The Residence Act and the City That Should Not Have Existed

In late June of seventeen ninety, a compromise reached its final form over dinner, and because of it, a city was invented on a swamp. The deal was struck informally at a gathering arranged by Thomas Jefferson, involving Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, and it bound two otherwise irreconcilable political debts together. Hamilton needed the federal government to assume the Revolutionary War debts of the states. Madison and Jefferson needed the permanent national capital placed somewhere on the Potomac River, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, rather than in Philadelphia or New York.

The Residence Act, signed by President George Washington on July sixteenth, seventeen ninety, authorized the president to select a site along the Potomac for a federal district not exceeding ten miles square. Washington chose land that included portions of Maryland and Virginia, territory he knew well, territory that happened to be not far from his own Mount Vernon estate.

The choice was contested from the start. Northern merchants argued that Philadelphia, already functioning as a temporary capital, had infrastructure. The Potomac site had almost none. It had tidal flats, malaria, and summer heat that would, within a few decades, earn it a reputation as one of the more miserable postings in the diplomatic world. The British Foreign Office reportedly classified Washington as a hardship post alongside tropical assignments, though the precise origin of that story is difficult to pin to a single source.

Pierre Charles L'Enfant, a French-born engineer who had served in the Continental Army, was appointed in seventeen ninety-one to design the city. His plan was extravagant and visionary in equal measure: radiating diagonal avenues overlaid on a grid, a grand Mall stretching west from a hill reserved for the legislative building, circles and squares at each major intersection, a canal running through the lower city. The plan was also barely affordable and deeply impractical for a young republic that had not yet decided whether it would survive.

L'Enfant was dismissed in seventeen ninety-two after refusing to work within the commissioners' authority and tearing down the house of a well-connected landowner who had built across one of his planned avenues. His plan, however, survived him, and the city that exists today is largely the city he drew on paper in seventeen ninety-one.