Why the United States built Washington

A Congress chased out of town

In June 1783 Revolutionary War soldiers who hadn’t been paid marched on Philadelphia, where the Confederation Congress was meeting, and surrounded its building demanding their money.^[5][6] Pennsylvania’s government did little to protect it, and Congress left for Princeton, New Jersey, meeting there from 26 June.^[5]

The framers of the Constitution remembered it. They gave Congress the power to govern its own seat directly, outside any state, so that it would never again depend on a state’s militia for its safety.^[6] The Constitution lets Congress exercise “exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States.”^[4]

The dinner-table bargain

The first Congress under the Constitution met in New York City from March 1789.^[1] It deadlocked on two questions at once. One was where to put the permanent capital. The other was Alexander Hamilton’s plan for the federal government to take over the states’ war debts, which the North wanted, because its states still owed most of theirs, and the South opposed, because its states had paid much of theirs off.^[7]

On 20 June 1790 Thomas Jefferson had Hamilton and James Madison to dinner. Madison agreed to stop blocking the debt plan and to bring some southern votes with him; in return the capital would go south, to the Potomac, after ten years in Philadelphia.^[7][3]

Congress passed the Residence Act, “An Act for Establishing the Temporary and Permanent Seat of the Government of the United States”, on 16 July 1790.^[3] Congress moved to Philadelphia that December, and sat there until May 1800.^[1] Philadelphians spent the decade lobbying to keep it, even offering President Washington an elaborate mansion.^[6]

Moving in

Work on the Capitol had begun in 1793, and cost more than expected.^[2] Congress met there for the first time on 17 November 1800.^[1] President John Adams, who moved into the President’s House that month, addressed Congress in a Senate chamber that was crowded, leaky and unheated.^[2][6] One senator wrote that the city needed “houses, cellars, kitchens, well informed men, amiable women, and other little trifles of this kind.”^[2]

Not quite ten miles square

The district straddled the Potomac, and one piece of it, Alexandria County, had come from Virginia. In 1846 Congress passed an act to give it back to Virginia if its voters agreed. They did, by 763 votes to 222, and President Polk declared the act in force that September.^[8]