I took this book to DC last week so I could read up on the city's founding in detail as we'd be spending the week looking around the city. The book turned out to be a very interesting read, explaining a lot about the founding of the city that I didn't know. The biggest theme in the book was what a phenomenal speculative swindle the city was, since George Washington (who played a far larger role in the city's location and creation than I ever realized) had decided that rather than ask Congress for money, they would pay for the Capital and the president's house, as well as the necessary civic improvements, by selling lots. In the end, this proved to be such a disaster that Washington had to turn to Congress for money anyway, and it was only by the thinnest of margins (plus a fortuitous outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia that put a damper on thoughts of keeping the capital there) that the new country's capital was actually moved from Philadelphia to DC in late 1800. (Actually the entire theme of the book - of lofty plans, deeply flawed men and motives, back room compromises and bungled execution as often the best that a democratic society can expect of its government) was a good metaphor for a week in DC during the final negotiations for passage of the health care bill. That there was the same compromising and struggling to do something positive about something important - when there are deep divisions in what "positive" means - actually made me feel a lot better about what was going on around me. The place has seen it before - many times - and they eventually get it more right than wrong, although the process is often almost unbearably ugly to watch. There is a big picture, although you sometimes have to wait a century to get things fixed right - Washington certainly did - it didn't start becoming a legitimiate year-round city for almost a century after its founding)
The subtheme of the book is why the capital was put where it was, and Bordewich argues strenuously that slavery was the major factor. Southern lawmakers were increasingly uncomfortable with the nation's capital being in a free state, Pennsylvania, where their use of slaves was frowned upon and made more difficult. Washington, for exmaple, had two slaves run away when we was serving as President in that city, and the rest of the lawmakers (who had decidely more pro-slavery feelings than he did) were angry at being forced to defend the practice in a city that increasingly did not like it. Thus when Madison, Jefferson and others had the opportunity to trade their support for Alexander Hamilton's financial legislation for Northern support for a Southern capital, they did it, and placed the capital where Washington had always wanted it - on the banks of the Potomac. That suited GW because he was an investor in the Patowmack Land Company, but more importantly because he believed (incorrectly as it turned out) that the Potomac would provided the major artery of commerce to the west, thus tying the original colonies to the new territories west of the mountain, a major goal in the early years of the nation, when there were deep fears that the western territories would eventually ally themselves with Britain or France rather than the seaboard colonies. But more importantly, it placed the capital in between two slave states, Maryland and Virginia, where the practice of owning and using slaves was not unusual, and would be accepted.
Where Bordewich goes astray, in my opinion, is in his repeated sections of the books dealing with irrelevant aside about slavery, which had nothing to do with the creation of the capital. It is true that slavery played a major role in where the capital was placed, and that due to the absence or unwillingness of white labor to work in the new capital (which was about the least hospitable location in the country during its creation from 1970-1800) the builders had to rely on forced slave labor - and a lot of it. But the number of slaves in the district actually started dropping substantially after the capital moved there, from 19 percent to about four percent in 1850. Which means that Bordewich is overstating the contribution of slaves to the construction projects in the city at that time. It is largely accurate to say that slaves laid the foundations of Washington. It not not accurate to imply that they provided the bulk of the labor up through emancipation, which Bordewich implies. That there were slaves at all in the capital of a nation founded on freedom was morally intolerable, no matter the number. But that point doesn't require overstating the contribution of those slaves beyond what their numbers would show. Thus Bordewich's pointing out that a slave was responsible for casting the statue of Freedom on the Capitol during the war as an example of the role of slaves in the capital's labor force at that time was, in my opinion, misleading. It would have been better to use that as an example of how despite the decreasing role slave labor played, it never stopped providing jarring examples of the gap between what the capital stood for and what was actually happening there. A slave was casting the statue of Freedom that would crown the dome of the Capitol - what a thing to have happen.
The book has a particularly good section on the aftermath of the War of 1812 and the Civil War, when attempts were made to move the capital to a more defensible western location (St. Louis). The vote in Congress after the 1812 war was a narrow one, and even after the Civil War a majority might have been obtained, except that President Grant flatly refused to move the capital unless there were 2/3 majorities in favor.
I did enjoy the book, but I was deeply disappointed in the shortage of maps and illustrations that showed what was there before, what L'Enfant's plan was, and how it was changed. I really was hoping for a more geograhic analysis of what was there before, and what's there now. Fortunately I got it - in a way I'd never even dreamed - in the new Capitol Visitor's Center, which has about half a dozen large scale dioramas of Capitol Hill from the initial construction of one wing in 1800 through the present, showing graphically what was where when, and how the site turned from a wooded hilltop to a busy city center.