money, advertised the sale of lots. They took the ground that the value of the lots, and consequently, the amount of money raised, would depend largely upon their situation in relation to the projected public buildings. L'Enfant, on the other hand, contended that if his maps were published, speculators would seize upon the choice locations and permanently destroy the best vistas with crowded blocks of shanties.

Washington promptly authorized the dismissal of the engineer with the incidental comment:

"Men who possess talents which fit them for peculiar purposes are almost invariably under the influence of untoward dispositions, or a sottish pride, or possessed of some other disqualification by which they plague all those with whom they are concerned. But I did not expect to meet with such perverseness in Major L'Enfant."

L'Enfant continued to live in the neighborhood of Washington until his death in 1825, a disappointed and prematurely aged man. For some years he made his home with his friend, Dudley Digges, at the latter's Manor House, Chellum Castle, near Bladensburg. There, for nearly a century, his remains

lay in an unmarked grave, until their removal in 1909

(p. 508) to a plot in the National Cemetery at Arlington. In his later years he repeatedly petitioned Congress, without success, for real or fancied arrears of pay. There seems ground for believing him inadequately compensated, since all that he received for his plans, involving many months of surveying, was $2500.

L'Enfant was succeeded by his assistant, Andrew Ellicott, a Pennsylvania Quaker, and later in life Professor of Mathematics at West Point. Ellicott retained practically all the essential details of L'Enfant's plans.

The work of building the city, which under the Residence Act was to be ready for occupancy before the first Monday in December, 1800, proceeded slowly. The money advanced by Maryland and Virginia was soon exhausted, and although Congress authorized loans, money was scarce and hard to obtain. Washington made a personal application to the Legislature of Maryland, which made the needful appropriation on the condition that the commissioners should add their individual guarantee. The work thereafter was rapidly pushed forward and, on June 15th, 1800, the commissioners reported the public buildings ready for occupancy. At this time only the northern section of the Capitol building was finished. Nevertheless, in Oct., 1800, the Government, including official records, furniture and the minor officials, arrived in a "Packet-sloop." The next day the high officials drove into

town. In November the 6th Congress assembled in the one completed wing of the Capitol. As might have been foreseen, accommodations were sadly inadequate. Sec. Wolcott, writing to his wife, said, "I do not perceive how the members of Congress can possibly secure lodgings, unless they will consent to live like monks in a monastery, crowded ten or twenty in one house."

John Cotton Smith, writing in 1800, says, "Our approach to the city was accompanied with sensations not easily described Instead of recognizing the avenues and streets portrayed in the plan of the city, not one was visible, unless we except a road, with two buildings on each side, called the New Jersey Ave. Between the President's house and Georgetown a block of houses had been erected, which then bore, and may still bear, the name of the six buildings. There were also two other blocks, consisting of two or three dwelling houses, in different directions, and now and then an isolated wooden habitationthe intervening spaces, and indeed the surface of the city generally, being covered with scrub-oak bushes on the higher ground, and the marshy soil either trees or some sort of shrubbery . . . The roads in every direction were muddy and unimproved."

on

Under such conditions, adverse and ironical criticism was inevitable; and for several years Washington continued to be known by various disparaging epithets: such as "Wilderness City," "Capital of Miserable Huts," "City of Streets without Houses," "City of Magnificent Distances." There was much agitation, both in and out of Congress, for a removal of the seat of Government to one of the older established cities. The advocates of such a movement came to be popularly known as "Capital Movers.”

Meanwhile, in these first ten years, the long series of experiments in local government had already begun. The original commissioners served nearly two years without salary, until March 4th, 1793, when on the recommendation of the President they were awarded a salary of $1000 each yearly, an amount raised later to $1600.00. These commissioners and their successors continued to rule Washington until 1802, when on May 3d, Congress granted the city its first charter, and provided for its government by a Mayor, to be appointed annually by the President, and by an elected council of twelve members. This charter was amended in 1804, and again in 1812, the chief change being a provision for the election of the Mayor by the members of the Council.

The war of 1812 had caused little local apprehension, Washington being regarded as too small and unimportant to be chosen as a point of attack. Consequently the city found itself quite unprepared when the news first came, in June, that thirty-five hundred seasoned soldiers, under Gen. Robert Ross, were embarking at Bermuda to join Cockburn's block

ading squadron in Chesapeake Bay. The chief blame for the Capital's unpreparedness rested with Armstrong, Secretary of War, whose whole management of the subsequent crisis revealed a monumental incapacity, which justified his later peremptory dismissal by Madison. "The British," Armstrong insisted, "would never be so mad as to make an attempt on Washington, and it is therefore totally unnecessary to make any preparation for its defense."

In spite of Armstrong, some feeble and abortive preparations were made. A military district was created, including the District of Columbia, Maryland and part of Virginia, and placed under command of Gen. William H. Winder, then recently returned from captivity as prisoner of war in Canada. On assuming command Winder found, to his consternation, that, although thirteen regiments of militia had been drafted from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, it was on condition that they should not be called upon for service until the enemy appeared. Winder protested fruitlessly; and the Government did not awake to the seriousness of the situation until August 20th, when a mounted courier brought the news that General Ross, with thirty-five hundred men, had effected a landing at Benedict's on the Potomac, only forty miles below Washington, and had been reinforced by a thousand marines from Cockburn's squadron, now under Cochrane. Belated efforts resulted in a hastily gathered army amounting to approximately six thousand men. Of these there were barely nine hundred regulars to meet the English force of forty-five hundred veterans. The latter, under Ross, had pushed forward until, on August 24th, they reached a fork in the road, one branch of which ran northward to Bladensburg, and the other westward to the Eastern Branch of the Potomac, crossed opposite Washington by a bridge. The main defense, under Winder, had been concentrated to defend the Eastern Branch bridge. But, discovering Ross' feint movement was designed to hide his real purpose, Winder hurried on to Bladensburg, before which he occupied a commanding position in a rising field, but unfortunately with a lack of confidence both in himself and his troops. The latter were, for the most part, raw recruits facing for the first time almost equal numbers of seasoned soldiers and marines. The American forces broke and fled in the face of a fusillade of Congreve rockets. The only part of the American army which showed real bravery was that of Barney's marines, who cut wide gaps in the British column, but were eventually surrounded and compelled to surrender. But they had taken a tribute of more than two to one.

Meanwhile the President and demoralized heads of the departments had fled from the city, the panic-stricken Secretary of the Navy giving his ill-advised parting order to burn the Navy Yard, thus destroying Commodore Barney's flotilla of gun-boats. The British forces reached the Capitol grounds at 6 p. m. That night they burned the Capitol (more than half the Congressional Library being destroyed (p. 369); the White House; the Treasury, State and Navy Buildings and a number of private edifices, including the office of the National Intelligencer, whose editorials had especially aroused the resentment of Cockburn. The flames were put out, during the afternoon of August 25th, by one of the severest thunder-storms in the city's history. This storm, amounting to a cyclone, together with the rumor that an American army of twelve thousand was advancing from Virginia, resulted in the withdrawal of the British that same evening.

During this three-weeks' campaign the damage done by the British troops to public and private property amounted to upward of three million dollars, including the valuable cargoes taken from the seventy-one vessels captured in the harbor of Alexandria. Plans were soon under way for repairing the damage done to the Capitol city; and one of the first acts of Congress, at a special session held in September, 1814, was to appropriate $500,000 for rebuilding the White House and the Capitol, notwithstanding the strenuous opposition of the "Capital Movers." The White House, restored by Hoban, was again open to visitors January 2d, 1818. The Capitol, first under Latrobe and then under Bulfinch, was not completed until 1830. In 1820 the city government was once more modified by a new charter providing for the election of a Mayor biennially by popular vote. The government established under this charter continued with but little change until 1871.

In 1846, by the desire of the inhabitants and at the request of the State of Virginia, Congress retroceded the thirty square miles south of the Potomac originally acquired from that state. This section contained the city of Alexandria, for the inclusion of which within the District, Congress had passed a special amendment, at the earnest desire of President Washington.

Down to the inauguration of President Lincoln, the Capital remained a quiet, retired place of slow though steady growth, its periods of gay activity during the sessions of Congress giving place to prolonged intervals of stagnation during the recesses. Active opposition to the Capital's location had long since given place to a nation-wide indifference.

With the outbreak of the Civil War the lethargy of the nation toward the Capital vanished over night. At the close of the first day's bombardment of Ft. Sumter (April 12th, 1861), Leroy P. Walker, the Confederate Secretary of War, boasted that before May 1st the Confederate flag would float over the Capitol. The answer of the indignant North was to transform Washington into a great military post. The plains around it were shortly crowded with camps, sheds and trains; and every available building in the city had been requisitioned by the Government. In a few months the population increased from 61,400 to nearly quarter of a million, an average maintained throughout the war. A cor

respondent of the London Times, returning to the Capital in July, 1861, after an absence of only three months, concludes as follows a vivid account of the marvellous change wrought:

"To me, all this was a wonderful sight. As I drove up Pennsyl. vania Avenue I could scarcely credit that busy thoroughfare-all red, white, and blue with flags, filled with dust from galloping chargers and commissariat carts; the sidewalks thronged with people, of whom a large proportion carried sword and bayonet; shops full of life and activity was the same as that through which I had driven the first morning of my arrival. Washington now, indeed, is the Capital of the United States."

Throughout the war Washington remained the center of military activities. Here armies were officered and marshalled; here also were the principal hospitals for the wounded, and the chief depots of military supplies. During the war the city was frequently threatened by Confederate armies, but was only once in real danger. This was in July, 1864, shortly after the Battle of the Wilderness, and at the beginning of Grant's nine-months' siege of Petersburg. To create a diversion in the rear of Grant's army, Gen. Jubal A. Early, with part of Lee's troops, was sent up through the Shenandoah Valley and across the Potomac. There was great alarm in Washington, then protected by less than five thousand soldiers; while Gen. Lew Wallace, then commanding the Middle Department (the territory included between Washington and Baltimore), had at his disposal barely three thousand men when, on July 9th, he opposed Early's passage of the Monocasy River, less than thirty-five miles from the Capital. Wallace was defeated after an all day battle, with a loss of one-third of his forces. On July 11th Early's troops appeared before the defenses of the city. But the loss of a day in the Battle of the Monocasy had thwarted his purpose, giving time for reinforcements to arrive; and within the fortifications of Washington there was an armed force of