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Chapter One: Black America in Search of Itself
In determining to fashion a new capital out of the wilderness, the founders of Washington, D.C., had the opportunity to mold a place entirely to their liking. At an early stage, they thought boldly. They embraced a grand plan for a new city at the heart of the federal district, anticipating that its advantageous location on the Potomac River would generate the commerce and subsequent growth necessary to achieve the expectations of that plan. Success demanded a close partnership between federal and local interests, and that seemed assured from the active role George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other leaders of the new republic played in the capital. Almost from the start, however, those high expectations were compromised.
Despite the best intentions of its founders, Washington less than its rivals benefited from government largess in the early republic. Elsewhere city governments and state legislatures promoted urban growth, aggressively supporting internal improvements to hasten trade and investing in the physical plant of cities. While Congress maintained a relationship to Washington akin to that between other cities and their states, it lacked the same loyalty to its urban constituents. By delaying investments in internal improvements, the federal government dampened Washington's prospects for economic self-sufficiency with the city lacking the anticipated revenues of trade. Congress assured its dependency on federal funding for physical improvement. But lacking the will to pay for services not directly related to its own functioning, the government proved doubly parsimonious. As a result, while the nation clung to hopes that a beautiful and magnificent city would soon emerge, Washington retained the reputation more of an unkept village.
Even as Congress remained reluctant to spend money on the new city, it played an active role in Washington's affairs, not the least in attempting to regulate race relations. In accepting the prevailing laws along with the land ceded to the new federal district by Maryland and Virginia, Congress assured at the capital not only a significant black presence but the practice of slavery Since the capital's location had been tied from the start to slavery by those seeking to protect their interests from government interference, the issue was bound to affect Washington as it more bitterly divided the nation.
City of Failed Intentions
To change a Wilderness into a City, to erect and beautify Buildings etc., to that degree of perfection, necessary to receive the Seat of Government of so extensive an Empire, in the short period of time that remains to effect these objects is an undertaking vast as it is Novel, and reflecting that all this is to be done under the many disadvantages of opposing interests which must long continue to foment Contention among the various Branches of the Union--the only expedient is to conciliate, and interest the Minds of all Ranks of People of the propriety of the Pursuit by engaging the national Fame in its Success, evincing in its progress that utility and Splendor, capable of rendering the Establishment unrivalled in greatness by all those now existing, by holding but forcible inducements to all Ranks of People.
-Pierre Charles L'Enfant to Thomas Jefferson, February 26, 1792
The establishment of a permanent capital for the new nation in 1790 was an event of immense importance forged at a critical point in the early nation-building process, the compromise that located the federal district on the Potomac River after years of contention between the states promised, as George Washington put it, to unify the country by creating a port city capable of exploiting to national advantage the rich agricultural hinterland of the western frontier. As it emerged from the wilderness, this new city could aspire to the status of New York or Philadelphia, or even London and Paris eventually. But even more was anticipated. By casting Washington as a symbol for the nation, the city's designer, the French architect and engineer Pierre Charles L'Enfant, expected it to inspire nation. A pride through the beauty of its buildings and magnificence of its physical plant. Exemplifying national aspirations for grandeur, Washington world prove viable enough economically to serve federal needs for years to come. Beauty would be yoked to enterprise.
In fact, nothing like that happened in Washington's early history, and in this failure lay the central contradiction in the founders, hopes for the new capital. Created as a city to inspire respect through the realization of an aesthetically powerful and inspiring physical presence, Washington instead fell victim to the constraints of its peculiar political culture, a city of magnificent but hopelessly failed intentions.
Washington's symbolic role followed most powerfully from L'Enfant whom George Washington called upon in 1790 to design the new capital. Imbued with America's revolutionary fervor out of his own participation as a military volunteer in the conflict, L'Enfant described to Congress in 1784 his hopes for a capital sufficient "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 supreme sovereignty" Five years later he wrote President Washington of the unprecedented opportunity for America to choose its own site for a capital. Noting that the nation as yet lacked the means it to pursue the design to any great extent," he nonetheless urged that any 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."(1)
L'Enfant's first surveys of the area generally designated for the new capital immediately impressed him with the beauty of the site and convinced him of the importance of building on that advantage. As he wrote Washington's chief agent in the area, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, his intent was to "unite the usfull with the comodious&agreable viewing."(2) To do this, he conceived of making ornamental even such a basic urban function as a canal intended to link shipping activities in the existing town of Georgetown with the superior deepwater port envisioned for the Potomac's Eastern Branch, or Anacostia River. Other uses of water would help beautify and embellish the capital in ways equal to the leading urban centers of Europe. A great avenue would extend from Georgetown to the Anacostia "laid out on a dimension proportioned to the greatness which . . . the Capital of a powerful Empire ought to manifest."(3) Given the excuse to plan a large city at the heart of the federal district, appropriately named after Washington himself,(4) L'Enfant conceived of creating strong relationships between the two central nodes of government. In locating the Capitol a mile and a half distant from the president's house and other public buildings, L'Enfant raised some practical concern about the difficulty of conducting federal business,(5) but such an arrangement, he argued, would by "giving them reciprocity of sight and by making them thus seemingly connected, would promote a rapid settlement over the whole extent."(6) Each element of L'Enfant's plan for Washington, as he wrote Jefferson represented his intent to "delinate on a new and original way the plan the contrivance of which the President has left to me without any restriction soever."(7)
Although some critics have described L'Enfant's vision for Washington as symbolically inappropriate for the new republic and too grand for its undeveloped site,(8) Pamela Scott makes a strong case that the French engineer, far from slavishly replicating forms from abroad, consciously designed a city to represent the new democratic experiment in America. By imposing a carefully orchestrated set of diagonal boulevards on the standard grid, L'Enfant's plan created a complex system of private neighborhoods and public ceremonial spaces. To each of the latter, he assigned a symbolic function. The grand avenues, designated an extraordinary width of 160 feet, would assume the names of the states. These L'Enfant arranged within the city of Washington to represent both geographic location and each state's prominence in the process of nation building. Massachusetts, Virginia, and especially Pennsylvania, with its associations both with the Declaration of Independence and the signing of the Constitution, gained the most prominence. Avenues named after other states with prominent roles in ratifying the Constitution, notably Delaware and New Jersey, intersected with the Capitol. At the same time, in devising means to create squares at the intersection of diagonal avenues with the grid, L'Enfant intended to provide locations for state buildings, thereby giving them the same symbolic importance in the capital city that they held in the federal system.(9)
Scott finds confirmation for her interpretation in an anonymous essay that appeared in 1795, believed to be written by Stephen Hallet, L'Enfant's draftsman in 1791 who later worked on the construction of the Capitol. It argued that the capital's size and central location was, like the city plan, an expression of national union: "To found a City in the center of the United States, for the purpose of making it the depository of the acts of the Union . . . which will one day rule all North-America . . is a grand and comprehensive idea . . . a temple erected to liberty." Seeing the symbolic significance of L'Enfant" calculated street plan in its relationship to the Capitol, it added, "Here he fixed the center of the city, as the city is the center of the American Empire, and he rendered the edifice accessible by more than twenty streets which terminate at this point. Each street is an emblem of the rays of light which, issuing from the Capitol, are directed toward every part of America, to enlighten its inhabitants respecting their true interests."(10)
Initially L'Enfant had no reason to believe his intentions to build a city to serve as a new seat of empire were out of ]me with those of his federal sponsors, not the least George Washington. Active as a young man in promoting the prospects of the tobacco town of Alexandria, Virginia, and the Potomac River more generally, Washington played a quiet but no doubt crucial role in securing the Potomac location for the new capital. As early as 1770 he advocated opening the river to better navigation by clearing its channel of rocks and building a system of bypasses around its major falls, a goal he attempted to put into effect by establishing the Potomac Company in 1784. He described the project as "the channel of commerce" for "the trade of a rising empire," one that could save the nation by forming a link to western rivers capable of "binding these people to us by a chain which can never be broken."(11) Thomas Jefferson shared Washington's enthusiasm, becoming involved in the improvement of rivers in Virginia as a young man and arguing in 1784 for a state tax to that end, saying of the Potomac, "This is the moment . . for seizing it if ever we mean to have it. All the world is becoming commercial,"(12)
George Washington, as much as anyone, was responsible for extending the boundaries of the new city of Washington. While initially it appeared that the city would be concentrated in a much smaller space, he clearly intended to expand the area, both to appease the interests of competing landowners m the area and to provide a site equal to his grand vision for the city. As he wrote L'Enfant April 4, 1791,
It will be of great importance to the public interest to comprehend as much ground (to be ceded by individuals) as there is any tolerable prospect of obtaining Although it may not be immediately wanting, it will nevertheless increase the Revenue; and of course be beneficial hereafter, not only to the public, but to the individual proprietors; in as much, as the plan will be enlarged, and thereby freed from those blotches, which otherwise might result from not comprehending all the lands that appear well adapted to the general design.(13)
Jefferson's early notes reveal every bit as much passion for prescribing the details of urban development, from the size of lots to the height of buildings and their arrangement on the street.(14) Writing L'Enfant in April 1791, Jefferson urged "very liberal reservations" for public buildings "on the back of the town," so as to be "of no injury to the commerce of the place, which will undoubtedly establish itself on the deep waters towards the Eastern branch and mouth of Rock Creek." The same day he indicated to George Washington his intent to circulate in the federal district plates of "about a dozen or two of the handsomest fronts of private buildings" with hopes that "it might decide the taste of the new town."(15) Like L'Enfant, Jefferson maintained an overriding concern with balancing the useful with the ornamental, a concept Julian Boyd asserts he had imbibed from his classical education.(16)
It is true that when Jefferson passed along his relatively modest conception of how the city might look in March 1791, L'Enfant reacted intemperately, calling the proposal "tiresome and insipid , and attacking the gridiron approach so closely associated with urban development in America for annihilating the natural advantages of Washington's site and threatening to injure the success of the undertaking.(17) But such was not the central factor of their disagreement. By all indications, Jefferson himself conceived his sketch as only tile first step in outlining the city. He never objected to L'Enfant's bolder concept, and he must have taken some satisfaction from L'Enfant's decision to incorporate his concept of public gardens along the Potomac River into what finally became the Mall.(18) Indeed, even after L'Enfant had been dismissed without finally completing the map detailing his ideas, Jefferson maintained the chief elements, excising only the sites for state squares.(19) While L'Enfant complained bitterly about alterations in his plan, the most telling of which was the absence of his name from the 1792 version, the scope and the intent of the federal city remained virtually intact.(20) The source of their disagreement lay not in the scale or design of the undertaking but in the decision on how to finance it, and in this lay the source of Washington's fundamental difficulty.
Given the conception he shared with Washington and Jefferson of the new capital as an engine for commercial development as well as a fitting symbol for the nation, L'Enfant concluded that the country ought to be willing to invest in the project. He favored issuing sufficient government bonds to construct public buildings and lay out the necessary infrastructure of roads, walkways, and the like. Once started, he believed, such improvements would attract substantial private investment, and from a grouping of small hamlets, or paper cities, as John Reps calls them, Washington would emerge virtually simultaneously as a thriving metropolis.(21) But while L'Enfant had the luxury of creating urban space that would place each state in symbolic harmony with the others, Jefferson was acutely concerned about divisions between the states and the jealousies that had only recently been aggravated by the long and bitter controversy over the location of the capital.(22) Fearing that burdening the states with the additional costs of Constructing the capital would only make matters worse, he advanced, and President Washington accepted, the alternative approach of raising the necessary revenues from the sale at auction of land the government would purchase from the local proprietors.(23) To do this effectively it was necessary to have an accurate map of the territory, and in efforts to secure one from L'Enfant for the first government sale lay the source of the friction that ultimately led to L'Enfant's dismissal.
By midsummer 1791, President Washington was pressing L'Enfant to have a map prepared in time for the first government sale slated for October 17. L'Enfant retorted that he needed more time to put into place the full details of his design, including the placement of the canal he believed was essential to spur the movement of trade within the new city. By withholding the map on the assumption that sales would not be harmed, when they were, L'Enfant provoked the anger of the president as well as the commissioners who had been designated by the Residence Act to supervise the capital-building process. By taking the additional step of ordering the house torn down of the nephew of one of the commissioner's relatives, Daniel Carroll of Duddington, on the pretext that it blocked the way of a projected street and an important square, L'Enfant severely undercut his position.(24) Yet Washington only mildly rebuked his planner, writing L'Enfant, "Having the beauty,&harmony of your Plan only in view, you pursue it as if every person, and thing was obliged to yield to it; whereas the Commissioners have many circumstances to attend to, some of which, perhaps, may be unknown to you; which evinces, in a strong point of view, the propriety, the necessity&even the safety of your acting by their directions."(25) Instead of reprimanding him for destroying Carroll's home, he asked the commissioners to delegate L'Enfant more authority.
Washington, it appears, was so anxious to avoid giving the enemies of the Potomac location any opportunity to rescind the Residence Act that he chose to protect L'Enfant in hopes of getting his as-yet incomplete plan rather than dismiss him.(26) When out of exasperation Jefferson finally instructed L'Enfant to submit to the commissioners, authority, L'Enfant, who had been used to taking his directions from the president directly, refused. Again ignoring the immediate pressure to sell the land, he defended his plan as the best means of overcoming national divisions by enlisting the "National Fame" in the city's success. For directly thwarting the president's request, Jefferson informed L'Enfant, his services had been terminated.(27)
The task of completing the map of Washington fell to Andrew Ellicott, who had worked with L'Enfant to survey the new territory He too clashed with the commissioners, indicating that L'Enfant was not entirely to blame for his own misfortune. Ellicott's own version of the map, when completed in 1792, was not sufficient to improve sales of lots, however, and the government finally had to resort to loans after all.(28) Once in hand, public funding allowed the capital-building process to begin in earnest, but delays and disappointing results from land sales meant that the capital city was anything but ready when the new government arrived in 1800.
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The first reactions, in fact, to the new capital as the government moved from Philadelphia in 1800 were highly critical. Reviewing the city's unpaved streets, the incomplete buildup of structures along major thoroughfares, and the lack of amenities by then commonplace and considered essential to modern standards of living in the nation's leading cities, Congressman Richard Griswold of Connecticut called Washington "both melancholy and ludicrous . . . a city in ruins."(29) Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott wrote his wife, " I do not perceive how the members of Congress can possibly secure lodging unless they will consent to live like scholars in a college, or monks in a monastery."(30) Brought to Washington to supervise public works, engineer Benjamin Henry Latrobe complained about the effect of delays in building as workers who might otherwise have settled in the city, finding their hopes for employment dashed, were forced to "inhabit the half-finished houses, now tumbling to ruins, which the madness of speculation has erected." He called Washington an "enormous baby of a town."(31)
Washington's shortcomings prompted not just criticism but suggestions that the capital be moved. As early as 1808, Representative James Sloan of New Jersey, citing the inconvenience of location and expense of erecting public buildings, offered a resolution to return the capital to Philadelphia. The resolution failed after provoking debate for a week,(32) but the issue emerged again after British soldiers devastated the capital in 1814. Bankers intervened with sufficient funds to rebuild public buildings and thus to retain the capital in Washington.(33) But as late as 1838, British visitor Harriet Martineau, declaring Washington "a grand mistake," described western efforts to move the capital to a more central location, noting that "the Cincinnati people are already speculating upon which of their hills or tablelands is to be the site of the new Capitol." Impressed as she was with the Capitol itself, she expressed dismay at its surroundings, "so sordid are the enclosures and houses on its very verge."(34) Charles Dickens provided the most devastating epithet for Washington, labeling it a "City of Magnificent Intentions" laid out with "broad avenues that begin in nothing and lead nowhere" and space wanting "only houses, roads and inhabitants."(35)
None of these problems were anticipated immediately in government circles because of the assumption that the close association of federal with local concerns could guarantee proper attention to city needs. Thomas Jefferson's administration quickly revealed the fault in that logic. As he had done in the original planning of the capital, Jefferson maintained a running correspondence with local agents charged with building up the city. In recognition of his interest, the school board, established in 1804, unanimously elected him their president. A number of local statutes designated the president, in title if not in name, as the chief authority in attending to local needs.
Almost from the start, however, Congress compromised Jefferson's capacities to act. To an 1803 letter from the city commissioners stating the belief that in allocating funds for public buildings Congress clearly intended to provide for roads to connect them, Jefferson provided a discouraging reply. Such funds, he reported, related only to maintaining the highway between the Capitol and other public buildings, which he interpreted to mean only Pennsylvania Avenue. This, he said, was "expressly explained to me by a member who moved the insertion of these words, and by others. Sincerely desirous of promoting the interests of the city and of Georgetown . . . I should have been happy to have it in my power to improve their communications with each other&with the country round about them: but no such power has been given to me."(36) When the issue arose again in 1807, Jefferson responded, "We cannot suppose Congress intended to tax the people of the US. at large for all avenues in Washington and roads in Columbia."(37) Given the restraints on his authority, Jefferson was more inclined to apologize to Congress for allowing the commissioners to overspend in their zeal to improve the city than he was to intervene, either to encourage improvements or to prevent private intrusions on the plan of the city.(38)
Such problems were anticipated immediately on the arrival of the first Congress in a series of articles by Augustus Woodward, who had recently moved from Alexandria to Washington. Writing under the pen name "Epaminondas" in the National Intelligencer, Woodward warned against the mixing of great with small concern that would inevitably follow from placing Congress in control of city affairs. Moreover, he pointed to congressional failure to specify what portion of local expenses it would bear. Could it be believed that Congress would lavish its resources upon "this favorite child" without such provisions clarified in law?(39) In what might be imagined as a response to these concerns, Congress granted the city its own charter in 1802, authorizing a may or appointed by the President of the United States and a bicameral city council, both branches to be elected by white male property owners, according to an amendment of 1804. Congress, however, withheld all powers that were not specifically delegated to the new corporation. Only gradually did it expand those powers by responding to local petitions to issue licenses, to provide for the superintendence of public schools, and to compensate the mayor. The Council subsequently enacted its own ordinances to regulate public markets, carriages, and places of amusement; to provide assistance to the poor; and prohibiting swine and geese from running at large in the city.(40)
In 1820 Congress granted the city a new charter, which in addition to establishing the popular election of the mayor every two years, authorized other powers, including the right to establish a board of health; to establish night watches and erect street lamps; to supply the city with water, and to authorize an annual lottery of up to $10,000, a measure pressed by city officials seeking additional funds for public improvements.(41) The charter also committed the federal government for the first time to pay its proportion of the cost of street and sidewalk improvements in front of public squares or reservations, but without specific appropriations beyond the proceeds from the sale of public lots.(42)
The expansion of municipal powers gave city officials more tools to pursue development, but throughout the early part of the century the operation of public affairs remained largely voluntary and consensual, in a manner more consistent with a villagelike community based on shared social values than a modern urban corporation based on law. The first act relating to fire authorized the purchase of three fire engines but failed to provide any appropriation. As a result, the council put the burden of protection on individual householders by requiring them to have on hand their own water buckets, one for each floor of the building. The mayor could spend no more than $50 for the purchase of ladders and fire hooks, which were informally designated for "such citizens as shall be disposed to take care of them and use them." A single fire engine was to be located near the center market, for general use by the community. By an additional act passed in 1804, fire companies were organized in the city's four wards under the supervision of citizen committees appointed by the mayor to serve without pay.(43)
A year later local residents petitioned Congress for funds to purchase engines, hoses, and ladders "for the material protection" of the United States, but Congress responded only by making the Treasury Department's lone fire engine available to the city. In 1811 the city supplemented private subscriptions to purchase an engine for the Columbian Fire Engine Company, and in 1815 it appropriated another $175 for the purchase of additional ladders and fire hooks as well as $25 for engine maintenance. It was not until 1822, however, that the city made any provision to provide the private companies with an adequate water supply by appropriating funds for reservoirs.(44) In 1818 the council authorized construction of reservoirs to be filled with spring later in each quadrant of the city. But officials dropped the plan a year later because the city lacked adequate funding. Once again Washington residents observed the federal government responding to its own interests alone: it located new firehouses next to the Capitol and the White House.(45)
Although a health officer had been authorized and appointed in 1819, it was not until 18 that the council established a board of health as granted under the 1820 charter. In line with the board's voluntary standing, the budget remained at only $15 a year. The council extended regulatory oversight by creating in 1828 the office of surveyor, whose responsibilities to "stake out and mark the lines and proper graduations, according to the plan of the . . . city" also included supervising the gradation of streets and keeping good records. Although provided with a salary of $800 a year, the surveyor could anticipate further remuneration from fees ranging from so cents to $2.00 each for surveying and recording lots.(46) A growing awareness of the environmental hazards to good health encouraged the council to provide the following year for a system of ward commissioners charged, in addition to Supervising local improvements, with removing nuisances from the streets. In 1844 the council laid down further restrictions on nuisances and authorized scavengers to remove wastes. Typical of the premodern city, these scavengers received no salaries, as they were expected to take their compensation in the form of the manure they collected and sold.(47)
Street lighting, which had been provided Congress in the years it was located in Philadelphia through some hundred lamps, did not exist in Washington at all when the federal government arrived in 1800. Although the city council appropriated $100 in 1801 for placing lamps "on the most public avenues and streets," it failed to provide appropriations for their maintenance and supply. Not until 1819 did the council begin to provide annual appropriations for that purpose in response to negative accounts from visitors to the city and to a member of Congress who complained publicly that on his way home one evening he had been forced by the nature of darkness to slip and slide by barrels and piles of bricks strewn along Pennsylvania Avenue. As late as 1830 municipal lights were lit only during the months Congress sat in session in order to save money. A year later the council abandoned street lighting entirely for the rest of the decade.(48)
Street improvements remained just as uneven. In asking whether Congress should create a new authority to supervise public buildings and paved walks, Congressman Henry Clinton Martindale of New York compared Washington's streets clogged with "liquid mud" unfavorably to other cities known to be "kept in a state of decency, and comparative neatness."(49) Congress remained reluctant, however, to provide funding adequate to local needs. In 1834, for instance, in considering a bill to complete improvements on Pennsylvania Avenue, Congressman James Parker of New Jersey warned that a $200 item designed for removing dust and mud from the street surface "might prove an entering wedge to future demands on Congress." According to the report of the debate, Parker
had no idea that Congress should take upon themselves the functions of scavengers to the good City of Washington Wash it he inquired, necessarily to follow, that because they had, at an expense of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, made a Macadamized road, they were to have this duty entailed upon them? If so, it was better they had not directed it to be constructed at all. He thought the people of Washington should do as the people of other cities did, namely: keep their own streets in repair, and keep the dust out of their own eyes.(50)
While other members of Congress came to the city's defense, the National Intelligencer could report a year later that as Pennsylvania Avenue entered Georgetown it terminated "in a half-formed cut, through a precipitous sand-hill, which to the right overtops the road, in all the rugged and unseemly barrenness in which it has been left by the spade of the laborer; and if [a visitor] rides in an omnibus or carriage, the chances are against him but he will get his bones half dislocated, or the vehicle upset, in one or the other of the enormous ruts with which this nonpareil piece of road is disfigured."(51)
The limits placed on the development of Washington's physical facilities were typical of those employed in other major cities. By practice, regulation of streets remained extremely fluid throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Typically, trash littered throughways, which suffered further congestion from animals wandering free.(52) Garbage collection, which remained in the hands of private companies, proceeded unevenly at best. Property holders along affected routes were required to pay the costs of proposed changes before work could begin. It was not until 1852 that New York City acquired authority to issue bonds in advance of such improvements, thus speering the expansion of the city's built-up sector.(53) Before midcentury, cities typically let contracts to private companies to provide essential services like water and gas, with anything but satisfactory results.(54) Washington stood out from other cities, however. State legislators could be every bit as meddlesome in local affairs as congressmen were in Washington, but on requests for public improvements they tended to accede to the requests of local officials.(55) In no way was this more evident than in the desire to advance internal improvements to enhance trade: first roads and turnpikes, then canals, and ultimately railroads. In this regard Washington's peculiar political culture set it apart in such a manner as to compromise its ability to be competitive.
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From the outset, promoters of the new capital pointed out the importance of trade to its development. Otherwise, a commentator in the Hartford Courant--believed to be Noah Webster--said, "neither grants of money, nor acts of Congress, will have the least effect. We may expend ten millions of money mere tiny accommodations for people, but if the place is not naturally designed for business, people will not live there."(56) To be successful an 1804 pamphlet urged, Washington should follow Baltimore's successful rise as a port by diversifying trade rather than relying on a single product as Alexandria and Georgetown had done with tobacco. By building a canal across the city, as L'Enfant had proposed, connecting the Potomac River in Georgetown with the superior port facility on the Eastern Branch, Washington could well expect to divert "most of the flour, corn,&c now carried by wagons to Baltimore" into its own facilities. Trade would bring draymen and boatmen to the city, who would build houses or rent them,
as wood for burning of bricks, stone, lime, coal, flour,&c will be landed there, instead of bringing them from the extremities of the city, . . . as these will require shops and warehouses. . . . As the city, not long ago a wilderness, becomes independent of Alexandria and George-town, it will progress in a compound ratio. No sooner is a canal formed through a town or city, than stores,&c are erected on its banks.(57)
The federal government eventually built a city canal, thereby enhancing the natural trade advantages promised by the river site. True to his earlier beliefs, Jefferson continued to promote Washington's commercial potential, not the least through the support of canals. Writing from Paris, where he had made a fortune as a shipping agent and broker by slipping American cargo into the country, Joel Barlow said of Jefferson on the occassion of his inaugural that one of his foremost objectives was to "improve the domestic state of the nation by his system of small canals, which shall take the place generally of roads, and cut . . . the expense of interior transit."(58) In his annual message for 1806, Jefferson proposed to sustain duties on foreign luxuries 50 that the proceeds could be applied to "the great purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals. . . . By these operations new channels of communication will he opened between the States; the lines of separation will disappear, their interests will be identified, and their union cemented by new and indissoluble ties."(59) Treasury Secretary "Albert Gallatin's 1808 plan authorizing the federal government to invest in a vast network of turnpikes and canals, intended to bind the nation together through better trade and communication, represented the culmination of arguments that federal leadership on a nonpartisan basis offered the best hope for national prosperity.(60)
Sectional rivalries, however, quickly undercut any hope that westward expansion would extend outward from Washington. The states, in addition to objecting to concentrating so much power under central authority, quickly perceived their own advantages through patronage and investment in public works. Congress rejected efforts by New Yorkers to secure national funding for a system of internal improvements that failed to include the Potomac region, but the state soon showed what it could do by itself. Completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, with such returns as to repay its debt five years into operation,(61) immediately demonstrated the benefit of state public works. Although a young John C. Calhoun in 1817 and President John Quincy Adams in 1824 attempted to revive Gallatin's concept of nationally directed investments in trade networks, the states were not interested. Instead, they looked to their own legislatures to make the public subscriptions in stock that could make their cities competitive with New York.(62)
The phenomenal success of the Erie Canal finally prompted Congress to investigate supporting a similar public investment for the District of Columbia. Engineers who had worked on the Erie Canal reported that the project would be extremely expensive, however, thus dampening initial enthusiasm for the project. A concerted effort in 1825 finally overcame resistance. Under John Quincy Adams's prodding, Congress revived George Washington's dream of a canal as a national project, one that would extend all the way to the Ohio River.(63) Congress backed the effort by subscribing $1 million to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company--the largest federal commitment to such a mixed enterprise project to date. In addition, it assured foreign investors that as supervisor of the District, it backed the C&O's credit. Formally organized in June 1828 with the help of an additional subscription of $500,000 from Maryland, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company broke ground July 4 the same year.(64)
The cities of Washington, Alexandria, and Georgetown eagerly embraced the canal, placing great hope in its prospects for boosting the local economy thereby providing the funds necessary to complete the task of building Up the area. In seeking authority for Washington to subscribe to $1 million and Georgetown and Alexandria $250,000 in shares of canal stock, the cities expressed confidence that "as the canal is extended, the revenue arising from its use will be augmented, and every augmentation of that revenue will proportionally reduce the necessity of taxation, to supply the interest on the several corporation loans; as will the gradual increase of the population and wealth of the Corporations, diminish the proportion of the assessed tax to the number of people, and the amount of property upon which it is charged."(65) In his 429 report to the city council, Washington mayor Joseph Gales noted, "to the success of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal I look with hope and confidence for the establishment of a commerce, and the influx of a population, which will indemnify this city for all its expenditures and reward the courageous enterprise with which it embarked its funds and its credit upon this great adventure."(66)
Despite considerable debate in ward meetings held throughout the city over the propriety of adding to its debt, the Washington city council purchased the City Canal from Congress, authorizing an additional $50,000 expenditure to insure that barges could move though the city from the canal terminus in Georgetown to deep water on the Eastern Branch. Alexandria, in turn, fearing that its isolation would result in lost bide, committed funds to connect its port with the C&C by building its own canal along the Potomac's southern bank, crossing the river at Georgetown on an aqueduct bridge.(67)
The timing of the C&O venture was inauspicious, however, not just because the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad broke ground for the nation first major rail line the same day, but also because Congress, under the influence of small-government Jacksonian Democrats, quickly determined to end the practice of subscribing to stock in private internal improvement companies. When in 1830 the canal company sought further help from Congress because its funds were depleted by delays and underestimates of expenses, legislators put off acting on the request, saying it was best to determine first the relative merits of railroads and canals.
Typically, District newspapers invested deep faith in the canal. If we were inclined to prophecy," the Alexandria Gazette declared in 1830, "we should much rather hazard our skill on the probability that the rail-road will benefit by the canal, than the canal by the railroad."(68) Likewise, the National Intelligencer, in defending the canal from a pro-railroad editorial in a Baltimore paper, claimed that "the world is wide enough for both of us; and why should he be jostled in our quiet and unobtrusive course to the West, in search of its inexhaustible mineral, animal, and vegetable productions by the exchange of which in commerce Baltimore herself will be enriched?"(69) The world, however, was hardly wide enough for both, as Baltimore fought to establish its dominance over western trade. The two companies reached a literal impasse at the entrance to the Potomac Valley at Point-of-Rocks, forty-eight miles above Georgetown and east of Harpers Ferry, when each secured an injunction against further work until the legal right-of-way through the gorge had been established.(70) In the ensuing political as well as legal contest, the railroad pressed every advantage, in Congress as well as in the Maryland assembly Early in 1833 Washington's leading citizens, protesting the railroad's efforts to block congressional funding for the canal, complained about "the gratuitous interposition of the railroad company to dry up the fountains of your liberality" and argued that "the destruction of the canal project would involve our city and our citizens in one common and irretrievable ruin."(71)
Although the canal finally won the legal battle in December 1831, delays in construction were costly, not just to the canal company but to the ambitious cities of the District as well. When the anticipated profits of trade failed to materialize and the cities found themselves unable to meet their obligation to pay the interest on a canal loan secured from Holland by Secretary of the Treasury Richard Rush, they turned to Congress for help in 1833 and 1831. The request for funds launched a particularly heated debate in Congress, with the first round directed at funding the Alexandria canal extension to Washington. Although part of the debate dealt with the purely logistical question of the propriety of building a canal alongside a river, it assumed larger dimensions as members of the House of Representatives quarreled over how much Congress had already done to assist the District of Columbia. While John J. Allen of Virginia charged that Congress had not so much as returned in funds the money that was received on the original cession of land from Virginia to the District, James Harlan of Kentucky, in charting loans as well as grants to the District, claimed, "There is not a convenient footway, or a piece of ground highly beautified and ornamented, which has not been done out of the public treasury."(72)
Washington's hopes received a major boost in February when New Jersey senator Samuel Southard reported that the Committee on the District of Columbia had approved a bill for relief. Pointing to debts exceeding $1.8 million, Southard described as "abhorrent" the prospect that Washington, having exhausted its revenues, might be forced to surrender its charter "and thus be left upon the hands of Congress to dispose of, govern, and sustain as may best suit their own views of what is proper for the capital of the Union." While concentrating to some degree on the immediate problem of the debt owed Holland, Southard accepted the broader argument of the Washington memorialists that in this instance as in others Congress had imposed its will on the city for national purposes, and now it was Obliged to back that commitment financially. In particular, Southard accepted the argument that the federal government had failed to pay its fair share of improving city streets. Noting that the plan of the city w as formed by public authorities, he declared, "It is a plan calculated for the magnificent capital of a great nation; but oppressive from its very dimensions and arrangements, to the inhabitants, if its execution to any considerable extent is to be thrown upon them."(73) Having paid itself only some $36,000 for land within the city, the government had acquired property worth more than $2.5 million, a sum which, had it been taxed, would have equaled twice Washington's indebtedness. "The committee are of opinion," Southard reported, "that the Government was bound by every principle of equal right and justice to pay a proportion of the expense incurred upon this subject."(74)
Such an argument was not entirely new. As early as 1826, in a petition seeking territorial government for the District, a committee of thirteen headed by Virginia's Richard Bland Lee argued that government property, if taxed, would yield $30,000 annually, enough to pay the cost of the local government.(75) In 1828, in debate over funding improvements to Pennsylvania Avenue, Senator John Eaton of Tennessee pointed to the discrepancy between the funds generated by the sale of government lots and the funds spent to improve the District. Asking whether it was fair or proper "for the citizens to be subjected to the expenses of improving and enlarging the town, making and keeping in repair the streets and avenues, whilst the government . . . shall . . . contribute nothing to that end," he urged that unappropriated lots and grounds be set apart as a fund for improving the streets and avenues and for establishing common schools.(76) There was a new implication in the Southard report--that since federal government property equaled in value that of the rest of Washington, Congress should pay at least half the expenses of improving the city. So encouraged were some members of the city council by the report that in July they considered an act that would have assessed and taxed for public improvements government property within the District at the same rate as property owned by individuals.(77)
The city council tabled the tax bill in deference to arguments that Congress might react negatively at a time when it w as considering petitions for assistance. When Congress considered relief again in the spring of 1836, it narrowed the question of government responsibility to its liability for the canal loan alone. Arguing for complete assumption of the debt, a Senate report asked rhetorically why Congress would permit "a weight to rest upon the District, which can only produce the effect of cramping all its energies and retarding most seriously its growth in wealth and population. . . . That the fortunes of the towns must advance in all ways, when the canal is made, may without hazard, be asserted."(78) The bill faced opposition in the House of Representatives, especially from Jacksonians who questioned the propriety of pouring money into the federal city. The House, by a close vote, rejected a potentially crippling amendment, but it also rejected, without a count, a proposal to set aside for the city's benefit all remaining unsold government lots. Congress finally assumed the full canal debt of $1.5 million in May 1836.(79)
Although reassured by Congress's decision, corporate authorities in the three District cities still struggled with developing an adequate economic base to underwrite urban development. Maryland further enhanced the prospects for the canal company with loans for $ 2 million in November 1835 and $3 million in 1836, but under the terms of the second bill the corporations of the District were required to surrender their stock to Maryland. Washington officials reacted angrily, declaring that Maryland, under the influence of the Baltimore and Ohio, was responsible for delays in the canal's construction:
Year after year, while this corporation was exhausting its means and oppressing its citizens to carry on this canal, Maryland was taxing the ingenuity of her ablest men to defeat the canal; surveying routes for a cross-cut; strengthening the railroad, the great rival of the canal company; demanding the right to cut a canal through this city; and, in every way, seeking to secure to herself every advantage from the investment of this corporation; and never relaxing these efforts until she was well assured that this was the only practicable means of bringing into use the great wealth of her mountains.(80)
Editorials in the intelligencer urged the city representative in the canal company to tight the surrender, but the city finally turned over its stock. When the federal government again refused additional aid, the company had to turn to Maryland again, securing by a single vote in the legislature an act giving the state control of the company, thereby authorizing it to issue its own mortgage bonds. With guarantees of $300,000 from Virginia, $25,000 from Georgetown, and $50,000 from Washington for new construction, the canal finally reached Cumberland in 1850. The canal terminated 160 miles short of the original Ohio Valley goal, however,(81) and in the meantime, the city suffered the irony of welcoming, in 1835, the only rail connection it could secure, a branch line of the Baltimore and Ohio.(82)
Lack of support from Congress prompted calls for withdrawal from the District from the two cities that predated its establishment. Boosters of both Georgetown and Alexandria complained about the lack of support from and sometimes active interference by the federal government in their efforts to build trade. Although the drive for retrocession in Georgetown did not lead to anything more than a sympathetic government report,(83) it continued to gain momentum in Alexandria and in Congress, where the chief Supporter of the bill, Virginia representative Robert Hunter, made a number of legal as well as political arguments but focused the heart of his case on Alexandria's commercial interests. With imports declining precipitously, population stationary since 1820, and a preferred channel in the Potomac blocked by a bridge thrown up by the government, Alexandria had grounds for complaint against Congress. The city's prospects, Hunter asserted, would have been different had it remained in Virginia: "She would have been the flourishing depot of the commerce of the western portion of that State--the keystone in a great arch of commercial interests which would bind eastern and western Virginia together-a common bond, perhaps the golden link, which, to a great extent, would have united the interests and healed the divisions of the two sections of that State."(84)
A consistent supporter of retrocession, the Alexandria Gazette argued that completion of the canal was a matter of importance to the whole state. It promised to make Alexandria one of the most important ports in the country where "manufacturing would at once spring up and flourish the coal trade would induce extensive and lucrative business relations with the great northern emporiums."(85) The Virginia Assembly not only accepted Alexandria back into the state but also promptly relieved the city with a large subscription in Alexandria Canal Company stock and a subsequent guarantee of some of the company's bonds.(86) Thus offered what both Georgetown and Washington had variously sought without success, not just self-government, but the active support of a state legislature for internal improvements, Alexandrians voted overwhelmingly in favor of retrocession, setting off a wild celebration in the town.(87)
* * *
Despite its sometimes troubled relations with Alexandria, the Washington city council passed a resolution opposing retrocession, charging that it would prove to be the first step in an effort to move the District elsewhere, "whereby total ruin and destruction would be brought upon the industrious and patriotic citizens of Washington."(88) The statement represented one more sign of government by reaction, but the effect of Alexandria's retrocession was more positive. Spurred by the dire consequences that could follow from the dissolution of the District of Columbia, the council assumed for itself a more active role on issues of urban development. Early in 1848 a member of the common council introduced a resolution calling for the development of general guidelines for improvements. A year later the same body passed a resolution calling on the ward commissioners to list proposed improvements according to priority, along with their costs, in advance of filing requests for payment.(89)
Also in 1848, the council reorganized the board of health. Although members remained virtual volunteers, being restricted to payment of 51 per meeting up to $12 a year, they were given additional powers to determine nuisances and have them removed. The secretary's salary was set at $25 a year and increased three years later to $100. In 1850 the council reorganized the system of ward commissioners, dividing the city into two districts each under a single salaried commissioner who assumed the responsibilities once given to scavengers. In 1852 the board attempted to solve the problem of streets used as dumping grounds for slops and garbage by encouraging residents to use tubs designated for refuse at certain locations. That measure failing, the board turned to contractors to remove the wastes. In 1856 it took an additional step to standardize its operations by appointing a health officer at a salary of $1,500.(90) The council provided detailed requirements for the removal of wastes in 1850, adding laws to prohibit burial grounds within city limits in 1852 and restrictions on lumber yards and slaughterhouses in 1858.(91) And in 1848, some thirty years after the precedent set by Baltimore, Congress authorized the establishment of the Washington Gas Works to light the city. By the eve of the Civil War Washington had eight hundred public gas lamps, many of them erected and maintained by the federal government.(92)
Constance Green describes, Washington in the antebellum period as "a community caught unprepared for expansion, a village formerly controlled by two or three hundred knowledgeable property-owners which found itself sudden]y converted into a burgeoning city run by inexperienced men who did not know what they wanted or how to get it."(93) But Green's own figures on expenditures suggest that by 1850 city officials were exercising greater control over Washington's fate. The proportion of city funds spent for public works rose sharply from a level of under 18 percent in 1848-49 to a level of 33 percent or greater throughout the 18,05. These included significant increases for street grading and lighting from 12.3 percent to 24.4 percent between 1848-49 and 1853-54. Expenditures for health also rose, from only 0.6 percent in 1848-49 to 3.7 percent in 1853-54.(94)
Even the federal government made a few significant steps toward upgrading the physical city. In response to a delegation of influential Washingtonians, including Mayor Walter Lenox, financier William W. Corcoran and Joseph Henry, secretary of the new Smithsonian Institution, President Millard Fillmore promised to improve Washington's central park, the Mall. Although conceived by Jefferson and L'Enfant as a "grand avenue" central to beautifying the capital city, this 150-acre area had been largely neglected to the point where it was described as a "bleak inhospitable common." Although acts of 1812 and 1820 vested powers in the president and city council to improve public lots in the city, under the sale of the City Canal to Washington in 1832, parts of the Mall were subject to development as building lots.(95) Undoubtedly aware of this possibility as well as the threat posed by wastes collecting in the Potomac a short distance from the White House (believed responsible for the sudden death from typhoid fever of his predecessor Zachary Taylor), Fillmore directed the Commissioner of buildings to invite the nation's leading horticulturist and landscape expert, Andrew Jackson Downing, to prepare a plan to landscape the Mall. Seizing the opportunity to demonstrate the utility of parks in the heart of cities, Downing accepted the commission, proposing to translate L'Enfant's original intent into a series of six linked gardens.
In order to provide the "healthful interval" and "relief" from Washington's built-up areas, Downing designed, in the words of Therese O'Malley, "an irregular landscape of hilly terrain, varied gardens, and changing vistas," which was intended to contrast with Washington's symmetrical classical federal buildings and straight broad avenues. This romantic treatment, he Suggested, was intended to exert an "enchanting influence, by which the too great bustle and excitement of our commercial cities will be happily counterbalanced by the more elegant and quiet enjoyments of country life."(96) In describing his hopes to make the Mall the first "real park in the United States," Downing expected to establish a national model as a "Public School of Instruction in everything that relates to the tasteful arrangement of parks and grounds."(97) Harper's magazine prematurely seized upon Downing's proposition as promising "the transformation of the marshy and desolate waste into a National Park." In fact, the same correspondent had to report seven years later that since Downing's untimely death in an 1852 steamboat accident, little had been done to execute his plan.(98)
More immediately successful was the effort, again pressed on Congress by local residents, to improve the city's water supply For years they had to secure their own water from wells and springs. An ordinance of 1812 authorized the mayor to sink wells upon the petition of two-thirds of the residents of any ward, but as was the usual custom, the costs were to b borne by those benefited by the improvement.(99) In 1830 architect Robert Mills, who spent much of the decade designing monumental buildings to adorn the new capital, presented to Congress a full report on Washington's need to secure a better water system, to deal with fires as well as to provide adequate supplies for cleaning and drinking.(100) The following year Congress authorized construction of pipes to bring water from a spring two miles north of the Capitol to supply public buildings, a boon to local residents only in that some of them proceeded to tap the pipes.(101) Congress remained reluctant to make any major appropriation, however, prompting Mayor Seaton in 1849 to complain that Washington had fallen well behind other cities. Mills backed his complaint in communications appearing in the Intelligencer the same year,(102) A number of Washington citizens petitioned Congress for action a year later.
It took a fire in the Library of Congress in 1851, which threatened to burn the highly combustible Capitol dome above it, to move Congress to appropriate $5,000 to plan for an adequate water supply Placing the work under the direction of a young and self-assured army engineer, Montgomery C. Meigs, Congress authorized a new system originating at Great Falls, some fourteen miles above the city Inaugurated in 1853 and completed only over a nine-year period, the system of pipes over rough terrain represented a major breakthrough as the largest federal expenditure--more than $2.5 million--on the capital city to date.(103) The new system required the city to begin addressing a vital element in city planning, the challenges of distributing fresh water and channeling off waste water, both sewage and drainage. Washington still lagged behind other cities, but with federal intervention the city assumed the basis of a modern system, a fact underscored in city expenditures for laying water mains, which soared from a figure consistently below 4 percent of total municipal expenses in 1848 49 to 29.2 percent a decade later.(104) In 1859 the city council established the new office of water registrar at a salary of $1,200 "to exercise a constant supervision over the use of waste." Five years later Washington added a water board with responsibilities to set regulations for laying water mains and service pipes and installing fireplugs and hydrants.(105)
By the time the Civil War had convulsed the capital with the overwhelming demands on its physical plant, Washington had achieved the framework for modernization. The lack of adequate paving for its broad streets, the use of the Washington Canal as an open sewer for much of the city's refuse, and the incomplete design of the Mall served to remind observers, however, that the grand vision for a beautiful and magnificent city conceived by its founders remained tantalizingly unrealized. Viewed in terms of population alone, Washington had failed to keep pace with its rivals for commercial hegemony. Compromised in their own aspirations for empire, Alexandria and Georgetown failed to grow at all during the antebellum period. Although Washington's population increased, it could best be compared to an as yet relatively isolated entrepot like Pittsburgh, whose late start did not prevent it from surpassing Washington in rate of growth at midcentury. As Washington's nearest rival, Baltimore ascended to the dominant position in the region, the product as much as anything of its success with the B&O Railroad and its advantage over the C&O Canal.(106)
Members of Congress could argue with some effect that they had been generous in their grants to the fledgling District cities. Compared, however, to the investments by New York in the Erie Canal, Pennsylvania in its system of state, or Maryland in the B&O, Congress had failed to support the District's young cities, except under a state of emergency, with the Dutch ready to put the capital city on the auction block. The vision that underlay George Washington's hopes for the District of Columbia and L'Enfant's grand plan for a booming city core boosted by trade and not government alone thus remained largely unrealized at midcentury. At particular fault was Washington's unique political culture. While the close relationship between capital and city clearly offered some possible advantages, in practice it retarded growth and stifled development.