Washington [454]
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.” 29 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.”30 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.”31 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.”32 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.33