Divided City

A Short History of Washington, D.C.

Part One: Before April 1791

In the early 1700's, Goose Creek or Tiber Creek, divided white land to the south and east and Indian land to the north and west. The Indians left and that creek, still many years away from becoming Constitution Avenue, divided the lands of the Carroll family from that of the newcomers Burnes and Peerce. It didn't take long for a lawsuit to foment between the prestigious family of Maryland Catholics and the Scot Burnes. Not that many noticed. The lands in question were used for farming. A boom in tobacco, and the discovery by Maryland and Virginia farmers in the lower Piedmont that wheat was an even better crop, helped three small port cities prosper. Alexandria (founded 1749), Georgetown (founded 1751), and Bladensburg (founded 1742) all joined the global economy of the 18th century. The area was so attractive that in 1770, the Carrolls and their friend laid out another city, Carrollsburg, just south of Jenkins Hill (which would soon become Capitol Hill), but they did this as a speculation; no houses were built. In 1771, A group of Germans was initially impressed enough to lay out a city, just west of the future site of the White House, that they called Hamburg. Then they decided to settle Hagerstown, Maryland, instead.

There is nothing special about this history. Such prosperity and speculation were happening along rivers throughout the east as the global economy demanded more of the new nation. War put the Potomac River in the spotlight. In the New World war was often a necessary prelude to development and exploitation of the continent's interior. So, during what we call the French and Indian War, when London decided to send an army to capture French forts in western Pennsylvania, the route the army cut through the wilderness became a matter of moment. Virginia officials lobbied strenuously for a campaign up the Potomac. Pennsylvanians urged a campaign west from Philadelphia. For the first campaign London sent troops up the Potomac. The commanding general, Braddock, never came back but his troops cut a road that became very familiar to a young colonial officer, Major George Washington, who scouted many of the trails along that route himself.

The Virginia born Washington was no stranger to the Potomac. One of his first jobs as a surveyor was to map land in the Shenandoah Valley. His war experience extended his view of the river, and he became convinced that the Potomac was the gateway to America's western empire. Soldiers who served in the campaign up the Potomac, as well as soldiers in the Revolutionary war, were paid in part with deeds to land in the west. Washington bought those deeds from them and became the owner of sizeable tracts of land, some 20,000 acres, in western Virginia, western Pennsylvania and southeastern Ohio. In 1784 a year after retiring as commander of the continental army he toured the upper Potomac again. In 1785 he became president of the Potomac Company, which he organized to build the series of canals needed to ease navigation down the Potomac. Washington was infatuated with developing the Potomac River. As James Madison wrote at the time, "the earnestness with which he espouses the undertaking is hardly to be described."

Some argue that the concerns of the Maryland and Virginia government over how to divide commercial rights over the Potomac sowed the seeds for a movement of cooperation and commerce friendly consolidation that led to the Federal Constitution. Washington was a leader in the movement but there is no evidence that he exerted his considerable influence to favor the Potomac as the site of the capital for the new government.

The continental congress first met in Philadelphia is 1774. British occupation of the city forced it to relocate temporarily in York, Lancaster and Baltimore. Congress returned to Philadelphia in late 1778. Then in 1783 a demonstration by 400 soldiers of the unpaid Pennsylvania Line in 1783 prompted Congress to leave the city and convene in Princeton, New Jersey. Not a few cities and would-be cities from the Hudson River to the Potomac began letting it be known that they were eager to bed and board congressmen. As a concession to the projected growth of the country, states usually touted areas a little to the west of their current centers of populaiton. Maryland proposed Georgetown. Congress requested particulars about the area, but met temporarily in Annapolis. New Jersey talked up Trenton, west of Princeton, as a possible site, and plans for a capital there were made. Congress tentatively decided to split its sessions between Georgetown and Trenton, but nobody took the idea seriously. Pennsylvanians spoke of a site on the Susquehanna. All that talk didn't prevent Congress from convening in New York City in 1785 and staying in that very convenient city through 1790.

The Constitutional convention met in Philadelphia and mindful of the insult to Congress in 1783, by both the soldiers and Pennsylvania officials who didn't protect them from the outrage, the delegates drafted a Constitution that placed the federal government in a ten mile square district to be controlled by Congress. Thus if disgruntled soldiers surrounded Congress once again, it would not be at the mercy of state authorities for protection. With ratification of the Constitution competition for the site of the permanent residence of the government became intense when the first federal Congress met in New York City. It became the political football at the end of the first session with sites on the Potomac, Delaware, Susquehanna, as well as Baltimore, vying for the prize. By the middle of the second session of Congress it became clear that getting a bill through both houses of Congress would not be easy.

Of course, as every American student is taught, the Compromise of 1790 settled the issue. At a dinner meeting between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton a deal was made. Jefferson would find enough southern votes to pass another stalemated piece of legislation - Hamilton's proposal that the federal government redeem at par the paper money the state's issued to pay their expenses during the Revolutionary War. In return Hamilton would find northern votes for leaving the convenience of New York and convening the next Congress in Philadelphia and creating a permanent seat for Congress on the Potomac to be ready for Congress in 1800. The temporary move to Philadelphia placated enough Pennsylvania congressmen so they would not scuttle the deal. Philadelphians banked on the Potomac capital not being built. The law Congress passed, on July 26, 1790, left it entirely up to the president to decide where on the Potomac the capital should be.

Congress's long indecision in passing the residency bill had important consequences for the future capital. It gave competing areas a chance to offer money and development schemes to lure Congress to their neck of the woods and created a belief that a grand capital could be built without the expenditure of any federal money. Senator Robert Morris of Pennsylvania offered $100,000 for the projected capital if it was placed on the Delaware River. A few years earlier Trenton asked for $100,000 to prepare the city to host the government. In response, the Virginia and Maryland legislatures put up $192,000 for a Potomac site. To flatter the purse conscious Congress, then worried about retiring a sizeable national debt, promoters suggested a scenario in which the seed money would pay for an initial purchase of land for the public buildings, and pay for plans, surveys and some improvements. The remaining land would be divided in half by the government and proprietors, then sub-divided into house lots and sold to an eager public. The government's profit from those sales, well over a million dollars, would finance construction of the public buildings. The original land owners would be eager to cooperate because they too would profit handsomely in sales of the house lots they owned.

George Washington usually relied on his advisors to form and implement his administration's policy. The law Congress passed required the president to appoint three commissioners to oversee the development of the federal capital. But in deciding where to put the capital, Washington relied on the advice of his fellow Virginians Thomas Jefferson, then secretary of state, and James Madison, a congressional leader. They toured the area near Georgetown and talked to landowners there, and got nine of them to sign-on to a liberal offer of their land. Three other sites seemed to get Washington's serious consideration, the area around Williamsport, Maryland, southwest of Hagerstown, an area near Sharpsburg, Maryland, and an area at the confluence of the Monocacy and Potomac southeast of Frederick, Maryland. In the debates on the permanent residence, James Madison, made much of the Potomac being a western river and implied that any capital on it would be on its western end. Washington visited the western sites and had maps drawn that showed water courses, springs, and land owners. He never revealed why he chose the site near Georgetown, nor, if that was his choice all along, why he explored the other sites. Perhaps it was to keep land owners on tenterhooks, prompting them to pledge lands to the government at a low price.

When Washington announced his decision on January 24, 1791, he showed a predilection for yoking together competing interests. He included both Georgetown and Alexandria in the federal district. Now he turned to his next decision. The law required him to put the public buildings on the Maryland side of the Potomac, but, with that caveat, he had to decide where in the ten mile square to lay out a city and the residence of the president and meeting place of Congress. He secretly utilized agents on the scene and put them in competition with each other. One agent tried to get the best offer he could from the landowners in and around Carrollsburg, or the eastern end of the district, and the other agents were to get the best offers possible from land owners around Hamburg. Meanwhile, on January 22 Washington appointed three commissioners, Thomas Johnson, Daniel Carroll and David Stuart (the first two from Maryland and the last from Virginia, and all slave owners). In February he sent Andrew Ellicott to survey the line of the federal district. From his agents he knew that the principal land owner around Hamburg, David Burnes, was not being as generous in his donation of land as he should be (he wanted to reserve enough acres for himself to continue farming!) So in early March Washington had Secretary of State Jefferson send Pierre L'Enfant, a French born Revolutionary War veteran who made a name for himself as an architect and designer in New York City, to begin planning a city with instructions to concentrate on the eastern area around Carrollsburg. That, Washington hoped, would get Burnes to cooperate.

At the end of March Washington came to the city. Family legend has Burnes becoming more cooperative only after a personal interview with Washington, but documents reveal that he received a sizeable douceur, or bribe, from one of Washington's secret agents, Benjamin Stoddert, a Georgetown speculator. Washington toured the area with L'Enfant and the land owners. He probably hardly noticed the series of farms and woodlots, scattered houses and shacks for the slave families (Notley Young who owned what would become southwest Washington owned 265 slaves.) What he saw was the site of a Metropolis such as Washington himself, who had seen no greater city than Philadelphia, had never seen. He decided he wanted the principal buildings of the city, the meeting place for Congress and the residence for the president, to be just over a mile a part. No city in America, perhaps none in the world, had its two principal buildings so far a part. Washington's long held belief that the Potomac would be the principal avenue of commerce to and from the western United States, convinced him that the new city would grow rapidly.

On March 30, the land owners who thought they were competing with each other suddenly found themselves united in a project to make a city filling upwards of 5,000 acres of undeveloped land. The complexities of the deal numbed some and they quickly sold their farms to eager speculators who gladly signed the deal. What lands the government took for public buildings and grounds, the original owner would be reimbursed at about $67 an acre. They would get nothing for lands used for streets. The government would survey all the remaining land and lay them out into small house lots. The commissioners and each landowner would decide later how to split the house lots fifty-fifty. For the moment no money and no land changed hands. Farmers could plant crops as usual. All waited on the plan and the surveys. All expenses would be defrayed by the donations Maryland and Virginia made to entice Congress to move the government to the Potomac. Prior to beginning a tour of the southern states, Washington gave instructions to Ellicott and L'Enfant "with respect to the mode of laying out the district, surveying the grounds for a city and forming them into lots." He charged his commissioners with the task of drawing up deeds for the land to be conveyed for the city. The commissioners asked him to check with Virginia officials in Richmond about when the $120,000 that state promised to the project would be available. No one seemed to have any foreboding of the difficulties the next ten years would bring.

Bob Arnebeck

to continue the story go to short2.html