Brian Jay Jones is the author of “The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building” (Dutton), from which this article is adapted.
Conflict and controversy are baked into the foundation of the U.S. Capitol building. Like the nation it embodies, the Capitol was built on debate and compromise, heated arguments and bruised egos, hurt feelings and loud disagreement — and often violence and chaos. The United States’ imperfections as a nation have shaped its structure since it was little more than a proposal. In the beginning, perhaps because of the way 18th-century Americans preferred to be governed — mostly regionally, nearly always frugally, and deferentially to the authority of states — the construction of the Capitol and the governance of the new capital city were left to determination, imagination and improvisation.
Even the location of the city was a matter of furious, and fiercely regional, debate and passionate political compromise. While the U.S. Constitution had authorized the creation of a new federal district, it had provided no guidance on where to put it.
In 1784, during the waning days of the Articles of Confederation — under which the cobbled‑together alliance of newly independent states were shakily governed after the American Revolution — the Congress had selected New York as its capital city, because of its existing infrastructure and easy access to a large port. However, with the formal ratification of the Constitution in June 1788 — and its marching orders to create a new federal district — several congressional delegations began lobbying to relocate the national capital to their home states. Members feverishly pleaded their cases for locations such as Baltimore; Philadelphia; Trenton, New Jersey; or Dover, Delaware — but with no site able to muster a clear majority, Rep. James Madison, stalling for time, persuaded his fellow congressmen to keep the capital in New York and pick up the conversation again later.
President George Washington, who still wanted the capital in a more southern location, initially blanched at that strategy — but Madison assured the president that New York remained an unpopular site and that it would be easier to persuade members to move the capital away from New York than it would be to rip it from a sentimental favorite like Philadelphia. Madison was certain the Congress would take up the issue again when the first session of the new Congress met in March 1789, but he warned, “The business of the seat of government is become a labyrinth.”
That was putting it mildly. The bickering began soon after Congress convened in its New York quarters, with every faction suspecting the others, fairly or not, of subterfuge and backroom conspiracies that would steal the capital away from its state. Eventually, two lead contenders emerged: Pennsylvania, with a site somewhere on the banks of the Susquehanna River, and Virginia, which was hoping to locate the new federal district along the river Thomas Jefferson would later name the Potomac. With Washington aligned with the interests of Virginia, the Pennsylvania-born Sen. William Maclay was certain the fix was in. “It is in fact the interest of the President of the United States that pushes the Potomac,” Maclay wrote in his diary. “He by means of Jefferson, Madison … and others urges this business.”
Still, when the Congress adjourned in autumn, most members went home believing Pennsylvania had the inside line. Before adjourning, the House of Representatives had approved the Residence Act, formally recommending the district be moved to the tiny town of Columbia, Pennsylvania, about 70 miles west of Philadelphia and easily accessible from the Susquehanna. The Senate, meanwhile, had gone off-script and suggested Germantown, a small town located just north of Philadelphia but nowhere near the Susquehanna River.
So as Congress reconvened in early 1790, it seemed clear that the federal district was going to go somewhere in Pennsylvania. But the Senate stalemated, again along mostly regional lines, with members unable to agree on Baltimore, Wilmington or somewhere on “the easterly bank of the Patowmack.” The U.S. Congress, barely a year old, had ground to a halt.
For the moment, the founders were flustered — and it was more than the location of the new federal district that was on the line. A deadlocked Congress this early in the American experiment was not only a potential cause of national discord, dividing the country along geopolitical lines, but also a probable source of international embarrassment. How did this new nation expect to be taken seriously by the rest of the world when its attempt at self‑governance was already stalled by something as petty as regional politics? Privately, even Vice President John Adams confessed it wasn’t a good look. “We are about founding a City which will be one of the first in the World,” he wrote in his diary after Congress adjourned in 1789, “and We are governed by local and partial Motives.”
On Saturday, June 19, 1790, outside George Washington’s New York residence on Broadway, Jefferson found Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton — whose proposal for paying off the young nation’s war debts had also been bogged down in Congress — looking “somber, haggard, and dejected.” The two struck up a conversation in front of the president’s front door and paced back and forth in the street for nearly half an hour as Hamilton pleaded his case for compromise, urging his stubborn colleague to at least present a unified front within the president’s Cabinet. “He observed that the members of the administration ought to act in concert,” wrote Jefferson, “ … that the President was the center on which all administrative questions ultimately rested, and that all of us should rally around him.” Jefferson agreed to further discussion and suggested that Hamilton and “another friend or two” dine with him at his quarters at 57 Maiden Lane the following evening. “I thought it impossible that reasonable men, consulting together coolly, could fail, by some mutual sacrifices of opinion, to form a compromise which was to save the union,” Jefferson wrote later.
At dinner the next evening, Jefferson’s “friend or two” turned out to be James Madison, who favored a Southern‑based capital and opposed Hamilton’s bill, but who could also be counted on to do the necessary head-counting and floor management to shepherd any compromise through Congress. Jefferson later claimed that Hamilton and Madison had done most of the talking, but however the deal was cut — and none of those in attendance would ever reveal the details — by the end of the evening, Hamilton and Madison had arrived at a compromise. Hamilton agreed to a Residence Act that would relocate the new federal district to the banks of the Potomac by way of a temporary, 10‑year stay in Pennsylvania — a bit of political appeasement to the Pennsylvanians, who would suddenly find the rug yanked out from under them — while the new Potomac‑based capital city was prepared and the Capitol building was constructed. In return, Madison would help steer Hamilton’s bill through Congress. As the three negotiators parted that evening, they felt certain there would be no objections from the chief executive; the so‑called Compromise of 1790 gave him everything he wanted.
When debate on the previously deadlocked Residence Act resumed in late June, the still suspicious Maclay sensed movement in the legislative logjam — and he wasn’t certain he liked it. Thanks to some backroom negotiating by Hamilton and Madison, “the Pennsylvania delegation had … agreed to place the permanent residence [of the Congress] on the Potomac, and the temporary residence to remain 10 years in Philadelphia,” wrote Maclay. “I know nothing of any such agreement.” And yet, with or without him, the deal was falling into place — and Maclay thought he knew whom to blame. “The President of the United States has (in my opinion) had a great influence in this business,” he wrote.
Maclay was right — Washington’s weight was enough to sway even the most stubborn of skeptics and holdouts. On July 16, 1790, the president signed the Residence Act into law. Under the terms of the bill — officially titled An Act for Establishing the Temporary and Permanent Seat of the Government of the United States — the capital was to relocate immediately to Philadelphia, where it would remain until the first Monday in December 1800, at which point the seat of government would be transferred to the new federal district on the Potomac.
With his signature on the Residence Act, Washington had started the clock. The capital city — and the Capitol — had to be ready for the Congress to occupy by Monday, December 1, 1800, a little more than 10 years away.
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