Why are so many State capitals NOT the biggest city in the state?

Factual Questions
1

Currently, 33 US State capitals are not the biggest city in their respective states. I understand that many of them WERE at the time they became capitals. But many were not, and the decision to eschew the metropolis, and instead house the capital in some podunk nowhere is baffling. I’m thinking specifically of Harrisburg, PA. Philadelphia was the state capial until 1799, at which time it was the most populous city in the country. Harrisburg wasn’t even incorporated until 1791, and as far as I can tell, it was just a couple of huts and a ferry crossing out in the scrubs when the state government decided to make it the capital.

Why would they do this? Why move the government away from the people? Is there some military advantage to having your capital separated from your major popluation center? Really? Or is the government fearing revolution from the city rabble? Or does it just have to do with the governing body wanting its own space?

Pennsylvania isn’t the only confusing one.

Jefferson City, MO - State since 1821. Capital since 1826. Why not St Louis, which was the capital from 1812-1826? Jefferson City was just a tiny trading post and it wasn’t even incorporated as a city until 1839. St Louis was huge at that time.

Albany, NY - State since 1776 (1788?). Capital since 1797. Why not NYC? It was the capital of the colony, etc. for several hundred years, and was the state capital for much of the 21 years before they moved it to Albany. I understand that Albany has a long important history, but why didn’t they keep the capital in the city that was big/important enough to host George Washington’s inauguration?

Sacramento, CA - State since 1850. Capital since 1854. Why not San Fransisco? Yes, the gold rush was much closer to Sacramento, but wasn’t the population center still closer to the coast?

(In case you’re wondering, the states whose largest cities and capitals are not the same are: Alabama, Alaska, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakoda, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virgina, Washington, and Wisconsin)

2

I’ve wondered about this myself. In the cases where the largest and (by several arguments) most important cities in the states are the capitals, people’s reaction is “of course”. So with Boston, Massachusetts, or Salt Lake City, Utah, or Providence, Rhode Island. It’s hard to imagine any other cities being the capital.
But Springfield, Illinois? My cousin was a state senator there once. He lived up near Chicago, and had to practically go into exile to serve his term at the other end of the state.

3

We just did this exact question not that long ago.

The basic answer is that your premise is flawed. The largest cities in the state don’t have any claim to being the state capital. The reverse is more often true. The capital of New York is Albany largely because it isn’t New York city. Geographical issues are also at play especially in the older days. New York City is not even near the bulk of New York State by area and the good people of Upstate New York need someone watching out for them as well. Many states moved their capitals over the years as well due to politics or changing conditions. Some of it is just luck where they ended up.

However, being the largest city in the state is a prime reason why it wouldn’t get to be the capital. Designating another city as the capital spreads the wealth so to speak and minimizes the co-mingling of state and city interests.

4

Also, many times the capital was chosen with the idea of being centrally located so as to appease the rural constituencies of the legislators, or to try and encourage settlement inward.

5

Baton Rouge is now the largest city in Louisiana in the post-Katrina era. Strike that one from your lists. It illustrates how things can change over time as well.

6

Although Columbus is no longer a small city, it was specifically chosen as a blank spot near the geographic center of the state. It was a balance between the populated areas in the north and south of the state. Neither region wanted the other to have an advantage in influence.

7

Think big town–small town / rural hostilities. The state capitol is (generally) designated by the state legislature. When the state leg was not elected on a one-man-one-vote basis, the leg was dominated by rural interests who would be damned if they were going to give any more power to the big city fat cats than they had already.

In my state the capitol moved three times with the advance of the frontier – from Burlington on the Mississippi where the first settlements were established, to Iowa City (which still has the beautiful Greek Revival “Old Capitol” building), and finally to Des Moines which is more-or-less in the middle of the state and is the largest city – to some extent by virtue of being the state capitol.

I suspect that Ohio happened from a combination of the two approaches. Columbus is in the middle of the state and it isn’t Cincinnati and it isn’t Cleveland. Springfield may be the capitol of Illinois for the same sort of reasons.

8

Also, sometimes they wanted to do the “fresh start” thing, away from the huge population center so they can’t say it controls everything, do a planned city, etc. Columbia here was a planned city, designed as the capitol when Charleston was where it was at. See also: Brazilia.

ETA - geography isn’t always obvious - not only is Columbia in the middle of the state, not only was it somewhere with not much there so you could plan it however you liked - it’s also by the fall line, which is generally the highest easily navigable point on the river and the point beyond which it’s harder to use water power for mills and such.

9

The metro area for New Orleans is still far larger than the metro area for Baton Rouge, and that’s crucial in every conceivable way that’s important.

Centrality is a huge issue. Large cities overwhelmingly tend to be on a coastline. The Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, the Great Lakes, the Pacific, or - inland - on major rivers, which are often boundaries rather than state bisectors. Putting the capital elsewhere almost always made them closer to the bulk of the state’s voters.

Don’t forget that when the U.S. started, about 95% of the population lived on farms. By the Civil War, that figure was still probably two-thirds. Large cities got all the attention but in only a few states held the bulk of the population. Legislatures were almost universally gerrymandered so that rural districts had a disproportionate share of the representation. They usually hated the big cities, the people who lived there - a much higher percentage of immigrants and other “thems,” and the urban industrial/financial forces that had such control over their lives.

We think today that cities are everything, but for most of the 18th and 19th centuries, cities were denounced as sinkholes of iniquity, lacking real American values. Small towns represented America at its finest. The American farmer was an ideal, even if few people elsewhere wanted to do the work themselves.

Besides, large central cities were emblematic of Europe, its royalty, its palaces, its decadence, and the evils that Americans had left behind.

Everything in the culture of the country worked against cities until the 20th century. Now, ironically, people apotheosize cities and demonize suburbs. It’s the same cultural trend at work, only in reverse.

10

For most of the history of Ohio, Columbus has not been the largest city, and it’s still not the largest metro area (Cleveland is the largest metro area). Columbus has grown in population partly because people have been attracted to the capital, and partly because the City of Columbus has aggressively annexed territory (so that it now stretches into three counties), while Cincinnati and Cleveland have not been able to annex territory in the same way.

And neither Cincinnati nor Cleveland have been the capital: earlier capitals have been Chillicothe and Zanesville, both relatively close to the centre of the state.

11

An excellent summary of Ohio’s capital history, Giles. In the cases of both Columbus and Montpelier, Vt. (which then and now is far from being the biggest city in the state), the city fathers also made an attractive offer to the legislature in terms of free land and subsidizing the construction of a new state capitol building, IIRC.

And on a slight tangent… in his 1960 Look magazine alternative-history article “How the South Won the Civil War,” Mackinlay Cantor posited that after the Rebs captured Washington, D.C. and a peace treaty was signed, Congress voted to move the national capital to Columbus, which was dubbed the “District of New Columbia,” while Cleveland became the state capital. Short of cash because of moving costs, Uncle Sam wasn’t able to buy Alaska when the Russians offered it.

12

Whoops. I did several searches and didn’t come up with anything. Could you provide a link?

This is an interesting one. When Springfield was made capital, Chicago had a population under 500. I assume that inertia took over before Chicago was a major transportation hub.

13

What is up with the state capitals?

14

Los Angeles! If Los Angeles were the capital, it would be easy for our gubernator Arnold to still appear in action movies!

15

We leave it in Juneau in the hopes that one plane crash will kill them all.

16

harrisburg is middle-ish of pa. the rose between the thorns of pitts. and phila.

the keystone of the keystone state.

17

Sacramento is the capital of California for a reason. It gives Los Angeles and San Francisco a mutual enemy. Someone they can hate, other than each other.

18

It’s not limited to the USA of course, or to state capitals as opposed to national capitals. Look at Australia, with its capital at Canberra instead of Sydney; or the former West Germany which had its capital in Bonn. (Come to that, what about Washington DC, which was built from scratch to be the US capital and was far smaller than the major US cities for much of its history?)

In all these cases, the idea seems to have been to avoid a concentration of power and wealth in one place. The big cities had the economic clout so the political clout had to be located elsewhere.

19

If a state has two or more major cities, locating the capital somewhere else can avoid conflict. Canberra was made the capital of Australia to avoid a fight between Melbourne and Sydney for that honor.

20

Most importantly, DC is exactly between the North and the South, and not considered part of either. It is not in any state. It doesn’t have Congressional voting power (but that may change soon).