles) as some Anti-federalists had suggested. A year after the ratification debate, the First Federal Congress easily defeated a proposed amendment from Anti federalists to ensure the operation of state law within the federal district.

Philadelphia held a great parade on 4 July 1788 to celebrate ratification of the Constitution by ten states. Many of the parading tradesmen carried banners and flags expressing federal sentiments in the idiom of their trade. The scene on the bricklayers' flag portrayed the federal city rising out of a forest. '~Both buildings and rulers are the works of our hands," proclaimed its motto. But the flag's rendition of the federal city as a new city rising out of a forest did not then represent an American consensus.

II. Hudson, Delaware, and

Susquehanna River Competitors

Congress bitterly debated the location of the capital in October 1783, December 1784, and September 1789 before it finally decided on a Potomac River site in July 1790. The chosen location was by no means a foregone conclusion for competition was fierce. Between 1782 and 1790 more than thirty sites between New-burgh, New York; Norfolk, Virginia; and the Ohio River were named as possibilities.

Advocates spared neither superlative nor imagination. Environmental detail such as climate, relief, scenic grandeur, soil and water, drainage, healthiness, and defensibility received attention. So too did economic base~ accommodations, hinterland, transportation, labor, relationship to other urban areas, and the avail-ability of energy sources and building materials. The preponderant considerations, however, were centrality and accessibility to both the West and the Atlantic Ocean. The outpourings of"Ohioisms " and reasoned geographical analyses in lavor ofvarious sites had significant impact only when proponents had the political clout to back them up.

The North and South disagreed on the definition of centrality, and politicians proved adept at portraying it in the manner which best justified their choice. Northerners based their definition on population, arguing that equal access by the citizenry ranked paramount in a republic. The 1790 census centered population southwest of the Susquehanna River in Maryland at a point closer to the flills of the Potomac than to the talls of the Delaware. In the absence of a census, however, the North insisted that the population center lay northeast of the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania, while the South believed it to be below the river and ever moving southwestward. Southerners considered centrality of territory on the Atlantic Coast more important than centrality of population. Congress could more effectively apply the reins of government over the American Empire if no one part of it were more distant from the capital than any other. Such a consideration did not appeal to the North because the midpoint between the St. Croix and St. Marys rivers~the northern and southern boundaries of the United States~was known to be on the Potomac River between Georgetown, Maryland, and Alexandria, Virginia. Although a

I A

mÃ_ _few northerners consequently dismissed geographic centrality altogether, others pointed out that the admission of Canada to the Union would shift that center northward, or that centrality of wealth should also be weighed.

The South's insistence that future westward growth of the Union be taken into account in seating the capital fueled sectional disagreement. By 1790 the American people were migrating westward beyond the Appalachian Mountains. Pennsylvanians were peopling the Ohio River; New Yorkers moved toward Lake Erie. The western extremes of Vi rginia and North Carolina soon would have enough residents to qualify for admission to the Union as the states of Kentucky and Tennessee. And five thousand American citizens lived north of the Ohio River. Certain northerners were apathetic if not hostile toward western needs. Because southerners resented this attitude, they exaggerated the possibility of the West seceding from the Union and made retaining it a key argument in their strategy for establishing the capital on the Potomac.

The question of whether the capital should have a tidewater harbor related closely to the criteria of proximity to the West. Almost everyone believed access by water to the Atlantic to be necessary, but many thought an inland site above tidewater on a river with potential for navigational improvement would be sufficient.

Talk of locating the capital above tidewater close to the West raised another issue. Should it be placed at, or at least tied to, an already existing population center, or should it be an undeveloped site? Those Americans who believed that cities were by definition antirepublican insisted that the United States abandon European precedents of placing capitals in large cities. On the other side of the issue, men argued that a preexisting population and economy were essential to the growth of an intant capital and that a rural site was too utopian. The social amenities of a city would heighten the dignity, glory, and importance of the capital in the eyes of both citizens and foreigners. Others pointed to availability offinancial and commercial resources as the most forceful reason to situate the capital in an existing city and reasoned that Congress should go no further from the Atlantic commercial cities than necessary to find a defensible position in case of invasion. Some politicians turned the old republican argument against cities on its head: A large city would provide the best protections for liberty because its population and newspapers would ensure close o~

ÿ_Ã_ _servation of the actions of government officials. The possibility that Congress might shun the Atlantic commercial cities prompted ridicule as well as serious discussion, for those who supported a coastal city found it useful to equate undeveloped sites above tidewaterwith " wilderness" or wasteland.

All of the undeveloped sites that Congress considered connected closely with existing towns or major transportation routes. It did not discuss any site truly adjacent to wilderness, although at least two men thought it should. In 1783 a Rhode Island congressman privately suggested that Congress temporarily sit at or near Pittsburgh, well west of the nation's major population centers. He thought such a decision would raise the price of federal lands in the West and thereby help pay off the public debt. In 1787 Manasseh Cutler, lobbyist for a land company that had settled Marietta in the Northwest Territory, argued that the seat of empire should be on the Ohio River. He urged Congress to postpone action until the claims of the Ohio could merit serious discussion. Not long after the adoption of the Constitution, ajocular writer proposed that it be amended to prohibit the location of the capital in an Indian wigwam or in the howling wilderness.

A final geopolitical argument stressed the importance of siting the capital in such a manner as to tacilitate the economic development of the rising American Empire. At stake was which one of the great midcoastal rivers-the Hudson, the Delaware, the Susquehanna-Chesapeake, or the Potomac-would become the route to the West. The sites given the most serious consideration lay on the latter three rivers, often at major obstacles to navigation. When these sites adjoined state boundaries they had stronger force of argument, for they tended to unite votes by offering to share benefits.

The issue of a permanent postwar seat for Congress first came before it in the spring of 1783 when New York offered the town of Kingston, picturesquely situated below the Catskill foothills eighty miles above the mouth of the Hudson River. Kingston promised to donate to Congress a square mile of land for federal buildings, but the legislature offered Congress only limitedjurisdiction.

New York's offer especially chagrined Lewis Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He wrote to Congress in September 1783 proposing instead that it choose his manor on the Harlem and East Rivers just above Manhattan Island, the pres26

ÿMÃ_ _ent-day South Bronx. Here Congress could have a territory separate from New York State and over which it held absolute jurisdiction. The site could be reached without lengthy voyages up bays and rivers. New England and the adjacent counties in New York could quickly provide a larger force of fighting men than could be raised at any other place in America, for there were no Quakers with religious scruples or slaveholders who had to keep guard at home. The manor lay eight miles from fortified New York City, the best harbor in the United States, where Congress could establish a federal arsenal and navy yard as well as transact its commercial business; nevertheless, the manor was tar enough from the city to protect Congress from the mobs and tumults associated with large cities.

Four years later at the Federal Convention his half-brother Gouverneur Morris priyately suggested that the Constitution establish the capital at easily defended Newburgh and New Windsor on the Hudson, sixty miles above New York City. He abandoned his proposal because it would have defeated the Constitution in several states south of New York. No place in the state figured as a competitor after the adoption of the Constitution in 1788. Instead, New York congressmen promised their votes to supporters of other sites who offered in exchange the longest temporary residence for New York City.

Sites in the Delaware River watershed seriously claimed the attention of Congress between 1783 and 1789. In June 1783 the citizens of a 12.5-square-mile area of Nottingham Township in New Jersey asked the state legislature to grant Congress whatever jurisdiction over them it saw fit. Nottingham included the village of Lamberton and sat on what was then the southern boundary of Trenton. New Jersey promised the federal government whatever jurisdiction over a twenty-square-mile district that it deemed necessary. In addition, the state pledged $75,000 to purchase land and erect buildings and urged other towns in the state to petition Congress directly if any wished to be the U.S. capital. Newark, New Brunswick, and Elizabethtown all made proposals but received little serious consideration. Princeton never sent a formal invitation to Congress but was understood to figure in the competition once Congress moved there in June 1783.

In September 1788, New Jersey, following the recommendation of its ratification convention, offered Congress jurisdiction over any ten miles square within the state. Nevertheless, the only

ÿóÿ!Ã_ _place proposed to the First Federal Congress was at the ta115 of the Delaware River near Trenton. Being astute politicians, the Trenton and Lamberton promoters realized that a joint offer with Pennsylvanians across the river would have a greater chance of success. Landowners on both sides of the Delaware from Borden-town up to Howell's Ferry near Washington Crossing reached agreement to place themselves under the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress, leaving it to determine on which side of the river to place the federal buildings. The location became a major off-the-floor contender in the 1789 congressional session. Senator Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, the most prominent speculator at the site and its most aggressive advocate in Congress, began acquiring land there just before the 1 789 residence debate. Morrisville, Pennsylvania, and Federal City Road, northeast of Trenton, are reminders of the aborted effort to locate the federal city at the ta115 of the Delaware.

Despite the efforts of Delaware's congressional delegation on behalf of Wilmington in 1783, no offer came from its citizens. Nevertheless, in December 1787 Delaware became not only the first state to ratify the Constitution but also the first to offer Congress a ten-miles-square district. Wilmington, the tavored site, again did nothing on its own behalf and Congress ignored it.

Midway between the talls of the Delaware and Wilmington lay Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania Ratification Convention in December 1787 agreed that, when the new government began to function, Pennsylvania would grant it jurisdiction over any place within the state except its capital: the port city ofPhiladelphia, the contiguous district of Southwark, and a portion of the adjacent township of Northern Liberties (below present-day Girard Avenue ). Consequently, Philadelphia could only be considered for the temporary residence.

In September 1783 and again in October 1787 Germantown, a mere seven miles northwest of Philadelphia, proposed that Congress move there. Its second petition delineated an area ten miles square that included most of the Northern Liberties; Frankfort; Kensington, including its piers and shipyards on the Delaware River; the tails of the Schuylkill River; and Chestnut Hill as well as the village of Germantown itself. In September 1789 the inhabitants of Philadelphia, Bucks, and Montgomery counties asked Congress to establish the permanent residence at Old Philadelphia on the Delaware River, the place originally designated

ÿåÂ_ _for William Penn's great city. This site centered on Byberry at the mouth of Poquessing Creek, the Philadelphia-Bucks County line. In the minds of many, both suburban sites were merely other names for Philadelphia.

A final Delaware River watershed site was Reading, fifty miles up the Schuylkill from Philadelphia. Its chief claim to consideration was its position at the head of the Great Valley, which ran from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas, and at the mouth of Tulpehocken Creek, which some Pennsylvanians advocated as a transportation link from Philadelphia to the Susquehanna and the West.

Many Pennsylvanians believed that the U.S. capital should be nearer the center of the state, in the Susquehanna River watershed. The Susquehannas claim was powerfully argued on the floor of Congress in September 1789: its centrality to territory and population; its proximity to commercial cities; its defensibility; its potential navigational ties to the Delaware, Chesapeake, and Ohio; and, in contrast to the Potomac, its adequate flow for navigation even during the summer. The riverbanks, however, did not provide good harbor for shipping.

Although Congress received no petitions for a location on the banks of the Susquehanna River in 1789, it discussed three sites. Peach Bottom, the southernmost ferry on the river, had little support. A member of the House of Representatives moved that a district including Middletown and Harrisburg be chosen. The real Susquehanna contender, Wright's Ferry, lay forty-five miles above the river's mouth. Midway between Lancaster and York, it served as the major ferry crossing after the 1720s. In 1788, Samuel Wright renamed his town Columbia in hopes of enticing Congress.

Three towns on creeks connected to the Susquehanna petitioned Congress in 1789. Americans recognized Lancaster, ten miles east of the Susquehanna, as the most populous interior town in the United States. Consciously seeking to transcend generalities, Lancaster's petition included a treasury of economic statistics, listing the number and kinds of artisans, the distance by road to major towns and ferries, the accommodations, the prices of food and firewood, and the nature of available building materials.

York, twelve miles west of the river, also petitioned Congress. Soon after arriving at New York to take his seat in the first House

ÿ�Ã_ _of Representatives, Revolutionary War general Thomas Hartley anonymously published Observations on the Propriety of Fixing upon a Central and In/and Situation for the Permanent Residence of Congress in order to put his hometown's claim before Americans. Hartley argued that the site would long provide for the exigencies of an increasing and widely extended people, renew the confidence of Americans in their government, recover lost credit in Europe, and encourage American manutacturing.

Carlisle, in the Great Valley west of South Mountain, lay seventeen miles west of the Susquehanna. Far from being a frontier town, Carlisle had been established by the Penns twenty years before the War for Independence and by 1790 could boast ofDickinson College, a newspaper, and plans to open a textile tactory.

The Susquehanna River emptied into the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. The bay might well have been named Susquehanna had it not been for the tact that it was settled before the river and by different proprietors. The economic relationship between the upper bay area and the states of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, and its location midway between the talls of the Delaware and the taIls of the Potomac, rendered it an attractive contender. In the tall of 1783 two Maryland sites at the head of the bay received a flurry of publicity. Citizens of the economically depressed county seat of Charlestown petitioned Congress to send a committee to view their town. The Baltimore press recommended Havre de Grace, a surveyed town site named in honor of Americ~s ally, France. When Elkton, Maryland, Federalists celebrated the adoption of the Constitution in July 1788, they proposed a toast that Congress fix its seat at the high, healthyjunction of Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, between Elkton and Newark, Delaware.

As early as November 1782, a broadside signed "Aratus" had suggested that the legislature deed the State House and the governor's mansion at Annapolis to the federal government. Maryland would retain ultimate jurisdiction, but Congress could be granted immunities. In May 1783 the citizens of Annapolis resolved to place the town's 300 acres under the jurisdiction of the federal government. The legislature responded by promising Congress the State House, the governor's mansion, $32,500 with which to build a hotel for each state delegation, and whatever jurisdiction over the town and its inhabitants that Congress found necessary for its "honor, dignity, convenience, and safety."

ÿ_Ã_ _Maryland's generous offer was the idea of Baltimore merchant George Lux, Jr., probably the author of Aratus. Lux had suggested to Congressman Theodorick Bland ofVirginia that the seat of federal government should be "a distinct independent territory totally under the government of Congress; but so narrow in that respect are the prejudices of most of the states, that I think such a measure cannot be effected in any one of them." Thus, at least seven months before the soldiers' demonstration at Philadelphia, at least one American envisioned an independent territory under the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government.

Shortly after Maryland ratified the Constitution in 1788, a newspaper writer suggested that the legislature revise its 1783 offer to include a district often miles square around Annapolis. Repeating many of the arguments Lux had used when he first proposed the idea, the author declared the town well suited for the American Hague. A decision by Congress in tavor of Annapolis would make Baltimore the state capital and the American Amsterdam.

By 1789, however, Marylanders residing on the upper Chesapeake Bay had united behind Baltimore on the Patapsco River as the premier Maryland site for the federal capital. Since mid-century when the town became a major milling center, it and its deep and never-frozen harbor had penetrated Philadelphi~s hegemony over the Delmarva Peninsula, central Pennsylvania, and northern Virginia. The Baltimore newspapers launched an aggressive campaign in January and February 1789, asserting the city's claims to the federal seat of government. Unmatched by propaganda for any other place until the Potomac's supporters sent out their missives after the 1789 congressional debate, the campaign described Baltimore as a prosperous, beautiful, militarily invincible port destined to become the key to the western door. In 1790, when it became clear that the capital would be established south of the Mason-Dixon Line, New Englanders, seeking to unite their political interests with those of the upper Chesapeake Bay, swung their support to Baltimore and away from the Susquehanna River.

III. George Washington and Potomac Fever

By a twist of geopolitical late, Maryland, whose residents had been the first to discuss an exclusive jurisdiction for Congress and the first to raise the issue of a permanent U~S. capital, found itself in 1790 providing the two major contenders: Baltimore and somewhere on the Potomac River. Maryland's December 1788 act offering to grant Congress jurisdiction over an area ten miles square had carefully not lavored either location. But those who advocated a Potomac capital had the advantage, owing to the efforts of an aggressive local development corporation known as the Potomac Navigation Company. The company not only provided data and publicists but also members who served in politically important positions. Marylanders Michael Jenifer Stone, Charles Carroll, and Daniel Carroll of Rock Creek and Virginians Richard Henry Lee and Alexander White were elected to the First Congress. Most important, the company's guiding influence and first president was George Washington.

Potomac Fever, a delusion-inducing obsession with the grandeur and commercial future of the Potomac River, infected these men and the corporation they founded. It passed from generation to generation along with the property if not the genes of such lamilies as the Washingtons and Lees of Virginia and the Johnsons and Carrolls of Maryland, whose landholdings on the Potomac and the Ohio to the west numbered in the hundreds of thousands of acres. One did not have to reside on the shores of the Potomac to succumb to the Fever. In 1784 an English traveler described the river as ~(certainly the most noble, excellent, and beautiful river I ever saw, indeed it can be excelled by no other river in the universe. . . . Every advantage, every elegance, every charm, that bountiful nature can bestow, is heaped with liberality and even profusion on the delightful banks of this most noble and superlatively grand river."

Potomac Fever culminated in the person of George Washington, who early in his youth fell victim to it. That the U.S. capital sits on the Potomac River just above Mount Vernon is due in large part to his influence. Washington's acute appreciation of the interrelationship between economic and political power, his deep concern for his personal fortune and place in history, his sense of

Ã_ _geographical place, and his Potomac Fever decisively influenced the location of the U.S. capital.

Washington, however, was legendary for his discretion-what John Adams once referred to as Washington's gift of silence-and therefore his exact role before July 1790 in bringing the capital to the Potomac is unclear. Washington himself wrote that he always made it a "maxim rather to let my designs appear from my works rather than by my expressions." He once confessed to General Henry Lee, a fellow promoter of the Potomac River, that he always took pains to avoid the imputation of having interfered in an issue from improper or selfish motives, "for I hold it necessary that one should not only be conscious of the purest intentions; but that one should also have it in his power to demonstrate the disinterestedness of his words and actions at all times, and upon all occasions."

Known to unrecorded generations of the Algonquin people as "Petomek, " the river's name has been translated variously as "trading place," "a place to which something is brought," and "a place to which tribute is brought." One hundred and fifty miles upriver from the Chesapeake, at the deepest penetration of tidewater on the North American continent, the sedentary Anacostians had built their wigwams among cornfields and gardens of squash, beans, and potatoes for at least half a millennium. There, at the juncture of the Anacostia and Potomac rivers, beginning early in the 1 660s, wealthy Britons patented speculative land grants with such colorful names as Rome, New Troy, Scotland Yard, Widow's Mite, and Cuckold's Delight.

Settlement of the Virginia bank of the Potomac followed the same pattern as in Maryland: fur trade with resident and nomadic natives, large unsettled land grants, land sales and re-grants ofexpi red patents, the first tenants, the gradual disappearance of the native population, and, finally, the arrival of planter lamilies. By 1700, a few frontiersmen living below the Arlington Hills could look across the river at the hearth smoke of their Maryland counterparts on Rock Creek.

In 17 11 Thomas Lee became resident agent for the more than five million acres in northern Virginia owned by the Fairlax lamily. While thus employed, young Lee succumbed to Potomac Fever. He envisioned the river's ten-mile drop onto the coastal plain as a future emporium of commercial and political energy linking the Atlantic and the westward flowing waters of the Ohio. There,

ÿ_Ã_ _he reportedly predicted, would rise a great Virginia commercial city, the capital of a nation independent from Great Britain. Moved by his dream, he purchased 20,000 acres of land stretching from Little Falls to above Great Falls.

By 1747, Lee was president of the Virginia Council and one of the most powerful men in the colony. In that year he, George Mason, Lawrence Washington, and other Virginia Potomac promoters formed the Ohio Company to establish a Potomac link to the western fur trade. The company soon blazed a path through the mountains from the Potomac to the Monongahela. When Lee died three years later, leadership of company aflairs passed to Lawrence Washington. After 1750 Potomac Fever was spread primarily by the Washingtons.

Lawrence Washington lived on a Fairlax County plantation above the Potomac, which he had named after Edward Vernon, a British admiral under whom he had served. Mount Vernon consisted of half the original patent of 5,000 acres between Dogue and Little Hunting creeks granted to his great-grandlather and a partner eighty years earlier. Like Thomas Lee, he understood Virgini~s need for a commercial city; unlike Lee, he dreamed of locating that city on tidewater. To become reality, his dream required finding a means to avoid the time and expense oftransferring goods from the West at the lalls of the Potomac. If the means could be found, he wanted the city to rise at the mile-wide, eighteen-foot-deep tidewater harbor at the mouth of Great Hunting Creek, ten miles upriver from Mount Vernon. The Virginia Assembly had established a tobacco warehouse at the site in 1732. Belhaven, the settlement that grew around the warehouse, attracted Scottish merchants who recognized the location as providing easy access to the inlant agricultural wealth of northern Virginia.

After several unsuccessful petitions from Lawrence Washington and other prominent Fairlax County residents, the legislature chartered Belhaven as the sixty-acre town of Alexandria in 1749. Alexandria grew rapidly, becoming by the 1760s the preeminent Potomac River port. It imported wares and building materials from England and rum and molasses from Barbados and exported wheat.

Lawrence Washington did not survive to witness the rise ofAlexandria. His death in 1752, the year the town became the Fairlax County seat, pulled twenty-year-old George Washington

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he reportedly predicted, would rise a great Virginia commercial city, the capital of a nation independent from Great Britain. Moved by his dream, he purchased 20,000 acres of land stretching from Little Falls to above Great Falls.

Lawrence Washington lived on a Fairlax County plantation above the Potomac, which he had named after Edward Vernon, a British admiral under whom he had served. Mount Vernon consisted of half the original patent of 5,000 acres between Dogue and Little Hunting creeks granted to his great-grandlather and a partner eighty years earlier. Like Thomas Lee, he understood Virgini~s need for a commercial city; unlike Lee, he dreamed of locating that city on tidewater. To become reality, his dream required finding a means to avoid the time and expense oftransferring goods from the West at the lalls of the Potomac. Ifthe means could be found, he wanted the city to rise at the mile-wide, eighteen-foot-deep tidewater harbor at the mouth of Great Hunting Creek, ten miles upriver from Mount Vernon. The Virginia Assembly had established a tobacco warehouse at the site in 1732. Belhaven, the settlement that grew around the warehouse, attracted Scottish merchants who recognized the location as providing easy access to the inlant agricultural wealth of northern Virginia.

Lawrence Washington did not survive to witness the rise ofAlexandria. His death in 1752, the year the town became the Fairlax County seat, pulled twenty-year-old George Washington

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from the shadow of primogeniture. George inherited Mount Vernon, as well as a commitment to the Ohio Company, Alexandria, and bypassing the lalls of the Potomac. Thomas Lee's and Lawrence Washington's vision matured during the half-century of George Washington's stewardship; by the time of his death in 1799, Washington left a Potomac River on the verge of political-and anticipated commercial~mporium.

George Washington's belief in the potential of linking the Potomac to the Ohio River caused him to invest heavily in land along the route. By the 1780s, he had acquired at Mount Vernon the alienated half of the original 5,000-acre grant and had added to it another 3,500 acres. He loved Mount Vernon and believed that its ten miles of river frontage, combined with its backwaters, marshes, wooded hills, and elevation above the Potomac, made it the most pleasantly situated estate in the United States. The five autonomous larms, along with the mansion house, the home manulactures ( including a grist mill), the meticulous landscaping, and the deer yard, supported by the largest group of slaves in Fairlax County, enhanced the natural grandeur. The many visitors who came to Mount Vernon considered it and its Potomac vista delightful. But Washington refused to limit his hunger for land to the expansion and cultivation of his estate. Through inheritances, military bounties, and his own funds and those of his wife, the wealthy widow Martha Dandridge Custis, Washington garnered another 60,000-plus acres, over two-thirds of which was virgin bottomland along the Potomac-Ohio river system.

To increase the value of his holdings and further his vision of the Potomac as the best access to the West, Washington early became the prime advocate of opening the Potomac to navigation by clearing its channel of rocks and building a system of bypasses around the major lalls. At age twenty-two, he had canoed the river from near the site of present-day Cumberland, Maryland, to Great Falls and reported the Potomac to be the most convenient and least expensive route to the West, notwithstanding a scarcity of water during much of the year, a drawback he quickly and conveniently repressed.

Washington soon found an influential ally in the person of Thomas Johnson of Frederick County, Maryland. The two men corresponded about the project during the 1 760s; in 1770 Washington assured Johnson that no person had more ardor for the opening of the Potomac than he himself and expressed fears that

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if the Potomac were not soon developed, other rivers would become the channel of conveyance for the extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire. In 1772 the Virginia legislature adopted a Potomac navigation bill drafted by a committee on which Washington served. This led one Potomac promoter to proclaim that the river would soon become the route for all the commerce between Great Falls and a point 300 miles up the Missouri River.

Navigational improvements on the Potomac required the cooperation of Maryland, which claimed jurisdiction over the Potomac up to the Virginia shoreline. Its legislature repeatedly refused to join Virginia in the effort despite Johnson's influence. Maryland's opposition to the plan was led by Baltimore merchants and their political spokesmen from the upper Chesapeake Bay, who worried that the opening of the Potomac would destroy any chance of Baltimore becoming the eastern terminus of western commerce and render Maryland an appendage of Virginia. Even if the profits of western trade could be diverted from Alexandria to Georgetown, they remained opposed.

Georgetown at Rock Creek on the Potomac, seven miles above Alexandria and three miles below Little Falls, stood out as a p0tential commercial rival for both Alexandria and Baltimore. Maryland had authorized a road to the creek in 1720, a tobacco warehouse in 1745, and finally a sixty-acre town in 1751. Georgetown also served as the major ferry crossing on the Potomac. Like Alexandria, Georgetown had attracted Scottish merchants who envisioned a great future in its location at the head of Potomac navigation, but unlike Alexandria, its shallow port suffered from shifting sandbars, flooding, and ice floes. Nevertheless, its promoters predicted for it the same glorious future that Virginians envisioned for Alexandria. In 1768 Jacob Funk platted Hamburg (Funkstown) just southeast of Georgetown at the mouth of the creek known variously as Tiber, Goose, or Duck. Two years later Daniel Carroll of Duddington laid out Carrollsburg on the north bank of the Anacostia, near its mouth. Both towns were speculative ventures in an area widely thought destined for commercial emporium.

The dream of commercial emporium on the Potomac languished between 1774 and 1783, the year that Washington returned to Mount Vernon from the Revolutionary War. The development of Alexandria marked the first step taken by Virgini~s Potomac promoters after the war, for the establishment

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of a commercial city within the state remained a paramount economic goal of postwar Virginia. Many of its leaders had long accepted the idea of such a city as essential to economic growth and rationalized the concomitant social costs as justified by the wealth produced. Washington, Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison were the most prominent of many who hoped for such a city in order to protect Virgini~s commerce not only from Philadelphia but also from rapacious Baltimore.

Virtually untouched by the fighting and stimulated by the war economy, Alexandria expected a commercial boom. Residents found a powerful supporter in Washington, whose adulthood had been intimately linked with the rise of his hometown. He inherited and purchased lots there, represented its citizens as a town trustee and colonial legislator, presided over the 1774 meeting that adopted the Fairlax County Resolves, and served as an officer and benelactor for various of its civic organizations. Alexandria provided Washington and other Fairlax planters access to the benefits of urban life. There he traded, voted, celebrated, and worshiped. A week after his return to Mount Vernon from the war, he rode to Alexandria to receive the salutations of its citizens.

"Your residence in our neighborhood will have a happy influence on the growth and prosperity of this inlant town," they proclaimed on welcoming home their special patron.

In the spring of 1783, when Congress received New York's offer of Kingston for its postwar capital, Thomas Jefferson was visiting Philadelphia. There he and Congressman James Madison launched their seven-year effort to bring the U.S. capital to the Potomac River. The Virginians consulted the two Maryland delegates, Daniel Carroll of Rock Creek and Thomas Sim Lee, both of whom lived in the Potomac watershed. They agreed that their states should jointly step forward with a tract of land centered on Georgetown. This pleased Jefferson who believed that, ifVirginia could not obtain a Potomac seat for the federal government, it should support a site north of the Chesapeake Bay, since a location on the bay might make Virginia dependent on Maryland.

The political conflict between Maryland's Potomac and upper Chesapeake Bay interests-which had so long blocked interstate efforts to open the Potomac to navigation-prevented Maryland from joining Virginia in ajoint offer of a site. The upper bay interest believed that a federal capital on either bank of the Potomac would be dominated by Virginia and that Maryland would be-

ÿÿýeÂ_ _I

come an economic vassal of its much larger neighbor. The conflict between the two interests influenced Maryland's position throughout the fight over the location of the capital. So strongly did the upper Chesapeake interest feel about the matter that in 1790 it secured the defeat of every incumbent member of the U.S. House of Representatives who had voted for a Potomac capital.

News of Maryland's independent offer of Annapolis reached Virginia early in June 1 783. If Maryland preferred to compete, Virginia would match Annapolis. At the end of June, Virginia granted Congress use of the Capitol, the governor's palace, all other public buildings, and 300 acres adjacent to Williamsburg, plus up to $250,000 to build thirteen hotels for the state delegations. In addition, the state promised Congress as much jurisdiction over a five-miles-square (twenty-five square miles) district as its residents would yield. The state offered similar terms if Congress preferred a residence somewhere on the Potomac. Keeping its options open, the Virginia legislature promised to cooperate with Maryland should it agree to ajoint cession in the future. In such a case, Virginia would make a grant directly across the Potomac from that ceded by Maryland; but if Congress decided to place its buildings on the north bank of the river, Virginia would donate only $100,000, expecting Maryland to supply the other $150,000

In addition to Virginia's need for a commercial city, Jefferson believed in the necessity of reaching across the Appalachians so that the trade of the Ohio Valley and the upper Mississippi flowed east rather than south to New Orleans. He also recognized the immense value to Virginia if the Potomac rather than the Hudson or Susquehanna became the route. Early in 1784 Jefferson served Washington a gourmet vision ofVirginia's Potomac-based future, pretending ignorance of his correspondent's commitment to opening the Potomac to navigation. Jefferson counseled immediate action by Virginia but noted a powerful objection to his proposal: the lamiliar argument that public undertakings are carelessly managed, with much money spent to little purpose. Only Washington could overcome this. Would he be willing, alone or in conjunction with any persons he chose, to superintend such a public project? "What a monument of your retirement it would be!" Jefferson proposed, before concluding with an assurance that his own zeal for the business was public and pure be-

û§Ã_ _cause he owned not one inch of land on the Potomac, the Ohio, or their tributaries.

"My opinion coincides perfectly with yours" respecting the Potomac-Ohio route to the West "and the preference it has over all others," Washington responded. "I am made very happy to find a man of discernment and liberality (who has no particular interest in the plan) thinks as I do, who have lands in that Country the value of which would be enhanced by the adoption of such a scheme." Washington agreed that not a moment should be lost because the New Yorkers would waste no time in opening a navigation route from the Hudson to the Great Lakes once the British surrendered the forts there. Nevertheless, Washington hedged on the central question. He doubted public funding feasible in 1784 and would wait to see its terms before agreeing to superintend.

What Jefferson lailed to achieve by pen was accomplished by Washington's September 1784 trip to the West. He returned to Mount Vernon and urged Virginia to incorporate a private company to develop the Potomac. As a result Virginia sent Washington to Annapolis in December to convince Maryland to cooperate in forming a navigation company. His great name and influence finally overcame Maryland's twenty-five-year opposition. At Washington's urging, Virginia adopted the Maryland act verbatim. President of Congress Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Lee's son, lauded Washington for his success.

The Potomac Navigation Company chartered by Maryland and Virginia issued 500 shares of stock valued at $220,000. Each state purchased fifty shares. Virginia bought an additional fifty shares in Washington's name as a sign of appreciation and as a means of conserving his private funds. The gesture later proved an embarrassment, but Washington did not refuse the offer, as he had all other postwar grants from public bodies. Thus, public funds purchased almost a third of the Potomac Company's stock. In March 1785 Washington played host to the Mount Vernon Conference at which commissioners from Maryland and Virginia discussed several problems related to the jurisdiction and navigation of the Potomac and Chesapeake. They adopted a mutually satislactory compact which, among other provisions, declared the Potomac a highway for citizens of both states. In May, Potomac area residents-from Alexandria to Shepherdstown in Virginia and from Georgetown to Williamsport in Maryland-attended

ÿqÃ_ _.4

the company's first meeting. Shareholders elected Washington president and Thomas Johnson to the board of directors.

Washington's zeal on behalf of the Potomac Company did not cease with its organization. Throughout 1785 he attempted to interest non-Virginians in the company. One guest at Mount Vernon could not resist recording how boring his host could become on the subject. Through Jefferson and LaFayette in France, Washington sought European capital. The return on any investment would be greater than on any speculation in the world, Washington assured LaFayette with the hyperbole characteristic of victims of Potomac Fever.

Washington also knew the political implications ofopening the Potomac, asserting at one point that they outweighed the commercial. He believed that the states nearest to the center of the Union would benefit the most from a navigable Potomac because the western country and the states carved out of it would share the p0litical interests of the seaboard states to which they were commercially tied. He understood that Virginia could thereby retain its political influence in the West and guarantee itself future political allies in Congress. Finally, he recognized that a Potomac connection to the West could influence the location of the permanent seat of the federal government.

Between 1785 and 1789, the clearing of the upper Potomac for navigation-the promised key to Alexandria's prosperity-progressed steadily, if not as rapidly as its promoters wished. Because American newspapers frequently reprinted articles from the Alexandria and Georgetown press about Potomac navigational improvements, by 1790 most articulate Americans were lamiliar with Washington's dream for the Potomac.

While most of the energy behind the plan to center American political and commercial emporium on the Potomac was Virginian, Marylanders with economic and geographic ties on the Potomac felt closer to the Virginians than they did to Baltimore and the upper Chesapeake interest. Just as the First Federal Congress under the Constitution convened in 1789, Baltimore's Maryland Journal highlighted the rival claims of Maryland's Potomac and upper Chesapeake interests in "A Conference between the Patapsco and Patowmack Rivers." Patapsco initiated the conversation by congratulating the Potomac and all other American rivers on the successful formation of a powerful, energetic American Empire and the election of George Washington to head it. "The

I Ct

ÿÿ¹Â_ _history of all former ages will readily show," Potomac observed, "that it has been the invariable practice of all wise founders ofEmpires, Kingdoms and States, from Nimrod down to the immortal Penn, to cement and support their dominions by one great Metropolis." Specifically, Potomac recommended the level plain between Rock Creek at Georgetown and the Anacostia River for a great metropolitan capital city. One could not think that Congress would prefer to sit in such an undeveloped place, protested Patapsco, when it could enjoy the accommodations offered by Baltimore. On the contrary, affirmed the Potomac, the capital of the empire must be a new city.

The specific capital site advocated by Potomac in its conversation with Patapsco had first been proposed by "A Citizen of the World" in the same newspaper on 23 January 1789. He considered the place militarily impregnable: warships required too much water to reach it, and a few forts below the Anacostia could defend it. Placing the capital there would stimulate the rise of a great commercial-political city, guarantee the completion ofnavigational improvements on the Potomac, lacilitate intercourse between East and West, and prevent the secession of the latter from the Union.

Rarely can the identity of eighteenth-century newspaper writers using pseudonyms be discovered. Fortunately, the name of the "Citizen of the World" who first suggested the site that became Washington, D.C., is known; likely he also wrote the conversation between the two rivers. It is time he received credit for his role in the early history of the city.

George Walker of Falkirk, Scotland, came to Georgetown in 1784 as agent for Huie, Reid and Company, a subsidiary of the Port Glasgow firm of Smith, Huie, Alexander and Company. Walker actively promoted Georgetown's growth, including a scheme to improve its often unreliable harbor. Immediately after reaching agreement with the U.S. government in 1791, the original proprietors of the land that became the early federal city rewarded Walker with several lots in the city for having first publicized the site and its merits. The mayor of Georgetown also presented him with a parcel of land. Walker soon thereafter purchased a 400-acre tract known as the Hop Yard from one of the original proprietors for $25,000. In 1793 he went to London to encourage British investment in the new city, publishing A De51

ÿÿ�Ã_ _P

A DESCRIPTION OF THE SITUATION AND PLAN

OF THE

CITY OF WASHINGTON,

NOW BUSIDINO FOR

THE METROPOLIS OF AMERICA;

AND ESTABLISHED AS THE PERMANENT AESIDENCE OF CONORESI MAnER THE TRAR

THE CITY of WASHINGTON, in the dotend' of Craraenbo flow baS&q be the permanent boar of Sin Gander-rot of the Uisand loath, Sooth at the juethion of the boar Poenmen and thelkdthee Btaac~ emniog a'ont boar milen opr-k i~ ludrg a tract a' territory, enrenred in port of coneenisen; edubisty, end bonuty, by ft- in Awhile~ if any in the noond~Fo; istheugh the land is apperondybrer1, r; by ge-c and ~Itorthi~ a rarhey of rue B~ prorpea am poednrrifr while there 'Sr Cusci- rebut - ronooe of'. wenen ft-loath by ben.

Wiran the limits of the Sri ate reerroy-bee "-r~isg Icuge of 'beadisro ft-el sor; by digging

read; r-r of thebeS qondity is nb-rIp bad; bethebe- tin ecena'a~ nrc-s rbnn ft- dir-gb

thee rereirney, Moe ad'rr be onkethed be ran nbc". city.

The Eurcean Bareonis toned the &ktI and ma rare-b-s beboure in remnoc; bring CutSr-By - be the lunged m&p*t be dame beme andee err-nuts month; while the ebearrael list nisalong the isgo of the niece end is aboaaadycarnis~

The City, berg Snaend per the gr-t - enadr enaty ergoisdoar bats the nwtinen and benteen ontnmirinn a' the Major; end 'beady a ants the Ad-B Or-m en the Oois ricer, upon the hod naergenor; and in the -B of the erhech comemiad - thee in Awion, rarenmabeg the watt enrenfine internal er-arm, in by be the -B dig'. fumborn be the er-aeon of Cnngewb; and - it now pordog boeeeM~ by the poand (Stand ennerynta of the pen-. a' the Ut-md I-err ; and by hrneigMer' it and grew op -Ire a degtsn of rn-re, 6rae nop-litled is the eon' of aireor; and

ii goner b-a the -imintian and eadigbrof the world.

Tbe inland mignison of the Ferret- is a be a'flu- thee tea brand -Ire prodore cone

borne tree tteor and its aneed bm-4 bats vp-rb of rise buednod a' eighty In no the geene (£1; which anofthie b-a tints of the flew City. lb c-b an 'he gerro and lirbo hileen rarely cots-cd, and that forks a fork beeeenedeet ~ then, is'. one of the etbiq iseroner, the --regaisne II be eciseedy op.- b-area is- wemer and the bead b-at of the Pe-etser er-a and peedorce a careb-ahen by ft-, between the Cey of W~a'-,% and'. ir-char parts of Virgande and Snep6~ by of'. Par-erace the &I--&e~ the loath inC-h, Oyeoeee Cape Capon, Pnwrbt's C'nebe Cam-re- and Mneerefr, be OF - of teen beadord her; dantsegb - of

tin-B beolty, -anhe and thede -- is A~ ~adns is cab -~-o~ t-Bon of

h-er qudiry, b-rh hen nnemr wheg and ether deed -ee with belt and-- proerne en obewist~ a net ~wsrse~ and neg-d is -it! a y be the Urdaed I-are.

The loath vp-the Pc-mt err-n the Caty of Waoi~ Mg ar-nd i; and be goty mile, hebree, oreehigh and dry, the-bog -Ire i-em-treble be- a' c-Band ft-Ct and err well conneed with Ear'. timber of wiand kinda Afro mile. bebeme the City, uponthe banner of the Pnwn~, noelenabraMble n--rn of mr-hen thee~ of the webe and and Pordand kiboat of er-a the p~the er-an is the ebty -ft- baddeg. Abate ekeCiry, adis opene the boner a' etre er-a, err ib-a egonne- of enorane- ande Secft~ cad embdr, with War S-, of Sn heft roolity.

wobeb-ag ofthis Caret a bator u~ I-abner vp-face a hI-ad end rlryirt yarne and by disrets 'twerisnere be erretheerd - agk p-' of the jedjemat and ( doe, of the pruict' l'tehifrca of tinUisud Stew; web be em-nuli' - boab in mordr en raced of ei~; run to-i intoti and thereble ~we of thee green -

lb - of thee Caret aim-i en therdbeSMcn of'. p--thee of'. United loath, ileggand

read denwa by'. rae-ed -g Linwunt, and is en i.-ceioobc irpeonreer yore dl outrOemo -danel - - c--awe -ph- of -hagbo anda thee 'beadrien of air, boar eeery'.~ g-d and be-ad thee - p'bdy be inreadeand is- a rise.

Treabethy -na-of thee - ft- ndelnead arthe pwedl Id-flee area there en Peiloddyhin rywe obmall near; and -erberenam en Beams vp-a t~b ad - is-bra tlob-a of the hue. bou~ and ft- dabethere -Ire rqaa' - the loath of thoCaty vp-the EMbeen ~L

lb ha and left impeenbam of the - is thee beady pabethed or irdad'bdrua up-e the ago kale, deheauge is ce-ac bered beidits in'. loatherge of the tan Preneb; fur, er-a then it

boar boar waco, is andy the-I c-lee and ri-s. Tbe n'cer boat boceenec, beer Concord by ouborniet, and is brand en 'or-ia Many and thsny-bea boar en -rae the syare red of the thy, er-air is ot0'hiucao and erarerry boar -lb City it disnbd is- ban en greod dritreent by the Benona ttisng den North and herb, and

raft and Wet, er-a goner the rowni-woth of the - Howeert, bats the Cuced, tho teebdoti', fiwab, and km of dw ieerpremne ft- is'. Chy, tone traenoc' accrue, en dio~notal dtenrnt hats u-c -aerial rbjt&an adreraert er-a - andy pod-a earanyof diad-bog 1trtrpo~ bat

Ii'- boar-B thee nodes goner edeer'.r-r boar ewpbcsbng. lock gnat h-hog Son err all cnn brenbed and goner boar-Id; i~e peramana of were boat reds greed ilk a' edny fort 5urtd moth ft-rn each boat er-a read bats nngbty boar of poord thats be brag' lb end of the dierne err in geamd one huedord andrea boar end; with naw andy 'erry boat recept North, South, and raft Cap'ed Scntt; need err tonehanderd and goner beet. Ta togeend loath err an-B abe, the re-ne loath cr--ag 'be Unboat while theth berg North aed Snoth ace, ft- the Coised hod

-Irrdr a-tee Eu,, Facet Stasat, Eust Scarce Staent, the, red thube Chet of it err in the A-. caild Wear Foete Starer, Wear Strove Soccer, be. thee, enenung Sub Ma'

err been the C'r~ Northward flu- Norm A Starer, Nerta S Socoat, So. and dame loath of is nor roocd loam A Street, Soon B Street, the.

lb 'I-err; en theikee of the City, hew there ne-ben in-B in the feror and aee-r toter-a Snaeberd and itfl.-ne is-angular 4~ genorolly roande from thor, to ke nonne and err ilkided

I I

ben lots of been bony en isgbry boar been, and clad, dti~ bats about tone buobrod endoer en thor, bun. born boar, arondieg rothe tone of the boats.

lb isorgolar dacifande produord by the dirgenof Scorns an Cute of er-a (and. but en gottrally in er-abe drerriane-Ibe taenpoencardi iobrcutrffaafoory lone, Co Coat or hrofr to the City will borer cant coeeet.-'flr lots in thee, itorguden q~ will till turn atorighe re;lt with the orf~ioo loath, iltruegh the barb of the brand upon them and err Sued panilel to roe anu'.fo which ire neneor of on co--roe.

By be mfrt theheed and -Idlend by the Prebboar of the Urited State,, be regolalung the buildinge within the aty, elI brand -a he of 5$- w brick-their wadis -B he punicIri to the done; ned 'bead pisrod imondiotly upon thee; en orobdeawn thereb- en 5oofan. lb malls of dl loath opondrem tone hoorted and goner boar -Ire -B been Icab thirty bra high; be therein no utligs. I born iseyrha' Mr baibd en icryrnee in s~ brand rand.

Tanero for the Coettre (en b-ra ten the Legena'' Bedorab is Sloath rite the S barsand emloathin the City. dame a-ta goner the had Sr=~ and err took other (tots the Pererra; conewendirgehel and canrpbrreisew a' Corey F-of too City, ten esenrcfdrorbisnrtora'eho orotoy ed.-ihe ?rrrtrtet'r Heoso and Bard upon a tiheg gruntilt ore is, bats are Bucks a' the Proc-c, podoiflog a &llghtfid -I- poc'- eugorto earth n coarrarbog er-a of the Cueote4 redkewoehetmt' perrofeheCity.

Dan forth bow C Ptosownr'e herb, and den S feats the Ca5tol~ rut ton great plenfun fares en andtcbObi-IruSoedtuwianrnupontnoSockeofihoyrrarec,iodrrnt0 br,mae,tej~'.

fodea bye torery of digeno bildi~ and hntofa let furtirt MiniSet; So.

Saterlprnbed rbtengh the Ciry, er-a the 'bead nartiad loath reoft ran north, ; own recioty doper COCCI; (trend in naritos orgoboc ggrrr; which in great nit ore ananmely oheul and nonatrena',

Fsatso a' the ad of tab Mere err erhe rypen-re en the diloathe loath compoSt; the Unient

tone wily an goner thee rcthd" crarec bra cc Prorn iffeeuhelr&; en'

oudumnerruthe tomorecof there fuer-are alice duo

-Id goner the Cased, end can beth fte'bead an

elnedeice deeneofO errant Wucetoorno, oerrciceetocttoflb bri~

heg hare blaflchnthrteo and Georgia Stomauhertee Ildutol err it gbcdena.

lb Acm rethe forth end of hub hipbt loathfor the fee it-re I

-Id; &r.-lb bend black list, whichcm S h neat, and, kperntio~

jorca the tanner Branch or ton per; leafore ther;

-~ Arm, who Scorn CS S treatHoa~ and

a hoC of wottt; thorn bring ft- 0 tory I

lb Awn; at rhejloath of the beet;

At the nod cod of horn Coettot Sr

leert nod a' Kertucat Street, who' tb-The I

Tyhe; which is the yiitoiyol Sector that Ito ho to cc he -'C a ~t-nd Scbtcrr

brIde 'Nc Cijuta', bet whenoc it is atice Cotylur

is fill doter it I-ucla' udilcor; tbtno0.bi.-lt no.

circe porte of iboCity ifecen en jiriod forMonet,Ctarcoce, rcentret,&e.

Tb Pastirero a' the Utter Senof ih City, petailod upon the ft

pin a' thefod utoedenoerruirpothet of the lots cci tocry hen Cr; tnhofisdbchudictfhtr; cod I 'St proceed, tobr andy eycedtr the fare, hoil~g; nod ether wenat or pobin na'it~titiiiOcbn City.

This great S pedant cane SI-ra thanditutit ire oily Ct area the yahhn 3 bribditg; but en dig the tend, condo'S to eiittocua' light the detent huh

will (nor eheney ton that aethe in other,',r edoibir.

lb gnonts of terry 'bead bylingietnucil Alo-fande, bring hithepublic Ir,

boor ye, bee (odd'ocrororeore cc c C - whct it ii

erynd the Ott,the er-B err in Aim C otoctitot

Cr thocgttaenntieod obeul

hehot the ccitt of chic lobWethingert, cit the end of Jannity

rod the baton diI woe poorly ilcy, and iSetiodi yio.

tithe ft the yehie ho climb of hendontrio on

with all farehlr nofrontal ytieetc books oar t eflod, oil u gier tutu ~ ntcin. tote cC be tern fnopouirg to h-hi toe celuing foteerte,

It Cocaqorwoontront Frito, Oeneat, hr

cbS New Corerno, here born ututyrd iiithe font,'

pet?, hr the Nabenyttotriog toebtit I tip~'d

in toe colic, of hotin the Cite of hVoOh.'o-0

cur irAatstin; under-ate ectryprobubilityof ibriebriognonup

pohue heildiege in loathandy udOamned ft olibtogh Incilt it ?~iinu how ebric qerreity, Oct toloubdo thur chub in Beibje, ye, lots irciuna gttt.i.y tell at high,

Heor; terry ctyotaruy tube ebonenoghI'ccl. Sn ytrnnd'tg otiS note

a' due piogande of ilioc gruod and -B oututedinch, itublic, by

nhndieoih.ti,tt,

Loeroc, Sind 1lro4 Srbfe)ron, ShoAl nrcISCORCE re-ALCyK.

.~er-a on

tour cit-rae

t"teu-" 'A

icA Description of the Situation and Plan of the City of Washington... " by George Walker Broadside, London0 1793. Collection of the Library of Congress.

Intended to encourage British investors0 Walker's broadside is an example of the promotional literature written toad-vance the development of the city.

scription ofihe Situation and Plan ofihe City ofWashington, a pamphlet based in part on "A Citizen of the World."

An active participant in disputes among the proprietors, the federal city commissioners, and city planner Pierre LEnlant, Walker returned to Scotland shortly after the federal government moved to the Potomac in 1800. His dream of making a fortune in the federal city had lailed, largely because the commissioners concentrated investment west of the Capitol. Walker's holdings, including the Hop Yard, lay east of the Capitol in an area of the city that he and LEnlant believed should be the residential and commercial sector as opposed to the government sector.

Some members of the First Federal Congress privately discussed the location suggested by Walker, but few distinguished between it and adjoining Georgetown, west of Rock Creek. That town had flourished during the 1780s and verged on becoming the largest tobacco market in Maryland. The years 1788 and 1789 witnessed the laying of the cornerstone of Georgetown University and the town's incorporation. Residents petitioned Congress in September 1789 and June 1790 to select it as the national capital, but neither document survives.

Both MarylandJournal articles took sides in a division ofopinion among promoters of a Potomac capital: should it be on tidewater or at some point above Great Falls? The first person to publicly advocate an upriver Potomac capital was General Otho Holland Williams of Baltimore, a proprietor of Williamsport, Maryland, a town platted in 1787 at the mouth of Conococheague Creek where his lamily had long owned an important Potomac ferry. In September 1788 he privately argued that Congress should not lay the foundation of its empire at a defenseless place. Even if all the seaports were perfect Gibraltars, lairness to the West argued against fixing the capital on one corner of the continent. Congress should place it at the mouth of the Conococheague.

Conococheague Creek, although it lay west "a long way indeed," as its Algonquin name translated, had good reason to assert its claim. It coursed through the twenty~mile-wide fertile Great Valley and had long functioned as a major transportation route. The Ohio Company of Virginia early established a storehouse there. During the 1 760s thousands of emigrants from Pennsylvania ferried across the Potomac at the Conococheague on the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road. In the 1790 residence debate, Senator

�_¹Â_ _1

Pierce Butler of South Carolina described the site as a rich, level, and highly cultivated area that tied the coastal states to Fort Pitt and the western country. Locating the capital there meant that it could include land in Virginia and Pennsylvania as well as Maryland. The Senate inserted it as the upper limit on the Potomac for the federal city in the 1790 residence act, despite ridicule of the name and the location.

Whether above tidewater or not, Virginians as well as Mary-landers divided over the precise location. William Grayson had argued to the Virginia Ratification Convention that the Federal Convention had erred by not constitutionally establishing the capital near Alexandria, the center of the Union. Virginia convention delegates privately discussed Richmond, Williamsburg, and Norfolk as potential sites, but the only politically viable one remained some point on the Potomac, preferably the area near its lalls.

Motivated by James Madison's fear, after the 1788 decision to convene the First Federal Congress at New York, that a location on the Susquehanna was the best that Virginia could expect, Virginians had begun to advocate an upriver capital near Pennsylvania to attract its ten votes in the House of Representatives. Shepherdstown, Virginia, which lay at the edge of the Great Valley midway between Williamsport and Harpers Ferry, Virginia, received some support. In 1789, the Virginia congressmen informed their colleagues from other states that they were willing to place the capital as lar up the Potomac as the Conococheague and implied they lavored an upriver location. Nevertheless, they and the Maryland congressmen who advocated the Potomac took care not to publicly name either an upriver or a tidewater site.

The most significant and lar-reaching efforts of the Potomac interest followed the September 1789 residence debate in Congress. In October the quixotic John O'Connor published a pamphlet in which he implored Congress to center the great city on the Potomac. A graduate of the University of Dublin, O'Connor briefly edited a Philadelphia newspaper after the war and then moved on to Norfolk and Georgetown. His pamphlet, entitled Political Opinions Particularly Respecting the Seat of the Federal Empire, contained more hyperbole than anything written to support any location during the entire seven-year debate. He named the Thames, the Seine, and the Rhone as rivulets compared with the Shenandoah, only one of many rivers that flowed into the Po55

ÿÆ§Ã_ _tomac. The commerce of the vast and luxuriant Potomac watershed would clothe and cherish the sufferers of the Siberian wilds as well as the pampered English aristocracy. Providence had sent a wise Father to be the Potomac's advocate, and that Father, the chosen secondary cause of every blessing to the human race, had become the first president of the United States. As if describing Potomac Fever, O'Connor identified one of his sources as "a man of veracity, and as well acquainted with the navigation of the Patowmack, as if, probably, he claimed this knowledge a species of inheritance; though the doctrine of innate ideas, and the lineal transmission of good and bad qualities, has been so long exploded."

Like George Walker, O'Connor named the flats between Georgetown and the Anacostia as the best site for the seat of federal government. The climate was temperate and the place defensible enough to "shelter the Archives of the United States from the Invasion and Cannons of the Universe." The Potomac below Georgetown, he claimed, could harbor 10,000 ships the size of Noah's Ark, and the Anacostia alone had room for all the ships on the Thames. A multitude of landscapes stimulated one's senses at Georgetown, and the hills above the Anacostia provided ample space for the mansions of ambassadors. If Congress chose this site-a center without parallel on the terraqueous globe-Americans would within a decade see a city more superb and powerful than London. It would be regarded with rapture by the children of future ages as the only imperial city ever founded on the principles of liberty and reason. The rarity of the pamphlet-the earliest extant non-newspaper imprint from Georgetown-suggests that its embarrassing rhetoric led Potomac promoters to suppress

it.

In December 1789 the Potomac interest launched its campaign to bring Congress to the Potomac. As part of its strategy, several leading citizens of Georgetown and Alexandria, most with ties to the Potomac Navigation Company, agreed to appeal to New Englanders in an effort to prove why they would benefit economically from a Potomac location. Dr. David Stuart, second husband of Martha Washington's widowed daughter-in-law, crafted the final version with some realism, for, as he confessed to George Washington, he expected that the sagacious New Englanders would laugh at the "flaming " account. The broadside, signed by prominent residents from Alexandria and Georgetown, George

ÿÿEÃ_ _Walker included, was mailed to the selectmen and other influential citizens of several New England towns at the end of the year. The means employed~irect communication between Virginia and New England-followed pre-Revolutionary War precedent.

Stuart began by informing the New Englanders that the citizens of Georgetown and Alexandria believed that, next to the ratification of the Constitution, the location of the capital carried greater importance for the present and future wellare of the country than any other issue. He dismissed arguments for placing it at either the center of population or wealth, since these fluctuated like the winds, and insisted that location at the center of territory paid greater attention to posterity and perpetual union. The Potomac acted to preserve the connection with the West better than any other river. This consideration required the utmost attention of the Atlantic states, for a separation would create connections highly dangerous to them. Stuart further described the navigation, extent, and products of the Potomac, quoting Jefferson on the relationship between the Potomac and the western waters to demonstrate why the route with its mere seventeen-mile portage constituted a better link to the West than the Hudson.

The broadside noted the defensibility of the Potomac, the healthiness of its residents, the fertility of its soil, the salubrity of its climate, and the availability and abundance of its fish, building materials, and coal. A special appeal to New England's economic interest concluded the missive. Georgetown and Alexandria merchants lacked capital and owned few ships. This, Stuart suggested, provided an opportunity for New England investment that could not be expected if the capital were located on the Susquehanna or the Delaware, where Baltimore and Philadelphia would engross the whole commerce to themselves. Finally, Stuart noted that New England's agricultural and manulactured goods would be in much greater demand on the Potomac than elsewhere.

On 22 January 1790, an article entitled "The Federal City Ought to be on the Patowmack" appeared in the MarylandJournal. Its author called the upcoming decision on the location of the capital the most important before the Union. The decision would determine whether the Union of North, South, and West would survive or dissolve into the horrors of civil commotion. Providence, the article proclaimed, had designated for the capital a site on the Potomac between Georgetown and Alexandria, the north-

ÿíÂ_ _ii

south center of the Union. Quoting at length from Stuart's broadside, the author also directed special arguments to New Englanders. They would dominate the trade of the Potomac when the capital on its banks became the largest commercial city in America. Finally, the Potomac offered New England the closest connection to its settlements on the Ohio River.

Virginians like Stuart were wise to expect a less than enthusiastic reaction from New Englanders. As John Adams complained many years later, Virginia geese are all swans; the hyperbolic Philadelphians and New Yorkers were modest in comparison with old dominionism. New England's only public response to the Potomac interest's efforts came in the form of newspaper articles. One condemned those Virginians who threatened to leave the Union if Congress did not situate on the Potomac. Nevertheless, the Potomac interest, led by George Washington, had been effective at putting its claims for the Potomac before the American people.

When Thomas Jefferson returned to Virginia early in December 1789 after five years in France, he likely recalled his own efforts on behalf of a Potomac capital in 1783: The Virginia legislature had just offered Congress jurisdiction over any ten miles square in the state. The politically strategic bill implied that the best site for the capital lay high on the Potomac above tidewater where Pennsylvania as well as Maryland and Virginia could share in the location. In addition, Virginia proposed to Maryland that it unite with Virginia in a joint offer ofjurisdiction and money. Should Congress accept a cession on the Potomac from either or both states, Virginia would give Congress $120,000 to erect public buildings if Maryland would provide

$72,000 for the same purpose. Despite objection from the upper Chesapeake interest, Maryland appropriated the money at the end of 1789.

Iv. Congress Debates the Issue, 178~9O

Even before the June 1783 soldiers' demonstration outside the State House in Philadelphia, Congress had determined to select a permanent postwar capital. Considering the implications of such a decision, it should not be surprising that all of the states except New Hampshire and Georgia attended Congress in October 1783 for what portended to be a major sectional battle. New Englanders ~vored a site at Trenton, New Jersey, located at the lower lalls of the Delaware River. Trenton offered convenience, a healthy climate, and centrality as to wealth, population, and number of states. The site also offered access to the resources of Philadelphia while at the same time keeping the federal government away from what New Englanders perceived as the city's dangerous influence. Southerners supported Maryland, citing its geographic centrality and its access to the West. But they could not agr~e on a specific location. Annapolis, Baltimore, and the Potomac River each had support.

Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who remained active in the congressional fight over the location of the capital until it was resolved in 1790, moved that Congress establish a federal town either on the Delaware River near Trenton or on the Potomac near Georgetown. Reflecting the inability of Congress to decide the degree ofjurisdiction it should exercise over the district, his resolution stated that Congress have "the right of soil and an exclusive or such other jurisdiction as Congress may direct." The seven states north of Maryland formed a simple majority, and they voted for the Delaware River, thus eliminating the Potomac from contention.

Southern congressmen were angered and frustrated by the decision. Such a location meant that the South would not experience the increased economic and political power that it expected a Potomac site to generate. In hopes of securing reconsideration of the issue, southerners met with New Englanders and presented several arguments. In response New England proposed that a second federal town be built on the Potomac and that Congress alternate between it and the federal town on the Delaware. Several wellinformed sources later asserted that Gerry suggested the compromise. New Englanders, whose state capitals tended to be mobile,

ÿ�Ã_ _recognized theoretical as well as practical benefits in the proposal. In their view one federal town would result in a concentration of wealthy citizens, generally neither the most virtuous nor the most patriotic of Americans, who would use their influence to establish an American aristocracy. Two residences~ven ifthat caused delay and difficulty in transacting business-meant greater obstacles to a consolidation of political and economic influence at the seat of federal government.

The seven New England and southern states agreed to support the dual residence proposal despite New England's recognition of the South's goal to buy time for a single federal town on the Potomac. Although Elias Boudinot described the seven-state coalition as the most heterogeneous imaginable, it was not unfi~miliar. The same alliance had dominated congressional politics during the early years of the Revolution. Congress adopted a resolution for a second federal town at or near the lower ~lls of the Potomac or Georgetown. Until construction of the Delaware and Potomac River capitals, Congress would alternate between temporary residences at Annapolis and Trenton. Congress then adjourned to Annapolis. The dual residence plan surprised the public. Nevertheless, considering the sectional division of the Union and the southern threats, it was a realistic compromise at a critical point in American history. With the common British threat removed, little existed to hold the United States in union.

Residents of the Middle states found the plan utterly preposterous. A satirical essay by Francis Hopkinson of Philadelphia helped render the dual residence plan ridiculous in the public mind. How should Congress resolve the contradiction between its earlier decision to erect an equestrian statue of George Washington at its place of residence with the fi~ct that it now had two such places? Let the statue move; indeed, make it large enough to transport the congressmen from the Delaware federal town to the Potomac federal town. Such aTrojan horse could even contain a little closet in its rectum for the secret papers of Congress.

Congress had appointed committees to choose the two specific locations. The committee to view the Delaware recommended either Lamberton, New Jersey, or a site on the highlands in Pennsylvania just above Trenton Falls. The Potomac committee undertook its mission at the end of May 1784. The members toured both sides of the Potomac to about four miles above Little Falls. They did not find a suitable spot north of Georgetown, and

ùÂ_ _their instructions prevented them from looking at the level banks above Great Falls. The committee employed Charles Beatty, a Georgetown landowner, to survey two sites adjacent to the town and recommended them to Congress. The first was a 600-acre tract of rising ground on the northwest side, encompassing all or portions of Frogland, Conjuror's Disappointment, and Rock of Dumbarton land grants. The lines ran approximately from present-day 34th and M streets north to Davis Place, west to Glover Archbold Park, south to the Potomac, and southeast to the starting point. The second site was a 750-acre tract below Georgetown that included all or portions of the Vineyard, Widow's Mite, and Little Prevention land grants, as well as the platted but unsettled town of Hamburg. Its approximate boundaries extended north from the Potomac up present-day 18th Street to Florida Avenue, southwest to Rock Creek, down the creek to the Potomac, and back to the starting point.

Agreeable to the dual residence decision, Congress adjourned in June 1784, resolving to reconvene at Trenton early in November. Congressmen began arriving at Trenton at the end of October, but it was another month before a quorum formed. This delay provided delegates with time to reflect on the present and future status of the federal government. Some advocated the immediate convening of a constitutional convention as the best solution to the existing problems. Instead, a consensus formed to support several actions to revitalize the Union under the Articles of Confederation. Central to the consensus was the belief that a single federal town should be chosen and, until completion of the buildings, Congress should sit in a large city where it would not suffer the inconveniences experienced in small towns.

The northern states were poorly represented when Congress made a quorum at the end of November; consequently, a report spread through the press that the South would likely draw Congress back across the Delaware River to Philadelphia. Sarah Jay, shocked by the possibility of yet another change of residence, observed to her congressman husband, John, that it was fortunate for the reputation of the female sex that none served in Congress. Philadelphia, however, at last had a rival that matched its merits in most respects except centrality and did not suffer from the stigma ofhaving been the Revolutionary seat of government. The New York legislature had just urged Congress to come to New York City.

ÿÿIÃ_ _By late December enough northern delegates had arrived to assure that the vote to leave Trenton would take the federal government north to New York City. Congress formally rescinded its dual residence resolutions, and Gerry proposed an ordinance that called for a single federal town on the Delaware. The ordinance as adopted provided for three commissioners to locate, within eight miles of the lalls of the Delaware at Trenton, a district for the federal town of not less than four nor more than nine square miles in area. Such a district could lie on either or both sides of the river approximately between Washington Crossing and Bordentown, New Jersey. The commissioners were authorized to spend up to $ 100,000 to purchase the land, erect an elegant federal house for Congress, and provide residences for the executive officials. Congress would remain at New York City until the federal town had been completed. By passing over the still controversial question of jurisdiction, Congress implied that the states retained it.

Public reaction to the ordinance was mixed. The French charge' d'af~ires in the United States declared the matter settled until such time as new western states removed Congress from the Delaware. In the meantime, the decision strengthened the federal government: having its own territory earned it a higher place in the American mind, while its intention to remain at New York gave it immediate stability and order. The ordinance was, he concluded, one of the most fortunate actions Congress had ever taken.

Although pleased to have avoided Philadelphia and to have the troublesome question removed from the congressional agenda, New Englanders nevertheless complained about the expense, particularly since there was no guarantee that a future Congress would not move the permanent residence elsewhere. Southerners such as George Washington disapproved of the decision to place the permanent seat of government on the Delaware. As to the temporary residence at New York, many Virginians likely agreed with Jefferson. Until such time as enough western states joined the Union and moved Congress to Georgetown, he instructed Congressman James Monroe, it was in Virginus interest that it remain at New York and that the federal town not be built.

Among its first business at New York, Congress elected three commissioners to locate and oversee construction of the federal town. One declined to serve, and attempts to replace him seemed futile in light of a growing movement to block the first $30,000

ÿÿ!Ã_ _I'LL,,

appropriated for the federal town. Virginian William Grayson, who disliked the Delaware location and wanted Congress at Philadelphia until enough votes materialized for a permanent capital on the Potomac, led the appropriation fight. He was jubilant in September 1785 when Congress struck the appropriation from the budget. Washington, who had encouraged his former aidede-camp in his efforts to buy time in the interest of a future Potomac River site, must have been delighted.

The decision to locate a single federal town near Trenton proved just as ephemeral as the earlier dual residence plan, although both had important side effects. The expeditious 1783 compromise maintained the Union at a critical point in the Revolution, while the 1784 decision to move to New York City helped to revitalize the federal government. Congress did not discuss the location of its permanent residence again until 1789. In the meantime, the adoption of the Constitution of 1787 had complicated the legislative process and settled the debate over jurisdiction and other issues that had prevented the 1783-85 struggle from being merely a sectional contest.

Congressmen were clearly aware of the Union's sectional divisions when the First Federal Congress convened at New York in April 1789. Nevertheless, the Federalist consensus of 1787-88 proved strong enough to withstand the stress until September, when Congress took up the question of a permanent capital. The f~miliar and fundamental division between North and South, which had played so prominent a role throughout the course of the American Revolution, reached a new level of intensity. That public debate marked the opening volley that led to the Compromise of 1790.

Congress began debate with a motion "that a permanent residence ought to be fixed for the general government of the United States, at some convenient place, as near the center of wealth, population, and extent of territory as may be consistent with convenience to the navigation of the Atlantic Ocean, and having due regard to the particular situation of the western country." Congressmen portrayed the capital as the grand link in the federal chain and argued that the future tranquillity and well-being of the Union depended as much on the capital's location as on any other question that ever had or ever would come before Congress. They could not agree, however, about where to locate it. The debate climaxed with a speech by Madison in which he publicly announced

ûÿõÂ_ _for the first time his reservations about the new Constitution that he had worked so hard to achieve.

Near the end of September, the House, after a month of intense bargaining and debate, adopted the seat of government bill by a vote of 3 1 to 17. It provided for the location of a district up to ten miles square on the banks of the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania and authorized the borrowing of up to $ 100,000 to purchase land and construct buildings. Congress would remain at New York until completion of the new capital. Finally, the bill granted extraordinary powers to the president, who would appoint three commissioners ~without the consent of the Senate

to report to him, rather than to Congress, their decision on the most eligible site for the capital. Under the president's direction, they would purchase and accept grants of land and construct within four years suitable buildings for the federal government. In the meantime Congress would remain at New York.

When Pennsylvania Senator Robert Morris had the audacity to ask Washington for his opinion of the House debate, the "Great Personage" appeared even more reticent than usual. He had good reason. If the Susquehanna bill passed Congress, he would have to pass judgment on it. Representative Richard Bland Lee ofAlexandria hoped Washington would veto it as partial and unjust. So, too, did the president's closest confidant at home, Dr. David Stuart, the man whom Washington relied on to oversee his business interests in his absence. Stuart wrote Washington anxiously from Alexandria, reminding him that its residents' expectations of the capital being on the Potomac had always been centered in him. Because Washington's opinion had long been known on the subject, Stuart urged him never to concur with the bill. Circumspectly, Stuart suggested procedural grounds for a veto : The bill should not have been discussed without previous notice, nor before Rhode Island and North Carolina rejoined the Union.

Robert Morris assumed floor management of the bill when it reached the Senate; his goal was to bring the capital to the Delaware River, as close to Philadelphia as politically possible. He would try first for the Philadelphia surburbs of Germantown and the Northern Liberties. If that liii led he believed the ~lls of the Delaware would surely carry. On 26 September the Senate sent back to the House a radically revised bill to locate the capital. The chosen site was Germantown, not the Susquehanna River.

_Ã_ _The coalition that had pushed the Susquehanna bill through the House believed it should accept the Senate changes. Many of them believed the precise location of the capital made little difference so long as it was north of Maryland. The South, on the other hand, saw postponement as the only way to save the Potomac. The inflamed Marylanders threatened a division of the Union if the bill passed, but a motion for postponement lliiled by a vote of 29 to 25. Madison saved the day for the Potomac by convincing the House to amend the bill to provide that the laws of Pennsylvania remain in effect at the site of the federal capital until Congress provided otherwise. As the Potomac's supporters expected, the Senate postponed the bill until the next session. Although it was widely assumed that Madison had tricked the Susque han na's supporters, postponement of the decision and remaining at New York had been New England's goal all along. The South, as in 1783 and 1785, had successfully prevented a northern capital and bought time for the Potomac.

That the First Federal Congress in its second session finally settled the divisive question of the location of the U.S. capital resulted from an opportunity as unique as that which had caused Congress to leave Philadelphia in 1783. From January through May 1790 the issue that dominated the attention of Congress, particularly the House, was payment of the Revolutionary War debt. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton proposed a long-term funding system to pay off both the foreign and domestic debt. In addition, he called on Congress to assume into the federal debt most of the war debt of the states, expecting that such an assumption would cement more closely the union of the states and wed state creditors to the success of the federal government.

Congress supported all of Hamilton's program save assumption, the political implications of which exacerbated the sectional tensions left by the 1789 residence debate. Northerners welcomed the proposal as a means of escaping their state debt and as a force for political stability. Southerners (except for South Carolinians) feared consolidation and viewed assumption as an unconstitutional seizure of state authority. Week after week, despite every effort of the primarily northern forces supporting assumption, Madison effectively prevented the House from including it in the funding bill.

Southerners confirmed the growth of sectional tension. The 1789 residence debate had created apprehension in the minds of

ü_Ã_ _many of the warmest friends of the federal government in Virginia. One concluded after the debate that, if the conduct of the New England states and New York was pursued, Virginia should no longer look to the Union as the rock of salvation, nor consider whispers about separate confederacies as treason. Before the 12 April vote against assumption, most public discontent with the federal government lay in the South. That vote, however, brought forth fundamental questioning of the new government in the North. One disgusted Connecticut assumptionist, incorrectly concluding that the debate over the slave trade had caused southerners to oppose assumption, groused that Congress should prefer the white people of this country to the blacks, and that when they had taken care of the former, they might amuse themselves with the latter.

With talk of disunion on the rise in Congress and the states

especially at such proven seats of radical solution as Boston and the Potomac, with the South and Pennsylvania fuming over the continued residence of Congress so fiLr north and the North angry over the refusal of Congress to assume the state debts~a fundamental compromise of almost constitutional magnitude appeared the only solution. From April to June various congressmen sought to resolve the assumption and residence issues by linking them in a compromise between North and South.

By mid-June, after five months of intense debate and politicking, Congress had finalized nothing in regard to either funding-assumption or the location of the capital. Congress had reached its first impasse under the new Constitution. Dissolution of the Union, perhaps even civil war, not compromise, seemed to some people the only solution.

Three politically astute Virginians pondered the congressional impasse and the flict that Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders were talking through Alexander Hamilton about the terms of yet another residence-assumption bargain. The success of such a scheme would doom their dream of an American Empire on the Potomac. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison recognized the moment at hand and within ten days had secured the votes to place the U.S. capital on the Potomac.

Washington's exact role in the bargain is unclear, given his concern for discretion and Madison's and Jefferson's willingness to honor it. Several ~ ctors, however, indicate that the two men

'Ã_ _worked closely with the president as the bargain evolved. Madison had kept Washington informed about the politics of previous congressional debates over the capital's location. The president's aides had been involved in various stages of the pre-June bargaining, and they showed their delight from the House gallery when the Potomac residence bill finally passed Congress. Even more indicative of Washington's evident role in the bargain were his central importance to the political process, his expressed displeasure in 1784 when the ~lls of the Delaware was chosen the permanent residence, his Potomac Fever, and his detailed attention to the capital's development from the moment the bill passed until his death.

At the end of the week of 13 June, during which the Senate had postponed both the residence and assumption questions, Jefferson encountered a distraught Hamilton. The latter raised the subject

Iof assumption and its necessity, stressing that New England

would make it a sine qua non for continuation of the Union. Hamilton asked Jefferson to seek southern support for the meaI

sure. Hamilton knew from a Madison proposal to Massachusetts

that votes might be procured, given the right agreement on the

promising to consider the matter. Soon after reaching his lodgings, he invited Hamilton and Madison to dine alone with him the next day so that they might seek a resolution. Over dinner, Madison agreed to provide the necessary southern votes to adopt a modified assumption. In return Madison sought assurance that the capital would be placed on the Potomac. He did not need any votes for a Philadelphia-Potomac residence bill. What he needed from Hamilton was his influence with the New Englanders to prevent them from interfering with an existing agreement between Pennsylvania and the South.

ate. Madison naturally looked to the Maryland and Virginia delegations. The flibulously wealthy Senator Charles Carroll, whose 10,000-acre estate lay just off the Potomac south of Frederick, agreed to provide the necessary vote in the Senate. The easiest House member to convince was Richard Bland Lee, who received a promise that Alexandria, the chief town of his congressional district, would be included within the federal district. Madison also secured the vote of Alexander White, who represented Virginia from Harpers Ferry westward to the Ohio River.

ÿiÃ_ _Madison next went to the Maryland representatives. By implication at least, he assured them that the public buildings at the capital would be restricted to their side of the Potomac. Daniel Carroll of Rock Creek, who represented a district that included Georgetown and all of western Maryland, agreed to shift his vote. He surely expected or received assurance that Georgetown would compose part of the federal district. Although Madison had found the three votes Hamilton needed, he also procured the vote of Maryland Representative George Gale for security.

On 22 June, Hamilton informed several of his Massachusetts supporters that assumption would be added to the funding bill if a Philadelphia-Potomac residence bill passed Congress first. What Hamilton wanted from the Massachusetts congressmen was a promise that they would not, as in 1789, support efforts to block the Philadelphia-Potomac scheme with a counteroffer to Pennsylvania. For Hamilton and the Massachusetts delegation, the funding system, including assumption, remained the primary national objective and anything else could be sacrificed. Indeed, establishing the national capital on the Potomac was the only way to achieve it. The Massachusetts delegation agreed to Hamilton's request.

On 28 June the Senate took up its postponed residence bill. A motion to place the capital on the Potomac between the Anacostia River and Conococheague Creek at Williamsport carried. The location of the temporary residence produced impassioned debate, but the Potomac-Philadelphia coalition prevailed and the Senate voted to place it at Philadelphia. On 1 July the Senate passed the bill by one vote. The bill provided that state law remained operative in the district until Congress provided other-wise. Further, the bill created a presidential commission modeled after the one proposed in 1789: The president could appoint-without the necessity of Senate consent-a three-man commission to survey a district, purchase or accept as much land on the Maryland side of the Potomac as the president deemed necessary, and supervise the construction of public buildings. Finally, the president could accept money for purposes of the act, but Congress appropriated only the "sufficient sum" necessary to transfer the capital to the Potomac in December 1800.

The House opened debate on 6 July. The ripe rhetoric, dire predictions, and personal attacks entertained the packed galleries. Madison led a majority which insisted that the bill be adopted

ÿÿÿ=Ã_ _without amendment; under no circumstances could it be returned to the Senate. Claiming the Potomac too fi~r South, Aedanus Burke of South Carolina described most of the proposed area as desert and questioned whether Congress really preferred a place in the woods to a populous city. New York City's John Laurance insisted that the bill threatened the existence of the Union. Elbridge Gerry, the only member from Massachusetts to argue strongly against the bill, believed that the Virginians planned to include Alexandria within the ten miles square, despite their repeated speeches in ~vor of going as fi~r west as possible. To divide the Virginians and the Pennsylvanians, he moved unsuccessfully that the House require its inclusion. On 9 July the House adopted the bill by a vote of32 to 29. No representative north ofEastJersey voted in the majority, and only five southerners voted with the northern minority.

The bill went to Washington for his signature. No one questioned the president's support for a Potomac capital, and he soon found himself confronted with an appeal to, and attacks upon, his honor. A newspaper article addressed to the president argued that the Constitution gave Congress the sole power of adjournment and that therefore the residence bill, which required his consent to the adjournment to Philadelphia at the end of the session, was unconstitutional: "The Constitution is the rock of our political salvation. . . our only bond of Union;. . . every citizen who has taken an oath to support the Constitution, violates that oath if he silently suffers any law to pass which appears to him, in the smallest degree, repugnant to it." On 16 July another newspaper described the president's situation as delicate and observed that bets remained open as to what he would do. Washington stopped such speculation when he signed the bill that day. "The Holy Name of the P t is not much respected in the mouths of the profline," as New Yorkers began to condemn him. One newspaper writer referred to him as formerly America's fi~vorite guardian and deliverer; another declared that his ruling passion had been made clear by his signature.

A few hours after Washington signed the residence bill, the

Senate voted to add to the House funding bill a provision for the

assumption of state debts. The vote was 14 to 12 because Charles

Carroll, as promised, changed his position. On 24 July the

House agreed to assumption when Alexander White, Richard

ÿAÃ_ _i.

Bland Lee, Daniel Carroll, and George Gale switched to its support.

New Yorkers, of course, complained bitterly about the compromise. The newspapers' treatment of Congress and the president was harsh and abusive. Several stinging political cartoons circulated on the streets of the city in July. One showed Senator Robert Morris, led by the devil, en route to Philadelphia with Federal Hall on his shoulders. A Philadelphia prostitute promised pleasure ahead, as did a man in women's clothing who identified himself as Congress' procuress. The most significant cartoon appeared after Washington signed the residence bill. In the cartoon, Congress had chosen to follow Morris and the southerners in the ship COflS1~~U1~Ofl over a water~ll to Philadelphia. A member of the northern minority, being pulled behind in a small boat, suggested that the rope which tied it to the COnsliluliOn be cut as soon as the ship appeared in danger, while another declared it best to do so immediately since the Constitution was going to the devil. The cartoon further accused Washington ofsigning the residence bill for reasons of self-gratification.

Influential national leaders saw the Compromise of 1790 as the only means of preserving the Union and urged support for it. Northern leaders proclaimed assumption-and legislative acceptance of the constitutionality of its implied powers-to be the final cementing of the Union and downplayed the implications of a southern capital. Southern leaders heralded the decision to place the capital on the Potomac and stressed those provisions in the funding act that most benefited the South. The Constitution survived its first major crisis because of the willingness of the American public to accept the compromise worked out by the executive and legislative branches of the federal government in 1790. The first publicly fought compromise in American history, it marked the end of the American Revolution, for it resolved the ~ most difficult and lingering issues: payment of the war debt and the location of the capital.

V. Implementation of the Residence Act, 1790-1800

Once George Washington signed the residence bill in July 1790, he had complete authority over and responsibility for its execution. Congress no longer had any involvement unless the president chose to consult it; it had relinquished its oversight role by not requiring senatorial consent of the individuals appointed as commissioners for the federal city and by not appropriating money for its construction. From 1791 until his death in 1799, Washington worked unceasingly to guarantee that the federal government would be seated on his beloved Potomac at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He believed that this location would strengthen the Union and his reputation in its history, as well as the Potomac's role in the political economy of the emerging American Empire.

Washington involved himself in the choice of a specific site on the Potomac, the purchase of land for the federal city within the federal district, the plan and activities of Pierre LEnlant, the details of construction and financing, and the neutralization of p0litical opposition. His concern over the physical development of the city itself led him to intervene in details as important as the design of the Capitol and as mundane as the nature of street railings. Contemporaries recognized the development of the capital as Washington's hobbyhorse, the li'vorite object of his heart and the one that more than anything else had his attention. His preeminent biographer, Douglas S. Freeman, concluded that had the District of Columbia been Washington's only responsibility, "he scarcely could have found the future seat of government more time consuming."

In the early phases of implementation, Washington worked closely with Secretary of State Jefferson and Representative James Madison. By 1790, both advisers knew exactly where Washington planned to locate the federal district, and both agreed that the residence act could be interpreted to allow him to select that location without relying ~n the commissioners. Until he suddenly recognized his indiscretion at the end of July, Jefferson had told his correspondents that the capital would be at Georgetown. Madison recommended, and Jefferson concurred, that the president at first announce the location of only part of the ten miles square so

¥Ã_ _Washington devoted little attention to the other potential sites, and his unannounced twelve-day journey caught advocates of upriver locations completely unprepared. Prominent residents suggested Senator Charles Carroll's 10,000-acre estate on the Monacacy; the Shepherdstown, Vi rginia-Sharpsburg, Maryland, area; and Williamsport, at the mouth of the Conococheague.

Success for the Potomac capital, wherever it was to be, required funds additional to the promised $192,000 from Virginia and Maryland. The United States considered various means of financing the purchase of land and construction of buildings for its capital. In 1783 Congress had been content to rely on commitments from states that made offers; a year later it had appropriated $100,000. In 1789 it considered borrowing that sum, but concluded instead that the money should be provided by the states in which the capital was fixed. The method attempted, after the decision to locate the capital on the Potomac, was proposed by George Walker, the Georgetown merchant and publicist. He suggested in 1789 that the federal government purchase the land from the proprietors, develop a city plan, divide the land unnecessary for public purposes into numbered lots, engrave the plan with them, and then sell them. Walker believed his plan would eventually raise about $10.5 million, thereby allowing the government rapidly to construct a great city without taxing the people. The sale of lots, however, liiiled to raise much money, and it became necessary to borrow. Once committed to borrowing money, the federal government assumed the full cost of the development of its capital.

To the surprise of many, Washington did not announce the location of the federal district when he addressed Congress in December 1790. Early in January he was still studying the best way to run the boundary lines so that the maximum amount of land could be included around Alexandria, allowing the town to grow westward as well as northward within the federal district. Finally, on 24 January he issued a proclamation announcing the chosen site. Washington not only included Alexandria~four miles south of the lower limit specified in the 1790 residence act-but also named a point within the town as the starting place for the survey of the district's boundaries. The ten miles square was oriented so that a corner of it pointed due north; its center was the site of the present-day Pan American Building. This orientation allowed for

ÿýÿAÃ_ _'F

the inclusion of more land in Virginia. The proclamation stated that only the area above the Anacostia in Maryland and above a line that ran southwest from it to about the mouth of Four Mile Run in Virginia be accepted for the district. In a letter to Congress, Washington recommended that it pass a supplemental residence act to enable him to complete the full ten miles square to his liking, by taking in Alexandria and land south of the Anacostia.

Washington's actions not only courted renewed sectional tensions and a confrontation with Congress but also attacks upon himself. He took these risks, nevertheless, because he was wedded to the location. He had fi~ith in the commitment of Congress to the Compromise of 1790, and he considered his reputation with Americans too secure for them to accuse him of local bias or private interest. That the president had selected the southern limit specified by their act did not surprise congressmen, despite the clear implication of the Virginia act of cession and the southern call during the residence debate of 1789 for a westerly, upriver site. Instead, the stunned congressmen complained of Washington's proposal to include land in both Maryland and Virginia south of the limit established by Congress. One congressman exaggerated only slightly when he observed that Mount Vernon bordered Alexandria. He, of course, did not know that Washington owned almost 1 ,200 acres along Four Mile Run within the proposed district or that George Washington Park Custis, Martha Washington's grandson and the president's ward, owned the 950-acre plantation that would become Arlington Cemetery

Washington's decision, however, was not motivated by purely personal gain, and to attribute the choice only to a desire to raise the value of Mount Vernon and other ~mily lands belittles his vision. To be sure, he clearly expected an immediate rise in the value of his land as a result of the location, for one of his most conspicuous traits was an open concern for his own economic interest. During the I 790s he referred in personal business transactions to the increase in the value of Mount Vernon that followed from the location of the federal district nearby, and raised his tenant rents accordingly. That he did not site the capital primarily for personal gain, as some have alleged, is suggested by the ~te of Abingdon, a 950-acre river plantation adjacent to presentday National Airport. In 1789 Washington secured an act from

_Ã_ _the Virginia legislature allowing him to alter the will of Marth~s son, Jack Custis, in order to return the plantation to its previous owner. The land had been a heavy burden on the Custis estate, but worth retaining if holdings within the federal district had been Washington's aim. He had more important reasons for his choice than to line his or his f~ mily's pockets.

What motivated this man so attuned to politics, public opinion, and his own reputation in history to select the site he chose and to risk putting the issue before Congress again~ The site was the midpoint between Maine and Georgia, and he considered it

the best spot for the survival of the Union to which so much of his life and reputation had been devoted. Potomac Fever and his commitment to the economic growth of Alexandria, however, outdistanced other ~ctors in importance. To David Stuart, Washington stressed the intimate political and economic connection between the federal district and the navigation of the Potomac. No exertions, he concluded, should be omitted to accomplish the latter, for, in proportion as it advanced, the former benefited.

Besides the few congressmen who privately criticized Washington's motives in 179 1, Americans showed little reaction to the location. Marylanders and Virginians residing on the Potomac expected it to boost the Potomac Company and to open new fields for commercial and land investment. The Potomac would soon echo with the din of industry, agriculture, and commerce, predicted a Georgetown merchant, who sought to buy land near Tiber Creek where he assumed Washington would situate the public buildings. At Alexandria, people believed their fortunes insured forever.

Aweek after Congress convened in December 1790, southerners saw what some perceived as the first legislative threat to the Potomac location in 1800: Alexander Hamilton's plan for a national bank. They feared that the frderal government and the bank would quickly become so entwined that one would hardly be able to function without the other; consequently, a national bank in Philadelphia, the financial capital of the United States, would render that city the permanent residence of Congress.

Southern paranoia intensified when a Senate committee reported the bank bill in January 1791. Under the terms of its incorporation, the bank would remain in Philadelphia after Congress left in 1800. The bill passed Congress despite

UÃ_ _Madison's last minute contention that it violated the Constitution. The South's only hope lay in convincing the president to inaugurate his veto power. Southerners had a willing ear in Washington, whose obsession with protecting the federal city against any threat liiced its first test. He turned immediately to his attorney general and secretary of state for opinions on the constitutional question. Both Virginians deemed the bank bill unconstitutional. Washington sent their opinions to Hamilton for his arguments in ~vor of its constitutionality.

As Washington considered use of the veto, Maryland Senator Charles Carroll gave notice that he would bring in a supplemental residence bill pursuant to the president's recommendation. Carroll's bill called for the federal district to include Alexandria and a few square miles of Maryland south of the Anacostia, but reaffirmed the 1790 provision that the federal buildings be situated on the Maryland side of the Potomac. The Senate postponed the bill for one week, specifically to the day on which Washington had either to sign or veto the bank bill. The first confrontation between a congressional majority and a president over the possibility of a veto loomed, and Congress had strengthened its position by letting Washington know that passage of a ~ vorite piece of presidential legislation first required his signature on the bank bill. By the morning of the tenth day, "there was a general uneasiness and the president stood on the brink of a precipice from which had he ~llen he would have brought down with him much of that glorious reputation he has so deservedly established." Washington, however, signed the bill.

The Senate immediately took up the order of the day-the postponed supplemental residence bill. The bill passed the next day, and the House agreed to it without comment. Congress had Washington's signature on the bank bill, and he had congressional approval for the inclusion of Alexandria within the federal district, as well as a reaffirmation of the Compromise of 1790. But in the process Washington had been subjected to greater public criticism than at any previous point in his presidency. Ultimately, the confrontation bore little fruit, for in 1 846 the United States retroceded to Virginia that part of the ten miles square which lay south of the Potomac.

Washington had not waited for the supplemental act to begin development of the capital. On 22 January, two days before announcing the boundaries he had chosen for the federal district, he

ùÌ_Ã_ _t

named as commissioners David Stuart of Alexandria, Thomas Johnson of Frederick, and Representative Daniel Carroll of Rock Creek. Each held Potomac Company stock and, in the opinion of Jefferson, each stood ready to do Washington's bidding. The president believed he could not have found three men more committed or better disposed to accommodate the conflicting interests.

No one who had not served under Washington in the Continental army shared as much intimacy with him as Stuart, who was understood to be the president's voice on the commission. The two carried on a private correspondence about the affi~irs of the frderal city, and through him Washington transmitted confidential information and personal opinions for the guidance of the commissioners. Thomas Johnson had long been associated with Washington in the promotion of the Potomac. Johnson had nominated him to be commander-in-chief in 1775 and had replaced him as president of the Potomac Company when he became president of the United States. Daniel Carroll of Rock Creek held a role in the political economy of Montgomery County, Maryland, similar to Washington's in Fair~x County, Virginia. A large slaveholder, Carroll lived at Joseph's Park, a 4,000-acre plantation northeast of Georgetown, and owned thousands of other acres in the county. His appointment to the commission held particular importance, for, although economically tied to Georgetown, he was related to both Notley Young and Daniel Carroll of Duddington, the largest landowners near Carrollsburg on the Anacostia.

Washington had no intention of slowing progress by waiting for the commission to meet. Early in February he dispatched Andrew Ellicott, assisted by the free black Benjamin Banneker, to Alexandria to survey the four boundary lines of the federal district as a preliminary step to a more exact survey later. More important than the survey of the district was the plan for the federal city within it. Little attention had been given during the long debate over the location of the capital to the question of a plan. In January 1789 George Walker had called for a city based on the best models of ancient and modern times, particularly Babylon and Philadelphia, and clearly separated into political and commercial sectors. To discourage speculators, Walker suggested that each purchaser erect a house built to specific standards within a certain number of years. With such a plan, the city would be able

åÂ_ _to accommodate residents even before completion of the public buildings. The author of the March 1789 "conversation" between the Potomac and Patapsco rivers included such proposed details as the width and angle of the streets. "The genius ofAmerica will rise superior to the Gothic taste that has so long pervaded" urban design, Potomac hoped, "and will, in some measure, revive the elegance, regularity, and grandeur of the ancients."

A variety of individuals suggested to Washington that they or their ideas be employed in designing the city. Nevertheless, he seriously considered only civil engineer Pierre-Charles LEn~nt, who had expressed his ideas on the subject to Washington at least as early as September 1789. Washington considered LEnfi~nt a scientific man of taste and the best qualified person in the world likely to accept the job. L'Enfi~nt's talents first came to Washington's attention during the Revolutionary War. A variety of artistic and architectural endeavors drew public attention to L'En~nt during the 1780s, none more prominently than Federal Hall, the first U.S. Capitol following the adoption of the Constitution. Its elegance and the speed of its renovation caused people to overlook its unexpected expense. Representative Thomas FitzSimons had recommended that L'Enliint prepare the public buildings at Philadelphia for the return of Congress in 1790. FitzSimons praised LEnfi~nt as a mild, unassuming person who would not expect too high a compensation and who worked well with common laborers.

L'En~nt reached the federal district early in March 1791 and, personally directed by Washington, began studying its topography and surveying the land between Tiber Creek and the Anacostia. Washington kept LEnflint south of the Tiber in order to frighten the Georgetown landowners into selling their land at reasonable rates to secret agents the president had dispatched to Georgetown for that purpose. One writer has recently described Washington's actions as private land speculation that the president undertook for his own profit, arguing that Washington could not have been acting for the public's benefit because no funds had been appropriated. Actually, Washington could have used the funds appropriated by Maryland and Virginia had he not had to abandon the feint when the enthusiastic LEnflint violated his instructions.

Washington then was compelled to authorize a survey north from the Tiber, to what eventually became Florida Avenue, so

ÿÿÿEÃ_ _that he could have a rough plat of the entire area between Georgetown and the Anacostia. Such a plat, he hoped, would allow him to play off one group of proprietors against the other. The president preferred the land along the Anacostia with its pronounced topographic features and commercial advantages. Nevertheless, he expressed reservation because he agreed with the Georgetown proprietors that a city located in the proximity of an existing population center would grow more quickly. LEnfi~nt helped convince Washington of the necessity of the whole area to the vision they shared.

At the end of March Washington called the rival proprietors together at Suter's Fountain Inn in Georgetown to impress upon them once again the past trials and future challenges to the Potomac capital. Their jealousies might deprive the federal government of the only means it had to raise funds for buildings. They need not be rivals, he told them, for the lands of both groups were necessary for the United States to have a capital tantamount to its status. On 30 March the proprietors reached an agreement with Washington : They would deed to the public all the land that the president wished to include within the federal city, and he would have complete control over its disposition. Once LEn~nt completed a plan for the city, the proprietors would receive $66.67 an acre for as much land as Washington wished for public buildings and reservations, as well as half of the lots platted on their former holdings; the federal government would retain half the lots and all land designated for streets. The U.S. government thus secured over 500 acres of public reservations for $36,099.35, as well as 10,136 lots and miles of streets at no cost to itself.

Early Washington, D.C., is popularly considered to have been a swamp. This idea apparently originated with the Irish poet Tom Moore, who described it as a place where "temples rose among primeval swamps." The dozens of observers of the young town, Europeans as well as Americans from the North, South, and Middle states, provide a more detailed description of its stunning natural setting. Almost all echoed First Lady Abigail Adams's simple assessment that it was beautiful. Water boundaries-the Potomac, the Anacostia, and Rock Creek-surrounded the amphitheatrical federal city on three sides. Cattail and reed tidal marshes, teeming with terrestrial and aquatic wildlife, lined the Anacostia and smaller inlets and creeks, but were less common on the more rapidly flowing Potomac. Along the upper Anacostia

ÿÿíÂ_ _grew extensive patches of wild rice. Oysters, a variety of fish, and wintering waterfowl provided good eating. Navigable Rock and Tiber creeks cut deeply into the city, and the former still provides residents and visitors with a sample of the are~s 1790 landscape.

The federal city was platted on three river terraces, seamed with stream valleys, which rose gradually northward from tidewater at the White House grounds to an elevation of 1 00 feet at what became Florida Avenue, the northern boundary of the city. To the north and east stood two more eroding terraces, the highest of which had an elevation of about 400 feet. To the west across the mile-wide, eighteen~foot-deep Potomac River rose the Arlington Hills. On the northwest the Georgetown Heights dominated the horizon, while to the south rose the hills of the Anacostia River terraces. Springs were numerous, particularly in the city's eastern sector. Tobacco and grain fields, cattle pastures, and woods of maple, tulip, black cherry, and oaks, and a few roads quilted the landscape. Scattered homes and outbuildings sheltered mostly Catholic, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian small planters and fi~rmers who had first settled the area in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. A majority of these f~rmers and planters owned no slaves and only a small portion owned more than ten.

No part of the well-drained city supported a swamp, a wetland where trees stand in water all or most of the time. Even given the loose definition of the word swamp in the late eighteenth century-it could mean swamp, marsh, fen, bog, brushy area, or just river bottomland-residents and visitors rarely used the word to describe any part of the federal city. Andrew Ellicott's 1793 topographic map of the District of Columbia clearly delineates marshes where they occurred; except for a few tidal marshes along the Anacostia, he shows none within the federal city.

When pressed for just how much of the nine-and-one-half square mile early federal city was a swamp, those who still believe the myth retreat to the land between the White House and the Capitol south to the Anacostia, an area roughly comparable to southwest Washington. Among the dozens of descriptions of the early federal city are two mentions of swamps in this area: one between the base of Capitol Hill and what became the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art and another at the Justice Department. These two small, low-lying areas between Tiber Creek and Pennsylvania Avenue were subject to periodic flooding, but the

ÿýÂ_ _most descriptive source uses "swamp" in the sense of an area overgrown with bushes, briars, and thorns, not trees in standing water.

Certainly the seemingly level plain on which southwest Washington stands was not a swamp in the eighteenth century, most of it being well-drained and not subject to frequent flooding. If it had been a swamp, or even swampy, would David Burnes have had a cornfield at the northern edge? Would Notley Young have built his plantation home at what became G and 1 0th Streets, S.W.? ( His fi~mily's graveyard and gardens lay even closer to the river and lower than the thirty-foot elevation of the house.) Would Daniel Carroll of Duddington have platted the town of Carrollsburg there? Would the prominent Delaney, Carroll, Johnson, Tilghman, Jenifrr, and Lux fi~milies of Maryland have invested there? Would the most successful of the early land speculators, Thomas Law, have chosen this part of the federal city to invest in and build? Most important, George Washington, whose eye for good land had few rivals, would never have selected swampy lowlands for the seat of an empire that he knew would perpetuate his name and reputation in history. The swamp myth simply lacks credibility whether one reads the landscape or the documents.

With the land acquired, Washington instructed LEnliint to prepare a plan, stressing the importance ofencompassing as much of the proprietors' holdings as possible. Nevertheless, Washington learned from the commissioners that problems had arisen over the agreement. Several proprietors complained that Washington had deceived them, and they refused to convey their lands. These men rightly recalled that, while the president had indicated the need for approximately 4,000 acres, L'En~nt's plan covered 6,000, and they feared that the city would be divided into so many lots that the value of each wduld be diminished. George Walker and other proprietors who had purchased their land after the adoption of the residence act supported the president. They did not believe he should be bound by anything he might have said, but only by the agreement itself, which clearly gave him the power to include as much land as he saw fit. They urged the commission not to concede to any demands that would mutilate the '~Metropolis of America" or frustrate the president's desires. The commission wisely decided to leave the matter in Washington's hands.

þ_��Ã_ _Meanwhile, LEn~nt continued his work. Nature had done much for the site, he told a member of Congress as they rode about the chosen area, and with the proper design the city would become the wonder of the world. To his friend Alexander Hamilton, LEn~nt expressed equal enthusiasm. No place in America was more susceptible to grand improvement or more capable of promoting the rapid growth of a city destined to be the capital of an extensive empire. The location, he believed, would end the demarcation between North and South.

The key feature of LEnfitnt's plan was a system of radial avenues imposed on a grid of streets. The numerous circles and squares that resulted provided public reservations throughout the city. The presidential mansion, with a view down the Potomac toward Alexandria, would be built near Georgetown. The Capitol, flicing east toward the area of the city proposed for commercial and residential purposes rather than west to the governmental sector, would rise nearer the Anacostia on wooded Jenkins Hill. The great distance between the two buildings reflected the political necessity to provide something for both groups of proprietors. Likewise, the decision to name the great avenue that connected the two buildings after the State of Pennsylvania reflected political considerations.

Deeply impressed with the plan, Washington suggested few changes. Nevertheless, his influence was significant, since he had chosen the ground within the district upon which LEn~nt imposed his design. Had Washington dispatched LEnf~nt to the heights above Georgetown, the designer could have created an Athenian capital for the United States. But the American Cincinnatus and his fellow citizens considered themselves republicans, not democrats. To them, Rome, not Athens, provided the appropriate model. Consequently, Washington had pointed LEnflint to the generally level plain through which the Tiber flowed.

Publication of the plan stimulated newspaper comment and praise for the designer's genius, taste, and imagination. George Walker, promoting the site as the most beautiful, salubrious, and convenient in America if not in the world, predicted that the federal city would rise with a rapidity unparalleled in urban history. It would become the delight and admiration of the world, and future generations would consider it one of Washington's greatest accomplishments. Others had reservations. At least one writer publicly condemned the plan as overly grand. More important,

1Ã_ _it lacked support of the commission. David Stuart, in particular, complained to Washington: Perhaps the "immense and gloomy wilderness" surrounding the presidential mansion was appropriate for despotic governments but not for the United States.

At the end of June, Washington returned to Georgetown where, with the aid of LEnliint's plan, he allayed the proprietors' fears of financial ruin and obtained their deeds. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and LEnliint met in Philadelphia in August 1791 to consider the measures necessary to prepare the capital for Congress by 1800. Washington sent Jefferson and Madison to Georgetown in September to share their discussion with the commission. Although encouraged to express their own opinions freely and to reach independent conclusions, the commissioners unanimously concurred on every point that had been determined at Philadelphia. In addition, they named the city "Washington" and the district, the "District of Columbia."

With the foundation so carefully laid by his own efforts, Washington planned to turn over responsibility for the federal city to the commission. But his assessment of the politics of the issue, his obsession with the political economy of the Potomac, and his desire to remain informed kept the president busy with the af~irs of the city that now bore his name. During the eight years remaining before his death, Washington not only fliced but also contributed to a variety of threats to the Potomac capital.

Washington quickly realized that the real threat to the capital came from discord among its friends rather than from its enemies in New England and Pennsylvania. The Anacostia and Georgetown proprietors jealously eyed one another. The commission sparred with both groups, with its own employees, and with the land speculators who invested in city lots after 1793. Washington attended personally to most of the crises that arose among the friends of the federal city, for they delayed construction and threatened to give Congress good reason for not moving to the Potomac in 1800. As a result, he immersed himself in the details of personnel, building regulations, and financing from 1791 until his retirement in 1797

The first personnel crisis proved the most devastating to the immediate as well as long-term development of the capital. Opposed to a sale of lots before wider dissemination of his plan, LEnf~nt refused to make it available to the commission for the October 1791 sale. He believed plats of the lots for sale to be suf98

ÿÿ_Ã_ _ficient, arguing that the absence of data with which to compare the lots to other points in the city would bring higher prices. Only 35 lots sold for a total of$8,756, ofwhich but $2,000 was immediately due. Although the fi~ilure of the sale confirmed his opposition to its timing, LEnfi~nt bore the onus. Secretary of State Jefferson encouraged the president to take the opportunity to assure the commission that the planner served at its pleasure. This placed Washington in a quandary. He considered LEn~nt to be defensive about his plan, yet he recognized that the commissioners did not pay enough attention to the feelings of either LEn~nt or Ellicott. Washington, therefore, chose a middle course. He admonished LEn~nt for withholding the plan and sent word to the commission-in a private communication through David Stuart-that he deemed the assistance of I'En~nt and Ellicott as essential and that the commission should honor their feelings, or at least appear to do so. Washington promised Stuart that he would instruct LEnflint that he served at the commission's pleasure.

LEn~nt further antagonized the commission when he took an action that threatened its chances of obtaining needed assistance from the Maryland legislature. Politically influential Daniel Carroll of Duddington had continued construction of a house in the midst of a square that LEnliint had set aside as a focal point for the southeastern sector of the city. Fearful of the precedent and indignant over Carroll's refusal to remove the structure when asked, LEnfi~nt ordered the walls carefully taken down so that Carroll could use the bricks elsewhere. He left the foundation alone, for it had been dug before the land became public. LEnIlint sent the commission a written defense; its high tone grew out of both pride and an un ~miliarity with the subtleties of the English language. Subject to one master, the infuriated commissioners refused to take orders from an employee, no matter how talented. Thus, Washington had to remind LEnf~nt that he was subordinate to the commission in all matters. Thereafter, however, tensions between the commission and LEnlant seemed to diminish, and the planner restrained himself when he discovered that the newly completed house of Notley Young-another relative of commissioner Daniel Carroll of Rock Creek-sat in the middle of one of his planned streets.

Early in 1792, LEnfi~nt went to Philadelphia to supervise the plan's engraving. He submitted to the president an expensive, de100

ÿåÿ5Ã_ _tailed proposal for the year's work, thus clearly indicating his refusal to act under the commission's supervision. Washington ignored the proposal and pressed LEnfi~nt to complete the engraving. Moreover, Stuart told Washington privately that the commissioners had agreed to resign rather than to be subjected any longer to LEnfi~nt's evident caprice. The president must either make the planner their servant or render him independent. George Walker's attempt at mediation liiiled. Washington took personal offense at LEnIlint's behavior and fired him. To prevent the incident from becoming an issue between the political fictions forming in his cabinet, the president had Alexander Hamilton draft the letter dismissing his friend and had Jefferson sign and send it. LEnfint lived out his life in poverty, a guest of the Digges fimily estate directly across the Potomac from Mount Vernon. Only in the twentieth century did the U.S. capital begin to recover from his loss.

With LEnfint gone, Washington instructed Ellicott to complete the engraving, authorizing him to make certain changes under Jefferson's guidance. It has been argued that replacing an artist with an engineer fundamentally modified the basic nature of the design and, by extension, the City of Washington: The "neatened, straightened, and engineeringly corrected" plan carved into the top of LEnfint's tomb and reconstructed at Western Square in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue is Ellicott's, and not the asymmetrical and more human-scale design of LEnfint.

The choice of commission members was vital to the early development of the federal city. Consequently, Washington devoted considerable effort to appointing committed replacements as the original appointees retired. Thomas Johnson's seat went to Gustavus Scott, a Maryland Potomac Company stockholder who had served on the Maryland legislative committee that had met with Washington in 1784 and drafted the bill to charter the company. William Thornton, the man whose design for the Capitol had so captivated Washington, accepted Stuart's seat. Daniel Carroll's seat went to Alexander White, a Potomac Company investor whose vote, like that of the man he replaced, had been essential to the Compromise of 1790.

Other personnel problems at the federal city required less of Washington's time; nevertheless, they proved worrisome. Shortly after assuming LEnfint's duties, Andrew Ellicott fought with

ÿÿÿ�Ã_ _the commission, and the scenario of the previous year repeated itself: The proprietors generally backed Ellicott, and Washington, while publicly supporting the commissioners, privately urged them to compromise. After Ellicott resigned, the commission appointed Samuel Blodget of Massachusetts as superintendent to expedite construction. Blodget, a man consumed by the idea of a Potomac capital and the establishment of a national university there, survived only a short time in the job. Several years after his dismissal, he published a defense in which he claimed to have heard Washington advocate the Potomac site for the capital when, as commander-in-chief of the Continental army, Washington encamped outside of Boston in 1775. LEnfi~nt, Ellicott, and Blodget were not the only men to leave the employ of the federal government after disputes with the commission. So, too, did architect Stephen Hallet, who worked on the Capitol.

One final major problem that Washington liiced was funding. The promoters of the capital had long expected the federal city's land to be their major source of money. The 1792 auction raised little more than the 1791 disaster, and Washington gave his blessing to a land speculation scheme to provide funds, speed construction, and further tie New England to the site. James Greenleaf of Massachusetts agreed to purchase 3,000 lots from the public at $66.50 each, to build 70 houses before 1800, and to lend the commissioners $ 2,200 a month until completion of the public buildings. He formed a consortium with Robert Morris and John Nicholson of Pennsylvania and sold 500 lots to Thomas Law at four times what he had paid the commission for them a year earlier.

Furious, Washington privately censured the commission for not locating such buyers itself. Greenleaf got into a dispute with the commission and withdrew from the consortium. By 1795 Morris and Nicholson owed the federal government thousands of dollars, and the president personally asked his friend Morris to pay up. The partners, however, went to jail for bankruptcy, leaving unfinished houses in the federal city and tarnishing its name as a place for investment. Law, on the other hand, proved to be a successful developer.

When the sale of lots ~iled to provide the money necessary to carry on the public works, and foreign loans proved unattainable, Washington reluctantly realized that he would have to turn to legislative bodies. Virginia showed no interest, and Maryland re104

AÃ_ _fused to lend any money without guarantees. In January 1796 Washington turned to Congress for permission to use the public lots for that purpose. Congress took the opportunity to launch a full-scale investigation into what Washington termed all the fliux pas that had been committed. After another sectional compromise related to the controversial Jay Treaty, Congress passed a bill to guarantee the Maryland loan with the federal city lots. Once again the Compromise of 1790 had been reaffirmed. Beginning with a direct appeal from Washington, Maryland lent the commission $250,000 between 1797 and 1799

Distant from the federal city and obsessed with dreams for its success, Washington's decisions had not always been wise. Nevertheless, by the time he retired to Mount Vernon in March 1797, the only opposition to a removal to the Potomac in 1 800 centered at Philadelphia. Its residents attacked the federal city as a forest with no access to commercial information and contrasted Philadelphia's civic improvements to the City of Washington, whose growth arose from speculation rather than from any qualities of site. Some Philadelphians still asserted that the northern states would refuse to go to the Potomac and that, if the South insisted, the Union would be sev &ed. In reporting such opinion, an English visitor concluded that the transfer would occur on schedule not only because a large majority of Americans Ilivo red it, but also because a refusal would destroy the harmony of the Union, if not the Union itself.

Friends and neighbors at Alexandria joined to welcome Washington into retirement, and he vowed his support for the town's prosperity. To keep this vow and to satisfy his own dreams, Washington violated his commitment to keep out of federal city concerns. Just as his very existence overshadowed President John Adams's efforts in military and foreign policy, it similarly operated in the afliiirs of the federal city. Adams declined to participate in routine decision making for the federal city and even refused Washington's suggestion that he make a symbolic visit to the city. He yielded, however, when the former president strongly dissented from Adams's proposal to place the executive offices near the Capitol instead of the presidential mansion, as originally planned. Washington maintained correspondence with the commission and individual commissioners, and relied on commissioner Thornton to oversee the construction of Washington's houses in the federal city.

i06

ÿ)Ã_ _Washington's commitment to a Potomac location for the seat of the American Empire is nowhere better captured than in Edward Savage's 1796 painting, "The Washington Family." Savage portrays George and Martha Washington, Martha's grandchildren, and George's devoted body slave, William Lee, before a vista of the Potomac. On a table lies the plan of the federal city. Washington's left hand is on the plan, his right on the shoulder of George Washington Parke Custis. In turn, the boy, representing the future of the United States, rests his right hand on a partially covered globe.

The year 1800, at the close of which the federal government would move to the Potomac, was a presidential election. The deeply split Federalist party had reason to fear Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican party. The Federalists' best hope, argued Gouverneur Morris, lay in Washington once again coming out of retirement to accept the presidency. Consider, he urged Washington, that the proximity of the capital to Mount Vernon would allow for relaxation there. And, Morris added, guaranteeing the removal of the federal government to the Potomac might require his acceptance. The proprietor of Mount Vernon did not receive the letter: Washington will live, a eulogist proclaimed, "cherished in the remembrance of all f~ithful Americans while their empire shall continue."

Over half a million dollars had been spent on construction of the capital between 1791 and 1800. The population and the number of houses had grown dramatically. An imposing home for the president and the first portion of a magnificent Capitol rose dramatically above the landscape. Nevertheless, the city's development did not suggest grandeur. Broad, sometimes muddy streets passed between tree stumps to connect the widely scattered buildings in the huge, empty city. Here and there decaying houses left unfinished by Morris and Nicholson added to the lonely vista. The Capitol and presidential mansion, although habitable, remained unfinished. Despite a newspaper, taverns, a theater, and such other evidences of urban life as outdoor concerts by the Marine band, the cultural deprivation of the federal city in comparison with Philadelphia struck observers. Abigail Adams concluded that New Englanders would have done it better.

President John Adams had no love for the Potomac. But ifanyone hoped in 1800 that he would seize upon lingering opposition to the residence act at Philadelphia to keep the federal government

108

ÿÿÿ1Ã_ _there, they misjudged the man. Adams had worked closely with the Virginians to start the Revolution three decades earlier. He understood the necessity of a removal to the Potomac for the preservation of the Union, and he respected George Washington's belief that a Potomac capital would bind North to South and East to West. The commission informed President Adams in the Ilill of 1799 that the capital was ready, and, when the Sixth Congress met in December, Adams called its attention to the impending transfer of the government. In April 1800 Congress passed a removal act-the funds for which had been appropriated in 1790-and in May it ordered its next meeting to be at Washington in November. Nothing perhaps better symbolizes the peaceful turnover of political power in the United States from the Federalists to the Democratic-Republicans than the move from urbane Philadelphia to rustic Washington, D.C. Even more important as an image, the move reflected an optimistic society willing to reaffirm a political act of ~ith in the future it had made ten years earlier.

109

Select Bibliography

The following is an abbreviated list of source materials for each chapter. Sources used in previous chapters are not cited again. Readers interested in specific citations should consult the author's forthcoming Seat of Empire: The Creation of Washington, D.C. (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press).

I. Exclusive Jurisdiction: The Idea of an American Capital

Bowling, Kenneth R. "New Light on the Philadelphia Mutiny of 1783: Federal-State Confrontation at the Close of the War for Independence." Pennsylvania Magazine ofHistory and Biography 101(1977): 419-50.

Butterfield, Lyman, ed. Letters of Benjamin Rush. 2 vols. Princeton, N.J., 1951.

Kaminski, John P., Gaspare J. Saladino, and Richard Leffler, eds. The Documentary History ofthe Rat~cation ofthe Constitution. 16 vols. to date. Madison, Wis., 1976-.

Smith, Paul, Gerald Gawalt, Eugene Sheridan et al., eds. Letters of Delegates to Congress. 15 vols. to date. Washington, D.C.,

1976-.

Washington, George. Papers. Library of Congress, Washing-ton, D.C.

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