Planners, Speculators, and Slaves
In America, where more than in any other country in the world, a desire for wealth is the prevailing passion, there are few schemes which are not made the means of extensive speculations, and that of erecting the federal city presented irresistible temptations.
—Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, 1799
Without Peter Charles L’Enfant, the task of building a capital city that lay before George Washington became even more Herculean. Creating a city, even a small one, was almost unheard of in the eighteenth century. Ideally, it demanded the firm hand of a supervisor, detailed building plans, a renewable stockpile of materials, a large supply of laborers and artisans, and great reserves of money. Washington had none of these. Instead, he had three commissioners whose expertise was scant and whose value was limited.
Washington knew he had to show some sign of progress to convince skeptics in Philadelphia. In the summer of 1792, he visited Rock Creek at the future K Street, where a handsome arched bridge was rising twenty feet above the water. No one seems to have told the president that the structure’s piers would force the three-hundred-foot-wide creek into a channel just sixty feet wide, and that after a hard rain, its waters would back up, flood the city, and scour the supports. The arch soon collapsed.
More visible than a bridge would be construction on the Capitol and the President’s House, but the buildings had yet to be designed. Although L’Enfant had begun digging foundations at both sites, he had never revealed his drawings, if indeed there were any. “The plans . . . ought to come forward immediately for consideration,” the president wrote to Thomas Jefferson that spring. But as the nation had no design tradition of its own, there were few architects. Indeed, in eighteenth-century America, the word usually meant a master builder, one who combined his knowledge of mathematics with his experience as a carpenter or mason. For inspiration, a master builder usually referred to books like Batty Langley’s The City and Country Builder’s and Workman’s Treasury of Designs, or Abraham Swan’s The Carpenters Complete Instructor, as Washington himself had when building Mount Vernon.
With Washington’s concurrence, Jefferson held design competitions for the President’s House and the Capitol. In March 1792, newspapers from Boston to Charleston announced “A PREMIUM of five hundred dollars, or a MEDAL of that value” for the winning design of the President’s House.
James Hoban took the $500 prize (about $6,875 today). Trained at the Royal Dublin Society’s School of Architectural Drawing, Hoban had come to America after the War of Independence to pursue his vocation as a draftsman and carpenter in Charleston, South Carolina. An imposing black-haired Irishman, his florid face, aquiline nose, and calm demeanor inspired confidence in all, including George Washington, who met him in Charleston in 1791. So taken was Washington with Hoban’s work that he sought out the architect, discussed his desires for the President’s House with him, and commended him to the commissioners.
Hoban’s design, which drew its inspiration from the home of the Duke of Leinster in Dublin, conformed to the commissioners’ request that the “Central Part” of the house “may be detached and erected for the present,” and be “capable of admitting the additional parts” in the future. Its footprint would be about a quarter the size of the foundations L’Enfant had begun. The three stories (later reduced to two, when the basement story was eliminated during construction) featured a center hall at the north entrance, an oval room at the center, whose windows afforded a view of the Potomac, and the great East Room, which would become the setting for receptions. In addition to awarding him the prize for the building, the commissioners hired Hoban for an additional 300 guineas a year (about $19,500 today) to oversee its construction as well as other projects in the capital.
It remained only for the Freemasons to consecrate the President’s House with a solemn ritual. That October 13, members of Georgetown’s Lodge Number 9 led a parade from Suter’s Fountain Inn down a horse path to the southwest corner of the site. After the requisite Masonic formalities, the master mason placed on the cornerstone a brass plate inscribed with the names of the nation’s president, the city’s three commissioners, the building’s master mason, and a closing command: “Vivat Respublica.” Then another stone was placed atop the first. It was but a few stones in a shallow hole. Yet it marked a beginning.
Choosing an architect for the Capitol did not go as smoothly. The commissioners had called for a brick building, the honest republican material Jefferson favored. It promised to be a huge building, the largest in the United States, dwarfing Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Nassau Hall in Princeton (then the largest in the United States), or L’Enfant’s Federal Hall in New York City. The advertisement called for a conference room, room for the representatives “sufficient to accommodate 300 persons each,” and a “Senate room of 1200 square feet area,” along with lobbies for each and twelve committee rooms. In January 1793, after some delay and much consultation with Washington, who had not been happy with any submission up to the last, the commissioners chose the plans drawn by another recent arrival to the United States, William Thornton. Unfortunately, funds had become so scarce that the commissioners had to borrow the money they had promised for the prize.
Romantic dreamer, Quaker, abolitionist, alphabet reformer, medical doctor, painter, sculptor, poetaster, inventor, horse racer, scientific experimenter, botanist, essayist, and amateur architect, “a little genius at everything,” William Thornton possessed all the virtues of a polymath, and many of the vices. Born in 1759 on the island of Tortola in the British West Indies to a wealthy sugar plantation owner, he was sent at the age of five to relatives in Lancashire, England, for his education. After an apprenticeship with a Quaker apothecary and surgeon and medical training at the universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen, Thornton became a doctor.
Over the years, the bands of Thornton’s Quaker precepts tightened on his conscience. He grew increasingly guilty with the knowledge that the seventy to eighty slaves who worked his sugar plantation brought him the income and the freedom to do whatever he wished. The values of America’s Declaration of Independence and of abolitionist thinkers in England had only accentuated his pangs of conscience: “I am induced,” he wrote to a friend, “to render free all that I am possessed of.”
In 1786, the tenth year of American independence, Thornton landed in Philadelphia, where his various interests gained him notice. (He would live at Fifth and Market streets with James Madison and other delegates to the constitutional convention.) Within a few years, Thornton had taken a wife, had been elected to the American Philosophical Society, had joined with John Fitch to help build the first successful steamboat, and had won the competition to design a new building for the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Thornton had so absorbed the ideals of the US Constitution and its bicameral legislature that he was able to translate them into architectural symbols. His Capitol design featured a central neoclassical domed temple and portico flanked by two wings to house the senators and representatives. “Thornton’s plan has captivated the eyes and judgment of all,” Jefferson wrote to the commissioners. “It is simple, noble, beautiful, excellently distributed, and moderate in size.” Washington saw that Thornton had done this and more when he gave his official approval on April 3, 1793. The amateur architect from Tortola had created an allegory of the republic that would be realized in brick and stone.
Thornton’s plans, however, were unsound. Delayed at his Tortola sugar plantation, where he was engaged in a futile attempt to free his slaves, he had drawn the designs in haste and submitted them after the July 1792 deadline. He lacked any professional training, a fact he boasted of regularly, and which many found troubling. (“In building an edifice so costly and so important, could they not have brought over one of the more celebrated architects of Europe?” a Polish visitor wondered after meeting with Thornton.) His inexperience exasperated others who had entered the competition, especially Stephen Sulpice Hallet, a French-trained architect who had fled to America in the wake of the Revolution of 1789. Jefferson had encouraged Hallet’s submission, going so far as to review several iterations of his plan, and his interest had given the architect the idea that the commission was his. “Some difficulty arises with respect to Mr. Hallet,” Washington wrote to his commissioners after Thornton was chosen, “who, you know, was in some degree led into his plans by ideas we all expressed to him.” So that his feelings might be “salved and soothed,” the commissioners awarded the Frenchman the second-place prize and hired him to “make calculations of the expence and materials” of Thornton’s plan.
An amalgamation of Georgian architecture that reflected the aesthetics of England and the neoclassical elements that hearkened back to the Roman Pantheon, Thornton’s plans captured the intellectual spirit of the new nation. Owing to the designer’s want of formal training, however, his design contained many flaws that caused problems for succeeding generations of architects, engineers, and builders. Credit: Library of Congress
Hallet perused Thornton’s plans with a trained eye. There were some disturbing aspects: many parts of the building, including the Senate, were without adequate light and air; galleries sometimes blocked windows, stairways wanted headroom, and, most troubling of all, “the floor of the central peristyle [was] too wide to support itself.” In effect, the building could collapse. Hallet took it upon himself to redesign the west front of the building, reconfigure the placement of windows, and suggest other substantial alterations. Thornton brushed the criticisms aside. The lack of support for the floor was a slight mistake in the plans, he conceded to Jefferson, but any skillful builder would recognize and rectify the problem. Hallet, not he, was the incompetent one, and his motive was jealousy.
Washington himself entered the dispute. He had approved Thornton’s design “knowing . . . the anxiety of the public to see both buildings [the Capitol and the President’s House] progressing, and supposing the plan to be correct.” Now these objections were wasting time at a crucial moment. Eventually, the commissioners would on Washington’s orders dismiss Hallet, who slunk back to Philadelphia to practice his art there. For the moment, Thornton had triumphed. Nevertheless, the good doctor’s lack of training would bring him, and the Capitol, considerable difficulty in the future.
Washington decided to make the start of the Capitol’s construction a very public and symbolic celebration that would affirm the government’s place on the Potomac. He hadn’t been present at the dedication of the stone marking the southern tip of the District at Jones Point, or at the laying of the cornerstone at the President’s House, but this time he would be there. And since he was a master mason himself, he decided to invest the event with all the symbolic trappings of the Masonic Order.
At 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday, September 18, 1793, the president crossed the Potomac with his brothers from Masonic Lodge Number 22 of Alexandria and members of the Alexandria Volunteer Artillery. After joining with Maryland’s Masonic Lodge Number 9, the entourage proceeded up Pennsylvania Avenue in full regalia, stepped gingerly on the fallen tree that served as a bridge across the Tiber, and ascended the hill for the dedication ceremony. The contrast between the marchers, dressed in medieval costumes, and the landscape must have been remarkable to slaves and farmers, and perhaps to David Burnes, across whose land they tramped. The “park,” or “President’s Square,” was an open grassland; Pennsylvania Avenue was no avenue at all but a recently cleared road, still marred by stumps and holes, passing through the wheat and tobacco fields that the prickly Burnes had insisted upon harvesting. Closer to the site of the Capitol, the procession encountered a crowd of several hundred citizens who had come out for the occasion. Still, “the procession marched two abreast,” a newspaper reported, “in the greatest solemn dignity, with music playing, drums beating, colors flying, and spectators rejoicing.”
As they neared the southeastern corner of the Capitol’s north wing (the only part of the building under construction), the procession divided into two columns to allow the “Grand sword bearer,” the “Grand Master,” and the President of the United States to proceed to the edge of the foundation. Wearing white gloves and the apron of the craft made for him by the Marquis de Lafayette’s wife, Washington and his two Masonic brothers descended into the trench. Grand Master Joseph Clark, a skilled mason, handed Washington a silver plate with an inscription that noted it was “the thirteenth year of American Independence.” The president placed the plate on the ground as workmen carefully lowered a three-foot-square cornerstone over it. Clark then followed with the all-significant corn, wine, and oil. Prayers and numerous artillery volleys concluded the ceremony. The entire entourage—including onlookers—ended the afternoon in a park east of the Capitol, where they feasted on a five-hundred-pound barbecued ox and celebrated “with every abundance of other recreation.”
However imperfect Thornton’s plans might be, the Capitol of the United States, one corner at least, had a firm foundation.
Even as George Washington was dealing with questions about the plans for the Capitol, he had to secure money for the entire project. Maryland had committed $72,000 (about $990,000 today); Virginia, $120,000 (about $1,650,000 today). But he had little else beyond those small sums. The first auction of lots had been an embarrassment, and still Congress had shown no inclination to allocate funds. Prospects were dim.
The situation rendered the president and his commissioners all the more vulnerable to anyone with a scheme to secure funding, no matter how questionable it, or they, might be. As often as not, those who came forth were speculators and swindlers, golden dreamers all, attempting to make or extend their fortunes in buying, selling, and building. Some were competent, others were naïve, and still others were outright frauds. Desperate for money, Washington and his commissioners frequently accepted the investors’ proposals. It was a moment when men with high ideals and dreams for the nascent republic met adventurers who possessed different values. But those values were nonetheless American. Land speculation had helped to develop towns across the American landscape. The new capital offered an opportunity for such speculation on a grand scale; perhaps it might work.
Those who succumbed to the irresistible temptations of speculation were men of varied backgrounds and experience. Several were financiers; some had served in the Revolution; all enjoyed great wealth, or claimed to. For a while they all deceived Washington and his commissioners; many deceived their partners also, and some deceived themselves. In the end they all suffered financial ruin. Four went to debtors’ prison; one died there. But far greater than their personal failures were the effects of their dubious financial schemes upon the city, effects that have rippled through Washington’s history even to this day.
For the most part the speculators’ golden dreams amounted to little more than variations on the theme of buying the building lots at a low price and selling them later at a higher one, on the promise that they would then be close to the federal government buildings and to the workers who would soon arrive. Buildings to accommodate the new citizens would rise, the lots would appreciate, and the owners would sell them at a profit. Unfortunately, the web of lines crisscrossing the maps of the barely planned city proved a trap for the avaricious.
Samuel Blodget was one of the first lured to the web. Typical of many American entrepreneurs, he possessed great ability but was beguiled by a self-assurance that knew no bounds. A failed business venture in Exeter, New Hampshire, had left him and his father (who assumed his debts) in penury, but another speculation in Boston’s East India trade brought him a fortune. By 1789, Blodget had moved to Philadelphia, organized one of the nation’s first insurance companies, designed the classic marble Bank of the United States, and married the daughter of the provost of the University of Pennsylvania.
Flushed with success, Blodget turned his attention to the new capital. Having purchased five lots in the recent auction, he proposed “purchasing and building a whole street in the new City,” as Jefferson characterized it to the commissioners. Although that idea failed because Blodget couldn’t sell the lots quickly enough, he presented another novel scheme in March 1792: to secure $500,000 (about $6,875,000 today) in loans by selling warrants that would be backed by the collateral of the city lots. With that money in hand, serious construction could begin. Jefferson, Washington, and the commissioners had little choice but to listen carefully. The auction of city lots had yielded little; L’Enfant had been dismissed; a financial panic in New York that spring, the first in the nation’s history, had reduced the value of securities by 25 percent in two weeks; and, worst of all, New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians in Congress were caballing to repeal the 1790 Residence Act.
As Washington soon learned, the plan was doomed. “I hope Mr. Blodget does not begin to hesitate concerning the loan?” he wrote to Jefferson on March 21, ending his sentence with the urgency of a question mark. Blodget hadn’t hesitated, but he hadn’t succeeded, either. On a recent trip to New York and Boston, he had found “a very gloomy aspect” on the Hudson and “a want of Cash” on the Charles. He had promised $50,000 (about $687,500 today) by mid-May and an equal amount by mid-November. But the amount dwindled to just $10,000 (about $137,500 today), money that came from Blodget’s personal account.
Neither daunted nor embarrassed, Blodget asked to be named superintendent of construction and cooked up another and bolder scheme for raising cash: a $350,000 (about $4,810,000 today) lottery, the largest ever held in America, with 16,737 prizes, including the grand prize of “1 Superb Hotel, with baths, out-houses, &c. &c. to cost $50,000.” As was the practice of the time, syndicates could be depended upon to purchase blocks of outstanding tickets. Advertisements appeared in major newspapers, always headed with the words, in bold type, “By the COMMISSIONERS.” That Washington and the others eagerly embraced Blodget’s plan indicates how desperate they were for cash.
The idea of a hotel—the grand prize of Blodget’s lottery—was a novel one for the nation, but Blodget believed it would serve the needs of transient members of Congress, merchants, and those with federal business. He enlisted James Hoban to design a three-story Georgian structure graced by a pediment supported by six Doric columns. Along with the Capitol and the President’s House, Blodget’s hotel would come to dominate the Washington skyline. But months later, when a Philadelphia man, the “fortunate possessor” of ticket 37531, journeyed to Washington to claim the promised “keys of the Hotel,” he found little more than a large hole in the ground. Blodget hadn’t completed his hotel, and the additional 16,000 winning ticketholders realized just a fraction of their promised winnings. Instead of using the lottery money to build, Blodget had engaged in yet more speculation that yielded little.
By early 1793, Washington, Jefferson, and the commissioners had lost patience. The president had wanted a person of “industry & integrity” to execute his building plans—someone who could always be present in the capital—but his superintendent was busy hustling tickets in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston and was seldom seen in the city. Construction had stalled. A year earlier Washington had called Blodget “certainly a projecting genius,” but now he had cause to reconsider: “Speculation,” he wrote, “has been his primary object from the beginning.” The commissioners dismissed Blodget, but they weren’t through with him. His dismissal arrived in May 1793, just as the entrepreneur was advertising a second lottery, this time for $400,000 (about $5,480,000 today) to erect “an elegant specimen of . . . private buildings.” The prizes included six “magnificent dwelling houses” that would never be built. Like the first lottery, the second scheme failed.
Blodget was not finished with Washington, either. He would become the first president of the Bank of Columbia; he would start a fire insurance company; he would take up George Washington’s scheme for a national university; and he would go to prison for debt. And it was Samuel Blodget who lured James Greenleaf to the Potomac River.
Lottery broadside. Credit: The New-York Historical Society
Like so many others who came to Washington, the twenty-six-year-old James Greenleaf had more than one past. Of old New England stock, he possessed a courtly and charming manner and a reckless sense of self-assurance. It was an air that Gilbert Stuart captured in his portrait: full-cheeked face, powdered hair tied in a queue, ruffled shirt and neckerchief, blue coat and gilt buttons—the very image of a gentleman possessing wealth and confidence. He had made his money through shipping and banking speculation in New York and Holland, and, by appointment of George Washington, had been the American consul in Amsterdam. But other matters of Greenleaf’s past were more complicated. A Dutch baroness had duped him into marriage by claiming she carried his child; Dutch bankers, from whom he had borrowed a small amount of money, deluded him into thinking he could ask for more. It was this slim promise of ready money that Greenleaf had in his mind when he returned to America in 1793 in search of opportunities for speculation.
Over dinners in Philadelphia in the summer of 1793, Samuel Blodget painted a bright portrait of the new city for James Greenleaf—the capital and the president’s mansion, the avenues, the stone and brick “Union Public Hotel,” as he sometimes called it, and, especially, the fortune to be had from land speculation. For his part, Greenleaf claimed that a million dollars from Dutch bankers awaited him. He could well be the city’s salvation. By August, Blodget and Greenleaf had become partners.
James Greenleaf stepped forward at an opportune time. Another auction of lots had not gone well, and although George Washington had bought four, few joined him. The president and his commissioners determined they had little choice but to sell the lots privately. Greenleaf purchased 3,000 building lots, 5,265 square feet each, for $66.50 apiece (about $900 today), with the promise to make seven annual interest-free payments of $21,000 (about $288,000 today) and build ten houses a year for the next decade. He would also loan the commissioners $2,600 (about $37,750 today) a month, at 6 percent interest. A letter of introduction from George Washington, and the promise of a loan from Amsterdam, helped to convince the commissioners to accept the terms.
That December, two more speculators, Robert Morris and John Nicholson, succumbed to Greenleaf’s promise of credit in Amsterdam, joining Greenleaf as partners. Morris’s financial acumen was undoubted, and it must have given his friend George Washington heart to know that someone of his sagacity, the one who had carried the financial burden of the Revolution, was now behind the construction. Nicholson, the comptroller general of Pennsylvania, possessed energy, financial skill, and numerous interests. He dabbled in exports, glass and button manufacture, textile production, steamboat promotion on the Delaware, road construction, lead mining, and city development. Eyewitnesses held that he could write a letter with one hand while simultaneously making a copy with the other—and carry on a conversation. Probity sometimes eluded him, however; as comptroller he was forced to resign after cornering the market for Pennsylvania’s bonds and lands.
Not content with Greenleaf’s original purchase, Morris and Nicholson doubled it to 6,000 lots, about 720 acres of the city. These cost more, so the combined amount of the seven annual payments jumped to $72,000 (about $990,000 today). The money would enable construction of the public buildings in time for the government’s move in 1800. But when they began their land speculation, neither Morris nor Nicholson had money. Greenleaf promised them credit, while the lots promised a quick turnover and a profit. Vast tracts of wilderness land had brought them little cash and many debts. Like so many speculators, the pair found flirtation with bankruptcy a test of their nimbleness and wits—an addictive stimulant that made their desire for riches all the more exciting, even sublime.
The partners wanted more. They created the North American Land Company, and under its aegis Morris bought 649 more lots from the original proprietors. Greenleaf inveigled Daniel Carroll of Duddington to give him twenty lots on South Capitol Street “free of charge” with the stipulation that he build a two-story brick house on each within three years. (Carroll’s kilns would supply the bricks.) Should Greenleaf not fulfill his part of the bargain, he would forfeit the property and pay a £100 penalty (about $4,400 today) for each lot. With just a year to go in the agreement, Greenleaf quietly sold the lots to Morris and Nicholson. They tried to build the houses in time, but were only able to complete twenty roofless, windowless, empty shells. By this time Carroll was in a financial bind, brought down by the trio’s failure to pay him for any of the properties, or even for the bricks he had sold them on credit. After Carroll took back his lots and the buildings, Greenleaf, Morris, and Nicholson had no compunction about suing him for the unlawful seizure of their property.
Initially, however, there were good intentions on all sides, and there was even some progress. If Greenleaf and his partners kept their pledge, there would be public buildings and close to a hundred substantial houses in Washington by the time Congress arrived. Greenleaf hired architects and builders, and he brought William Cranch, a young lawyer who had married his sister, to Washington. Cranch would supervise the operations and act as his legal agent. To further the construction, the speculator brought a builder to the city and found a Philadelphian who had invented a brick-making machine. Greenleaf hoped the device would turn out bricks as fast as slaves could dig the clay for the automated molds. Today, fragments of his work still stand in southwest Washington at what is now the Naval War College and “Greenleaf’s Point.”
Land acquisition and financing became an elaborate shell game. Having cornered about 40 percent of the choicest private lots in the new federal city, the trio felt free to raise their prices for resale. More importantly, they were able to use their Washington holdings as collateral for still more land that they acquired in Pennsylvania, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia. If all worked out as planned, they would sell those lands to European speculators. The commissioners showed their own desperate complicity. Seeing evidence of some construction, and understanding that money from Holland was critical to their success, the commissioners gave Greenleaf clear title to 2,000 of the Washington lots to use as collateral. They knew it was a gamble, for neither Greenleaf nor his partners had made more than a partial payment on their first installment. For Greenleaf there was but the dream of a fortune. In time it would turn to dust.
In the end, Greenleaf would make just one payment of $72,000 (about $990,000 today). George Washington was not happy. Greenleaf “was speculating deeply”; he would make “an immense profit to himself and those with whom he was concerned.” Still, Morris maintained that neither he nor Nicholson intended to keep their property, only “to resell [it] when it can be done to our satisfaction.” Again George Washington grew angry. Construction of his city was not progressing, and Greenleaf was profiting handsomely. “Why,” the president asked, “are speculators to pocket so much money?”
But in the fall of 1794, before the true character of their enterprise had completely emerged, Greenleaf found in Philadelphia Thomas Law, an Englishman who had made a £100,000 (about $6 million today) fortune in Bengal as a collector of taxes for the East India Company. Filled as he was with admiration of America’s institutions and a desire to invest in land, Law proved an easy mark for Greenleaf, who spun tales of the brilliant “metropolis” rising at the center of the nation. “There all rays must come to a point,” he said, as Law put down $133,000 for 445 lots that he and his partners had purchased in “the New Jerusalem.” Never having been to Washington himself, Law let Greenleaf choose the lots. Nine months later, when Law signed the final papers, Greenleaf managed to short the sale by about nine acres.
Finding Law turned out to be one of the few good deeds Greenleaf did for the city. Arriving the following February, Law got to work building houses on his land and promoting the future capital to all. In 1796, at age thirty-nine, he compounded his own fortune by marrying Martha Washington’s granddaughter, nineteen-year-old Eliza Custis. He built an elegant house for himself and Eliza on a bluff overlooking the Potomac at Greenleaf’s Point. (It survives today at Sixth and N streets SW.) Nearby he erected a sugar refinery in the unrealized hope that he might import cane from the West Indies. Other buildings followed, including a row of ten houses on New Jersey Avenue and a large one near the Capitol on the same avenue at C Street SE. In time, Law would sour on the speculators. Their legal battles would take over two decades to resolve. Throughout the vicissitudes with Greenleaf and his partners, Thomas Law never faltered in his support of the capital. “You may say,” he wrote to Greenleaf in 1795, “that I had rather sell my horses or books or anything rather than part with a foot at present of Washington City.”
Aside from luring Thomas Law to Washington, the trio of speculators had no success. Word came from Amsterdam, where Greenleaf had sent an agent to arrange the fabled loan, that no gilders would be forthcoming. It was only a matter of time before the elaborate confection of air and promises that they had created would implode. Greenleaf had run out of money and ideas for how to raise it.
The speculators employed every subterfuge to wiggle out of payment for anything. It became standard practice to challenge every bill a contractor sent, with the result that many houses remained unfinished and abandoned. Greenleaf went so far as to refuse to pay for a fine set of houses called Wheat Row that Joseph Clark built for him and his partners at Greenleaf’s Point. They were too small, he claimed; from Baltimore Clark’s wife countered Greenleaf with the stark truth. She and her family were “without money, property, or credit with an helpless husband, whose intellect you have deranged, by your vile treatment.”
In September 1796, Morris arrived from Philadelphia to see the city for himself. Although he filled his letters with optimism about the capital’s promise of grandeur and beauty, he knew better. Workers were still refusing to complete twenty brick houses he wanted to erect on South Capitol Street unless they were paid; the structures remained roofless and abandoned, a haven for vagrants and squatters who roamed the countryside. Gradually, Morris came to realize that Greenleaf had duped both him and Nicholson. They had made payments to him in good faith and with the understanding that he would transfer the money to the commissioners, but he had not done so. “The return of all Mr. Greenleaf’s bills falls heavily upon us,” Morris complained. Greenleaf had encouraged his partners with the promise of sure money from Amsterdam, and when he returned to Philadelphia, creditors were waiting. “The blood hounds want food,” Morris lamented.
Morris and Nicholson resolved to buy out Greenleaf’s shares in the North American Land Company and dissolve their partnership, but this strategy proved near impossible, as they could only pay him with promissory notes backed by the company, which faced insolvency. By this time, Nicholson was moving from house to house in order to evade creditors, lawyers, and sheriffs, leaving Morris alone, and afraid to leave his house or let anyone in. Creditors made so many claims on Nicholson’s notes that the notary decided to save time by having the appropriate legal forms preprinted. “My difficulties have been brought on by an unfortunate connection,” Morris wrote to Amsterdam bankers as he stared at financial ruin. “I was led into speculations too deep and extensive.”
Morris had nowhere to turn. “I wish to God I had the same command of money as formerly,” he wrote to Gustavus Scott, the commissioner who succeeded Thomas Johnson. “I would make the city of Washington flourish.” But from the dunning documents of creditors, Morris could “read Prune Street [Philadelphia’s debtors’ prison] in every line.”
The specter of the Prune Street prison was not a happy one for either debtor or creditor, but all three partners would spend time there. Morris called it his “hotel with the gated door,” and while there entertained relatives, business associates, and friends, including Hamilton and Washington. Nicholson used his imprisonment to edit a newspaper, The Supporter, or, Daily Repast. He wrote voluminously, impressing visitors with his remarkable two-handed dexterity until his death on Christmas Day in 1800. Of the trio, James Greenleaf survived the longest. Released from prison on a technicality, he quietly slipped back into Washington and lived in a house he had built at Greenleaf’s Point. There he took solace in his library of over 2,600 volumes, many in French, Latin, Italian, and Dutch. Death came on September 17, 1843. To his brother-in-law William Cranch fell the task of threading a path through the legal labyrinth of legal suits and countersuits that had been filed against him.
The court cases over the mess that Greenleaf, Morris, and Nicholson left in their wake endured long past their deaths. In 1813, Thomas Swann, the federal district attorney for the District of Columbia, filed a suit against Greenleaf for the recovery of six lots near the Capitol. Countersuits followed, succeeded by an endless series of adjournments, continuances, and still more suits of Dickensian proportions. Along the way Swann retired, but the attorneys who succeeded him faithfully kept the suit going; Greenleaf died, but his two daughters and his granddaughter dutifully continued the fight. By midcentury no one really understood what they were contesting. Finally, in 1853, forty-four years after litigation began, the district attorney summarily sold the six lots for $15,000 and distributed the money among the parties.
In 1814, another case in the Greenleaf imbroglio came to an end. Greenleaf, Morris, and Nicholson had sued Daniel Carroll of Duddington for unlawful seizure of the twenty buildings on South Capitol Street that Morris had not had the money to complete. Two of the plaintiffs were long dead, but Greenleaf lived on like an avenging fury. That July, the circuit court judge for the District of Columbia ruled in his favor, fining Carroll $39,847. The judge was James Greenleaf’s brother-in-law and his former property agent, William Cranch.
Such personal dramas and stories of avarice did not advance the construction of the new federal city. Lots did sell, though slowly, to individual purchasers, but Greenleaf’s virtual monopoly on their sale meant that cash receipts for sales could not push the building forward swiftly. Virginia and Maryland were not always forthcoming with their payments in a timely manner. Reduced to begging, the commissioners sought to cut costs wherever possible. When a new doctor moved to the District in 1794, they contracted with him to attend to sick and injured workers for £25, a savings of £17 (or $1,530 today) over the doctor they had hired the previous year. Such frugality became the norm.
Compounding the fact of insufficient funds was a labor shortage across the United States. When he began in 1791, L’Enfant had wanted to hire 150 laborers, but he had difficulty finding half that number. In 1792, before the finances became desperate, Jefferson suggested to Thomas Johnson and the other commissioners that they look to Germany for workers, but Johnson replied, “People are on tip toe to come . . . we might probably have 2,000 mechanics and laborers here.” They hired Colin Williamson, a Scotsman, as supervisor. Williamson set the foundations for the President’s House that summer and would do the same for the Capitol, but he was chronically shorthanded. Contrary to the commissioners’ expectations, only a few laborers and mechanics came. By June they grudgingly allowed that workers from Europe would “eventually be useful, perhaps almost necessary,” and asked the Dutch to help them secure as many as 100 unmarried German stone masons. That summer they tried to lure workmen from Scotland at 12 shillings a month “to be employed in public work only . . . living as free men,” but had no success. In October they sent Williamson to northern ports seeking redemptioners, indentured servants who had to work off the cost of their passage from Europe. When George Walker, a Scottish merchant from Georgetown, returned to Great Britain for a visit, the commissioners asked him to approach Masonic Lodges for men skilled in the craft. When James Greenleaf went to Holland, they asked him to secure “a number of men who have been bred to cutting and laying free stone,” including some stone carvers. All these attempts proved to be in vain.
Perhaps in anticipation of failure, the commissioners also turned to enslaved laborers. Although L’Enfant had never hired slaves, even to quarry the stone at Aquia Creek, this practice seemed almost an anomaly in a culture that saw slavery as an essential part of its economic foundation. On the last day of April 1792, the commissioners passed a resolution to hire “good labouring negroes by the year, the masters cloathing them well and finding each a blanket.” It was a solution to the labor shortage that came easily to the commissioners, as they themselves were slave owners.
It was a comfortable arrangement for the commissioners and enslavers, at least on the surface. Slave owners could rent out each of their male slaves for about $5 a month (about $70 today). They didn’t have to provide them with food and shelter during that time, and only had to supply blankets, although some expenses, such as shoes that had to be replaced, were deducted from the payments the slave owners received. The commissioners got what they needed, too, a cheap supply of workers to dig the foundations of the President’s House and the Capitol, quarry stone, make bricks, and clear land. And they got something more, as the relatively low fees paid to masters for their slaves kept wages paid to free laborers low. As the commissioners put it to Thomas Jefferson in January 1793, the use of slaves “proved a very useful check & kept our Affairs Cool.”
But using slave labor had considerable drawbacks. The commissioners had to take care of them—feed them, give them shelter, and pay for their doctor when they became sick or injured. The practice became a bookkeeping nightmare because of the necessity of tracking the expenses for each man.
Nor could the commissioners keep affairs as “cool” as they would have liked. Stone cutters from Philadelphia demanded 13 shillings, 6 pence, or about $1.50 a day, for their services. Recoiling at the price, they eventually hired a group of masons to build the basement walls of the Capitol on a piecework basis. However, the work was so shoddy that the walls had to be replaced.
Slaves worked beside freedmen and whites in all the trades—brick making, masonry, and carpentry among them—but they usually had the most menial (and hardest) jobs: quarrying and sawing stone, and felling and sawing trees, were almost exclusively their domain. The great problem the commissioners faced was their lack of experience.
William Thornton, who was by now a commissioner, proposed hiring “intelligent negroes” outright to build the Capitol. He wanted to train them in the necessary skills and let them earn their liberty after five years of labor. His plan was both humanitarian and practical. The slaves would become free, eventually; the commissioners would avoid any interference from the owners, who sometimes took their slaves back to work on their own land; and, most important for Thornton, the Capitol’s designer, “it would insure the completion of the building.”
The other commissioners preferred to rent workers and came to rely more and more upon slave labor. By 1798, about ninety laborers, nearly half the labor force of two hundred men building the Capitol and the President’s House, were slaves.
Outsiders were quick to note the incongruity of slaves building the twin temples of liberty. “I have seen them in large numbers,” wrote Julian Niemcewicz, a Polish poet and statesman touring America at the end of the century, “and I was glad that these poor unfortunates earned eight to ten dollars per week.” But then Niemcewicz learned that the men were not free, that they were hired out by owners who made money on the arrangement. “What humanity! What a country of liberty. If at least they shared the earnings!”
Despite the financial and labor problems, the idea of a capital city and the commerce it would generate began to take hold. The Reverend George Ralph established Christ Episcopal Church on New Jersey Avenue near D Street. He later taught students at the same spot, which was likely the first school in the District. William Prout bought land on the waterfront, built a wharf, and opened a market. In a small frame house at Greenleaf’s Point, Robert Bryson from Georgetown established a clothing store to serve the laborers. Richard Forrest, the postmaster of Georgetown, opened a hardware store nearby to supply the builders. Pierce Purcell, an associate of Hoban’s, came from Charleston to set up a tavern just east of the President’s House. In a slighting reference to Blodget’s hole in the ground, he jocularly called it the “Little Hotel,” and kept it stocked with porter, rum, brandy, and gin for the thirsty laborers. Purcell soon met with competition from William Prentiss, who opened a tavern at Greenleaf’s Point.
Still others were building houses. By regulation the buildings could be no taller than forty feet on streets, but had to be at least thirty-five feet tall on avenues; all had to be parallel to roadways. Rowhouses with common walls, even if they were built individually, became the norm. Some investors bought houses from Greenleaf, Morris, and Nicholson that were already under construction. In 1794–1795, Morris and other investors built a set of Federal-style rowhouses known as the “Seven Buildings,” and in 1795, Isaac Polock from Savannah came forward to purchase and complete the “Six Buildings,” a project that Greenleaf had begun on Pennsylvania Avenue at Nineteenth Street. (Greenleaf also sold the same contract to Morris and Nicholson.) When the government arrived in 1800, the Six Buildings became the offices of the State Department and the Secretary of the Navy.
The commissioners and the president still had to wrestle with the lack of money. With but $6,864.26 in cash at the beginning of 1795, and projected building expenses for the year of $100,960, they were desperate. As L’Enfant had counseled earlier, now the commissioners, too, recommended to George Washington that they secure a loan. The president assented; the Bank of Columbia gave them a line of credit until May. The president got Congress to guarantee a loan of up to $300,000, certainly not enough to finish construction, but a sufficient amount to continue work. After learning that the banks in Holland had refused a loan, the commissioners had to limp along until the last month of the year, when the Maryland legislature voted to loan the city $100,000.
It should be no surprise that the glacial pace of construction yielded little evidence of progress. When Thomas Twining, a young Englishman whose family was connected to the East India Company and the tea business, decided to pay a visit to Thomas Law in May 1796, he had to endure an eleven-hour coach ride from Baltimore to Georgetown. Unable to secure a stage to the city, he traveled “a very imperfect road,” as he later wrote, “made, principally by removing the trees, or rather the upper parts of them.” In time he arrived at Pennsylvania Avenue, where the trees had been cut down in a straight line: “I had no doubt but I was now riding along one of the streets of the metropolitan city.” Continuing half a mile, he came upon a large clearing “in the centre of which I saw two buildings on an extensive scale, and some men at work on one of them.”
John Adams’s accession to the presidency in 1797 brought little change to the pace of construction—or relief from the funding question—but Adams did bring about a significant change nonetheless. By 1798, America was finding it difficult to maintain neutrality between the warring nations of Europe. French warships and privateers had taken to harassing anyone trading with Great Britain; by 1797, they had captured close to four hundred American vessels. In response, Congress established a Department of the Navy, and Adams appointed Benjamin Stoddert to be its first secretary. A staunch Federalist, Stoddert had been one of the original proprietors who had worked closely with George Washington to arrange the purchase of land for the capital. Stoddert decided to establish a navy yard at the capital where his men could build and outfit the frigates he needed to protect American ships. In July 1798, Adams approved an act annexing land on M Street between Fifth and Ninth streets and the Eastern Branch, and Stoddert appointed Thomas Tingey to build and operate the naval yard at the site.
British by birth, Tingey had a reputation for valor that appealed to Stoddert and Adams. While commanding a squadron of boats protecting American commerce in the Caribbean for the US Navy, he captured several important French privateers; significantly, he refused to allow the captain of a British frigate, who was searching for British subjects to impress, to board his ship. In the coming years, Tingey would hire scores of skilled laborers to build ships, making the Washington Navy Yard, after Congress, the largest employer in the city.
The slow progress of construction served to increase the reservations of those in Congress about moving the seat of government. Some wanted to modify the plans. John Adams joined with those who suggested building a small house for the president close by the Capitol and reserving the President’s House for the Supreme Court and other government offices. Others noted that the Residence Act required the federal government to move to the Potomac, but did not obligate it to stay.
Once George Washington retired to Mount Vernon in March 1797, the commissioners requested a substantial amount from the government to keep the construction going on the public buildings. Ultimately, Congress approved an additional loan of $100,000 to complete the Capitol, which had been Washington’s most insistent desire. The commissioners found money to erect a brick building for the US Treasury and to make the President’s House habitable, albeit in a crude fashion.
George Washington so liked Edward Savage’s painting of “The President and His Family, the full size of life,” that he ordered “four stipple engravings” in “handsome, but not costly, gilt frames, with glasses,” and hung one of his purchases over the fireplace mantel in the small dining room at Mount Vernon. As the Washington family—George and Martha, and two of Martha’s orphaned grandchildren, George Washington (“Washy”) and Eleanor (“Nelly”) Custis—took their daily repast, Edward Savage’s tableau of “The President and His Family” looked down upon them.
It is likely that Washington favored the portrait above many others because of its intimacy and its affirmation of the future. The family gathers about a table at Mount Vernon, George seated at the left, opposite his wife, Martha. Washy, the younger of the two grandchildren, stands in the left foreground, while Nelly stands at the right in the middle ground. Washington rests his right hand upon the boy’s shoulder; Washy, in turn, holds a compass in his right hand, which he rests upon a globe, in a stance suggesting that succeeding generations of the family were destined to spread the ideals of liberty and democracy around the world. In the background, framed by large pillars and a swagged curtain, Savage presents a glimpse, as he said in a note, of “a view of thirty miles down the Potomac River.”
On the table at the portrait’s center rests Andrew Ellicott’s map of the new federal seat of government. The family appears to be unrolling the document; Washington holds it flat with his left arm and sword, while Nelly and Martha steady it on the right. With her folded fan, Martha gestures to “the grand avenue,” as Savage called it, that connects the Capitol with the White House.
In the right middle ground stands one of the chief contradictions of the new democracy, a nameless black male servant, part of the retinue of more than three hundred slaves the Washingtons depended upon for their comfort, security, and prosperity. Dressed in the colors of Mount Vernon livery, a gray coat over a salmon red waistcoat, he possesses an almost princely quality. His black, combed-back hair frames his dark face with its prominent nose. His unknowable eye impassively takes in the scene. He keeps his left hand enigmatically concealed in his waistcoat; his collar flamboyantly mirrors Washington’s across from him. The slave must remain a shadow, unobtrusive, unassuming, unremarkable, almost a part of the frame for the Potomac. Only the slave’s destiny seems apart from those gathered about the table examining the plans, yet from the beginning the fates of both slavery and the new city were inextricably intertwined. The nameless man’s story, along with the stories of tens of thousands of others, was very much a part of the plot unfolding on the Potomac in the 1790s. The consequences of involuntary servitude would affect and effect Washington’s development to the present day.
In retirement at Mount Vernon, Washington followed the affairs of the “Federal City,” as he called it in his correspondence, and he invested in its future. In the fall of 1798, he purchased two more lots northeast of the future Capitol, contracting to have two brick houses of his own design built upon them. When he was approached to invest in a hotel to be erected near the Capitol, he bought five shares for $250. He followed the efforts of the District’s commissioners to secure loans from Maryland and Virginia, and he followed the funding issues in Congress. The money would enable the government to erect a brick building for the Treasury, as well as finish the president’s house and the Senate wing of the Capitol.
People still turned to Washington for counsel about the national city rising on the Potomac. By December 1799, however, his patience had grown thin. For nine years he had contended with the myriad questions and disputes that surrounded the nation’s boldest project. He had chosen the site, the designer, the surveyor, and the commissioners. He had coped with a Congress reluctant to spend money for the erection of government buildings, and he had selected, sometimes over Thomas Jefferson’s quiet intrigues, designs for the city, including the President’s House and the Capitol. He had had to contend with labor and material shortages, impractical and unscrupulous speculators, discord among architects and designers, and, unceasingly, the enduring skepticism of Congress, the public, and the press about the entire enterprise. But now a commissioner told him that the attorney general was questioning the legality of yet another loan that Congress had made to complete construction, and he revealed his pique: “By the obstructions continually thrown in its way,” he wrote from Mount Vernon on December 8, “by friends or enemies, this city has had to pass through a fiery trial. Yet, I trust will, ultimately escape the ordeal with eclat.” Then he added, mourning his own high expectations for the city named in his honor, that “instead of chapter, it would have been more appropriate to have said, it has passed or is on its passage through the ordeal of local interest, destructive jealousies, and inveterate prejudices.”
These were the last words George Washington would write about the new city he had done so much to bring into existence. On December 13, 1799, he contracted a chill and sore throat brought about by a hard ride through snow earlier that week. By the time doctors arrived to practice their craft, the general had already ordered an aide to bleed him. The doctors took more blood, and then still more, until at ten o’clock on the evening of December 14, he passed, to borrow Lord Byron’s phrase, into “the all-cloudless glory.”
On Tuesday, June 3, 1800, a group of Georgetown’s chief citizens waited on horseback at the District line on the Frederick Road to receive John Adams to the District of Columbia. It was Adams’s first trip to the capital—indeed, his first below the Mason Dixon Line. His coach and four had charted a course across the verdant land of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, before dipping south to Frederick. He found the country “fertile and beautiful.” But the new seat of government was most on his mind. He hoped, he told the District’s citizens, “that all the reluctance” to move the capital would cease, that “the virtues and talents of the United States may here be displayed forever for the preservation and protection of our country.”
The next day, Adams crossed the rebuilt bridge over Rock Creek at K Street. At the future Washington Circle, his carriage turned right onto Pennsylvania Avenue, toward the President’s House. Along the way he passed Isaac Polock’s Six Buildings, Robert Morris’s Seven Buildings, and the cherry orchard at today’s Lafayette Square. As the President’s House and Treasury Building came into view, Adams saw workers’ outbuildings and a shed for brick making. He had ordered the President’s House to be finished—at least enough for him and his wife, Abigail, to live there—by fall. He saw also that its exterior, a light brown Aquia sandstone, had been whitewashed, which made it stand out in the barren landscape. After inspecting the building with commissioner Thornton, who no doubt had ordered masons and carpenters to be especially busy that afternoon, he wrote to Abigail: “I . . . shall Sleep, or lie awake next Winter in the president’s house.”
Adams spent the night at the Washington Capitol Hotel, which had been opened across from the Capitol by an enterprising Englishman, William Tunnicliff. The next day he visited Thornton’s still unfinished north wing of the Capitol, the only building that would be ready to accept Congress when it arrived in 1800. Still, Adams congratulated Thornton and the other commissioners “on the blessings which Providence has been pleased to bestow” upon the “permanent seat of government.”
Despite the raw landscape, the stark lots without buildings, and the rude paths in the place of streets, Adams remained sanguine. “I like the Seat of Government very well,” he wrote Abigail, who had stayed in Braintree, Massachusetts. “The Establishment of the public officers in this place has given it the air of the Seat of Government and all Things seem to go on well.” Congress had held its final session in Philadelphia in May, and Adams directed that federal business commence by June 15. Over the summer, the government’s furniture and records, along with 131 employees and their families, began to trickle into the city. Most arrived by boat, landing at Lear’s Wharf on the Potomac at the foot of G Street. Ill-tempered northerners loath to leave Philadelphia, a city of 41,000, for Washington, 3,210, called the new seat of government “The Capital of Miserable Huts,” and “The City of Streets without Houses,” but to no avail. The capital of the United States had come to the banks of the Potomac at last.
When Abigail Adams arrived in Washington in mid-November, she found an unfinished city. “There are buildings enough, if they were compact and finished,” she wrote in a letter to her daughter, “but as they are, and scattered as they are, I see no great comfort for them.” Abigail had good reason to complain. She was writing from the unfinished President’s House, which was surrounded by mud, several construction shacks, and a brick kiln. Workmen kept blazes burning night and day in the house’s thirteen fireplaces to help dry the plaster. Still, she muted her complaints. “The house is made habitable,” she continued, “but there is not a single apartment finished.” She took to drying her clothes in the great unfinished audience room.
The scene around the Capitol that November was equally bleak. Congress had invested in a walkway of sharp fragments left from shaping the freestone, which cut everyone’s shoes in dry weather and covered them with white mortar in wet. The south wing that would house the Senate chamber was still under construction (carpenters were trimming the door jambs and fitting the sash windows); work on the domed rotunda that would connect the two wings and bring harmony to the structure had yet to begin.
Elsewhere development was sparse. On Pennsylvania Avenue, west of the President’s House, stood the Six Buildings and the Seven Buildings, offices for the State Department and some members of Congress. William Thornton’s unique house for the prominent and wealthy Virginia planter John Tayloe III was rising at what would become New York Avenue and Eighteenth Street. Near Seventeenth Street and the Potomac River, David Burnes’s rustic cottage still survived. East of the President’s House at Pennsylvania Avenue and Fifteenth Street was the Washington Hotel; nearby at Fifteenth and K streets there was another hotel owned by William Rhodes. Still further east, at Tenth Street, the enormous, unfinished shell of the Union Public Hotel, that monument to Samuel Blodget’s failed lottery scheme, awaited completion. On the land bordered by Pennsylvania Avenue, K Street, and Third and Seventh streets (about present-day Judiciary Square), there were dormitories for indentured Irish laborers and barns for hired slaves.
Around the north wing of the unfinished Capitol, development was denser. George Washington’s rental houses that he had built on speculation stood on what would become North Capitol Street. Otherwise there were few residences for members of Congress or government workers. For the most part, they would live in boardinghouses or hotels. To the east stood Tunnicliff’s Washington Capitol Hotel. On First Street between East Capitol and A streets stood Carroll’s Row, three three-story houses, and Pontius Stelle’s Hotel. To the south of the Capitol was Daniel Carroll’s Duddington. Thomas Law had voluntarily given up his house on New Jersey Avenue at C Street SE for a boardinghouse that served members of Congress. Conrad and McMunn’s, as it was known, boasted stables for twenty horses. Across New Jersey Avenue in another Thomas Law building, Robert Peacock established another boardinghouse, the “Congressional mess.” Representatives lived there two to a room, but in separate beds.
South of the Capitol on New Jersey Avenue stood a few businesses—a shoemaker, a tailor, a washerwoman, a grocery store, and an oyster shop—and some small houses. According to Albert Gallatin, Thomas Jefferson’s secretary of the treasury, the buildings were little more than shanties.
Pennsylvania Avenue, L’Enfant’s projected Grand Avenue between the President’s House and the Capitol, was mostly still a dream. Although the Washington Hotel stood at Fifteenth Street, the avenue was best known for tree stumps that had not yet been grubbed from the soil and alder bushes crowded on the unpaved, ninety-foot-wide track. After a rainstorm, the avenue became a morass—as the congressmen and senators who listened to John Adams deliver his last State of the Union Address on Saturday, November 22, knew all too well. That evening, Adams hosted a “levée,” the name he and his predecessor gave to their formal receptions, at the President’s House. But John Cotton Smith, a newly elected representative from Connecticut, found that Pennsylvania Avenue had become impassable: hackney coaches had to take “a road long and circuitous to avoid the swamp . . . and the mud very deep.”
Water helped to define the city’s limits. To the west was Rock Creek. On Eastern Branch, Thomas Tingey was developing the Navy Yard. The Tiber, that tidal wash that flowed before the President’s House, so L’Enfant and George Washington imagined, would serve the nation’s commerce as a canal. And to the south flowed the great Potomac. From her window in the President’s House, Abigail Adams could look out upon vessels plying the river, many headed for the commercial ports of Alexandria and Georgetown.
Alexandria, five miles from Washington at the southern tip of the District, was the twenty-second largest city in the United States. Because of relatively good roads from the Shenandoah, most of Virginia’s wheat, flour, and tobacco production shipped from its wharves on packet boats bound for Europe, the West Indies, and the American seaboard. Georgetown was already an established port. Although the exhausted Maryland soil yielded just a quarter of the tobacco crop of a decade earlier, corn and wheat now accounted for an increasing amount of the town’s exports. Georgetown’s brick houses and its churches attracted a good number of southern senators and congressmen. They found the amenities of its boardinghouses and taverns outweighed the rutted and muddy three-mile ride they had to make to the Capitol, a trip that regularly took upwards of an hour.
Other government employees lost little time reporting their unfavorable impressions to friends, relatives, or their diaries. On the hot and humid Fourth of July of 1800, Oliver Wolcott Jr., the secretary of the treasury, wrote a disagreeable letter to his wife in Litchfield, Connecticut. New England bred and Yale educated, Wolcott wanted nothing to do with the “perfidious Virginians” and Jeffersonian republicans below the Mason Dixon Line. The Capitol stood in the middle of the “immense country here called the city,” he noted. The soil was “bad . . . an exceedingly stiff, reddish clay, which becomes dust in dry, and mortar in rainy weather.” There was but “one good tavern about forty rods from the Capitol.” Members of Congress would have “to live like scholars in a college, or monks in a monastery, crowded ten or twenty in one house, and utterly secluded from society.” The houses themselves were “small miserable huts” that looked all the more pathetic in comparison with the Capitol and President’s House. Only those in Georgetown, “three miles distant, over as bad a road, in winter, as the clay grounds near Hartford,” offered comfortable lodging.
Of the inhabitants and their living conditions, Wolcott was even more dyspeptic: “The people are poor, and as far as I can judge, they live like fishes, by eating each other.” The properties were “unfenced”; the gardens “in bad order.” There were “brick kilns and temporary huts for laborers.” Although Wolcott conceded that there were exceptions, such as Thomas Law, “most of the inhabitants are low people, whose appearance indicates vice and intemperance, or negroes.”
William Thornton assured everyone who would listen that the population would soon number 160,000, but Wolcott was far from convinced. He could think only of the 109 brick structures and the 263 wooden ones that dotted the 5,000 acres. “No stranger can be here a day and converse with the proprietors, without conceiving himself in the company of crazy people,” he wrote to his wife that July. “Their ignorance of the rest of the world, and their delusions with respect to their own prospects, are without parallel.”
President John Adams took a very different view. Asserting that Washington was indeed the permanent seat of government, he affirmed its future in his final State of the Union Address: “I congratulate the people of the United States on the assembling of Congress at the permanent seat of their Government, and I congratulate you, gentlemen, on the prospect of a residence not to be changed.” The president offered a prayer: “May this territory be the residence of virtue and happiness! In this city may that piety and virtue, that wisdom and magnanimity, that constancy and self-government, which adorned the great character whose name it bears be forever held in veneration! Here and throughout our country may simple manners, pure morals, and true religion flourish forever!” And then Adams reminded the legislators that the Constitution gave them the unique power to control the destiny of the District of Columbia. The time was upon them to decide if they should exercise it: “You will consider it as the capital of a great nation advancing with unexampled rapidity in arts, in commerce, in wealth, and in population, and possessing within itself those energies and resources which, if not thrown away or lamentably misdirected, will secure to it a long course of prosperity and self-government.”
The Constitution gave to Congress alone the power to make the city flourish or fail. Washington’s future was in its hands and would be forever.