Whither Columbia? Congressional Residence and the Politics of the New Nation, 1776 to 1787

Abstract

IN i790 Congress adopted legislation that moved the nation's capital from New York to Philadelphia, with the stipulation that a new capital city be built on the banks of the Potomac River by i8oo. This was not the first time that Congress had acted, on the question of the location of the national government. Repeatedly, over a period of more than two years-from I782 to I784, when New York was designated the temporary residence of Congress and the decision was taken to fix its permanent site in open country near the falls of the Delaware-the representatives of the confederated states had grappled with the issue. Their deliberations involved important sectional interests, both political and economic, and these considerations were associated with basic attitudes toward the power and function of central government, federally conceived, in a republican society. The wanderings of Congress during the Confederation period were also related to the declining political fortunes of the proponents of a stronger national government and the subsequent reaffirmation of the limited government prescribed in the Articles of Confederation. The debates over the location of the capital thus provide insights both into the nature of factional divisions in Congress at the close of the period of nationalist ascendancy and into the complex relationship between ideology and sectional self-interest that influenced the decisionmaking process in Congress during the I780s.