Founding Brothers (11 page)

The more
romantic case for the Potomac entered the debate during Madison’s initial
speech against the Susquehanna site. He seemed to argue, contrary to common
sense and the visual evidence provided by all maps, that the Potomac was
actually farther west than the Susquehanna. What he seemed to mean was that the
upper reaches of the Potomac near the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, where the
Conococheague Creek emptied into the Potomac, was nearly as far west as the
Susquehanna and—here was the grand Virginian illusion—afforded the
only direct water route to the Ohio Valley and through its river system to the
Mississippi itself. The mention of Conococheague Creek provoked waves of
sarcasm from incredulous congressmen: “Enquiries will be made,”
observed one Massachusetts member, “where in the name of common sense is
Connogochque?” (And, he might have added, how does one spell it?) The
consensus outside Virginia seemed to be that “not one person in a
thousand in the United States knows that there is such a place on earth,”
and those few who did were all Indians. Madison’s preferred location for
the national capital was a “wigwam place” suitable for hunting
parties and hermits.
³⁷

While
Madison was probably stretching the truth for his Potomac-driven political
purposes, it was nevertheless a truth that he and many Virginians sincerely
believed. For nearly a decade, Jefferson and Washington had corresponded about
making navigation improvements in the Potomac on the presumption that it
afforded a direct link between the vast American interior and the Chesapeake
Bay. The misconception drew its inspiration from the same combination of
soaring hope and geographic ignorance that subsequently led Jefferson to
believe that the Lewis and Clark expedition would discover a water route across
the North American continent where none existed. One could trace the illusory
properties of the Potomac’s waters all the way back to John Smith, who
first explored the mouth of what the Algonquin Indians had named
“Petomek,” meaning “trading place,” in 1608. For
Virginians of the revolutionary generation, the myth of the Potomac probably
derived its credibility from the colonial era, when the lack of any border to
Virginia’s western provinces—theoretically and legally, Virginia
extended to either the Mississippi or the Pacific Ocean—caused a habit of
mind to develop within the Old Dominion that it was America’s gateway to
the West. Once established, the myth developed a rather hilarious life of its
own, to include publications like
Potomac Magazine,
in which the
Potomac was described as the Thames, the Seine, and the Rhine rolled into one
and the confluence of the Potomac and the Anacostia was thought the
world’s most perfect harbor, where “10,000 ships the size of
Noah’s ark” could comfortably dock.
³⁸

Unfortunately for Madison, the Potomac mythology was largely confined to
Virginians. Fisher Ames of Massachusetts spoke for those congressmen denied the
vision when he said that the customarily sensible Madison had obviously come
under some biblical spell and had confused the Potomac with “a Euphrates
flowing through paradise.” The Virginians were certainly free to dream
their provincial Potomac dreams, but meanwhile the Congress should proceed to
the serious business of selecting a national capital located in this world
rather than in Madison’s imagination. By June of 1790, Madison himself
had just about given up hope. “If any arrangement should be made that
will answer our wishes,” he confessed, “it will be the effect of a
coincidence of causes as fortuitous as it will be propitious.” And this,
of course, is where the fortuitous prospect of a bargain entered the
picture.
³⁹

W
E CANNOT
know how many secret meetings
and political dinners occurred in New York during the late spring and early
summer of 1790. We do know that Jefferson’s famous dinner was not, as he
implied, the only such occasion. First, Hamilton’s chief assistant in the
Treasury Department, Tench Coxe, met with Jefferson and Madison on June 6,
presumably to discuss Virginia’s debt and the impact of assumption on the
state’s balance of payments to the federal government; second, around the
same time Hamilton met with members of the Pennsylvania delegation to negotiate
a trade of their support for assumption—Hamilton’s overwhelming
priority—in return for the location of both the temporary and permanent
capital in their state, a trade that never materialized because Hamilton could
not deliver the votes to assure Pennsylvania’s victory in the residency
sweepstakes; third, and most significantly, delegates from Virginia and
Pennsylvania met on June 15 and agreed on a political alliance whereby
Philadelphia would become the temporary capital and—a major triumph for
the Virginians—the Potomac site was resurrected as the permanent
residence, a compromise the Pennsylvania delegates probably accepted out of the
conviction that, once the capital moved from New York to Philadelphia, it would
never move again. Doubtless there were several additional dinners, clandestine
meetings, and secret sessions that have escaped the historical record. But the
ones we do know about demonstrate conclusively that the compromise reached over
Jefferson’s dinner table was really the final chapter in an ongoing
negotiation that came together because the ground had already been
prepared.
⁴⁰

More
specifically, Jefferson’s account of the dinner-table conversation
distorts the truth by conveniently eliminating the preliminary negotiations,
thereby giving the story a more romantic gloss by implying that three prominent
leaders could solve an apparently intractable national problem by establishing
the proper atmospherics. The Potomac location for the permanent capital had, in
fact, already been secured. Hamilton did not need to deliver any votes on that
score, though there is some evidence he agreed to help seal the Potomac deal by
urging his friends in New York and Massachusetts not to spoil it. Madison did
need to come up with at least three votes on assumption—here
Jefferson’s account is accurate—and eventually four members
switched their votes, all of them congressmen from districts bordering on the
Potomac. The major business of the evening, in all likelihood, was an agreement
to recalculate Virginia’s debt and corresponding share of the enlarged
federal debt. In effect, Madison got what he had always demanded: settlement
before assumption. And Hamilton did what he had unofficially implied he would
do all along: manipulate the numbers to make the Virginians more comfortable
with assumption.
⁴¹

This last
dimension of the deal was not terribly attractive, so Jefferson left it out of
his account altogether. But he immediately sent out letters to his Virginia
friends, confiding that the new version of the Assumption Bill would reduce the
state’s total obligation so that the debt assumed and the federal taxes
owed would turn out, rather miraculously, exactly equal ($3.5 million).
“Being therefore to receive exactly what she is to pay,” he
observed triumphantly, “she will neither win nor lose by the
measure.” Assumption, in effect, would be a wash. The total financial
package, moreover, once the Potomac location was factored into the equations,
should make most Virginians smile. For the proximity of the new capital,
Jefferson predicted, “will vivify our agriculture and commerce by
circulating thro’ our state an additional sum every year of half a
million dollars.” Jefferson was only guessing, of course, and the larger
significance of the Potomac site transcended any merely economic forecast, but
his initial gloss on the bargain had substantive merit: It was a three-sided
deal—residence, revised assumption, and settlement—and Virginia won
on each score.
⁴²

But would
the bargain actually hold? Jefferson and Madison made their greatest
contribution, not during the dinner itself, but in the months afterward, when
they assured that the answer to that question remained resolutely positive. The
sudden victory of the Potomac location had surprised almost everybody, since it
had fallen to the bottom of the list in the spring of 1790, then somehow bobbed
to the top again without any congressional debate. As a result, despite the
passage of the Residency Bill in July, there was a widespread skepticism about
a capital, as one New York wag put it, “Where the houses and kitchens are
yet to be framed / The trees to be felled, and the streets to be
named.” The Philadelphia press was particularly incredulous, declaring
that it was “abhorrent to common sense to suppose they are to have a
place dug out of the rocky wilderness, for the use of Congress only four months
in the year and all the rest of the time to be inhabited by wild beasts.”
The consensus in Congress was clear that, once ensconced in Philadelphia, the
capital would never move to some deserted and wholly hypothetical place:
“It will be generally viewed … as a mere political
maneuver,” observed one congressman. “You might as well induce a
belief that you are in earnest by inserting Mississippi, Detroit, or
Winnipiprocket Pond as Connogocheque.”
⁴³

The strategy
that Jefferson and Madison adopted was elegantly effective and thoroughly
imperialistic. One senses Madison’s matchless political savvy at work
throughout the process, but also a preview of Jefferson’s defiantly bold
behavior thirteen years later in pushing through the Louisiana Purchase. The
key strategic insight was that the residency question must never again be
allowed to come before Congress, where it was certain to fall victim to the
political version of death by a thousand cuts. Jefferson was particularly clear
on this point: “if the present occasion of securing the Federal seat on
the Patowmack should be lost, it could never more be regained [and therefore]
it would be dangerous to rely on any aids from Congress or the assemblies of
Virginia or Maryland, and that therefore measures should be adopted to carry
the residence bill into execution without recourse to those bodies.” But
how could one do that, since the funds to purchase the land, the selection of
the specific site, the appointment of an architect, and a host of unforeseeable
but inevitable practicalities would seem to require legislative approval? The
answer recalled the earliest advice half-jokingly offered by a newspaper editor
when the residency question had first appeared on the national agenda: Give the
decision to George Washington. Jefferson proposed in August of 1790 that the
entire series of subsequent decisions about the location, size, and shape of
the capital be made a matter of executive discretion, that is “subject to
the President’s direction in every point.”
⁴⁴

While
congressmen continued to make sarcastic jokes about the uncertain location of
the theoretical Potomac site—why not put the new capital on wheels and
roll it from place to place?—Jefferson and Madison were tramping up and
down the Maryland and Virginia countryside assessing the terrain. Washington
listened to their report, then made the decision in January of 1791—the
hundred-square-mile area stretching east from Georgetown to the mouth of the
Potomac. Jefferson noticed that Washington seemed “unusually
reticent” about his choice, probably because Mount Vernon adjoined the
site and Washington also owned considerable acreage within its borders. He
might also have felt somewhat uncomfortable knowing that this easternmost
option contradicted the impression that Madison had created in the earlier
debates—namely, that a more western location near the Pennsylvania border
was preferred. (The Pennsylvanians, who had conceded the Potomac choice on the
presumption of its proximity, were surely disappointed. Perhaps naming the
central street in the new capital Pennsylvania Avenue was Washington’s
gesture of accommodation.) At any rate, the decision was made. And it was
final. And no one in America was prepared to question a decision made by
Washington, at least publicly, when rendered so summarily.
⁴⁵

Every step
in the decade-long process of designing and building the city predestined to
carry his name was supervised by Washington. Like a military operation, it had
many troops but only one commander. In late fall of 1790, Jefferson wrote
Washington about the political urgency of starting construction as soon as
possible: “Mr. Madison and myself have endeavored to press … the
expediency of their undertaking to build ten good private dwellings a year, for
ten years, in the new city.… Should they do this … it will be one
means of ensuring the removal of government thither.” Once the buildings
were up, in other words, Philadelphia’s hopes would collapse. In a speech
delivered as the Residency Bill was being passed in the House, Madison had
noted that many observers fully expected the Potomac choice to be repealed and
the capital to remain at Philadelphia: “But what more can we do than pass
a law for this purpose?” he asked rhetorically, since “A repeal is
a thing against which no provision can be made.” Then he concluded,
“But I flatter myself that some respect will be paid to the public
interest, and to the plighted faith of the government.” By making the
implementation an executive action headed by Washington, Jefferson and Madison
demonstrated that, “plighted faith” notwithstanding, they were
taking no chances.
⁴⁶

On the other
side of the dinner-table bargain, however, they had already taken a calculated
risk by betting that more favorable financial terms, plus the capture of the
permanent capital, would undermine Virginia’s powerful aversion to
assumption. Several friends south of the Potomac had warned them that the
widespread hostility toward Hamilton’s financial plan defied compromise
of any sort. “The Assumption under any Modification will I fear be
Considered as a Bitter pill in this State,” ran one typical account, and
“Arguments of Accommodation will have but little Avail.” The old
Antifederalist coalition that Madison had opposed so effectively at the
Virginia ratifying convention in 1788 believed with some justification that
their cause had never really been defeated, merely outmaneuvered. Under the
renewed leadership of Patrick Henry, with an able assist from Henry Lee, this
powerful group mobilized against assumption in the fall of 1790 and pushed a
resolution through both branches of the Virginia legislature in December. It
brought together the old revolutionary rhetoric, even deploying some familiar
Jeffersonian language, with all the oppositional energy of the Whig tradition,
then hurled it at assumption as the new incarnation of foreign domination. Like
the previous attempts by Parliament, assumption was described as a threat to
Virginia’s independence and “a measure which … must in the
course of human events, produce one or other of two evils, the prostration of
agriculture at the feet of commerce, or a change in the present form of federal
government, fatal to the existence of American liberty.”
⁴⁷