Capital Moves to D.C.: U.S. Government Relocates

Federal clerks loaded crates of government documents onto wagons in Philadelphia during May 1800, beginning the transfer of the United States capital to a half-built city on the Potomac. The move to Washington, D.C., formalized by the Residence Act of 1790, fulfilled a compromise between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson that traded a southern capital for federal assumption of state debts from the Revolutionary War. The city that awaited the government bore little resemblance to Pierre L'Enfant's grand vision. Pennsylvania Avenue was an unpaved track through swampland. The Capitol building had only one wing completed. The President's House, later called the White House, was habitable but unfinished, surrounded by construction debris and workmen's shacks. Abigail Adams, arriving in November, famously hung laundry in the East Room because it was the only space large enough to dry clothes. President John Adams arrived in June and became the first president to govern from the new capital. Congress convened there for the first time in November. Diplomats accustomed to Philadelphia's urbane society found themselves in what one ambassador described as a "city of magnificent distances," where grand avenues connected widely spaced clusters of buildings separated by forest, marsh, and open fields. The choice of location was deeply political. Southern states had insisted on a capital below the Mason-Dixon line, away from the commercial power of northern cities. The Potomac site, carved from Maryland and Virginia, placed the government in a neutral zone between North and South. That geographic compromise held symbolic weight for sixty years until the Civil War shattered the fiction of sectional balance. The city itself grew slowly, not reaching a population of 100,000 until the 1860s.