From the history of Washington

In Washington, more than anywhere else, the visitor is amidst history. The city was created for a definite purpose — to provide a permanent seat of national government.

During the Revolutionary period several cities were the seat of the Continental Congress at different times. The need for a per­manent seat of a national government becoming imperative, the Congress considered propositions from various sections. After years of bitter conflict, the Residence bill was passed in 1790, giving the right to select a site for the future capital somewhere in the Potomac region.

By the beginning of the 18th century most of the lands on the Potomac had been taken up and peopled by some of the most aris­tocratic families of the South. Tobacco had brought vast wealth to the planters of Virginia and Maryland, and the abundance of slaves had given them enough time for leisure: card parties, hunting, horse races, athletic sports. General Washington recol­lects that his family did not once sit down to dinner alone for 20 years.

But these landowners did not comprise the whole of humanity in Colonial Virginia and Maryland. There were many small plant­ers who worked the less fertile lands themselves. They could not, like the rich planters, deliver their crops to English agents. The large landowners, therefore, became traders, buying the tobacco of their poorer neighbours. There was also a rather considerable mechanical and labor class, mostly persons sent over from Eng­land. But Negro slaves constituted by far the largest population group in the region.

This was the region in which President Washington decided to set the national capital. Congress had no money to invest in such a project. In 1790, the President met local landowners and per­suaded them to sell any land the Nation might need as sites for public buildings and to permit the remainder of the proposed city to be divided into lots¹ and sold.

Pierre L'Enfant, well tho­ught of by Washington, offered his assistance in creating the capital. The French engineer saw deeply and clearly into the future. In planning a city of American government he plan­ned also a great community which he knew would develop here since the government was here. The original design is still visible in the plan which he inscribed upon the woods and marshes of the region.

All seemed well. But the landowners were amazed by L'Enfant's planning. To their mind, wide streets and avenues meant throwing away land that could be sold as city lots. After the conflict with Daniel Car-roll, the largest landowner of the Federal region, the planner was dismissed. For his services in planning the city L'Enfant was offered 2500 dollars and a lot near the White House, both of which he refused. He died, impover­ished and broken-spirited, in 1825. 84 years later his body was removed from his grave and buried with honors in Arlington Cemetery².

Little progress was made during the course of years that fol­lowed L'Enfant's dismissal. Throughout at least the first half-century of its existence, Washington was but little more than a southern village with scarce houses, most of them miserable huts, and muddy streets.

To Charles Dickens, Washington in 1842 consisted of "spa­cious avenues that begin in nothing and lead nowhere, streets a mile long that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants... One might fancy the season over, and most of the houses gone out of town for ever with their masters".

Only by the middle of the twentieth century it had become an important world capital.

Дата добавления: 2015-09-03