Washington [545]
During the summer of 1797 he had toured the fledgling city and thrilled to the sight of its rising buildings. The President’s House and one wing of the Capitol stood ready to receive their roofs, while an “elegant bridge” had been thrown across the Potomac. 7 Where construction of the new capital had appealed to Washington’s imagination, President Adams groaned under the unwanted burden. “The whole of this business is new to me,” he complained, telling one commissioner that he would not “make himself a slave to the Federal City; that he would do what his official duty required of him and no more.”8 Washington gladly stepped into the vacuum and even submitted his views on architectural details, as when he advised that the Senate chamber should feature Ionic columns. With a clear vision of how the city should function, he insisted that executive departments should be situated near the President’s House to facilitate daily contact between department heads and the president.
As proof of his unswerving commitment to the city, Washington purchased lots in various locations to avoid accusations of favoritism toward any section. After hearing criticism that the neighborhood near the Capitol would lack housing for congressmen, he bought adjoining parcels on North Capitol Street, between B and C streets, and constructed a pair of attached three-story brick houses designed by Dr. William Thornton. Boasting that they stood upon “a larger scale than any in the vicinity of the Capitol,” he said they would be capable of housing “between twenty and thirty boarders”—an excellent example of Washington’s take-charge spirit.
Much as its backers had intended, the new capital was a southern city that would be hospitable to slavery, and it continued to owe its existence to slave labor. Noting the arduous work involved in draining swampland, one commissioner admitted that the project “could not have [been] done without slaves.”9 Five slave carpenters now labored over the President’s House, and future presidents who lived there, starting with Jefferson, would enjoy the residence in undisturbed possession of their human property. When Julian Niemcewicz toured the Capitol in 1798, it pained him to see slaves hard at work: “I have seen them in large numbers, and I was very glad that these poor unfortunates earned eight to ten dollars per week. My joy was not long lived. I am told that they were not working for themselves; their masters hire them out and retain all the money for themselves. What humanity! What a country of liberty.”10 For many decades, Washington, D.C., would qualify as a work in progress. George Washington never lived to see John Adams occupy a still-unfinished, sparsely furnished President’s House. As he had feared, congressmen complained about the incomplete Capitol and inadequate lodgings, and the huge Capitol dome was completed only during the Civil War. For a long time the Capitol and President’s House stood out as splendid but incongruous fragments in a still barren landscape; only later would the city expand to fill the spacious contours of Washington’s buoyant dream.
DESPITE HIS CHILDLESS STATE, Washington had enjoyed a happy, abundant family life, having first stepchildren and then stepgrandchildren while also serving as guardian for numerous family orphans at Mount Vernon. After his sister, Betty, died, he had brought her son Lawrence, a childless widower, to Mount Vernon