Capital Stories

Still, it is not much short of miraculous that "Washington the city" as we know it emerged from the beginnings described by Bordewich. Because the country was just about flat broke and because, in any event, the supporters of the Potomac plan did not believe they could extract funds from Congress to build the city, they relied on private real-estate speculators -- chief among them the aforementioned Robert Morris -- to underwrite the project. Con man after con man descended on the Potomac, a few of them welcomed by the rather gullible George Washington, who was determined to force the capital into being and wasn't really all that picky about how he did so.

Money was an unending problem, and so was the work force. "Skilled workers were not interested in coming to the federal city," with good reason: In summer the heat and humidity were oppressive, and decent living quarters were nonexistent. As it developed, "slaves would be the salvation of the federal city. . . . There would be free white, and a few free black, wage earners who contributed their sweat to the creation of the capital. But much of the work that would make the city a reality would be done by men who were hired out to the [city] commissioners and their agents, and who were rewarded with nothing but bread, sardines, and salt pork. The capital would become, at least in part, a slave labor camp." Without these slaves, "the federal city could not have been built." Yet "for two centuries, their presence, and their sacrifice, was largely left out of the story of the capital's creation, as if they had never been there."

It is hardly surprising that Bordewich places such heavy emphasis on the role of the slaves. A freelance journalist and historian, he specializes in the history of American minorities . But what he does here is not revisionism in the name of political correctness; it is setting the historical record straight. The role played by blacks in the early development of this country has been scanted for more than two centuries -- in some instances blithely overlooked, in others deliberately ignored -- and is only recently being placed in proper perspective. Bordewich makes an important contribution to that undertaking.

One African American who contributed to the building of Washington actually has been acknowledged. He was the amateur astronomer Benjamin Banneker, whom Bordewich calls one of "the most remarkable men of his time." He assisted Andrew Ellicott of Maryland in surveying the federal district and, as Bordewich reports, eventually became the subject of "fanciful legends," among them "that he had helped to select and plan the Federal City." His "actual role was more modest," Bordewich says, but "it was rich in symbolic importance" as "a harbinger of the emerging class of men and women who were just beginning to invent the first free black communities."

Banneker is one of many fascinating characters who walk through these pages. They include Samuel Blodget, a young financier who "played Washington, Jefferson, and the commissioners like a pitchman hustling a crowd of hayseeds at a county fair"; Dr. William Thornton, a native of the British Virgin Islands, who "loved the United States with romantic abandon" and eventually worked closely with Washington; James Greenleaf, a charismatic con man who "looked more like a pampered schoolboy than a power broker" but who managed to drive Robert Morris into penury and prison with his manipulations; and Thomas Law, who "had come all the way from faraway India" and possessed what "the other speculators lacked: cash, a great deal of it." Bordewich does justice to all these people, demonstrating that the making of the capital is a story almost too incredible to be believed.

As he says, "The establishment of Washington, D.C., was, at least in part, rooted in fictions: that the Potomac was destined to become the high road to the West, that there was no better location for the seat of government, that land speculators could do for the nation what its elected officials would not, that executive privilege could shield Congress and the public from unpleasant truths, and that -- the biggest illusion of all -- slavery had little or nothing to do with putting the capital on the Potomac in the first place." Yet somehow there emerged from all this a place that became "a massive symbol that would embody the spirit of a nation that barely yet existed." As the year-round parade of tourist buses attests, it remains such a symbol today, despite the "political deceit, self-interest, and scheming ambition" that too often dominate its affairs. What George Washington would think of it now is impossible to say, but the hunch here is that he would like it just fine. ·

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.