How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [80]
James K. Polk, as promised, was not a candidate.
VIRGINIA, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
ROBERT M. T. HUNTER
Cutting Washington Down to Size
Virginia is ready to receive these people back into her bosom, and they are ready and anxious to return. They desire to enjoy the rights of men, the privileges of free men. Can the American Congress fail to respect such a feeling?
—CONGRESSMAN ROBERT M. T. HUNTER1
In 1791 Andrew Ellicott and Benjamin Banneker marked off the boundaries of the District of Columbia: a square with ten-mile sides, straddling the Potomac River. It encompassed two municipalities (Georgetown and Alexandria), a federal enclave (Washington), and rural areas on either side of the Potomac (Alexandria County and Washington County).
Fifty-five years later, President James K. Polk signed away the entire section of the nation’s capital on the Potomac’s southern side, returning it to Virginia. In reaction, one newspaper in the North wrote:
The Senate has passed, by a majority of more than two to one, the bill which passed the House the 8th of May, retroceding the city and county of Alexandria, D.C. to Virginia.
The Democrats of Maine have nominated John W. Dana, of Fryeburg, as their candidate for governor.2
District of Columbia, 1790-1846
In the South, by comparison, a Mississippi paper wrote:
In the Senate, on the 2nd inst., the bill taking the city of Alexandria from the District of Columbia and giving it to the State of Virginia passed.
In the House, on the 3rd, McKay’s tariff bill passed.3
Hello? Was anyone paying attention?
This 1846 legislation was initiated by Virginia Congressman Robert M. T. Hunter. His success, however, culminated efforts that had begun more than forty years earlier. The seeming indifference of the press is misleading. It had been covering these efforts for decades. As early as 1803, Washington, DC’s National Intelligencer reported on the problem of the federal government running the District of Columbia.4 That year and the next, Congress vigorously debated the return of areas ceded to the federal government for the creation of a nation’s capital. The Annals of Congress record that Virginia Congressman John Randolph “believed the interests of the several parts of the [District of Columbia] were as hostile as any in the Union, as it was manifest there was an Alexandria, a Georgetown, and a city interest.… He therefore thought it expedient to retrocede all the territory, excepting the City of Washington.”
Robert M. T. Hunter (1809-1887) (photo credit 24.1)
While the preponderance of the speakers debated whether or not “retrocession” was constitutional, all agreed with Massachusetts Congressman John Bacon that “the exercise of exclusive legislation [for running the District of Columbia] would take up a great deal of time, and produce a great expense to the nation.… It was likely that as much time would be spent in legislating for this District as for the whole United States.”
Years later, Hunter repeated Randolph’s and Bacon’s concerns, amplified now since they had become established facts:
We have three cities in this District, each aspiring to be great, and all desiring to open up communications to the sources of their trade.… They have shared unequally in the appropriations.… Go look at [Alexandria’s] declining commerce, her deserted buildings, and her almost forsaken harbor. Look to the waste of natural advantages and opportunities in that town, suffering not from the blight of God, but the neglect of man.… We have not done all that might have been done for those who depend upon us for the necessary care which this government alone can bestow.
Because Congress indeed had its hands full running the country, it had given scant and uneven attention to the District of Columbia.