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wanted only what was best for his country. Such was the hysteria that greeted his triumph over the British that he could have had any tribute he cared to ask for – a kingship, a lavish life pension, his own Blenheim Palace on the Potomac. He asked only to be allowed to return to a quiet life at Mount Vernon. When elected President he requested Congress not to pay him a salary, but only to meet his expenses – a position all the more honourable when you consider that he was chronically hard up. ‘My estate for the last 11 years has not been able to make both ends meet,’ he wrote in despair to his cousin shortly before becoming President, and when he made the trip from Mount Vernon to New York to be sworn in, he had to borrow £100 to pay his costs.37 (Financial hardship was a common problem for Virginia planters. Jefferson was so chronically pressed for money that in 1815 he sold his beloved private library to Congress for a much needed $23,950, though he rather undid this achievement by almost immediately beginning to acquire another just as splendid. By the time of his death, he was over $100,000 in debt, and most of the contents of Monticello had to be auctioned off.)

Congress refused to heed Washington’s request and insisted he take a salary of $25,000 a year. It also did him the honour of allowing him to choose the site of the nation’s permanent capital – not so much out of altruism but more because it couldn’t decide on a location itself. At least forty sites had been considered and argued over, from Germantown, Pennsylvania, to Kingston, New York, before Washington was authorized to make his choice. He selected a ten-mile square alongside the Potomac River’s head of navigation. (In 1846 Virginia reclaimed the portion on its side of the river, which explains why the modern Washington has ruler-straight boundaries on three sides but an irregular wriggle on the fourth.) In 1791 the city-to-be was named Washington; the 6,100-acre tract within which it was situated was called the Territory of Columbia (eventually of course changed to District of Columbia), thus neatly enshrining in one place the two great mythic names of the age.

Two years later, Washington laid the cornerstone for the Capitol, and in 1800 the city of Washington opened for business. America was on its way.

5

By the Dawn’s Early Light: Forging a National Identity

Bombardments in the early nineteenth century provided a spectacle that must have been quite thrilling to anyone not on the receiving end. The art of the matter was to cut fuses to just the right length so that they would detonate at or near the moment of impact. In practice, they went off all over the place. Hence the ‘bombs bursting in air’ of the American national anthem. As most people know, the words to the anthem were inspired by the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbour during the War of 1812. Francis Scott Key, a young lawyer, had been sent to try to negotiate the release of an American prisoner, and found himself detained aboard a British man-of-war.

Through the night Key watched as the British fleet ranged round the harbour threw a colourful fusillade of explosives at the embattled fort. When dawn broke and Key saw the American flag still flying, tattered but defiant, he was sufficiently moved to dash off a poem. The poem was frankly terrible, but it bore an emotional impact easily forgotten at this remove. Published under the title ‘Defence of Fort M’Henry’, and set to the decidedly funereal tune of an English song called ‘To Anacreon in Heaven’ (the beat has since been considerably enlivened), it became a sensation. Soon almost everyone had forgotten its original title and was calling it ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, by which name it has been known ever since.

The flag that Key saw flying over Fort McHenry had fifteen stars and fifteen stripes. In the early years of independence, the custom was to add a star and a stripe to the flag each time a state joined the Union. By 1818 Congress was flying a flag with no fewer than eighteen stripes and it was becoming evident