At around the time that the conversation in the Senate surrounding what remained of S.J. Res. 39 seemed to be winding down, the senior senator from Florida, one Spessard Holland, curiously decided to try to refocus the discussion on the essential logic underpinning the very existence of the District of Columbia. Holland, as mentioned previously, had sponsored one of the clauses of the original draft of S.J. Res. 39 – namely, that which proposed to make poll taxes illegal – and in many ways it was only natural that he should have been compelled to speak on the subject of its subsequent mutilation by the House. And this he did, remarking both upon his sense of disappointment as well as his conviction to keep pursuing the same goal. But then, for whatever reason, Senator Holland kept talking. “I wish to make it very clear that I am not entirely sold on the amendment which is before the Senate, although I propose to vote for it [,]” he said.
The reason why I am not entirely sold
on it was stated by the Founding Fathers, and I think that there is a grave
question as to whether the position they stated at that time is not yet true.
That position was that, based upon the experience they
had had in other cities, each lying in a State of the Union where the Capital
of the young United States of America had been for a time located, they
felt that it was sounder to have the Capital in an area where it could be
insulated from the continued pressure of an electorate and of a citizenry
which, clothed with all of the powers of an electorate elsewhere, would be
pressing for local improvements, pressing for local measures, pressing for
construction of buildings, and for other measures not justified by the state of
the economics in the Nation, and otherwise resorting to pressure which would be
more acutely felt by Senators and Representatives of that young Government
because of the fact that they were surrounded by the citizens of the site of the
Capital.
Given Holland’s
status as a Southern Democrat, a degree of opposition on his part might have
been expected to any measure that threated to empower the majority Black
population of the District of Columbia. And yet, contrary to the reasoning
deployed by the likes of Congressman Broyhill – who believed that D.C.’s
inhabitants simply had less claim to their home city than did the combined
citizens of the United States – Holland purported to approach the issue from
the perspective of the Founders. The District of Columbia had been placed under
the auspices of Congress for a very specific reason, he sought to remind his
fellow lawmakers, and they would all of them do well to remember exactly what
that reason was.
Holland’s argument, in essence, was
the same as that offered by James Madison in the aforementioned Federalist No.
43. That is, in an effort to ensure that Congress did not ultimately fall under
the sway of the government of whichever state was chosen to act as its host, it
was only sensible to carve out a small slice of territory within which Congress
would perpetually exercise paramount authority. The fear was, as Holland put
it, that the inhabitants of whichever state Congress chose to call home, “Clothed
with all of the powers of an electorate elsewhere, would be pressing for local
improvements, pressing for local measures, pressing for construction of
buildings, and for other measures not justified by the state of the economics
in the Nation [.]” Exactly how they might set about applying this pressure,
Holland did not say. Nor did he make it entirely clear why Congress would end
up being the recipient of popular agitation over various local concerns rather
than the relevant state legislature. Such vagueness notwithstanding, however,
one can discern a hypothetical scenario fitting this basic description.
If, in response to a public outcry in favor of infrastructure funding, the
government of the state in which Congress made its home then pointed to
Congress in turn as the proper source of such improvements – claiming that the
least the national government could do was invest in the state that had agreed
to host it – it surely wouldn’t be very long before public ire became focused
on the latter. And if that same state government then threatened to start
taxing Congress in order to secure compliance? The possibilities for great
mischief would indeed seem to be rather obvious.
Hypotheticals, to his credit, were not all that Holland had to offer. The Framers, he said, had come to believe the creation of an autonomous federal district to be essential, “Based upon the experience they had had in other cities, each lying in a State of the Union where the Capital of the young United States of America had been for a time located [.]” And while he elaborated upon this claim no further, his point is nevertheless well taken. Prior to settling permanently in the District of Columbia in 1801, the national government of the United States – in its various provisional and ultimately transitory forms – had been headquartered in a number of cities over the course of the 1780s and 1790s. Philadelphia had been its original home, of course, and enjoyed the longest association with the same, being the site of both the First Continental Congress (September-October, 1774) and the succeeding Second Continental Congress (May 1775-March, 1781), the Congress of the Confederation (March, 1781-November, 1783), and the current United States Congress (December, 1790-May 1800). But in and amongst these various sojourns in the City of Brotherly Love, Congress also met in a number of other locations in various other states. Between December, 1776 and February, 1777, for example, the assembled delegates convened in the city of Baltimore, Maryland. In the latter year, they then met for one day (September 27th, 1777) in Lancaster, Pennsylvania before spending the next eight months (September, 1777-June, 1778) in nearby York. For a four-month period in 1783, Congress next met in Princeton, New Jersey, and for another eight months after that, it met in Annapolis, Maryland. This was followed by a month and a half period in the late fall of 1784 when it called Trenton, New Jersey, its home. And finally, for the better part of six years between January of 1785 and December of 1790 – the longest period of residency in any one location since last leaving Philadelphia in June of 1783 – the United States government was firmly headquartered the City of New York.
Bearing all of this in mind, at least a part of Holland’s claim would seem to check out. That is, over the course of the earliest years of its existence, the location of the capital of the United States of America did indeed vary quite significantly, lending the Framers a fair bit of experience in terms of the nature of the relationship between the apparatus of the national government and whichever state happened to be its host. But was this experience purely negative in its character and its outcomes? Did the Framers come to believe that creating an autonomous federal district was essential because in every instance in which Congress was hosted by another state, the result was mutual antagonism and disaster? Well, no, in point of fact, though the full truth is somewhat…complicated. In most cases, the residency of the United States government in any given city during the period in question was relatively brief and never intended to be permanent. In the 1770s, this was almost exclusively due to the ongoing Revolutionary War. As British forces first threatened Philadelphia – prompting the initial relocation to Baltimore in December of 1776 – and then captured the city and occupied it – resulting in the second relocation in September of 1777 – Congress found itself on the run and seeking shelter wherever it could find it. And for most of the 1780s, it was quite simply the case that the membership of Congress could not agree where precisely to locate the seat of national power. Southerners demanded a Southern capital, Northerners would only tolerate a Northern capital, and New York City was finally settled upon as a tolerable – if temporary – solution. Congress did remain in some of these locations for relatively lengthy intervals – almost nine months each in York and Annapolis and almost a full six years in the City of New York – but its departure was never due to a souring of local relations. The national government, that is, did not spend so many years in constant transit because it just couldn’t get along with the various state governments that played its host. The exception being, of course, the government of Pennsylvania.
It was quite probably because the City of Philadelphia had had such a long and intimate relationship with Congress that the relationship between the embryonic national government and that of the state of Pennsylvania eventually become so frayed by the beginning of the 1780s. Prior to 1799, recall, when the mantle was taken up by the aforementioned City of Lancaster, Philadelphia was also the capital of Pennsylvania itself. Having to thus share the city with the ad hoc national government of the nascent United States of America, the political class in the Keystone State accordingly found themselves in a bit of a spot. Because Congress had made the capital city of Pennsylvania its home, said city inevitably became the target of concerted British military attention. Accordingly, when the British navy blockaded the entrance of the Delaware River while attempting to move troops through southern New Jersey near the end of 1776, nearly half the population fled and Congress relocated to Baltimore. Where this not disastrous enough – both for the state of the local economy and for the ability of the Pennsylvania government to transact its own business – the return of Congress to Philadelphia in March of 1777 prompted a second British offensive which resulted in the capture and occupation of the city by the end of September. Over the course of the following nine months, Philadelphia and its remaining inhabitants – some fifteen thousand in total – suffered through repeated food shortages and price fluctuations as winter set in and basic supplies became increasingly scarce, along with round after round of theft and looting on the part of garrisoned British soldiers with too little to eat and too much free time. By June of 1778, when the British finally departed, the city was in a sorry state, significantly damaged in terms of public infrastructure and private property alike. Congress chose to return, of course, Philadelphia being its birthplace as well as the birthplace of the Revolution itself. But the next time it left the city, British bayonets would have nothing to do with it.
By June of 1783, a great deal had occurred to change the nature of the relationship between the national government as embodied by Congress and those of the various states. The ratification of the Articles of Confederation in February of 1781 had established a fairly strict differentiation between the authority of Congress and the authority of the various states which left the former with little in the way of practical power. Congress could requisition funds from the states but had no means of enforcing collection. Congress could command the combines armed forces of the states but only during a state of war. In the midst of an ongoing conflict with Great Britain, this made for a reasonably functional arrangement. The governments of the various states understood the value to their collective war effort of allowing Congress to act as a coordinating body and allowed it – if sometimes grudgingly – to make military and financial decisions on their behalf. With the war’s looming conclusion, however, circa 1783, this sense of permissiveness swiftly evaporated as, absent a common threat to their existence, the states shifted their focus to guarding their respective sovereignties. Congress, in consequence, very swiftly lost a great deal of the agency to which certain of its members had grown accustomed during the late conflict with Britain. Not only was the national government no longer able to cajole the states into filling its coffers by invoking the threat of British conquest and repression, but the increasingly effective army which it had but lately commanded was on the brink of ceasing to exist. This all made for a somewhat tenuous situation, particularly as Congress proved itself repeatedly incapable of fulfilling certain of the responsibilities which it had taken on during the recent war. Enter, in June of 1783, the City of Philadelphia and the events of the so-called “Pennsylvania Mutiny.”
While, as of the summer of 1783, the war between Great Britain and the breakaway United States had not yet come to a formal conclusion – the Treaty of Paris not being signed until September and not being ratified until the following January – active hostilities had, by that time, more or less come to an end. The Franco-American victory at the Battle of Yorktown (1781) marked the end of major British military operations in the North American theater, and while the years that followed were marked by the occasional minor skirmish – the Battle of Blue Licks, for example, or the Battle of the Combahee River, both fought in August of 1782 – most of the Continental Army was allowed to lapse into inactivity. The result – understandable in hindsight – was something of a disaster in the making. Here were hundreds of soldiers garrisoned throughout the United States, many of whom had fought and suffered for years under the command of Congress, being told to stand down by a government which had promised to pay them for their service but now found itself unable to raise the necessary funds. The states had no particular interest in taking up the resulting debt, of course. Many of them had already collected more than their fair share of liabilities during the war and were in many cases struggling just to pay off their own militiamen. And while, for the most part, the loyalty which the average soldier felt towards the leadership of the Continental Army – and particularly towards its Commander-in-Chief, one George Washington – kept the discontent which had begun to simmer in the ranks from boiling over into outright hostility, the likes of General Washington could not be everywhere at once. So it was, on June 17th, 1783, that a group of disaffected Continentals stationed in Philadelphia sent a message to Congress asking for the pay that they were owed and threatening drastic action if they were refused.
At first, Congress opted to ignore this initial demand. Perhaps its members – a group which at the time included the likes of Alexander Hamilton, James Wilson, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson – felt that the soldiers, however disgruntled, were nevertheless unlikely to turn against the government for which they had so recently risked their lives. And for a time, at least, this seemed to be the case. Two days went by without a military uprising taking place. But then, on the second day, distressing news reached Philadelphia. A group of about eighty additional soldiers had just left their barracks at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, travelled the sixty miles between that city and Philadelphia, and joined with the local garrison to seize control of the nearby weapons depot. The following day, on June 20th, several hundred of these soldiers descended on the Pennsylvania State House while Congress was in session. Their demand, as before, was that they be paid what they were owed and they refused to allow for an adjournment until the assembled delegates acquiesced. Hamilton, a former Continental himself, was ultimately able to convince the assembled mutineers to stand down for the moment and allow Congress to add the topic of military back pay to its agenda for the following day’s session. But while this seemed to point that a peaceful solution was in the offing, certain members of the national legislature evidently had other ideas.
Meeting in secret, Hamilton and small committee of fellow delegates subsequently drafted a request to the Pennsylvania Executive Council – then the state’s collective executive body – asking for the state militia to step in and deal with the rebellious soldiers. The next day, June 21st, the committee then met in person with the Executive Council and once more made their request for active protection. In response, Council President John Dickinson (1732-1808) promised to consult with the militia leadership and return on the 22nd with a response. That response, when it finally came, was an unambiguous refusal. Congress, its members’ backs now against the wall, was accordingly forced to do as it had threated and fled the city for more welcoming environs in New Jersey. Two days later, having received word of the incident, George Washington dispatched a force of some fifteen hundred troops to dispel the mutiny and arrest its leaders. Congress, as aforementioned, would never again face as serious a threat to its authority, though it would likewise decline to return to Philadelphia for a further seven years. And by that time, its authority – under the auspices of the newly-ratified Constitution – would be significantly enhanced far beyond what the Articles of Confederation ever allowed.
As to the reasons that the Pennsylvania government ultimately declined to come to the assistance of Congress, the likeliest answer would seem to be a combination of elements. There was, of course, the simple fact that Pennsylvania state militiamen, regardless of their orders, were as likely to sympathize with the Continental Army mutineers as to attempt their arrest. All throughout the war between the United States and Great Britain, state militia units had fought alongside formations of the newly created Continental Army. Indeed, to the extent that militia units were often placed under the command of Continental Army officers, the two frequently acted as though they were part and parcel of the same force. In consequence, having thus shared the same hardships and savored the same triumphs, it would have been only natural, circa 1783, for members of any given state militia detachment to look upon their Continental counterparts as comrades-in-arms. As the entire nation was at that moment also struggling under the weight of the debts that had been accumulated during the late war, there would accordingly seem to have been ample reason for the Pennsylvania Militia to refuse to turn their weapons against soldiers of the Continental Army. Having been promised reasonable pay for the suffering they’d been made to endure – suffering which, as noted above, many militiamen had shared in – why shouldn’t they have agitated for the compensation they had earned?
This question, no doubt, at least passed through the mind of the President of the Executive Council, the aforementioned John Dickinson. Having served, during the Revolutionary War, as an both an officer in the Pennsylvania Militia and a private in the Delaware Militia, Dickinson almost certainly had a better idea than many of his fellow statesmen of the privation and the hardship involved in soldiering in the late 18th century. In consequence, when asked to turn the Pennsylvania militia upon a group of Continental Army personnel whose only crime was to insist that they be paid the wages that they were promised for their service, it is little wonder that Dickinson did not acquiesce on the spot. Alexander Hamilton may have been able to speak with firsthand knowledge of the physical and emotional toll of battle – a fact which makes his apparent lack of sympathy for the mutineers all the more alarming – but men like James Wilson, and James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson could not. And while those who had indeed served in either the Continental Army or in the militia of their home state evidently found it in themselves to reconcile whatever sympathy they might have felt with the sense of frustration that doubtless accompanied being waylaid by a pack of disgruntled soldiers, Dickinson was evidently in a position to respond coolly and thoughtfully. His Quaker upbringing, to be sure, would not permit him to resort to violence at the first suggestion of conflict. But his personal experiences in the military was more likely what made him respond to cries of privation from soldiers with sympathy and to refuse the pleas of Congress when it directed violence against the same.
It is also worth recalling, when attempting to explain the ambivalence displayed by the government of Pennsylvania during the events of the Philadelphia Mutiny, that the relationship between that state and the government of the American republic did not at that point have much cause to be particularly warm. As discussed above, Philadelphia – then also the capital of Pennsylvania itself – had twice suffered directly for having played host to Congress. First, in 1776, its citizens had been moved to flee in fear that a British invasion was imminent. And then, in 1777, when a British invasion did finally take place, the city spent the next nine months under enemy occupation. But while Congress eventually returned following the British evacuation in the summer of 1778, one cannot help but imagine that it was not welcomed back with the utmost of warmth. The war was still ongoing, the threat of British attack still very much extant. What did Pennsylvania receive in exchange for hosting Congress? What did the state government gain for thus exposing its own seat of power to the depredations of British soldiers? Nothing, it would seem, but whatever prestige it might have thought to claim. Congress could not reward the state by paying for new roads or better sewars in the City of Philadelphia. Congress had not the means to raise the funds for such improvements. Nor could it claim that serving as the seat of the national government would make Philadelphia, de facto, the most well-guarded city in America. To the contrary, experience had shown that exactly the opposite was true. When it became clear, therefore, in the summer of 1783 that Congress was under threat from a cohort of mutinous soldiers intent on collecting their promised pay, what reason had the government of the state of Pennsylvania to react in any manner beyond indifference? Thus far, hosting Congress had garnered them little more than suffering while the promise of being rid of Congress carried the prospect of peace and freedom. Peace, at least, compared to being the repeated target of enemy invasion. And freedom, at least, from becoming a permanent accessory to Congress’s various misfortunes.
Whatever the reason for it, of course, the basic circumstances of the mutiny are clear. In June of 1783, a state government – in the form of the Pennsylvania Executive Council – flatly refused a request for aid from Congress in the midst of a burgeoning mutiny by federal soldiers. Granted, this was not exactly the kind of scenario that Senator Holland would go on to describe as having motivated the Framers to advocate for the creation of a federal district. Holland spoke of “pressure” being exerted upon the national government chiefly as a result of the agitations of the local populace. The events of the Pennsylvania Mutiny involved something else altogether. One can fairly see, however, the manner in which such an incident could have brought about the same outcome. Lacking any control over either the government of the City of Philadelphia or the state militia of Pennsylvania – and faced with a hostile contingent of Continental Army soldiers no longer interested in obeying their orders – Congress was quite at a loss to defend itself once presented with a serious threat. During the late war with Great Britain, the fledgling national government had been able to depend on foreign loans and requisitions from the states to pay off its various military responsibilities. And in its capacity as a body of military coordination and foreign diplomacy, Congress had amply demonstrated its usefulness to the various states. But by the summer of 1783, this usefulness had more or less evaporated. The states, Pennsylvania included, had less reason to defend Congress than at any point since the American republic had declared its independence from the British Empire. And Congress, now without the means to easily command the loyalty of the various states or raise the funds necessary to keep the Continental Army from effectively turning to banditry, was in as vulnerable a position as it had ever been during the war. It is little wonder, then, after having been essentially chased out of Philadelphia at the behest of embittered American soldiers and a seemingly ambivalent state government, that certain members of Congress began to develop certain specific ideas about how the national government might best secure its continued existence.
Bearing all of this in mind, it might be fair to say that Senator Holland did seem to have a point. The relevant history did not play out precisely as he described it, but Congress had indeed once suffered as a result of relying on a state to act as its host. And doubtless in large part as a result of this specific incident, certain members of the Founding Generation had indeed been moved to push for the later creation of an autonomous federal district. Was something like the Pennsylvania Mutiny at all likely to recur at the time that Holland was speaking in the summer of 1960? That is, was the rationale which led directly to the creation of the District of Columbia still relevant at the far end of the 20th century? This is, in truth, a rather difficult question to answer. Seemingly, one must first conjure a hypothetical scenario in which, though the Constitution was indeed ratified in 1787, a federal district was not created and the seat of government remained entirely within the jurisdiction of one of the states. Flashing forward from that point once more to the summer of 1960 – at which point Congress was in session in New York, or Philadelphia, or Baltimore, or wherever – was it at all likely that members of the United States Armed Forces would turn against Congress and attempt to hold it members hostage in an attempt to secure their unpaid wages? All else being equal, it really rather doesn’t. Circa 1960, the United States Government had possession of more than enough funding sources to keep the soldiers in its employ paid. Nor does it seem particularly likely that, faced with an unforthcoming paymaster in the form of the United States Government, members of the armed forces would decide that holding Congress hostage was the best way to secure what they were owed. Broadly speaking, American servicemen at the far end of the 20th century tended not to think like that.
But maybe this is the wrong way to go about answering the question entirely. Generally speaking, what the Framers were responding to – what they were attempting to counter in the future, essentially – was not necessarily another mutiny by federal soldiers so much as any situation in which the national government was under threat and found itself bereft of assistance from the states. Another uprising by unpaid soldiers in federal service would fit the bill, to be sure. But so would a natural disaster – a flash flood, say, or an ice storm – which required more personnel to deal with than the national government could muster on its own authority and on short notice. And so, too, would an insurrection of a more…popular nature. Imagine that the District of Columbia was never created and that the United States capital ended up in, say, Baltimore, Maryland, where it had met previously in the 1770s. Now imagine, as was the case in fact, that the second half of the 1960s witnessed a rising tide of liberalism among the dominant wing of the Democratic Party. Senators and congressmen begin sponsoring increasingly progressive pieces of civil rights legislation, the result of which is a series of ultimately failed filibusters and the slow but steady erosion of the power of the segregationist South. What if, in the midst of all of this, a group of embittered segregationists who had come to fear that their representatives in Congress were on the cusp of giving in, decided to stage an intervention in order prevent this from happening?
Organized, in large part, by existing groups like the KKK or the Citizens’ Councils of America, these individuals gather firearms, organize transportation, and then finally launch their attack. Congress, then in session, is caught completely off guard by the sudden appearance of several hundred armed men on the grounds of the Capitol, and naturally responds by reaching out to the city police. But while the Baltimore PD responds as best as they are able, it soon becomes clear that the insurrectionists, having occupied the building, now possess the upper hand. As the federal government is then in the process of summoning the necessary military personnel, a request is made to the government of the State of Maryland. “Please,” says the President, “call out the National Guard. This may end up getting worse before it gets better.” Now just imagine one last, crucial detail. Imagine that the government of Maryland was then controlled by segregationists. In answer to the call for assistance, the Governor of Maryland simply says, “no.”
Not that simply, of course; he makes some excuse having to do with federalism and how the crisis at hand has little all to do with Maryland. But the end result is the same no matter what the man says: the Maryland National Guard will not be called out. The business of Congress is accordingly halted until such federal forces can be assembled as to finally take the Capitol back. Days go by, and while the insurrectionists are eventually thwarted, arrested, and even charged with treason, their actions have nevertheless wrought the desired effect. Those few segregationist Senators who were on the cusp of voting for cloture are now so terrified by what might happen to them if they do that they make a show of reaffirming their prior positions. Nothing will ever shift them from upholding the rights of the states, they say, particularly now that the government of Maryland has made it clear where it stands. The filibuster thus continues, the bill under discussion is eventually withdrawn, and the national campaign for civil rights completely loses all momentum. The relationship between the federal government and that of Maryland is thoroughly soured, of course, and in the decades to come it recovers only gradually. And as to calls to move to the nation’s capital to more friendly environs? Think of the cost, the lost time, the lost work. Best to remain in Baltimore for at least the foreseeable future. If more incidents like this one occur, perhaps then it will be worth considering.
This may very well be a somewhat fanciful scenario. Several independent variables would need to align in order for it to have taken place, of course, but stranger things have happened over the course of American history. And the central point remains no matter how unlikely the specific hypothetical. As it currently exists – and as it existed in 1960 – the District of Columbia possesses its own reserve military force in the form of the D.C. National Guard. Numbering, at present, just under thirty-five hundred men and women, they may be called into service by either the President or by Congress and may be tasked with supplementing the efforts of the D.C. Metro Police Department in such cases as when the latter proves insufficient to the needs of the occasion. Under the circumstances described above – an attempted insurrection by an ad hoc popular militia intent on disrupting the work of Congress – the ability of the federal government to call on the D.C. National Guard would seem to conform exactly to what the Framers claimed to intend. Rather than depend on the cooperation of the relevant state government for protection from such popular agitation – an arrangement which, as aforementioned, may not necessarily yield particularly desirable results – the national government has at its disposal the tools that it needs in order to ensure that its officers are not unduly influenced and that it may conduct its business as normal at all times.
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