The Fabric of America (16 page)

Unfortunately Banneker's letter took forty-five days to reach the wilds of the Erie Triangle where Ellicott was engaged in the “hardship, trouble and difficulty” of the survey. By then it was too late to correct his calculations in time for the 1791 almanac. Impressed by his achievement, however, Ellicott showed his work to a neighbor and fellow member of the Philosophical Society, James Pemberton, who was also president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Pemberton seized upon Banneker's astronomy to rebut the argument made most notably by Thomas Jefferson that slavery was justified on the grounds that black Americans were mentally inferior to whites. Pemberton's pamphlet celebrating Banneker's work provided ammunition for antislavery groups not only in the United States, but across the Atlantic in France and Britain. And when Benjamin Banneker at last produced his almanac, it sealed his fame as the first African-American scientist.

What first brought Banneker public recognition was not his almanac, however, but Ellicott's decision to employ him as his assistant on the survey of the federal district. A month after their arrival, the
Georgetown Weekly Ledger
reported approvingly, “[Mr. Ellicott] is attended by
Benjamin Banniker
, an Ethiopian, whose abilities as a surveyor and an astronomer clearly prove that Mr Jefferson's concluding that race of men were void of mental endowments, was without foundation.”

In the next paragraph, the newspaper also told its readers of the recent arrival of “Major
Longfont
, a French gentleman, employed by the President of the United States to survey the lands contiguous to Georgetown, where the federal city is to be built.” This was Pierre L'Enfant, whose volubility, energy, and addiction to high drama enchanted and exasperated everyone he encountered.

Ellicott and he had brushed by each other the year before in Pennsylvania senator William Maclay's office, when the senator noted sourly in his journal, “L'Enfant was with us, like most Frenchmen, [he] was so talkative that scarce a word could be said.” His face was dominated by dark brows and a heavy forehead, but lightened by quick, black eyes, and a romantic imagination that had in 1777 induced him to cross the Atlantic with the Marquis de Lafayette to fight for American independence.

At the time he was a Paris art student with no military training—a French officer recorded that “he has some talent for drawing figures, but nothing of use for an engineer”—but succeeded in persuading the authorities in France to issue him a temporary commission as lieutenant as a safeguard in case of capture by the British. With characteristic élan, once arrived in America, L'Enfant parlayed the lieutenancy into permanent rank as a captain, then a major in the Corps of Engineers, and with equally impetuous courage volunteered for a doomed assault on Savannah in which he was wounded and taken prisoner.

Apart from that episode, his military experience was limited to providing the illustrations for General von Steuben's military manual and, after his release on parole, sketching fortifications. Once peace came, his artistic ability enabled him to earn his living as an architect in New York, and among several other commissions he was responsible for the restoration of New York's City Hall, where the new federal Congress first met. The magnificence of the hall, and especially the symbol of the United States, a giant eagle clutching thirteen arrows in its talons, immediately caught George Washington's eye. But what convinced the new president of L'Enfant's unique talent was the architect's expansive response when the project for a new capital was published.

“
The plan should be drawn on such a scale,” L'Enfant wrote Washington, “
as to leave room for that aggrandizement and embellishment which the increase of the wealth of the nation will permit it to pursue at any period, however remote.” That single insight into the president's unspoken ambitions for the United States and for its capital was what secured him the commission for designing the city. “An eminent French military engineer starts for Georgetown,” Washington announced to an associate in March 1791, “to examine and survey the site of the federal city.”

In the president's mind, Major L'Enfant always did remain “the Engineer,”
someone who could plan and build, and his intention was that L'Enfant should not only design the city but construct its public buildings. Major Ellicott, by contrast, was referred to as “the Surveyor,” the person who would lay out the design on the ground. The commissioning letter from Jefferson that L'Enfant carried in his pocket when he left Philadelphia clarified the president's idea of his duties: “You are desired to proceed to Georgetown where you will find Mr Ellicott employed in making a survey and Map of the Federal Territory. The special object of asking your aid is to have a drawing of the particular grounds most likely to be approved for the site of the Federal town and buildings.”

Early in March, the Engineer set out in driving rain to climb to the top of Jenkins Hill, soon to be better known as Capitol Hill. “After coming up on the hill from the Eastern Branch ferry,” he reported to Jefferson, “the country is level and, on a space of about two miles each way, present [
sic
] a most elligible position for the first settlement of a grand City.” The panorama of flat woodland in front of him was bordered on one side by the Potomac River and extended to the northwest as far as Rock Creek, a stream dividing it off from the bustling streets of Georgetown. Behind him, the southeastern limit was provided by another, wider river known to settlers as the Eastern Branch, but by Native Americans as the Anakostia. L'Enfant is usually given the credit for envisioning the whole grand sweep of the city from the banks of the Eastern Branch to those of Rock Creek. Nevertheless, his initial sketch comprised a capital half that size stretching, as he had been instructed, no farther than Tyber Creek, today's Tidal Basin. The grandiose plan originated with the president himself.

Pierre L'Enfant

Washington's strategy—and he conducted the creation of the capital like a military campaign—was dictated by the need to purchase at a reasonable price whatever land was needed for the city from the existing owners. He appeared to have in mind two possible sites. “The competition for the location of the town now rests between the mouth of the Eastern Branch, and the lands on the river below and adjacent to Georgetown,” he wrote in February 1791. “In favour of the former, Nature has furnished powerful advantages [principally a deepwater harbor]. In favour of the latter is its vicinity to Georgetown.” Most of the land around the Eastern Branch belonged to Daniel Carroll of Duddington and his cousin Notley Young. Because they had patented some of the land for a settlement to be called Carrollsburg, Washington used to refer to them as “the Carrollsburg proprietors,” and his strategy depended on playing them off against the Georgetown proprietors, so that each group feared that the capital might be located on the other's land.

The order for L'Enfant to begin work at the Eastern Branch was motivated by the reluctance of some Georgetown proprietors to sell at a reasonable price. On March 2, Washington assured his associates that it was only a feint, so that “on seeing this operation begun at the Eastern branch, the proprietors nearer Georgetown who have hitherto refused to accommodate, will let themselves down to reasonable terms.”

The same tactics were then applied to the Carrollsburg owners, this time using an outline plan by Jefferson showing streets and buildings on a site nearer to Georgetown. Either site would have produced a capital measuring
around fifteen hundred acres, a size that Jefferson advised the president would be “sufficient.” But on March 28, when the president appeared in person to negotiate with the holdouts among the proprietors, it became clear that he wanted not one or the other but both, the mouth of the Eastern Branch
and
the lands adjacent to Georgetown, together with territory running inland from the Potomac for more than a mile, an area covering more than six thousand acres.

In a hard-nosed piece of real estate negotiation, he let both groups of proprietors understand that any delay in their agreement to the entire deal might “degear the measure altogether.” The threat was effective, and on March 31 Washington observed in his journal, “[They] saw the propriety of my observation … and mutually agreed to surrender for public purposes one half of the land they severally possessed … This business being thus happily finished and some direction given to the Commissioners, the Surveyor and Engineer with respect to the mode of laying out the district—I left Georgetown, dined in Alexandria and reached Mount Vernon in the evening.”

The three commissioners had the task of ensuring that the capital was ready for occupation by the year 1800 and were to play as crucial a role as the Surveyor and the Engineer. Each was Washington's handpicked choice. His personal representative, Dr. David Stuart from Alexandria, Virginia, was an old friend, quiet, well-read, and married to the widow of Washington's stepson. The legal expertise came from Thomas Johnson, a former governor of Maryland and owner of fifteen thousand acres in nearby Anne Arundell County, who had recently been appointed an associate justice of the Supreme Court and was often absent as a result. The real power lay with Daniel Carroll of Rock Creek, a congressman and a member of Maryland's wealthiest and most influential family. He was closely related to both Charles Carroll, generally acknowledged to be the richest man in the United States, and the Carrollsburg proprietors.

This family connection was seen as no more of an obstacle to Carroll's appointment than Washington's own financial interests. “
If the commissioners live near the place, they may in some instance be influenced by self interest and partialities
,” Jefferson acknowledged, “but they will push the work with zeal; if they are from distant and northwardly, they will be more impartial, but may affect delays.”

The success of the deal Washington had forced through depended entirely on the boom in land speculation. The proprietors agreed to sell land designated for public buildings and parks to the United States for about $67 an acre; land designated for streets, however, was to be given to the government, while land designated for houses would be split half and half between the government and the owners. The price for public building land yielded the proprietors a fair profit, but the real gain would come from the increase in the value of the house lots as more people flocked to live in the new capital. On its side, the government got the five hundred acres needed for public buildings for about $35,000 and stood to make such large profits on the sale of house lots that the entire operation might be self-financing.

In May, a pamphlet written by an Eastern Branch proprietor, George Walker, was published in London announcing that “the City of Washington [is] now building for the Metropolis of America.” Reminding his readers of the “immense fortunes” already made in U.S. real estate, the author predicted this to be “the next field for speculation in America.” Apparently no one considered what might happen if the boom came to an end.

Although he had approved L'Enfant's preliminary sketch, the president now wrote telling him to expand his ideas. “It will be of great importance to the public interest to comprehend as much ground (to be ceded by individuals) as there is any tolerable prospect of obtaining,” he advised his engineer on April 4. “Although it may not be immediately wanting, it will nevertheless encrease the Revenue.” In other words, he wanted as large a city as L'Enfant could imagine, and to L'Enfant's enduring fame, he imagined on a behemoth scale.

He pushed the “President's Palace,” as he termed the White House, farther toward Georgetown until it was a full mile northwest of “the Congress-house”; he created a broad mall running due west to the Potomac from the Capitol; he scattered fifteen great squares across the site to represent the fifteen states that by then made up the Union; he drew vast avenues radiating from the squares like the spokes of a wheel; and since all this was free land, he specified that each avenue should be double the usual breadth of a main street.

The nearest comparison to this gigantism was the new capital of St. Petersburg that another French architect, Jean-Baptiste Le Blond, had laid out across the swampy delta of the Neva River in 1717 for the Russian czar
Peter the Great. But his plans were confined to the land on either bank of the river closest to the island fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. Not even Czar Peter, an autocrat capable of conscripting a workforce of up to three hundred thousand people, thought of commissioning a design on the scale of that dreamed up by L'Enfant for his democratic patron.

Up to that time, the largest planned city in America was Philadelphia, a plain grid of streets that Thomas Holme had laid out on an arrowhead of land between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. Not only was L'Enfant's city approximately three times the size of Holme's, his inspiration was the infinitely more complex design devised by André Le Nôtre in 1663 for the gardens of
Versailles
, a series of focal points from which radiated paths and vistas connecting the farthest parts of the garden with one another. To complicate matters further, Washington's intricate deal made it of paramount importance to establish accurate plans showing not only streets, avenues, and house lots, but who already owned the land, and where the existing boundaries ran in this enormous construction site.