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?
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.
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. Essentially, several Southern delegates agreed to a key funding 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.
The other realistic proposals were also pretty nasty in summer - on the Susquehanna near Philly, or even further south.
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.
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 …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.