Washington [455]
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.36 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.”37 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.38 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.”39 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