"WASHINGTON: THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN CAPITAL"
SWAMP THING
By NEIL GRAVES
Last updated: 2:17 am
July 6, 2008
Posted: 2:00 am
July 6, 2008
Shady land deals, cost overruns, arguments over design - long before Ground Zero, there was Washington, D.C. This Independence Day, it may be comforting to know some things never change.
As this history of the District shows, Washington is an accidental capital - a location the Founding Fathers never even originally considered. Many had wanted the city in a free state, like Pennsylvania or New York, and bandied a variety of locations, including the South Bronx.
But a backroom deal, hatched on Maiden Lane among Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, traded support for Hamilton's plan to make America solvent in exchange for a capital further south.
With 13 states freelancing their finances with mostly Dutch banks and running deeper into debt, Hamilton's plan was to form a centralized federal bank that would guarantee investors their money - a none too popular idea at the time. But enough Southern congressmen went for it in exchange for making the Potomac area the national capital because the value of their own properties would skyrocket.
George Washington - chairman of a Potomac lobbying group while president - was a major player. Being smitten with "Potomac fever," Washington had large land holdings up the river - the gateway to the West, some felt - not to mention prime real estate right across the river in Mount Vernon, Virginia.
So the shores of Maryland - slave property with plenty of slave labor - became home to the future federal government, starting with the "President's House" and the Capitol Building.
"Slaves driven by white overseers cleared the land for the new capital city," writes historian Fergus Bordewich. "More slaves, hundreds of them, rented by the federal government by the month and year . . . erected the walls of the grand new temples to American liberty. Without them, the federal city could not have been built."
The numbers will seem shockingly small to us. About 600 slaves worked on the project, reflecting the sparseness of the embryonic nation whose largest city was the 45,000 citizens of Philadelphia. When the project began in 1791, 591 of the Federal District's 720 people were slaves.
Although George Washington was an abolitionist at heart and eventually freed his own slaves, he said nothing about the slavery at the capital grounds that he could see from his home.
