by Andrea Wulf
The separation of power was not the only political gesture written into the map of the capital. The sheer importance and strength of the federal government was also crucial to Washington’s vision, meaning that everything in the new city was to be magnificent. The buzzword was clearly “grand”—there would be “grand fountains,” a “Grand Cascade” one hundred feet wide with a forty-foot drop, vast public parks and, of course, a “Grand Avenue,” the Mall, which connected Congress, the garden south of the President’s House and an equestrian statue of George Washington. Congress would assemble on a hill that was, L’Enfant enthused, “a pedestal waiting for a monument.” One and a half miles westward, placed on a ridge overlooking the Potomac with views of the entire city, was the president’s home. Washington’s city, L’Enfant said, would be “a monument to national genious and munificence.”
L’Enfant’s plan also appealed to Washington as a landscape designer. Like Washington, who had carefully staged his house within the grounds at Mount Vernon to take advantage of the long vista toward the west and views across the Potomac in the east, L’Enfant placed the public buildings on “the most advantageous ground” with the best prospects across the city and the countryside. His plan combined the language of French baroque grandeur and formality with the sensibilities of English picturesque garden design.
On paper the radiating avenues and straight lines had imposed a formal grid of squares and diagonals onto the city, but like an accomplished landscape designer L’Enfant had also integrated the undulating lie of the land. Instead of leveling the city and forcing it into a one-dimensional frame of geometry, L’Enfant used the billowing hills and valleys, the broken ground and dips, to create the irregularity and variety that according to the school of English landscape gardens were hailed as picturesque. From the wooded ridges to the plains at the river, L’Enfant exulted, the hills were like “the waves of a tempestuous sea.” When he remarked that “nature had done much for it, and with the aid of art it will become the wonder of the world,” he used the same language as English gardeners. Just as irregularity in the English garden had replaced the formality that had symbolized French absolutism, L’Enfant was introducing the same ideas to the capital of the United States. But where the vistas in the English garden culminated in temples and statues that celebrated virtues and heroes, L’Enfant’s avenues were designed to end at real symbols of liberty—the Capitol and the White House. The metaphors of liberty that had been used in the eighteenth-century English gardens such as Stowe would be translated into a city.
Contrary to these ideas was L’Enfant’s notion of the “sumptuousness of a palace” for the house of the president. Clearly visible in his map, it measured almost 700 feet by a little more than 200 feet (four times bigger than the White House that was eventually built). Washington told Jefferson that he wanted the house “upon a scale far superior to any thing in this Country,” and the enormous footprint of the palace epitomized what Jefferson feared. The secretary of state who during his time in Paris had developed a taste for elegant furniture, fashionable clothes and other luxury goods, was more austere when it came to his country’s capital. Instead of L’Enfant’s palace, he preferred a more modestly sized house based on the country villas his favorite architect, Andrea Palladio, had designed in sixteenth-century Italy. Elegant but simple, a Palladian villa celebrated country life and was, for Jefferson, the most suitable building for an American president.
Unsurprisingly, the conflict-averse Jefferson never openly opposed Washington’s plans for his magnificent federal city, opting instead for a less direct approach, when he tried to steer the president toward a simpler design and sent suggestions and drawings of his more intimate layout. Similarly reluctant to engage in an open dispute, Washington pretended not to be aware of any disagreement, but did not move at all from his original ideas, steadfastly clinging to the majestic designs. He politely forwarded one of Jefferson’s drawings to L’Enfant, but left no doubt what he thought by adding, “I do not conceive that you will derive any material advantage from an examination of the enclosed papers.” The frustrated Jefferson was in luck, however, for in the end it was L’Enfant who brought about his own downfall.
The debacle began in November 1791, when L’Enfant, without authorization, demolished the house of Daniel Carroll, one of the most powerful landowners in the district. Surprised that his house had been razed, Carroll bombarded Washington and Jefferson with complaints, but L’Enfant maintained that he was not at fault. Carroll’s house stood in the middle of a main street, an indignant L’Enfant told Jefferson, and therefore it simply had to be destroyed. Jefferson coolly observed that “there is as yet no such thing as a street” and that L’Enfant had no right to remove houses on streets that only existed in plan. This was the difference between a city that grew organically from its center, as Jefferson envisaged, and L’Enfant’s master plan, which saw the matrix of the biggest city in America superimposed onto a wilderness. When L’Enfant refused to submit to the authority of the commissioners, Jefferson must have been delighted to inform him that his services were no longer required. Even Washington, who had tried to defend his architect to the end, had to admit that L’Enfant’s behavior “astonishes me beyond measure!”5
Following L’Enfant’s forced resignation in February 1792, Jefferson, sensing another opportunity to influence matters, suggested that an architectural competition be held for the design of the President’s House. Some historians believe that Jefferson not only wrote the advertisement for the competition but also anonymously submitted his own design, modeled on Palladio’s famous Villa Rotonda, a small country house. Others think that the drawings were entered by builder John Collins, who had been encouraged by Jefferson. Either way, Jefferson seemed to have been involved to some degree in reducing the size of the original plan. In the end, however, it was Washington who was once again victorious, because James Hoban, his favorite and the architect whom he had introduced to the commissioners, won the competition with a larger design (though much smaller than L’Enfant’s original footprint).
Over the next two years Jefferson continued to scheme and succeeded in removing from the Capitol a tomb space for Washington and the president’s chamber. Both designs were at odds with his ideas of a republican city—one turned the Capitol into a shrine, while the presence of a president’s chamber was an intrusion of the executive into the legislative. Exploiting the jealousy between the two architects William Thornton (who had won the architectural competition for the Capitol) and Stephen Hallet (who had lost it) allowed Jefferson to instigate these changes—after Hallet found several mistakes in Thornton’s drawings, he was put in charge as site architect and eliminated the president’s chamber and the tomb. Jefferson, who corresponded with Hallet in French, must have suggested these changes. When Washington finally discovered all these alterations months later, during an inspection of the foundations, it was too late to reverse them. Despite his reputation of glacial cool, Washington was furious that such drastic changes had been made behind his back, and lost his temper, forcing the commissioners to fire Hallet.6 Despite all Jefferson’s efforts, much of the original plans were still on the table. Instead of a small, self-effacing republican town, L’Enfant’s huge city had prevailed. By the time he resigned as secretary of state in late 1793, Jefferson had grown to rue his role in the Dinner Table Bargain bitterly—“of all the errors of my political life, this has occasioned me the deepest regret,” he admitted.
After his refusal to take power at the end of the War of Independence and his reluctance to become president, Washington’s apparent obsession with grand designs might seem out of character. But the man who preferred being the master of his crops to being the leader of the American people had not suddenly changed. Quite the contrary, Washington simply believed that the unity of the states and therefore the nation depended on a strong central government—and he would make sure that his eponymous city was a reflection of this.
One project, in particul
ar, the commissioners realized, was “an object which the President has much at heart”: the first national university and botanic garden. In the summer of 1796, as he prepared himself for retirement and Hamilton wrote the Farewell Address, Washington became engrossed with the idea. Visitors at Mount Vernon noted that the conversations were either about agriculture or about the establishment of the university in the new capital.
The importance of a national university and an adjacent botanic garden was not so much about the education of young men per se (there were several state universities across the United States) but, as ever with Washington, for the purpose of national unity. As men from across the different states would study together at a young age “when friendships are formed,” he explained, they would understand that there was no reason for the “jealousies & prejudices which one part of the union had imbided agains[t] another part.” Their loyalties would be to the nation rather than to their states. At the same time a national botanic garden would bring together a “forrest of the different trees of America,” just as Washington himself had attempted at Mount Vernon. Thornton, the architect of the Capitol, believed that the trees in the botanic garden could “serve as parent-trees” to supply nurseries across the states. In September and October 1796, a flurry of letters scuttled between Washington and Hamilton, the commissioners, Thornton and Madison. Washington wanted the need for a university added to the Farewell Address, but Hamilton thought that the president’s last speech to Congress would be a more appropriate vehicle. “It will be felt as the last request of a departing Friend,” one of the commissioners wrote to Madison.
At the same time the restless Washington began to search for the best site for the botanic garden. The commissioners suggested that the grand gardens that L’Enfant had designed between the president’s park and the Capitol (today’s Mall) would be “extremely well calculated for this purpose,” but others disagreed. With so little basic infrastructure in place, many thought it was a little premature even to think about a botanic garden. But the president saw the political importance of the project and remained unmoved. He reiterated that a botanic garden would be “a good appendage” to the university and pressed for a final decision to be made. But nothing could be agreed during his presidency—his last public project in the federal city would depend on his successors.7
SIX MONTHS LATER, in March 1797, John Adams was inaugurated as the second president of the United States and assumed responsibility for the federal city. Unlike Washington, Madison and Jefferson, Adams had never been particularly interested in the removal of the capital to the Potomac. A shining city in the wilderness seemed absurd and against his parsimony. “I was strenuously opposed to the whole system in every grade of its progress,” he commented later.8 Friends had warned him back in 1789, when discussions on the locations began, that “you will probably be dragged in a few years to the banks of the Potowmac, where Negro slaves will be your servants by day, mosquitoes your sentinels by night.” A project that drained public coffers when Congress wouldn’t even increase his meager salary was not what the frugal Adams wanted. Washington, D.C., was the vision of Virginia men, not his. In fact, Adams would have preferred if the seat of government had moved every four years between Philadelphia and New York.
For the first three and a half years of his presidency, Adams governed from Philadelphia, the temporary capital, and the commissioners quickly learned that he had no intention of getting involved in the building of Washington. In the month after his inauguration Adams wrote to them that he would rely entirely on their expertise and experience because “the whole of this Business is so new to me.” A few months and several pleading requests from the commissioners later, Adams realized he needed to be more explicit. “The Importance of the City to the Union, I fully understand,” he explained exasperatedly, “but at present the Union is menaced, from other Causes and Quarters with more dangerous Portents.”
The threat came from the French, who since the ratification of the Jay Treaty (and the Union’s subsequent realignment with Britain) had begun to seize American merchant ships. Instead of creating a city of magnificent public buildings, Adams was building a navy and preparing for the possibility of war. The presidency and negotiations with the French government, Adams said to Abigail, would be neither “Beds of Roses nor Walks of Flowers.” France not only threatened America at sea in the so-called Quasi-War (an undeclared war) but also humiliated the administration when a diplomatic delegation of three distinguished American politicians was refused a meeting with the French foreign minister in Paris. Adams struggled to maintain the United States of America’s neutrality, uncomfortably stuck between the wishes of his own belligerent cabinet to declare war and the attacks from the pro-French Republicans who accused him of being a warmonger. Unlike Washington, who had been revered for most of his presidency, it seemed that Adams was assailed from all sides. The foreign crisis and political struggles kept him so busy that it took him almost a year even to glance at the map of the city. This was certainly no time to play architect, the overworked Adams insisted—the “Situation of the United States is uncommonly Critical.”
As Adams governed from the presidential house in Philadelphia, building work in the capital was progressing only slowly. At the time of Adams’s inauguration in March 1797, the White House still had no roof and the windows were empty holes in the walls. The Capitol was even more behind schedule. With the relocation of government to Washington, D.C., scheduled to take place in just three years’ time, the commissioners had a daunting task before them. Their anxiety was exacerbated by the fact that funds had begun to run low. In October and November 1797 they wrote repeatedly to Adams, expressing their concern about the shortage of funds, but it took the president until December to reply. The wording of his letter made clear how little interest he had—though he granted them the power to borrow $150,000, he failed to specify where this would actually come from, suggesting instead they procure it “wherever you can find it.” He refused to “make himself a Slave to the Federal City,” he said in the following year—he would do what his official duty required of him “and no more.”
Like Adams, the new vice president, Thomas Jefferson, was showing no interest whatsoever in the new capital. As the secretary of state under Washington, Jefferson had been constantly in contact with the commissioners, but now he went silent on the subject. The city as it was designed was still based on Washington’s grand vision of sweeping avenues and enormous public buildings. Therefore, the less progress made, the closer it would come to Jefferson’s original ideas. If the avenues remained mud roads, no glittering parades would be able to be held there; if the President’s House remained roofless, the executive of the American nation would fail to reflect power and strength; and if plots were left undeveloped it would resemble a small country town rather than a buzzing metropolis. If Adams was not going to do anything about the city, Jefferson certainly wasn’t going to either.
Building work was progressing so slowly that by March 1798, it seemed that there might not even be a home for the president in the new capital at all. Work came to a complete halt and “clashing interests” threatened Washington’s dream. Some wanted to move the Supreme Court or even Congress into the White House, while others proposed that a smaller, more modest dwelling for the president be built on Capitol Hill. Adams still did not care, telling the commissioners that he would be perfectly happy just to rent a simple house. In despair, Alexander White, one of the commissioners, wrote to the retired Washington in Mount Vernon, explaining what was going on. Gossip began to circulate that Adams was trying to sabotage the new capital. For the first time since he had become vice president, Jefferson picked up his pen to write about the new city. It was rumored, so Jefferson told Madison, that Adams had no desire to keep the government in Washington for long. Once politicians and government employees lived in the unfinished city and experienced the lack of comfort, it would be easy to convince them to abandon Washington, D.C. They would return to
Philadelphia and make it the capital instead, and that was certainly not what Jefferson had envisaged.
Adams, however, had no such intentions. The truth was that even if he had wanted a say in anything to do with the capital, he would have struggled to make much of an impact, for the commissioners sang a chorus of “the late President always,” referring constantly to Washington’s opinions as well as continuing to write to him. When Adams dared to suggest moving the War Office and Treasury away from the White House to the Capitol, for example, he was quickly overruled—Washington, who had personally sited them there, dismissed Adams’s plans as “nothing short of insanity.” He needn’t have worried, because Adams quickly got bored by such backroom dealing and did not even answer the commissioners’ letters. Only when they told him that they would proceed with the original plans did Adams reply. “Although I may have been inclined to an opinion,” he finally wrote, with humility, he never intended “to give orders contrary to your unanimous Judgment.” Government departments stayed where Washington had placed them, Congress would meet in the Capitol, and the president would live in the executive mansion.