George Washington's Washington: Visions for the National Capital in the Early American Republic

Adam Costanzo. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2018. xii and 164 pp., maps, tables, images, notes, references, index. $74.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-820-35285-5); $29.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-820-35389-0); electronic (ISBN 978-0-820-35286-2).

George Washington's Washington, by Adam Costanzo, provides an account of the contest to create a capital for the embryonic United States of America from the enactment of the Residence Act by the U.S. Congress, which authorized creation of a new capital in 1790, through 1840. Congress approved the project to create a federal capital city that George Washington foresaw would become “though not as large as London, yet of a magnitude inferior to few others in Europe” (p. 15). Washington's vision for the new capital was challenged by others with a variety of different objectives—the planned capital immediately became a contested city. Costanzo's volume is in the “Early American Places” series, which features revised doctoral dissertations that examine local historical developments in their larger societal and geographic contexts. The series is financially supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and its volumes are published by the University of Georgia Press, New York University Press, and Northern Illinois University Press.

George Washington's vision for a capital city of grand scale was based on his conviction that it was to serve a nation that would encompass much of North America. Located on the Potomac River, which he envisioned providing the best transportation link to the continent's interior, the new federal district was expected to become the metropolis of the Eastern Seaboard. Washington himself personally owned about 40,000 acres of land in the modern states of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio—he was not only philosophically, but financially vested in “the West” playing an important role in the nation's future. Others, including Thomas Jefferson, thought that the era's modestly sized state capitals, which provided seats for legislative bodies and little else, served as more appropriate models for the nation's capital; there really was no need to create a federal capital that would become a metropolis.

Costanzo provides a detailed account of how multiple contests played out during the new capital's initial forty years, between contending visions over how large the capital should become at one level, and continuously on a day-by-day basis among outside speculators, local entrepreneurs and residents, and the Congress, which largely attempted to ignore its legal role as local governing authority. Local promoters and Congress initially failed to stimulate much interest in the venture, and some continued to actively work to return the capital to Philadelphia or New York, arguing that the nation's capital should be located where well-established investment communities already existed.

The spatially expansive plan for the new city, which had been prepared by Peter (Pierre) Charles L'Enfant and approved by Washington, presented its own immense obstacles. The White House, where functions associated with the President were expected to cluster, was located a mile and a half from the nearest existing settlement of Georgetown; it was a mile and a half from the Capitol building, where the Congress and the Supreme Court met; and it was two miles from the projected port on the Eastern Branch of the Potomac River—the plan itself led to the formation of small settlement clusters that were widely dispersed. In 1800, when Philadelphia and New York contained more than 40,000 residents and Washington only 3,000, Washington's residents were dispersed throughout an area that was three times the size of the other two cities. Congress, the town's governing body, refused to pay for infrastructure to connect the dispersed nodes of settlement, and the assets of the capital's newly established banks, another possible source of funds, only possessed the small-scale investments of local residents. When the United States declared war on Britain in 1812 and the young nation's Capitol building, White House, and other public structures were burned, Congress once again openly reconsidered relocating the nation's capital.

It was not until 1820, when a new governance charter for Washington was approved by Congress, that the Congress finally accepted limited forms of financial responsibility for infrastructure improvements. During the two following decades, the federal government joined with existing local boosters in promoting Washington as a center not only of national political power but one that would also include cultural and social institutions. As the nation expanded through western settlement and the creation of new states in the interior, and as administrative tasks were added to the federal government, demands for additional staff members and office space increased, and reasonable accommodations came to be provided that would place Washington on the path to becoming a metropolis.

By the close of the 1820s, Congress had agreed to join private interests in funding the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal to connect the tidal waters of the Potomac River with the continent's interior at Pittsburgh, and although the canal would eventually reach only to western Maryland and be bankrupt by the end of the century, it represented a dramatically altered view of Congress's expectations for Washington—from then on, it aligned with George Washington's original conception. In 1829, when Andrew Jackson, who had run as a small-government Jeffersonian democrat, became president and members of his party controlled Congress, the general rise in nationalism led him and the Congress to alter course and promote Washington as an object of national importance. During the decade that followed, the capital's first new offices for agencies of the executive branch were erected, including structures for the Treasury Department, the Patent Office, and the General Post Office, each of which embodied the view that “the character of a nation is judged by the character of its public buildings” (p. 174). Each of these structures remains in use.

How these numerous contests played out is a dramatic story that is well told by Costanzo. In numerous ways, the contests of this early phase of Washington's history are similar to those that played out in many of the nation's other growing urban centers. In Washington, though, where the interests of members of Congress focus on the consequences of federal actions for their own corners of the nation, concerns about governing the nation's capital understandably took a distant back seat. This aspect of Washington's local governance continues with dramatic consequences to the present day.

Costanzo's account of Washington's initial decades focuses on the transformation of its physical space. A reader's understanding of those transformations would gain much from far larger maps than the three-by-four-inch ones that are provided—my reading was assisted by regularly referencing a set of maps that record the spatial evolution of Washington by depicting individual buildings and infrastructure from 1800 into modern times (Passonneau and Partners 1993). Nonetheless, Costanzo makes a valuable contribution; his work proves the value of publishing doctoral dissertations and their extensive examinations of primary source materials. He has provided an account that I recommend as a starting point for understanding Washington's formative decades. I have no doubt that the “Early American Places” series would be enriched by the inclusion of doctoral dissertations prepared by geographers addressing historical topics as well.

Washington has morphed into a metropolis of 6 million residents. It is filled with national monuments and museums that are visited by more than 20 million visitors annually. It belongs to all Americans, and its ongoing decision-making contests should be of interest to all, if for no other reason than comparative purposes. Costanzo provides a worthy account of the historical foundations of many of these contemporary contests.