It was also a refuge for religious dissenters, a dump for convicts, or a meeting ground for adventurers from different empires. From very early on, the different settler colonies within the imperial territory mattered, and secession polities had to respect and balance them. This, it came to be viewed, could be achieved only by creating new capital centres.
Within this category, we have to distinguish three groups. First, there is pioneering Washington, capital of a state of ruptural secession by a war of independence, capital of a slavery state and with a very weak and vulnerable indigenous population. Second, there are the capitals of the three White Dominions, with a very gradual emancipation from the motherland, all without slavery and two with marginal Native populations: Ottawa, Wellington and Canberra. Third, there is the capital of the finally failed settler state, Pretoria, South Africa.
The thirteen American rebel colonies seceding from the British Empire were divided into two economic and cultural blocs, North and South, centred on the significance of slavery, which was the basis of the Southern plantation economy. At first the United States had an itinerant Congress; in 1783 it opted to have two capitals: one in southern Virginia, the other in northern Delaware. A statue of the victorious commander-in-chief General George Washington, was proposed that would be transported between the cities.1
The following year’s Congress selected New York City as its permanent site, but Southerners, including George Washington, started to intrigue against it. Finally, in 1787, a deal about the handling of the national debt secured Northern support for a Southern solution. President Washington was authorized to select an area on the Potomac River (near his home) and commissioners to build a new ‘Federal District’ to be opened by 1800. In September 1791 the commissioners decided that the district should be called Columbia – an oblique way of referring to the European background of the settlers, although Columbus never reached any part of what became the United States. The city itself was to be called Washington.* The President engaged a recent French immigrant, the painter and engineer Pierre-Charles l’Enfant, who had grown up at Versailles, to make a plan for the city.
L’Enfant made a grandiose Baroque plan: a grid with diagonal grand avenues 160 feet wide and roundabouts meant to include monumental landmarks. It had two central nodes, the President’s House and Congress House, the latter soon being given precedence, up on a hill. The two were to be connected by a Grand Traverse Avenue while forming a great triangle, of which the Avenue was to make up the hypotenuse; the Capitol, the President’s House and a Washington Monument would be the three corners, connected by parks as the two smaller sides of the triangle. The central diagonal avenue was named Pennsylvania Avenue, a kind of consolation prize to the main state of the North, which lost the location battle. The federal character of the capital is further emphasized in all the other original main avenues being named after states.
L’Enfant was explicitly planning a ‘Capital of [a] vast Empire’. It took about a century for it to be realized, revived by a Senate Planning Commission of 1902. Congress was always stingy with city finances, and most of the capital’s construction had to be financed by land sales.2
The Supreme Court had no place in the original plan; it did not emerge as a major power until the 1830s, and in spite of its significance ever since and its late, stately building, it has never been properly fitted into the city plan. A major building L’Enfant did plan, on the other hand, was never realized: halfway between President and Congress he had envisaged a non-denominational church and a kind of pantheon for the heroes of the nation.3 Persistent American religiosity has spawned a large number of houses of worship in central Washington, but religious pluralism has not favoured religious monumentality. Only since 1990 has there been one such claim, the Episcopalian Washington National Cathedral, the building of which Congress authorized a century earlier.
When L’Enfant couldn’t (or wouldn’t) produce the engravings of advertising for the land auctions of city plots – the United States already being a country of capitalist commerce – Washington fired him. Thomas Jefferson, Washington’s secretary of state and the third president, became the major architectural influence, which meant, inter alia, ‘antiquity’ for Congress and ‘modern’ for the President’s House.
Jefferson did not at all share L’Enfant’s and Washington’s grand ambitions for the city, which he always referred to as the ‘federal town’. Jefferson oversaw the Capitol building and the President’s House, but for the rest he was very restrictive with respect to the capital. For principled moral reasons, Jefferson was basically anti-urban. In his view, big cities were ‘pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberty of man’,4 and he did not want Washington to resemble the ‘overgrown’ cities of the North, like Philadelphia and New York.5 The vast Federal District and its city remained, in fact, a rustic area of separate villages for more than half a century, until the Civil War, largely due to frugal policy but also because the big geo-economic plans of George Washington and other Virginia gentlemen dried up. The Potomac silted up and was out-competed by Northern connections to the west, and Baltimore outdid Washington as a port.6 Charles Dickens, who visited Washington in 1842, found the Capitol a ‘fine building’ but was full of contempt for the rest: ‘Spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete’. But he was wrong in his conclusion: ‘Such as it is, it is likely to remain’.7
Jefferson’s idea of a government town was actually part of a virtually unique US configuration of seats of political power. Most US state capitals are not the largest cities of their states, and many are not even big cities. For instance, the capital of New York State is Albany; of Michigan it is Lansing, not Detroit; of Illinois, Springfield, not Chicago. California’s capital is Sacramento; Texas’s is Austin; Florida’s Tallahassee and Pennsylvania’s Harrisburg. These are all political decisions, not effects of uneven socio-economic city development. Motives were mixed, but basically rooted in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century varieties of fear of and hostility to big private interests, power and/or unruliness. Urban-rural conflicts have been a constant of US politics since then, refuelled by White suburbanization and the Blackening and Browning of metropolitan cities.8
The Southern location of the US capital brought one feature of settler city characteristics to the fore: racism. The great African American intellectual and community leader Frederick Douglass gave a lecture on ‘our National Capital City’ in the hopeful years of the mid-1870s, after the military defeat of the slave-holding South, in which he spelled out what the Southernness of Washington meant before the Civil War’s outcome:
Sandwiched between two of the oldest slave states, each of which was a nursery and a hot-bed of slavery … pervaded by manners, morals, politics, and religion peculiar to a slave-holding community, the inhabitants of the National Capital were from first to last, frantically and fanatically sectional. It was southern in all its sympathies and national only in name. Until the war, it neither tolerated freedom of speech nor of the press.9
Slaves made up a fifth of Washington’s population in 1800, and the Capitol Building was partly constructed by slave labour.10 By 1860, Blacks made up 18 per cent of the city, most of them freed.11 Washington, until recently, was never a major port of immigration, and immigrant communities left less impact on the capital than on many other settler-state cities. There were a few, though: The German Schützenfest became the city’s second festive event, after the Fourth of July, and the Societá Culturale Italiana donated a statue of Garibaldi to Congress.12
The Natives had been killed or expelled, and in 1853 the major figure of Native ethnic cleansing in the first century of the United States, the military hero and president Andrew Jackson, was honoured by the nation’s first equestrian statue.* But the African American issue soon returned, after the Emancipation decade following the Civil War. From about 1880 until the New Deal, the situation of African Americans steadily deteriorated, politically and legally. Washingtonians
