Thanks to the musical “Hamilton,” we should all be familiar now with how the nation’s capital wound up on the banks of the Potomac River. If not, it’s time to take a listen to “The Room Where It Happens,” which dramatizes how Alexander Hamilton agreed to back the Potomac location if Thomas Jefferson and James Madison provided the votes for Hamilton’s plan for the national government to assume state debt (and thereby establish credit in the marketplace).
The decision on where to locate the national capital was one that bedeviled the rudimentary federal government that existed under the post-Revolution Articles of Confederation. The seat of government moved around more often than a modern-day sports franchise without a stadium deal — from Philadelphia to Princeton, New Jersey, to Annapolis, Maryland, to Trenton, New Jersey, and eventually to New York City.
All those were temporary residences. States battled over how far north or south the permanent capital should be — Kingston, New York, was the northernmost suggestion; Norfolk and Williamsburg in Virginia were the southernmost. There was also a proposal for a more western location, to put the capital farther inland where it would be safer from foreign invasion and acknowledge the nation’s western expansion. The specific suggestion was Marietta in what was then still the Northwest Territory but today is Ohio.
In the end, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison cut their deal and, nearly two and a half centuries later, the consequence is that the northern counties of Virginia — once farmland — are today suburbs of a capital city. All that is the story we know. Here’s the story that many don’t — and that has not been turned into a hit song from a Broadway musical: After the Civil War, there was a serious attempt to move the nation’s capital to St. Louis, closer to the physical center of the country. Not just to declare St. Louis the capital, but to physically disassemble the White House, the Capitol and other government buildings and ship them by rail to St. Louis.
Had that happened, Virginia would look very different than it does today. Northern Virginia would not be the state’s most populous region, or its main source of tax revenues. Without Northern Virginia, the state would be poorer — and more conservative. There would be no Washington Nationals baseball team, no Washington Capitals hockey team, maybe no Washington teams at all because, without the federal government, the Washington that some proposed to abandon would not have had much reason to grow beyond its 1870 population of 131,700.
Here’s the tale.
The closed-door deal between Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison did not fully settle the matter of where the nation’s capital would go. The early Washington was an unimpressive place that left some government officials less than satisfied with their surroundings. One grumbled that it was “A Mudhole almost Equal to the Great Serbonian Bog.”
In 1804, the Senate was on the verge of approving a bill to move the capital to Baltimore, a measure pushed by Federalists from the relatively cosmopolitan cities of the Northeast who looked with disdain on “that wretched site on the Potomac.” According to History.net, “it took all of President Thomas Jefferson’s influence to ensure defeat of the bill.”
In 1808, a New Jersey congressman led the push to move the capital to Philadelphia. “In a great and flourishing Republic the seat of government ought to be fixed where provisions are best in quality and quantity,” James Sloan argued. That measure obviously failed, but the idea of moving the capital kept coming up every now and then.
After the British sailed up the Chesapeake Bay in 1814, burned the White House and laid siege to Baltimore, the House took up a bill to “temporarily” move the capital to somewhere more secure. House Speaker Langdon Cheves of South Carolina cast a tie-breaking vote to keep the capital in Washington. Instead, he did what many politicians do: He called for a study. That study recommended against moving the capital. The House then proceeded to do what many legislatures today do: It rejected that recommendation and proceeded to draft a bill to move the capital to Philadelphia. This was presented as a compromise measure. The bill called for the capital to move to Philly for the duration of the war, with the promise that when fighting was over, it would return to Washington. Cynics saw this as a clever move because once relocated, inertia (another legislative specialty) might keep the capital in Philadelphia for good. That bill fell just nine votes shy of passage.
The Civil War spurred some affection for Washington on the Northern side, as a symbol of the nation. After the war, though, came the calls to move the capital someplace farther west, with St. Louis emerging as the future capital of choice. The next census would show that St. Louis was the nation’s fourth-biggest city, and the biggest one not on the Eastern Seaboard. The years 1867 and 1868 saw multiple bills introduced in Congress to move the capital. Most of them died in committee, but one, which called for removal to “the valley of the Mississippi,” actually made it to the House floor. Eastern congressmen thought it was a joke. “Is not a part of New York and northern Pennsylvania in the valley of the Mississippi?” one New York congressman asked. (For that matter, so is most of Southwest Virginia, because the waters in the New River, the Holston River and the Clinch River eventually flow into the Mississippi.) Those Easterners were shocked when the bill came close to passing.
By 1869, the talk of moving the capital was serious enough that Midwestern cities started making a public relations case to be chosen — Chicago, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis and even Keokuk, Iowa, all pitched themselves as potential capitals. No one was more aggressive, though, than Logan Reavis, an eccentric businessman from St. Louis. A former newspaper publisher in Illinois, he started producing pamphlets on the subject, with titles such as “A Change of National Empire, or Arguments for the Removal of the National Capital from Washington to the Mississippi Valley.” He embarked on a nationwide speaking tour to promote St. Louis.
Remarkably, even the Chicago Tribune endorsed St. Louis as a potential capital. “Instead of the Potomac,” Joseph Medill wrote in an editorial, “the capital would overlook the Mississippi, so appropriately expressive of the broader tide, the deeper flow, the longer current, and the resistless force our national development has attained since that early day when the tabernacle of the government was set up amidst the solitudes of the Potomac.” A former congressman from St. Louis offered 500 acres for the capital, provided he could retain the right to develop housing nearby. Land speculators started buying up land around a former U.S. military base near St. Louis.
St. Louis business interests organized a National Capital Removal Convention in St. Louis in 1869 that drew representatives from 17 states and territories. They adopted a resolution: “Resolved, That the convenient, natural and inevitable place for the capital of the republic is in the heart of the valley, where, the center of population, wealth and power is inevitably gravitating and where government, surrounded by numerous millions of brave union-loving citizens, would be forever safe against foreign foes or sectional sedition and where it would require neither armaments nor standing armies for its protection.”
The immediate task: stop Congress from appropriating money for the upkeep of government buildings in Washington. With that, the “capital removers” ran into a formidable force: President Ulysses S. Grant.
Although he was from Illinois, and had once lived in St. Louis, he had no interest in moving the capital. On the contrary, the following year, in 1870, he proposed a whopping $22 million for capital improvements in Washington, chief among them a new building for the State Department. That was more than twice what had ever been spent on infrastructure in Washington. Grant lobbied hard for the money and delivered a speech on the subject: He condemned the idea that a mere majority of Congress could take an act of such seeming permanence. “I think the question of removal, if ever presented, should go through the same process at least as amendments to the Constitution,” Grant said. “This language may seem rather unpopular for a person coming from the part of the country I do, but it is expressed with earnestness, nevertheless, and without reserve.”
That effectively killed the idea of moving the capital. Congress approved the spending Grant wanted and, having invested that kind of money in Washington, no one had any interest in moving the capital. No one except Reavis, that is, who kept writing about the idea until his death in 1889.
Today there’s no dispute that the nation’s capital should be on the Potomac, just disagreement over how big that government should be. If the move-to-St. Louis effort had succeeded in 1870, Northern Virginia would not be what it is today — and the fallout from federal job cuts and data center growth would be playing out in Missouri and Illinois, not here. Virginia would look very different today without Northern Virginia, which is the single biggest source of tax revenue in the state, as well as votes in statewide elections. If you want to think of it this way, President Grant helped make Virginia what it is today.
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