Washington, D.C. -- Why???

[CalMeacham]

Aside from the past few years, it seems that every time I go to D.C. it's in the summer. This year I went there on vacation with Pepper Mill and MilliCal. Washington, D.C., in the summer, is the pits! It is unbelievably humid. And hot. And humid. Mostly, it's humid. I've been told it was built in a swamp. If not literally true, it's close enough.



Why, why, why, when they were laying out the Brand New Capitol of the New Republic, with all of that region to consider, with all of Virginia, if you believe some stories, why did they choose to put it in the Center of All Humidity? In an era well before air conditioners.

According to David McCullough's biography John Adamd, they had to have the fireploaces going full blast to keep the bedding and furniture dry, IN THE SUMMER!


Why, in the name of all that is reasonable, would the people of a new nation subject themselves to the hot and clingy climate, the paper that sticks to your hopelessly sweating arms, the smell and the stink (think eighteenth-nineteenth century plumbing. Think mainly horses for transporation). Why would they do this when they could have placed it a little farther uphill, away from the sweat and the dank and the mosquitos?

[cmkeller]

The reason is very simple. In addition to not having air conditioning back then, there was also no fast transportation. Having the government as centrally located as possible was important. And if you look at a map of the original 13 states, DC is pretty much dead center.

[OxyMoron]

Hmmm, is this really a GQ? Assuming there is one - the reason the capital wound up on the fetid shores of the Potomac can be traced to the Compromise of 1790 (http://www.gwu.edu/~ffcp/exhibit/p14/). Essentially, several Southern delegates agreed to a key funding (http://www.gwu.edu/~ffcp/exhibit/p13/) law that bailed out Northern states' debts, in exchange for locating the national capital in the South - specifically, the Potomac River near the existing town Georgetown. This area had already been considered as a cite as early as 1783 (http://www.gwu.edu/~ffcp/exhibit/p12/index.html).

The other realistic proposals were also pretty nasty in summer - on the Susquehanna near Philly, or even further south.

[CalMeacham]

The reason is very simple. In addition to not having air conditioning back then, there was also no fast transportation. Having the government as centrally located as possible was important. And if you look at a map of the original 13 states, DC is pretty much dead center.
__________________


This don' answer nothin'. I'm sure there were plenty of centrally-located sites that didn't have humidity so bad you have to wring out your clothes by lunchtime.

[David Simmons]

The preceding post don't really answer the question of why not move the 10 mile square enclave a few miles away from the swampy ground.

One would have to search obscure interoffice memos of the time and read the correspondence to find an answer which would doubtless still be challenged.

WAG. The new government had little money and more desirable land would have been more costly. Nobody wanted to marshes along the river so ....

[Giles]

Other factors would have been:
(1) It was close to George Washington's home at Mount Vernon.
(2) The site was a good one to build a port, at a time when a lot of the transportation between the different states was by sea, not by road.

[twickster]

The other realistic proposals were also pretty nasty in summer - on the Susquehanna near Philly, or even further south.

The Susquehanna doesn't run near Philly -- it's significantly further west.

[Ravenman]

This sounds fairly authoritative, despite the Geocities address: Link. (http://www.geocities.com/bobarnebeck/short.html)

With ratification of the Constitution competition for the site of the permanent residence of the government became intense when the first federal Congress met in New York City. It became the political football at the end of the first session with sites on the Potomac, Delaware, Susquehanna, as well as Baltimore, vying for the prize. By the middle of the second session of Congress it became clear that getting a bill through both houses of Congress would not be easy.Of course, as every American student is taught, the Compromise of 1790 settled the issue....

The law Congress passed, on July 26, 1790, left it entirely up to the president to decide where on the Potomac the capital should be.... The law Congress passed required the president to appoint three commissioners to oversee the development of the federal capital. But in deciding where to put the capital, Washington relied on the advice of his fellow Virginians Thomas Jefferson, then secretary of state, and James Madison, a congressional leader....

Three other sites seemed to get Washington's serious consideration, the area around Williamsport, Maryland, southwest of Hagerstown, an area near Sharpsburg, Maryland, and an area at the confluence of the Monocacy and Potomac southeast of Frederick, Maryland. In the debates on the permanent residence, James Madison, made much of the Potomac being a western river and implied that any capital on it would be on its western end. Washington visited the western sites and had maps drawn that showed water courses, springs, and land owners. He never revealed why he chose the site near Georgetown, nor, if that was his choice all along, why he explored the other sites. Perhaps it was to keep land owners on tenterhooks, prompting them to pledge lands to the government at a low price.

When Washington announced his decision on January 24, 1791, he showed a predilection for yoking together competing interests. He included both Georgetown and Alexandria in the federal district. Now he turned to his next decision. The law required him to put the public buildings on the Maryland side of the Potomac, but, with that caveat, he had to decide where in the ten mile square to lay out a city and the residence of the president and meeting place of Congress. He secretly utilized agents on the scene and put them in competition with each other. One agent tried to get the best offer he could from the landowners in and around Carrollsburg, or the eastern end of the district, and the other agents were to get the best offers possible from land owners around Hamburg....Washington's long held belief that the Potomac would be the principal avenue of commerce to and from the western United States, convinced him that the new city would grow rapidly.

[Ravenman]

Oh, and by the way, I am completely in favor of moving the summer capital of the United States to San Diego.

[ouryL]

Wasn't Washington, DC back then, :eek: a virtual ghost town during the most humid months?

[RiverRunner]

Oh, and by the way, I am completely in favor of moving the summer capital of the United States to San Diego.

Boy, shipping the Washington Monument back and forth is going to be a real bear.


RR

[Early Out]

While it's true that they were considering some other sites further upstream on the Potomac, it's important to note that just above Georgetown, one encounters Little Falls, and shortly upstream from that, Great Falls. While you can get around them via the C&O canal (and there are remnants of an earlier canal that, IIRC, George Washington had a hand in), only below those cataracts is the river itself navigable in anything larger than a canoe (especially during any sort of drought). In a time when water transportation was often the quickest way of getting to most places, that must have been a significant consideration.

[Early Out]

Wasn't Washington, DC back then, :eek: a virtual ghost town during the most humid months?It's often been said that DC was just a sleepy little southern town until WWII, when the combination of the explosive growth of the Federal government and the advent of air conditioning changed the picture. I'd wager that very little got done during the summer months before that era.

[RealityChuck]

Air conditioning is so ubiquitous that you're forgetting one important thing in your assumptions*: it didn't exist back then.

It would have been hot just about anywhere in the 13 colonies in the height of summer, and there would have been no good way to cool things down. People just were used to the heat (note that they went around in many layers of clothing and often wore wigs). It was something you lived with.

Do you really think the delegates from Georgia or South Carolina would think DC was all that different from their own homes in summer?

Ultimately, the climate wasn't a concern.

*I realize you know it didn't exist. But your question is posed by someone who is used to air conditioning and the tacit assumption is that those back then thought the same way as you do. As I often say, one of the most difficult things for people to understand is that people in the past thought differently than we do.

[adirondack_mike]

While it's true that they were considering some other sites further upstream on the Potomac, it's important to note that just above Georgetown, one encounters Little Falls, and shortly upstream from that, Great Falls. While you can get around them via the C&O canal (and there are remnants of an earlier canal that, IIRC, George Washington had a hand in), only below those cataracts is the river itself navigable in anything larger than a canoe (especially during any sort of drought). In a time when water transportation was often the quickest way of getting to most places, that must have been a significant consideration.

IOW DC is on the fall line - the furthest upriver navigable portion of a river from the ocean (or where the coastal plain meets the piedmont physiographic province). Cities on the fall line inclue Albany, NY and Harrisburg, PA.

I also remember reading (but can't cite) that the early congress only met in the spring and had business finished by the summertime.

[CalMeacham]

*I realize you know it didn't exist. But your question is posed by someone who is used to air conditioning and the tacit assumption is that those back then thought the same way as you do. As I often say, one of the most difficult things for people to understand is that people in the past thought differently than we do.


Get one thing straight, bub -- you don't know what or how I think.

And I've written for history journals.



You don't have to be used to air conditioning to know an uncomfortable climate when you encounter it. Writings back then are filled with descriptions of swamps as "unhealthy", and people would rather live in more comfortable regions if they could. Building fires in the summer to keep the furniture and sheets dry cannot have been anyone's idea of fun. So why build down there where it's hot and humid if you could avoid all that with different positioning? Baltimore, with its sea breezes and port location, would have been centrally located, comfortable, and have easy access to water transporation.

[paperbackwriter]

In addition to the reasons given in the prior posts, the possibilities for location were limited by a couple of parameters:
The location needed to be closer to the center of the infant nation than New York, Philadelphia, York (PA), and other early capitals.
The commission was avoiding established cities that were already large, important, politically-sensitive locations.
The location needed to be accessible by water.

The first parameter puts you in the Maryland-Virginia region. You'll notice that the locations mentioned in Ravenman's post are almost all on the Potomac.

The second parameter ruled out a number of locations like Baltimore, and Annapolis. They looked to other Chesapeake Bay estuary locations.

The third parameter eliminated locations farther up-country that would have been less oppressive in the summer.

IOW, whatever location chosen would have approximately the same summer climate. Having survived more than a couple ones there, the humidity is something you get used to. Summers in MA really aren't much less humid, after all.

[jsc1953]

This seems like a good place to repeat one of my favorite presidential quotes: JFK's assertion that Washington was a city that "combines Northern charm with Southern efficiency." A double-slam without even mentioning the weather.

[barbitu8]

Baltimore, with its sea breezes and port location, would have been centrally located, comfortable, and have easy access to water transporation.
I don't know about Baltimore, but here in Charleston, SC, sea breezes are of little help, and the little help they give is only if you live very close to the coast. Go out a few miles and instead of being a help, they will cause severe thunderstorms, in what is called "the seabreeze area." The hot air on the land, about 15 miles from the ocean, rises and the sea breezes come off the coast, laden with moisture.
It is not the swamp that causes the muggy weather. It's the tropical air coming off the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic.

Actually, in the summer mornings it is hotter near the ocean than away from it, since the sea surface temperature is in he mid-80s.

[SpartanDC]

If I'm not mistaken, it was also crucial that the capital be just a little bit inland so as to make it harder for invading armies to attack it. The British in 1812 did not get this memo. But that factor did rule out most of the major existing cities of the time.

Also, the Washington Post ran a story in its magazine not too long ago discussing how the election of 1877 and its protracted conclusion, for some reason, finally made the city seem legit in the eyes of most of of the nation, though DC would remain rather sleepy until the 1930s and, yes, would be all but deserted for large chunks of the year, especially the summer.

Before that time, there was considerable debate about moving the capital to an inland location. I think the story said that St. Louis was one of the proposed locations. After all, it would be centrally located not only between north and south, but also east and west, and still be accessible by water.

[OxyMoron]

Before that time, there was considerable debate about moving the capital to an inland location. I think the story said that St. Louis was one of the proposed locations. After all, it would be centrally located not only between north and south, but also east and west, and still be accessible by water.Oh joy - all the heat and humidity, but with more mosquitos and tornados. Nice. And in fact, I've heard the southern-effciency-northern-charm line applied to St. Louis, too.

Let's face it, the only way we'd get a city with a decent climate in all seasons is if we moved the capital to the Pacific coast. I'd prefer the Northwest - too much sunlight rots the brain, I think.

Waitaminnit, that might actually be a step up for our nation's leaders....San Diego, DC?

[dtilque]

I also remember reading (but can't cite) that the early congress only met in the spring and had business finished by the summertime.
You just have to look in the US Constitution to see that it specifies Congress will meet on the first Monday in December unless specified otherwise by law. This was changed by the 20th Amendment in 1933 to be the 3rd of January.

The reason for this was not because of the DC weather (DC hadn't been chosen yet when they wrote the Constitution) but rather that many Congressmen were expected to be farmers or plantation owners. Winter is the slack season for them.