Washington: A Life (130 page)

Thomas Jefferson helped to arrange for publication of
The Rights of Man
in Philadelphia, telling the printer that he was “extremely pleased to find it will be reprinted here and that something is at length to be publicly said against the political heresies which have sprung up among us.”
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Jefferson professed amazement when the printer used this letter as a preface to Paine’s work. Since Jefferson’s reference to “political heresies” was widely construed as a swipe at the supposed crypto-monarchism of John Adams’s treatise
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it created a brouhaha. The mortified Jefferson wrote a long, repentant letter to Washington, claiming that his letter had been used without permission and denying any intention to vilify the vice president. Washington’s failure to acknowledge Jefferson’s apology suggests his silent fury. Jefferson’s own letters to Paine reflect his fear of highly placed monarchists in Washington’s administration who were “preaching up and panting after an English constitution of king, lords, and commons and whose heads are itching for crowns, coronets, and mitres.”
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Because of the controversy over Paine’s work, Washington responded to his letter with a blandly evasive reply. He pleaded the pressing duties of office and his imminent return to Mount Vernon as reasons why he couldn’t react in detail: “Let it suffice, therefore, at this time to say that I rejoice in the information of your personal prosperity and … that it is the first wish of my heart that the enlightened policy of the present age may diffuse to all men those blessings to which they are entitled and lay the foundation of happiness for future generations.”
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Washington had a matchless talent for skirting unwanted controversies.

In June 1791 King Louis XVI and the royal family fled Paris in disguise—the king dressed as a valet, the queen as the children’s governess—only to be stopped and arrested by Lafayette’s National Guard at Varennes, northeast of Paris. Although Lafayette duly informed the king and queen that the National Assembly had placed them under a full-time guard, he was nonetheless denounced as a traitor on the Paris streets, and Danton accused him of engineering the royal family’s escape. The underground press in France went so far as to caricature Lafayette in pornographic poses with Marie-Antoinette. These events dimmed any hope for a constitutional monarchy. Jefferson delivered to Washington the stunning news from Paris. “I never saw him so much dejected by any event in my life,” Jefferson reported of his reaction.
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A crestfallen Lafayette was dismayed by the behavior of the royal couple, lamenting that Marie-Antoinette was “more concerned about looking beautiful in the face of danger than about staving it off.”
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In September 1792 the monarchy would be abolished. Beset by terrible premonitions, Washington was extremely concerned about Lafayette’s endangered position and, in a letter to him, identified a cardinal characteristic of the French Revolution that especially upset him: the urban mob. “The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded,” he wrote. “Their indiscriminate violence prostrates for the time all public authority, and its consequences are sometimes extensive and terrible.”
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In October 1791 Lafayette resigned from the National Guard and retreated to the rural serenity of his home, the Château Chavaniac. He sent Washington a letter that breathed contentment, as if his troubles had suddenly evaporated. “After fifteen years of revolution, I am profiting from a new and agreeable life of calm in the mountains where I was born.”
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Given the turbulent events unfolding in Paris, this peaceful interlude was fated to be of short duration.

EVEN AS WASHINGTON worriedly tracked events in France, he had to deal with a brilliant, charming, but difficult Frenchman at home. Though historians often pin the label of military engineer or architect on Major Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, he had trained as a painter at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris. At twenty-two, he joined the Continental Army with other French volunteers, forming part of the engineering corps, and sketched soldiers at Valley Forge. After the war he had turned New York’s City Hall into Federal Hall, establishing his credentials as a talented architect. As early as September 1789 he proposed himself to Washington as designer of the new federal capital. A peerless judge of talent, Washington soon grasped L’Enfant’s visionary powers, but their relationship was never smooth.

A portrait of L’Enfant shows a man with a coolly superior air. With an imagination shaped by the courts, palaces, and public works of Europe, L’Enfant would be hotheaded and autocratic in negotiating the intricacies of the new capital. Hypersensitive, with a touch of grandiosity, he was the perfect man to hatch a dream but not to implement it. It was characteristic of Washington that L’Enfant’s hauteur did not deter him; the president had faith in his ability to control even the most intractable personalities and extract the best from them. His checkered relationship with L’Enfant was a classic encounter between a consummate pragmatist and an uncompromising dreamer.

In early 1791 Washington asked L’Enfant to review the grounds selected for the new capital and identify the most promising sites for the chief government buildings. Local proprietors had already granted the president sweeping powers to shape the city. “The President shall have the sole power of directing the Federal City to be laid off in what manner he pleases,” they agreed. “He may retain any number of squares he may think proper for public improvements or other public uses.”
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On March 28, at the outset of his southern tour, Washington met with L’Enfant, who laid before him a rough pencil sketch of the new capital. He envisioned the seat of Congress on the brow of the highest wood, a steep spot called Jenkins Hill, which he praised as “a pedestal waiting for a superstructure.”
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This building would be the visual centerpiece of the city, with broad, diagonal thoroughfares radiating outward. Its centrality bore an unmistakable message about the primacy of the people’s branch of government. Rejecting a simple grid for the capital as “tiresome and insipid,” he argued that such a pattern made sense only for flat cities.
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Not only would diagonal streets provide “contrast and variety,” but they would serve as express lanes, shortening the distance between places.
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Town squares would be situated where diagonal avenues crossed. The kernel of the future Washington, D.C., lay in that conception. Striking a note of buoyant optimism that appealed to the president, L’Enfant wanted the city to be able to grow in size and beauty as “the wealth of the nation will permit it to pursue, at any period, however remote.”
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Aside from trimming the number of diagonal streets, Washington gave L’Enfant an unrestricted hand to pursue his plan. At the close of his southern tour, he rode across the federal district with L’Enfant and Andrew Ellicott to experience the elevations chosen for Congress and other public buildings. While he endorsed Jenkins Hill for Congress, he balked at a site chosen for the executive mansion and opted for higher ground farther west, thereby asserting executive power and giving it visual parity with the Capitol. In endorsing the spot for the future White House, L’Enfant cunningly played to Washington’s interests by observing that it would possess an “extensive view down the Potomac, with a prospect of the whole harbor and town of Alexandria”—that is, it would face Mount Vernon.
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The entire project gratified Washington’s vanity on another level: people assumed that the new city would be named either Washington or Washingtonople. In September Washington learned that the commissioners had indeed decided, without fanfare, to call the city Washington and the surrounding district Columbia, giving birth to Washington, D.C. Washington would never have signed the original Residence Act had the capital then been called Washington—it would have seemed supremely vain—but now he was merely acceding to the will of the three bureaucrats he had appointed.

That October Washington sneaked in a monthlong stay at Mount Vernon before Congress reconvened. The health of his tubercular nephew and estate manager, George Augustine Washington, had deteriorated so sharply that he had gone to Berkeley Springs for rest. He was a likable young man who pleased many visitors; one praised his “gentle manner and interesting face” and another described him as a “handsome, genteel, attentive man.”
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By this point, however, he could scarcely ride a horse, much less manage an estate, and Washington named his secretary, Robert Lewis, as temporary manager of Mount Vernon. Lewis would eventually be succeeded by Anthony Whitting.

In the federal district L’Enfant, schooled in a European tradition where master builders ruled entire projects, refused to take direction from anyone. The first lots were auctioned off in Georgetown on October 17, with Jefferson and Madison in attendance; L’Enfant declined to show anyone his map, afraid that buyers would shun parcels in sections distant from the main government buildings. The most he deigned to share with bidders was a verbal description of the town layout. Washington had expected to be on hand for the three-day sale but was caught in an embarrassing error. In planning his return trip to Philadelphia, he knew that Congress would meet the fourth Friday of October, which he calculated as October 31. He was mortified to discover that he had miscalculated and that Congress would meet October 24. “I had no more idea of this than I had of its being doomsday,” he told Tobias Lear.
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Thrown for a loop, he departed hastily for Philadelphia to give his annual address to Congress and arrived in time to deliver an upbeat assessment of the state of the Union, noting “the happy effects of that revival of confidence, public as well as private, to which the Constitution and laws of the United States have so eminently contributed.”
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L’Enfant had been instructed to bring to Philadelphia a plan of the federal city, which Washington would submit to Congress with his annual message, but the mercurial Frenchman never delivered it.

In late October the three commissioners informed Washington that L’Enfant’s high-handed refusal to turn over his plans had impeded the auction; scarcely more than thirty lots had been sold. Washington replied angrily that while he had suspected that L’Enfant might be obstinate in defending his plan, he had not thought he would go so far as to sabotage the sale. Clearly L’Enfant would make no concessions to attract real estate speculators and considered himself answerable only to the president. His feud with the commissioners festered. At one point, when L’Enfant demolished a building erected by a commissioner because it intruded on one of his grand avenues, the clash erupted into open warfare. Washington confidentially told Jefferson that he could tolerate the French prima donna up to a point, but “
he must know
there is a line beyond which he will not be suffered to go.”
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Much as he hated losing L’Enfant, Washington knew that, unless he reined him in tightly, he might lose his three commissioners. He had Jefferson draft a stern reprimand to the Frenchman, to be sent out under his own signature. “Having the beauty and harmony of your plan only in view,” Washington wrote, “you pursue it as if every person and thing was
obliged
to yield to it, whereas the commissioners have many circumstances to attend to, some of which, perhaps, may be unknown to you.”
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L’Enfant seriously misread Washington, who wanted harmony and cooperation among those involved in planning the new capital. In January 1792 the self-important L’Enfant submitted a lengthy memorandum to Washington, which was a barefaced attempt to push aside the commissioners and take sole control of the project. After proposing a one-million-dollar expenditure and a workforce of a thousand men, L’Enfant ended by saying, “It is necessary to place under the authority of one single director all those employed in the execution.”
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Washington grew apoplectic. “The conduct of Maj[o]r L’Enfant and those employed under him astonishes me beyond measure!” he told Jefferson, who drew up an ultimatum in which he asked L’Enfant point-blank whether he intended to subordinate himself to the commissioners.
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Always eager to compromise, Washington sent Tobias Lear to patch things up with L’Enfant, but the latter blustered that he needed complete freedom from the commissioners. On February 27, 1792, bowing to the inevitable, Jefferson terminated L’Enfant’s services. Washington ended up feeling bitter toward L’Enfant for his imperious treatment of the commissioners. Nevertheless, the broad strokes of L’Enfant’s design for Washington, D.C., left their imprint on the city. As John Adams concluded years later, “Washington, Jefferson, and L’Enfant were the triumvirate who planned the city, the capitol, and the prince’s palace.”
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Philadelphia’s citizens were by no means resigned to their city being only a temporary capital and continued to throw up new government buildings, hoping to sway legislators to stay. When they tried constructing a new presidential residence, Washington saw their secret intent and insisted that his current house was perfectly satisfactory. Sensing an even split in public opinion about moving the capital to the Potomac, he divulged his fears to Jefferson: “The current in
this
city sets so strongly against the Federal City that I believe nothing that
can
be avoided will ever be accomplished in it.”
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Washington grew paranoid about the wily Philadelphians, even imagining that local printers stalled in producing engraved designs of the Potomac capital. Any delays, he feared, might doom the enterprise. He pressed for buildings in the District of Columbia that would foreshadow America’s future might and rival the great cities of Europe. “The buildings, especially the Capitol, ought to be upon a scale far superior to anything in
this
country,” he insisted to Jefferson. The house for the president should be both “chaste” and “capacious.”
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In time the city of Washington would come to justify the grandiose dimensions envisioned by both Washington and L’Enfant.