The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  Early in March, the Engineer set out in driving rain to climb to the top of Jenkins Hill, soon to be better known as Capitol Hill. “After coming up on the hill from the Eastern Branch ferry,” he reported to Jefferson, “the country is level and, on a space of about two miles each way, present [sic] a most elligible position for the first settlement of a grand City.” The panorama of flat woodland in front of him was bordered on one side by the Potomac River and extended to the northwest as far as Rock Creek, a stream dividing it off from the bustling streets of Georgetown. Behind him, the southeastern limit was provided by another, wider river known to settlers as the Eastern Branch, but by Native Americans as the Anakostia. L’Enfant is usually given the credit for envisioning the whole grand sweep of the city from the banks of the Eastern Branch to those of Rock Creek. Nevertheless, his initial sketch comprised a capital half that size stretching, as he had been instructed, no farther than Tyber Creek, today’s Tidal Basin. The grandiose plan originated with the president himself.

  Pierre L’Enfant

  Washington’s strategy—and he conducted the creation of the capital like a military campaign—was dictated by the need to purchase at a reasonable price whatever land was needed for the city from the existing owners. He appeared to have in mind two possible sites. “The competition for the location of the town now rests between the mouth of the Eastern Branch, and the lands on the river below and adjacent to Georgetown,” he wrote in February 1791. “In favour of the former, Nature has furnished powerful advantages [principally a deepwater harbor]. In favour of the latter is its vicinity to Georgetown.” Most of the land around the Eastern Branch belonged to Daniel Carroll of Duddington and his cousin Notley Young. Because they had patented some of the land for a settlement to be called Carrollsburg, Washington used to refer to them as “the Carrollsburg proprietors,” and his strategy depended on playing them off against the Georgetown proprietors, so that each group feared that the capital might be located on the other’s land.

  The order for L’Enfant to begin work at the Eastern Branch was motivated by the reluctance of some Georgetown proprietors to sell at a reasonable price. On March 2, Washington assured his associates that it was only a feint, so that “on seeing this operation begun at the Eastern branch, the proprietors nearer Georgetown who have hitherto refused to accommodate, will let themselves down to reasonable terms.”

  The same tactics were then applied to the Carrollsburg owners, this time using an outline plan by Jefferson showing streets and buildings on a site nearer to Georgetown. Either site would have produced a capital measuring around fifteen hundred acres, a size that Jefferson advised the president would be “sufficient.” But on March 28, when the president appeared in person to negotiate with the holdouts among the proprietors, it became clear that he wanted not one or the other but both, the mouth of the Eastern Branch and the lands adjacent to Georgetown, together with territory running inland from the Potomac for more than a mile, an area covering more than six thousand acres.

  In a hard-nosed piece of real estate negotiation, he let both groups of proprietors understand that any delay in their agreement to the entire deal might “degear the measure altogether.” The threat was effective, and on March 31 Washington observed in his journal, “[They] saw the propriety of my observation … and mutually agreed to surrender for public purposes one half of the land they severally possessed … This business being thus happily finished and some direction given to the Commissioners, the Surveyor and Engineer with respect to the mode of laying out the district—I left Georgetown, dined in Alexandria and reached Mount Vernon in the evening.”

  The three commissioners had the task of ensuring that the capital was ready for occupation by the year 1800 and were to play as crucial a role as the Surveyor and the Engineer. Each was Washington’s handpicked choice. His personal representative, Dr. David Stuart from Alexandria, Virginia, was an old friend, quiet, well-read, and married to the widow of Washington’s stepson. The legal expertise came from Thomas Johnson, a former governor of Maryland and owner of fifteen thousand acres in nearby Anne Arundell County, who had recently been appointed an associate justice of the Supreme Court and was often absent as a result. The real power lay with Daniel Carroll of Rock Creek, a congressman and a member of Maryland’s wealthiest and most influential family. He was closely related to both Charles Carroll, generally acknowledged to be the richest man in the United States, and the Carrollsburg proprietors.

  This family connection was seen as no more of an obstacle to Carroll’s appointment than Washington’s own financial interests. “If the commissioners live near the place, they may in some instance be influenced by self interest and partialities,” Jefferson acknowledged, “but they will push the work with zeal; if they are from distant and northwardly, they will be more impartial, but may affect delays.”

  The success of the deal Washington had forced through depended entirely on the boom in land speculation. The proprietors agreed to sell land designated for public buildings and parks to the United States for about $67 an acre; land designated for streets, however, was to be given to the government, while land designated for houses would be split half and half between the government and the owners. The price for public building land yielded the proprietors a fair profit, but the real gain would come from the increase in the value of the house lots as more people flocked to live in the new capital. On its side, the government got the five hundred acres needed for public buildings for about $35,000 and stood to make such large profits on the sale of house lots that the entire operation might be self-financing.

  In May, a pamphlet written by an Eastern Branch proprietor, George Walker, was published in London announcing that “the City of Washington [is] now building for the Metropolis of America.” Reminding his readers of the “immense fortunes” already made in U.S. real estate, the author predicted this to be “the next field for speculation in America.” Apparently no one considered what might happen if the boom came to an end.

  Although he had approved L’Enfant’s preliminary sketch, the president now wrote telling him to expand his ideas. “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,” he advised his engineer on April 4. “Although it may not be immediately wanting, it will nevertheless encrease the Revenue.” In other words, he wanted as large a city as L’Enfant could imagine, and to L’Enfant’s enduring fame, he imagined on a behemoth scale.

  He pushed the “President’s Palace,” as he termed the White House, farther toward Georgetown until it was a full mile northwest of “the Congress-house”; he created a broad mall running due west to the Potomac from the Capitol; he scattered fifteen great squares across the site to represent the fifteen states that by then made up the Union; he drew vast avenues radiating from the squares like the spokes of a wheel; and since all this was free land, he specified that each avenue should be double the usual breadth of a main street.

  The nearest comparison to this gigantism was the new capital of St. Petersburg that another French architect, Jean-Baptiste Le Blond, had laid out across the swampy delta of the Neva River in 1717 for the Russian czar Peter the Great. But his plans were confined to the land on either bank of the river closest to the island fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. Not even Czar Peter, an autocrat capable of conscripting a workforce of up to three hundred thousand people, thought of commissioning a design on the scale of that dreamed up by L’Enfant for his democratic patron.

  Up to that time, the largest planned city in America was Philadelphia, a plain grid of streets that Thomas Holme had laid out on an arrowhead of land between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. Not only was L’Enfant’s city approximately three times the size of Holme’s, his inspiration was the infinitely more complex design devised by André Le Nôtre in 1663 for the gardens of Versailles, a series of focal points from which radiated paths and vistas connecting the farthest parts of the garden w
ith one another. To complicate matters further, Washington’s intricate deal made it of paramount importance to establish accurate plans showing not only streets, avenues, and house lots, but who already owned the land, and where the existing boundaries ran in this enormous construction site.

  Even if L’Enfant had been the properly trained engineer Washington supposed him to be, he would have faced difficulties in realizing such an immense concept. But with no scientific training, no technical background, and no experience in drawing up accurate, scale maps, he was lost. His only surviving plan of the city, a sketch delivered to the president in August, consisted simply of ruled lines without compass points, descriptions, or any indication of scale. It is hardly surprising that to translate vision into reality, he should have depended utterly on Andrew Ellicott. What is astonishing, given the American’s passion for order and the Frenchman’s voluble flamboyance, was the warmth of their partnership. Like many others, Ellicott was charmed by L’Enfant’s enthusiasm and imagination, and a warm working friendship quickly developed.

  The first essential step was to make up for L’Enfant’s lack of expertise. Ellicott had already assembled a team of axmen and four trained surveyors, and he promptly loaned the services of one of them, a professional engineer named Isaac Roberdeau, to help with the survey and act as L’Enfant’s lieutenant. During the summer, Ellicott also took time from running the boundary of the federal district to measure the exact longitude and latitude of Jenkins Hill, where L’Enfant proposed to build the Congress-house, or Capitol. And in August, when L’Enfant raced back to Philadelphia to show the president his plan, Sally received a letter from her husband telling her, “I expect my companion Major L’Enfant which is prounounced in English Longfong will pay you a visit in my name some time next week. He is a most worthy French Gentleman and though not one of the most handsome of men, he is from good Breeding and native politeness a first rate favourite among the ladies.”

  Washington had ordered the first housing lots to be ready for sale in October 1791, a deadline that forced both men into a hectic schedule. Shortly after beginning work, Ellicott fell sick with flu, but Isaac Briggs, another of his assistants, reported that not even illness interfered with his early-morning start from Georgetown at the beginning of the week: “He used actually to arrive at our camp on the lines, at no less distance than seven miles from that town, on Monday morning before it was light enough to see distinctly without a candle. It was also his usual custom [during the week] to breakfast by candlelight in the morning; the labors of the day commenced before sunrise.”

  The rushed timetable took its toll, especially in the woods where a track twenty feet wide had to be cleared along the territory’s borders. “I have had a number of men killed this summer,” Ellicott reported mournfully, “one of whom was a worthy ingenious and truly valuable character. He has left a wife and three small children to lament his untimely fate.” After four months, the fifty-nine-year-old Benjamin Banneker found the pressure too much, and in May when Ellicott’s youngest brother, Benjamin, arrived, he took the opportunity to return to the Patapsco.

  Banneker already had copious calculations of the ephemerides necessary for an almanac, and during his time in the federal district he had picked up the need for order and accuracy that had become second nature to Ellicott. Before the summer was over, he delivered his figures to the Baltimore printer William Goddard, who was persuaded to publish it with the help of a letter of recommendation signed by no fewer than three Ellicotts, headed by Andrew. The following year, Benjamin Banneker’s Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia Almanac and Ephemeris for the year of our lord 1792 was published. Presented with this evidence of an African-American’s abilities, Jefferson publicly shuffled back from his earlier assertions of black inferiority, allowing the possibility of “respectable intelligence in that race,” although privately he insinuated, quite wrongly, that the almanac was produced with “aid from Ellicot[t], who was his neighbor and friend, and never missed an opportunity of puffing him.” His equivocations had no effect on the lasting fame that Banneker’s almanac secured.

  As the summer of 1791 turned to fall and the October deadline approached, Ellicott transferred his brother Benjamin to assist Roberdeau. Eventually he abandoned his own task of running the perimeter of the federal district and put himself, Briggs, and the entire Ellicott team to work on Pierre L’Enfant’s survey.

  Since the capital consisted of nothing more than surveyor’s marks and walkways cut through the woods and undergrowth, potential customers had to have a map showing its proposed shape, otherwise they would, in the president’s pithy phrase, be “buying a Pig in a Poke [sack].” In early September the city commissioners ordered an engraving to be made of the master plan in L’Enfant’s possession and ten thousand copies printed. It was to be entitled “A Map of the City of Washington in the Territory of Columbia”—the first time that either the capital or the district had been named.

  Until that moment, Washington had personally supervised the work, repeatedly visiting the site to talk through problems with both the Engineer and the Surveyor. Now the three commissioners took over. Since Johnson’s duties as an associate justice of the Supreme Court frequently took him away from the federal district, Daniel Carroll became the lead figure. Long experience of land speculation, from a 1763 investment in the Mississippi Land Company through postwar deals in confiscated loyalist estates, had conditioned Carroll to regard the business of laying out the city as nothing more than a technical step in preparing the property for sale. It was no way to handle the temperamental L’Enfant.

  The flash point came over the map of the city. The very idea of an early sale appalled L’Enfant because it would mean losing control over parts of the city before his masterpiece was complete. Despite the commissioners’ peremptory orders, he adamantly refused to provide any kind of map, leaving possible purchasers with no option but to guess the shape of the city from the paths cut through the trees. After a three-day sale that was supposed to finance the rest of the survey, just thirty-five lots were sold for an average of $265 each.

  Although disappointed, Washington was more inclined to blame the commissioners than L’Enfant. Gently, he suggested that they try consulting rather than dictating, “because, from a source even less productive than L’Enfant’s, may flow ideas that are capable of improvements; and because I have heard that Ellicot, who is also a man of uncommon talents in his way, and of a more placid temper, has intimated that no information had been required either from him, or L’Enfant.”

  In response to the president’s prodding, L’Enfant did finally produce a plan of the nation’s capital, which was presented to Congress in December 1791. It was, however, drawn by Andrew Ellicott. Unlike the August sketch, this was an accurate map of the area with longitude and latitude carefully worked out, a specified scale, and a grid of streets running precisely north-south and east-west, and calibrated on the meridian and parallel that Ellicott had measured out from Capitol Hill. The streets were crossed by wide Le Nôtre–inspired avenues reaching to distant hubs—“Philadelphia griddled on Versailles,” as Jefferson described it—and the compass bearing of each one was exactly calculated and mapped.

  Andrew Ellicott’s plan of Washington, D.C.

  Accompanying the map was an explanation in Ellicott’s handwriting of the symbols and dimensions of the streets and avenues, and in case there was any doubt about its reliability, the map carried a characteristic declaration that began, “In order to execute the above plan, Mr Ellicott drew a true Meridian line by celestial observation,” and ended with the usual defensive assertion of the care taken: “He ran all the lines by a Transit Instrument, and determined the Acute Angles by actual measurement, and left nothing to the uncertainty of the Compass.”

  The latitude of the Capitol was entered as 38° 53′ north, but instead of the correct longitude of 77° 3′ west, it appeared as 0° 0′ west. This was Ellicott’s unilateral decision that the prime meridian from
which the whole of the United States was to be measured should no longer run through London but through its new capital. Relating the coordinates of meridians and parallels to a point on the mainland rather than overseas allowed exact distances to be measured from the base point, but patriotism was Ellicott’s prime motive. The measurement of the United States should, he felt, begin from its capital, and the borders of a dozen states undreamt of in his lifetime would be affected by his innovation.

  On a more mundane and practical level, the map also showed that he had begun the vital task of marking out the lots whose sale was supposed to pay for the capital’s development. The huge site was divided into more than eleven hundred squares, most of which were subdivided into housing lots, giving over fifteen thousand lots to be pegged out. As each square was marked with marble stones at the corners, its boundaries were entered on the surveyors’ plats, then transferred to a large master plan, which symbolically remained in L’Enfant’s hands. The success of Washington’s plans for the city’s development would rest on the use made of this document.

  That November, L’Enfant decided to pull down a house being built by Daniel Carroll of Duddington, nephew of Carroll the commissioner, because it was found to project over a line showing where a square was to go. In the city’s grand scheme, it was virtually irrelevant, and Ellicott believed the line could be adjusted without harm, but to L’Enfant the intrusion was a deliberate blemish on his masterpiece. He ordered Roberdeau to pull it down and, when the commissioners had Roberdeau arrested, went in person to supervise the destruction of Carroll’s building to a pile of rubble.