The Fabric of America (17 page)

Even if L'Enfant had been the properly trained engineer Washington supposed him to be, he would have faced difficulties in realizing such an immense concept. But with no scientific training, no technical background, and no experience in drawing up accurate, scale maps, he was lost. His only surviving plan of the city, a sketch delivered to the president in August, consisted simply of ruled lines without compass points, descriptions, or any indication of scale. It is hardly surprising that to translate vision into reality, he should have depended utterly on Andrew Ellicott. What is astonishing, given the American's passion for order and the Frenchman's voluble flamboyance, was the warmth of their partnership. Like many others, Ellicott was charmed by L'Enfant's enthusiasm and imagination, and a warm working friendship quickly developed.

The first essential step was to make up for L'Enfant's lack of expertise. Ellicott had already assembled a team of axmen and four trained surveyors, and he promptly loaned the services of one of them, a professional engineer named Isaac Roberdeau, to help with the survey and act as L'Enfant's lieutenant. During the summer, Ellicott also took time from running the boundary of the federal district to measure the exact longitude and latitude of Jenkins Hill, where L'Enfant proposed to build the Congress-house, or Capitol. And in August, when L'Enfant raced back to Philadelphia to show the
president his plan, Sally received a letter from her husband telling her, “I expect my companion Major L'Enfant which is prounounced in English
Longfong
will pay you a visit in my name some time next week. He is a most worthy French Gentleman and though not one of the most handsome of men, he is from good Breeding and native politeness a first rate favourite among the ladies.”

Washington had ordered the first housing lots to be ready for sale in October 1791, a deadline that forced both men into a hectic schedule. Shortly after beginning work, Ellicott fell sick with flu, but Isaac Briggs, another of his assistants, reported that not even illness interfered with his early-morning start from Georgetown at the beginning of the week: “He used actually to arrive at our camp on the lines, at no less distance than seven miles from that town, on Monday morning before it was light enough to see distinctly without a candle. It was also his usual custom [during the week] to breakfast by candlelight in the morning; the labors of the day commenced before sunrise.”

The rushed timetable took its toll, especially in the woods where a track twenty feet wide had to be cleared along the territory's borders. “I have had a number of men killed this summer,” Ellicott reported mournfully, “one of whom was a worthy ingenious and truly valuable character. He has left a wife and three small children to lament his untimely fate.” After four months, the fifty-nine-year-old Benjamin Banneker found the pressure too much, and in May when Ellicott's youngest brother, Benjamin, arrived, he took the opportunity to return to the Patapsco.

Banneker already had copious calculations of the ephemerides necessary for an almanac, and during his time in the federal district he had picked up the need for order and accuracy that had become second nature to Ellicott. Before the summer was over, he delivered his figures to the Baltimore printer William Goddard, who was persuaded to publish it with the help of a letter of recommendation signed by no fewer than three Ellicotts, headed by Andrew. The following year,
Benjamin Banneker's Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia Almanac and Ephemeris for the year of our lord 1792
was published. Presented with this evidence of an African-American's abilities, Jefferson publicly shuffled back from his earlier assertions of black inferiority, allowing the possibility of “respectable intelligence in that race,” although privately he insinuated, quite wrongly, that the almanac was
produced with “aid from Ellicot[t], who was his neighbor and friend, and never missed an opportunity of puffing him.” His equivocations had no effect on the lasting fame that Banneker's almanac secured.

As the summer of 1791 turned to fall and the October deadline approached, Ellicott transferred his brother Benjamin to assist Roberdeau. Eventually he abandoned his own task of running the perimeter of the federal district and put himself, Briggs, and the entire Ellicott team to work on Pierre L'Enfant's survey.

Since the capital consisted of nothing more than surveyor's marks and walkways cut through the woods and undergrowth, potential customers had to have a map showing its proposed shape, otherwise they would, in the president's pithy phrase, be “buying a Pig in a Poke [sack].” In early September the city commissioners ordered an engraving to be made of the master plan in L'Enfant's possession and ten thousand copies printed. It was to be entitled “A Map of the City of Washington in the Territory of Columbia”—the first time that either the capital or the district had been named.

Until that moment, Washington had personally supervised the work, repeatedly visiting the site to talk through problems with both the Engineer and the Surveyor. Now the three commissioners took over. Since Johnson's duties as an associate justice of the Supreme Court frequently took him away from the federal district, Daniel Carroll became the lead figure. Long experience of land speculation, from a 1763 investment in the Mississippi Land Company through postwar deals in confiscated loyalist estates, had conditioned Carroll to regard the business of laying out the city as nothing more than a technical step in preparing the property for sale. It was no way to handle the temperamental L'Enfant.

The flash point came over the map of the city. The very idea of an early sale appalled L'Enfant because it would mean losing control over parts of the city before his masterpiece was complete. Despite the commissioners' peremptory orders, he adamantly refused to provide any kind of map, leaving possible purchasers with no option but to guess the shape of the city from the paths cut through the trees. After a three-day sale that was supposed to finance the rest of the survey, just thirty-five lots were sold for an average of $265 each.

Although disappointed, Washington was more inclined to blame the commissioners than L'Enfant. Gently, he suggested that they try consulting
rather than dictating, “because, from a source even less productive than L'Enfant's, may flow ideas that are capable of improvements; and because I have heard that Ellicot, who is also a man of uncommon talents in his way, and of a more placid temper, has intimated that no information had been required either from him, or L'Enfant.”

In response to the president's prodding, L'Enfant did finally produce a plan of the nation's capital, which was presented to Congress in December 1791. It was, however, drawn by Andrew Ellicott. Unlike the August sketch, this was an accurate map of the area with longitude and latitude carefully worked out, a specified scale, and a grid of streets running precisely north-south and east-west, and calibrated on the meridian and parallel that Ellicott had measured out from Capitol Hill. The streets were crossed by wide Le Nôtre–inspired avenues reaching to distant hubs—“Philadelphia griddled on Versailles,” as Jefferson described it—and the compass bearing of each one was exactly calculated and mapped.

Andrew Ellicott's plan of Washington, D.C.

Accompanying the map was an explanation in Ellicott's handwriting of the symbols and dimensions of the streets and avenues, and in case there was any doubt about its reliability, the map carried a characteristic declaration that began, “In order to execute the above plan, Mr Ellicott drew a true Meridian line by celestial observation,” and ended with the usual defensive assertion of the care taken: “He ran all the lines by a Transit Instrument, and determined the Acute Angles by actual measurement, and left nothing to the uncertainty of the Compass.”

The latitude of the Capitol was entered as 38° 53′ north, but instead of the correct longitude of 77° 3′ west, it appeared as 0° 0′ west. This was Ellicott's unilateral decision that the prime meridian from which the whole of the United States was to be measured should no longer run through London but through its new capital. Relating the coordinates of meridians and parallels to a point on the mainland rather than overseas allowed exact distances to be measured from the base point, but patriotism was Ellicott's prime motive. The measurement of the United States should, he felt, begin from its capital, and the borders of a dozen states undreamt of in his lifetime would be affected by his innovation.

On a more mundane and practical level, the map also showed that he had begun the vital task of marking out the lots whose sale was supposed to pay for the capital's development. The huge site was divided into more than eleven hundred squares, most of which were subdivided into housing lots, giving over fifteen thousand lots to be pegged out. As each square was marked with marble stones at the corners, its boundaries were entered on the surveyors' plats, then transferred to a large master plan, which symbolically remained in L'Enfant's hands. The success of Washington's plans for the city's development would rest on the use made of this document.

That November, L'Enfant decided to pull down a house being built by Daniel Carroll of Duddington, nephew of Carroll the commissioner, because it was found to project over a line showing where a square was to go. In the city's grand scheme, it was virtually irrelevant, and Ellicott believed the line could be adjusted without harm, but to L'Enfant the intrusion was a deliberate blemish on his masterpiece. He ordered Roberdeau to pull it down and, when the commissioners had Roberdeau arrested,
went in person to supervise the destruction of Carroll's building to a pile of rubble.

This violent reaction sprang from L'Enfant's discovery that Carroll the commissioner was actively aiding his relatives to retain strategic lots around the Capitol and the Eastern Branch so that the land could be sold as a package to land speculators in Europe and northern cities. As Washington himself put it, “One of the reasons for L'Enfant's reserve and delay in publishing his mature plan was his conviction that the Commissioners were willing to favor the real estate speculators more than they were willing to cooperate in establishing his plan.”

The federal government was less than two years old, and this was the first sale of federal land to individual buyers, but no one except L'Enfant would have been surprised to find such close ties between commissioners and speculators. The government of New York had favored Gorham, just as Pennsylvania acted for Nicholson and Morris. The federal authority could be assumed to do the same, and significantly even Washington did not censure the commissioners on that score. Speculation was the engine intended to drive forward the building of the capital, a fact that L'Enfant refused to accept. He had become an American citizen and changed his first name from Pierre to Peter, but he retained an entirely French belief that Washington was a transatlantic Louis XIV whose commands had to be obeyed. So far from being all-powerful, the chief executive was haunted by the fear that Congress would, if given the chance, strike down the Residence Act, and, as Washington told Stuart in 1792, “the Government will remain where it now is,” meaning in Philadelphia. A cultural shift into an American mind-set was required to appreciate the consequences of a president who felt too weak even to be confident of retaining his own federal district. It meant that he could not approach Congress for extra funds, and that if his ambitions for his gigantic capital were to be realized, the power of the speculation had to be harnessed rather than opposed.

In December, L'Enfant took down another house, this time belonging to Notley Young. “
He must know
there is a line beyond which he will not be suffered to go,” Washington exclaimed in exasperation to Jefferson. “Whether it is zeal—an impetuous temper or other motives that lead him to such blameable conduct I will not take upon me to decide—but be it what it will, it must be checked; or we shall have no Commissioners.” Jefferson
sent a final warning that L'Enfant had to respect the commissioners' instructions, but to no effect.

Early in 1792 L'Enfant presented the commissioners with a budget for developments in the coming year of over $1 million. Since their income from sales was barely $7,000, the commissioners rejected his proposals, but with magnificent disregard for anything but the beauty of his design, L'Enfant ordered Roberdeau to begin quarrying stone for the construction of the President's Palace and the Capitol. This time he had gone too far, and on February 27 Jefferson wrote to him, “I am instructed by the President to inform you that notwithstanding the desire he has entertained to preserve your agency in the business, the condition upon which it is done is inadmissable and your services must be at an end.”

What snapped Washington's patience was more than L'Enfant's waywardness. Sales demanded an accurate illustration of the site, and despite the existence of the December map, L'Enfant continued to refuse to produce a plan showing the housing lots for would-be customers. “Many weeks have been lost since you came to Philadelphia in obtaining a Plan for engraving,” Washington wrote the day after L'Enfant's dismissal, “notwithstanding the earnestness with which I requested it might be prepared on your first arrival. Further delay in this business is inadmissable.”