Joseph J. Ellis (13 page)

The case Madison had tried to make for the Potomac was simultaneously crafty and driven by romantic illusions about its prowess that were shared by Jefferson, Washington, and most members of the Virginia dynasty. In the crafty vein, Madison was ingenious at contesting the strongest argument for a Pennsylvania location, which was its geographic centrality. (The Pennsylvanians were not devoid of craft either, arguing that the Susquehanna River was destined to become the center of the United States because the trans-Mississippi West would never enter the union and eastern Canada almost surely would.) Madison countered that centrality could be measured demographically as well as geographically, so they should await the results of the census of 1790 before deciding. Then he argued that a purely geographic measure on a north-south axis revealed that the exact midpoint between northern Maine and southern Georgia was not just the Potomac; it was Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon, a revelation calculated to carry providential overtones.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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