by Andrea Wulf
12 In 1807 Jefferson received a gold medal from the Society of Agriculture in Paris for his moldboard. He never patented his plough because he believed that every improvement should be shared with other farmers. A patent, Jefferson said, was “doing a great deal more harm than good.”
13 When Adams was made an honorary member of the British Board of Agriculture, he wrote, “I am not much charmed with the honor of being elected a member of any Society in Europe especially in England,” while Jefferson (who accused Adams of being pro-British) did not have such qualms when he was offered the membership.
14 The first award that the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Agriculture gave was for two essays on manure.
15 In 1803, Madison became the president of the short-lived National Board of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., but it was only in 1852 that a nationwide agricultural society was successfully established.
16 The rule that the candidate with the second-most votes became vice president was changed in 1803 with the Twelfth Amendment because of the problems in the 1796 and 1800 elections.
6
“CITY OF MAGNIFICENT INTENTIONS”
THE CREATION OF WASHINGTON, D.C., AND THE WHITE HOUSE
ON 1 NOVEMBER 1800, President John Adams arrived at Washington, D.C., the new capital of the United States. But instead of magnificent tree-lined avenues, elegant houses, shaded gardens and thriving shops, his carriage passed marshy fields and forests, dodging filthy deep puddles and ruts along the way. Where roads should have been, cattle grazed in pastures divided by fences, and none of the streets he had seen on the large map that the city’s architect had drawn were recognizable. The only signs that this scrubland might one day be divided into an urban grid were the overgrown quarry stones, each bearing the name or number of a street.
The first government clerks had arrived five months earlier, bringing with them a bewildering array of crates, papers, files and furniture from Philadelphia, which had been the seat of government for the last decade and where Adams lived in the President’s House in Market Street. Everyone had been struck by the sharp difference between life in Philadelphia, the largest and most metropolitan city in the United States of America, and the new capital, which offered only a few hundred “small miserable huts” as houses. “We have the name of a city but nothing else,” one congressman griped. Not a single thing about Washington exuded the atmosphere of a city—quails perched in the bushes, bullfrogs serenaded lonely riders and turtles sheltered under a web of roots of the sycamores along the river. Pennsylvania Avenue, the road that connected the Capitol to Adams’s new home, was hidden by a thorny veil of briars and described by one contemporary as impenetrable, nothing more than a “deep morass.” The avenue that was designed for grand parades, another visitor scoffed, “is as much a wilderness as Kentucky.” Just below the Capitol the avenue wasn’t even opened yet because a farmer was growing crops there—carriages, he offered, could take the path through his fields.
As Adams’s carriage jostled along, he saw to his dismay that the Capitol stood only half-finished, even though Congress was due to convene there for the first time in less than three weeks. “The City of Magnificent Distances,” Charles Dickens would later write, Washington “might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent Intentions.”
When Adams’s coach rolled to a stop at his new residence, the President’s House, which soon would be called the White House,1 his reception committee consisted of a group of workmen who had spent the day plastering some of the rooms. The building that Adams saw—bar the east and west wings and the porticos, which were added later—still stands today, but it was a work in progress to say the least. The secretary of the treasury, Oliver Wolcott, had been so shocked on first inspecting it four months earlier that he declared, “I cannot but consider our Presidents as very unfortunate men, if they must live in this dwelling.”
To enter the house Adams had to traverse some wooden planks that precariously bridged the one-story gap over the basement between the front door and the ground below. Six of the thirty rooms had been prepared for the president’s arrival, but not a single one was completely finished and furnished. There were not enough lamps to light the rooms and what little furniture had arrived from Philadelphia was dwarfed by the vast, empty spaces. To reach his private apartments on the first floor the rotund Adams had to climb a small, twisting back stair, because where the main staircase should have been was a gaping void. The White House might have been the biggest house in the United States, but when Adams moved in, it was cold and horribly uncomfortable, with every room reeking of wet lime and horsehair from the fresh plaster.
In the evening, as the fires roared to drive the damp out, Adams tried to take his mind off his miserable surroundings and thought instead of his country’s future. “May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof,” he wrote to Abigail, who had stayed behind at their farm and whom he missed desperately. His letters had always been infused with love—“Yours, Yours, Yours, ever, ever, ever yours,” he had written from France twenty years earlier—and his affection showed no sign of abating: “I am with tenderness inexpressible ever yours,” he still wrote. His wife of thirty-six years was the only one who understood him, and for some time had been worrying about the political pressure the presidency put on her husband. “He is made of the oak instead of the willow,” she explained to her sister, “he may be torn up by the Roots, or break, but he will never bend.” As he sat at his table in this enormous empty building the day after arriving, the sixty-five-year-old Adams wrote to his wife to invite her to join him. The house was “habitable,” he promised, but knowing that she had been concerned about unfinished rooms and the cold, he wisely refrained from mentioning any of the missing details.
The outside, it transpired, was even worse than the interior. The vast grounds that surrounded the White House were ornamented with brick kilns instead of fountains, workers’ shacks instead of pavilions, and construction debris instead of finely raked gravel paths. No vegetable plots or fruit trees would provide any produce for the president’s kitchen, nor was there a private area that the family could use as a garden. In an attempt to clear up the mess the commissioners had tried—and failed—to evict the carpenters who were living in wooden sheds on the grounds. The carpenters had warned that the president’s new home would remain unfinished if they were forced to leave because there was no other accommodation in the city. Only two days before Adams’s arrival, the commissioners had written more letters asking workmen to remove their temporary houses, but the orders had been ignored.
Nothing had changed when Abigail arrived three weeks later. “This place,” she wrote to her sister, echoing the scornful congressman, is “known by the name of the city, and the Name is all that you can call so.” Abigail’s coachman had been forced to jump off the carriage again and again to cut overhanging branches so that they could pass after losing their way in the thick woods. Determined to find something positive amid such depressing circumstances, Abigail praised the views from the house across the wide, romantic expanse of the Potomac and the forests beyond. The marshy edge of the Tiber Creek (a small arm of the Potomac south of the grounds) appeared like the glinting surface of a lake and the wooded hills seemed to stretch on into infinity.
Others, however, were less forgiving or appreciative of the landscape. Some called it a “mere swamp,” while many government officials could find neither accommodation nor workspaces. The Treasury Building to the east of the White House was the only completed office building; the War, Navy and State offices had to rent temporary rooms; the Supreme Court was still looking for a home two months after its occupants had all arrived; and the House of Representatives had to meet in the rooms allocated to the Library of Congress. There weren’t even enough water closets: with only days before Congress convened, the doorkeeper of the House of Representatives cautiously suggested that they erect one in the center lobby for the members of Congress “who are at such a dist
ance from the ground floor that it might be difficult to reach the journey’s end in time.”
THAT THE SEAT of government should have been situated in such an uninspiring location, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, was a reflection of the tensions within the Union—between the North and the South, the rural and the urban, the farmer and the merchant, as well as the wider differences between the Federalists and the Republicans. American politics in all its subtleties was played out in the layout, design and location of the city and, in particular, in the way in which the White House gardens developed over the years.
To understand why the capital was placed where it was, we have to return to the summer of 1790, when New York served as the temporary seat of government and the first political fissures quivered through the Union. During that summer two issues paralyzed Congress: the future location of the nation’s capital and the question of how America’s finances and debts should be handled—“two of the most irritating questions,” as Jefferson remarked.
One after another, more than a dozen potential sites for the new capital had been proposed and then rejected as each different state held to its own parochial agenda. The Northern states pressed for a capital in one of the commercial centers, such as New York, while the Southern states insisted on a location more proximate to their own soil. Countless arguments and justifications were batted back and forth—James Madison, for example, had appealed to science to prove that Virginia would be the best home for the capital, by presenting a geographical calculation which placed the Potomac and Washington’s Mount Vernon at the country’s exact center.
“We pity the poor congress-men, thus kicked and cuffed about from post to pillar,” the New York Advertiser wrote with mock concern, “where can they find a home?” But the dilemma was serious, and seemingly intractable. Washington later said that the dispute proved “more in danger of having convulsed the government” than any other event.
The other congressional gridlock that summer stemmed from Alexander Hamilton’s finance plan for the United States, proposed in January 1790, whereby the Revolutionary War debts of each of the thirteen states would be “assumed” by the federal government into one national deficit. This would allow the government to deal with one centralized debt rather than with thirteen different ledgers. As well as exacerbating the divide between the mercantile Federalists and the agrarian Republicans, however, the so-called Assumption Plan also triggered vehement opposition from the large Southern states because most of them—unlike their Northern equivalents—had already paid back much of what they owed, and they resisted the idea of giving power over their state economies to central government. As the congressional debates raged on, all refused to compromise. The Southern states, led by Madison (who had been nicknamed “Big Knife” for his battle-hardy political skills and in defiance of his size), had staunchly opposed Hamilton’s proposal, bringing the discussions to a deadlock in the early summer.
That June, Jefferson—reluctant to accept Hamilton’s plan but convinced that “a mutual sacrifice … [was] the duty of every one” invited Madison and Hamilton to his New York house in Maiden Lane. There, over a meal cooked according to the latest French recipes and helped along by bottles of fine wine, he brokered a deal between the two opponents. By the time the dinner ended, Jefferson later claimed, Madison had agreed to stop blocking Hamilton’s fiscal plan (though he wouldn’t vote for it). In return—because “the pill would be a bitter one to the Southern states”—Hamilton would support the capital’s new location on the Potomac River along the Maryland and Virginia border.2 Clearly the location of the seat of government was so important to Jefferson and Madison that they were willing to trade it for an economic strategy they despised.
Shortly afterward the Assumption Bill and the Residence Act were passed. With these, Hamilton’s economic vision was enacted while Philadelphia would be the temporary capital for ten years until the new city was built. To avoid further conflict it was decided that Washington, who still tried to maintain an impartial role in the new party politics, would determine the new capital’s exact site (but only after Jefferson and Madison had crisscrossed Maryland and Virginia on an assessment mission).3
Both Jefferson and Madison produced detailed memorandums on how to proceed, and in January 1791 Washington announced the capital’s location. By placing it on the banks of the Potomac—the river that for many Virginians was the gateway to the West—the city was turned toward the future of the country. And even more important, by choosing a site away from the commercial centers, the three men proclaimed their vision of the United States of America as an agrarian republic. The capital would be far away from Hamilton’s odious merchants, speculators and corrupt, money-obsessed cities. Cities, according to Jefferson, also were the source of anti-Republican sentiment because Federalists “all live in cities.”
Although they agreed on the location of the capital, when it came to the actual design of the city and the public buildings, Jefferson and Washington were of very different minds. This was because of their conflicting beliefs about what the role of the federal government should be. And though Washington had tried to stay clear of the emerging battles between the Federalists and Republicans, he had been vocal about the importance of a strong government. By contrast Jefferson had always insisted that the central government should not have too much power over the states. They agreed, however, that the capital was to reflect the government and its power (or lack of power) and that it needed to be designed accordingly. Consequently, Washington envisaged a grand imposing city, while Jefferson wanted it to be as unobtrusive and out of the way as possible. As such the struggle over how the capital should be designed was not so much an aesthetic or architectural disagreement but an important political battle.
In his first memorandum to Washington, Jefferson made explicit what he held to be the most important issues: the capital should be a small town laid out on a rectangular grid that would grow organically over time, spreading out from its center. Two squares should be allocated for the president’s house and garden, one for the Capitol, one for a market and nine for “public walks”—far from being a celebration of the seat of government, the capital of the United States should be a city of gardens. Some 1,500 acres, he suggested to Washington, would be needed in total, of which 300 would be for public buildings and parks, and the rest should be laid out in the future. It would be a republican city—on an intimate scale, virtuous and simple. “A government continually at a distance and out of sight,” Hamilton had warned in The Federalist Papers, “can hardly be expected to interest the sensations of people”—exactly what the Republicans had in mind for the new capital.
In 1791 Jefferson sketched his vision of the new capital, already underlining the need for parks and gardens when he scribbled “public walks” on the plan. The city was to grow organically from the small center around the President’s House and the Capitol, while the areas marked with dots were to be laid out at a later stage. (Illustration credit 6.1)
By contrast, the magnificent city that Washington and his chosen designer, the French Major Charles Pierre L’Enfant, dreamed up would proclaim a mighty, dominant central government. L’Enfant was the Federalists’ favorite architect, having transformed New York’s City Hall into the splendid Federal Hall—the home of Congress during New York’s time as capital—resplendent with a frieze of thirteen stars and a pediment filled with the great American eagle, clutching thirteen arrows and an olive branch. Over the years L’Enfant had also staged spectacular patriotic events and parades, mastering the language of monumental symbols and gestures. He derided layouts like Jefferson’s, which were based on a rectangular and regular grid, as “tiresome and insipide.” Instead the capital, L’Enfant told a receptive Washington, was to be built on an “enlarged plan,” with sweeping avenues that cut like sunrays through the city.
At 5,000 acres, L’Enfant’s design would be almost four times what Jefferson had in mind—larger than New York, Philadelphia and Boston c
ombined. Where Jefferson had scribbled on a small piece of paper a small town bounded between Georgetown and Rock Creek to the north, Tiber Creek to the south and the Potomac to the west, L’Enfant’s map of the city was so enormous and unwieldy that it was difficult to carry around to present at meetings.
Jefferson was not alone in his objections to Washington’s “Hobby-horsical federal City.” L’Enfant’s plan was on “too large a scale,” one of the commissioners complained, explaining that this “may suit the genius of a Despotic government” but certainly not a republic. Yet, as so often, once he had made up his mind, Washington stood resolute—he wanted a city that would be imbued with the tenets of the Constitution, the Union and the American Revolution. The plan and buildings had to be impressive, he argued, because they “shou’d look beyond the present day.” The new capital would be the nexus of America, binding together not only the Northern and Southern states, “but the trans-Alleghenians with the Atlantic states.”
L’Enfant understood that Washington’s vision required the layout of the capital to be infused with political ideology. He therefore drew the balance of power—the executive versus the legislative and the states versus the federal government—onto his master plan of the city. The two most prominent buildings in the capital, the White House and the Capitol, would house the executive and legislative powers respectively. Connected by Pennsylvania Avenue (named after the state where the Declaration of Independence had been signed and the Constitution written), the executive and legislative were linked and yet apart. At the same time the broad avenues that pierced vistas through the city were named after the original thirteen states. They were arranged geographically with New Hampshire and Connecticut avenues to the north, South Carolina and Georgia avenues to the south and Maryland and Pennsylvania avenues in the middle.4