The Fabric of America (18 page)

Despairing of the Frenchman, Jefferson asked Andrew Ellicott in mid-February to produce a map, and although L'Enfant refused to let him see the master plan, Ellicott was able to put a map of the capital in the president's hands just ten days later. “In this business we met with difficulties of a very serious nature,” Ellicott reported to the commissioners on February 23, 1792. “Major L'Enfant refused us the use of the original! What his motives were, God knows.—The plan which we have furnished, I believe will be found to answer the ground better than the large one in the Major's hands.”

The authorship of this February map was to prove pivotal in the legends that rapidly grew about the capital's foundation. It could hardly have been otherwise, since it became the official plan on which the city was based. The first of the legends was that Banneker enabled Ellicott to produce the map by remembering every detail of L'Enfant's master plan, but since the African-American had left nine months earlier, this tale, however charming, is make-believe. More enduring was the story that Ellicott had stolen L'Enfant's plan and passed it off as his own. His February map certainly bore
the formula “To execute this plan, Mr Ellicott drew a true Meridian,” etc., while L'Enfant's name was omitted, but exactly the same words had first appeared on the map they had jointly produced in December, without any reference to L'Enfant's contribution, and L'Enfant had not objected. The phrase was not a claim to authorship but to accuracy. Finally the legend that the city's shape was dictated by a desire to incorporate into it Freemason symbols is equally fanciful, for although many of those concerned in building the city were Masons, including Washington and Commissioner Stuart, neither of the two people responsible for its design, L'Enfant and Ellicott, was among their number.

The most immediate effect of Ellicott's map was to destroy the men's yearlong partnership. L'Enfant felt himself betrayed and bitterly attacked his former friend for producing a map that “is now most unmercifully spoiled and altered from the original plan to a degree indeed evidently tending to disgrace me and ridicule the very undertaking.” For almost a century, the truth of his complaint could not be checked because the December map disappeared, although Washington did confirm that “many alterations have been made from L'Enfant's plan,” some of which were suggested by himself and Jefferson. When the map was rediscovered in 1887, however, the similarities appeared more obvious than the differences. There was the same central triangle formed by the Capitol, White House, and Mall, and the same grid of streets overlaid on spokes radiating from hubs scattered across the city.

This resemblance was hardly surprising. Ellicott had drawn the earlier map, he and L'Enfant had collaborated throughout in translating ideas into workable blueprints on the ground and on the page, and because Ellicott's team had primarily been responsible for laying out the city, he had copies of all the survey plats. As Washington expressed it to Congress, “Had it not been for the materials which [Ellicott] happened to possess, it is probable that no engraving from L'Enfant's draughts ever would have been exhibited to the public.”

A closer examination, however, reveals the sort of changes that would have infuriated L'Enfant. Massachusetts Avenue was straightened out, South Carolina Avenue was extended, the total number of avenues was reduced and their alignment simplified, the area round the President's House was enlarged, gardens at the center of hubs were omitted, and the general
appearance was tightened. But easily the most striking change was that the avenues were named for the first time. Since L'Enfant had never suggested any titles, and Washington and Jefferson would surely have named the capital's chief highway after their own home state, Andrew Ellicott must have the credit for giving the United States' most famous street its name, Pennsylvania Avenue. Nevertheless, in the eyes of the president the innovation that really mattered was that the squares containing the all-important housing lots were at last numbered and laid out ready for sale.

Writing to the commissioners in March 1792, the president suggested there was really only one candidate to take L'Enfant's place: “A better than Mr. Ellicott for all matters, at present, can not be had. No one I presume, can lay out the ground with more accuracy, lay out the squares, and divide them into lots better. He must understand levelling [calculation of heights] also perfectly, and has, I suppose competent skill in the conducting of Water. Beyond these, your opportunities to form an opinion of him must exceed mine. I believe he is obliging, and he would be perfectly Subordinate. What he asks, five dollars a day (if Sundays are included) seems high, but whether a fit character can be had for less I am unable to say.”

The hint was enough, and the commissioners duly hired Ellicott in L'Enfant's place. Bearing the title of superintendent, he set about harnessing the engine of speculation with a plan to sell off first the commercially valuable lots closest to Georgetown and the Eastern Branch. To ensure the integrity of the design, the lots in the central area between the Capitol and White House were to be held back until the public buildings were constructed. While the Georgetown and Eastern Branch lots were being measured out, Ellicott returned to defining the last lines of the perimeter. Before the summer was finished, the building of the President's House began, not to L'Enfant's design as originally intended, but following a plan incorporating a pillared façade and graceful symmetry submitted by the architect James Hoban. To preserve the site of Notley Young's house, Ellicott altered L'Enfant's plan again by moving the Capitol two hundred yards farther east, a favor for which the commissioners were duly grateful.

For six months the honeymoon persisted, with each side commending the other—“We have told Majr. Ellicott that we wish an opportunity, to make him a present at the Close of the work for his Expedition in doing it,” the commissioners confided to Jefferson in the summer, and Ellicott assured
the secretary of state that “in my opinion [the commissioners] have conducted their business with judgment, and firmness.”

The harmony did not survive a second disastrous sale of house lots in October 1792. With just fifty-two lots sold, most at the Georgetown end, the simmering jealousy between the two sets of proprietors came to a boil. In a fading market, each side became desperate to obtain any advantage available. Georgetown seemed to be favored by Ellicott because the lots at their end of the site were measured and numbered first, but Carrollsburg held a trump card because, as L'Enfant once confided to Jefferson, “it seemed to be the sole object of the [commissioners] to benefit their interest.”

Following the October sale, the commissioners, particularly Carroll and Stuart, began to criticize Ellicott for his slowness in marking out the lots. Loftily Ellicott dismissed their complaints as not having “even the shadow of a phantom for a foundation,” but privately he shared L'Enfant's opinion about their real motives. “They never could be taught to distinguish between the President's House, Hotel and Capitol on the plan,” he pointed out wearily to William Thornton, the Capitol's designer. “Mr Carroll [the commissioner], however, was enabled to point out Notley Young's and Daniel Carroll's lots which are much less conspicuous!!”

During the summer, a new surveyor and former slave dealer, James Dermott, was hired on the recommendation of David Stuart. An increasing number of slaves were being taken on for construction work, and part of the reason for Dermott's employment was that Ellicott refused to employ slaves himself. A confidential report noted that Dermott “now and then drinks to access [
sic
], and when enebrated [
sic
] … is unruly and quarrelsome.” He was, however, the commissioners' man and, following the failure of the October sale, proved ruthless in favoring the Carrollsburg proprietors at the expense of Georgetown.

Soon after the new surveyor was taken on, Ellicott became convinced that Dermott was tampering with the master plan of the city's lots, and sabotaging the markers that delineated the house lots on the ground. Significantly they all concerned the squares nearest to Georgetown. To prove his suspicions, Ellicott demanded that Dermott hand over his city plans for comparison with the master plan and refused to authorize payment of his wages until he complied. On February 6, 1793, Dermott at last agreed to bring the papers round, but that night Ellicott's offices were broken into,
and the master plan together with his astronomical calculations were stolen.

Thereafter matters rapidly descended into chaos. Ellicott bluntly accused Dermott of theft, only to be blamed himself by the commissioners for alterations and inaccuracies. When they ordered Ellicott to hand over all his papers, he refused on the grounds that Dermott had stolen them. The argument culminated with the commissioners demanding that Ellicott withdraw “a severe charge for which he ought to be well grounded before he made it.” In a fury, he gave them notice of his intention to quit, and when they fired him anyway, the crew came out on strike in his support. By March 1793 work on the site had come to a complete halt, at which point both Washington and Jefferson intervened to require Ellicott's reinstatement.

The results were apparent from a jubilant letter Ellicott scribbled to Sally on April 10: “My victory was complete, and all my men reinstated in the City, after a suspension of one month. As my reputation depended on the determination, I neglected nothing in my power to defeat the Commissioners, but had to contend very unequally oweing to all my papers being seized by their order the day after I returned from Philadelphia. And this day they were all restored to me again!!!”

His return was greeted by cheers from the Georgetown proprietors, but the real victors in the struggle were the Carrollsburg owners. Dermott was kept on the payroll, and with Washington's agreement the commissioners took money from construction of the President's House in the west to begin building the Capitol in the east. In a change of unambiguous symbolism, the Capitol was constructed to face not toward the President's House, but toward the Eastern Branch and the commercial district due to grow up on land owned by the Carrolls and Youngs. Their success appeared to be sealed by the arrival in Washington that summer of one of the United States' richest men, the young Bostonian James Greenleaf. He came with the stated intention of buying no fewer than twenty-five hundred lots, all at the eastern end of the site.

Convinced that his position had become impossible, Ellicott left Isaac Briggs in charge of the survey and returned home. “Where you are is all my happiness,” he told his wife, “and if I can manage matters in such a manner as to be able to support you as you deserve without leaving you again, you may rest assured that my arms shall enfold you every night.”

In Washington the triumph of the Carrolls seemed complete. The twenty-eight-year-old Greenleaf offered to pay $480,000 over seven years, split roughly half and half between the government and the Carroll and Young families. In addition he promised to build ten houses a year. He kept his word to the point of building twenty houses in the next two years on a knuckle of land pushing into the Potomac now known as Greenleaf 's Point. With the President's House rising from its foundations, the Capitol's cornerstone laid, a hotel for congressmen being built, and the Treasury and Mint in the pipeline, the capital was apparently beginning to take tangible form.

Appearances were deceptive. In bleak reality the engine George Washington had relied on to drive the development of his capital had run out of power. Ever since the federal government had taken on the states' debts in 1790, the value of paper money had been growing. Once it became clear that a $100 bill was backed by the federal government, it rose in value from $20 to $90, then to face value. That killed the instant profit speculators were accustomed to make from buying land worth $100 with paper money worth one fifth as much. As demand in the United States slackened, speculators turned to Europe as a market and briefly found Dutch and British financiers ready to invest in American land. But in 1792, European interest started to wane when revolutionary France declared war on Austria. One year later, Britain and Spain were drawn into the conflict, and suddenly there was no more British finance. Frightened by the hostilities, Holland's financiers also drew in their horns. In 1793 when Greenleaf made a fund-raising visit to Europe, he was sent away empty-handed.

In desperation Greenleaf brought in the two giants of the land market, Robert Morris and John Nicholson, to finance the capital's development. They persuaded Thomas Law, a wealthy British merchant, to buy five hundred Washington lots for $155,000, but the full deal was never carried through. Nothing could revive the market. When one Georgetown proprietor, Samuel Blodgett, tried to raise money for development by running a lottery with housing lots as prizes, it had to be canceled due to lack of interest. All along the Atlantic coast, land speculators were in retreat. Morris and Nicholson bought one another's stock with promissory notes bearing a face value of $2,000 and a street value of nothing. The shares that Green-leaf received for his Washington investment paid no interest, and the lots
that Andrew Ellicott had marked out so carefully disappeared into the ownership of a web of interweaving companies and trusts whose only assets were one another's worthless paper.

In 1795 the first set of commissioners were replaced, and soon afterward Dermott returned to trading slaves. Except for the White House, the Capitol, and a cluster of buildings at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, development gradually closed down. Almost the last to read the writing on the wall was Daniel Carroll of Duddington, nephew of the commissioner and owner of fourteen hundred acres due south of the Capitol. His cousin Notley Young sold to Greenleaf for what he could get, but Carroll was determined to make a killing and hung on for a higher price. When bankruptcy forced both Morris and Nicholson behind bars in Philadelphia's plush Prune Street prison—“a hotel with grated doors,” to use Morris's nonchalant phrase—the better part of Washington's eastern end was tied up in a legal maze that kept lawyers busy for half a century. Carroll died almost penniless.