Washington D. C. [antikvár]

Preface There are literally hundreds of cities all over the world that call themselves unique, but Washington DC is the only one that truly deserves that appellation. It is the first city that was created with the distinct purpose of establishing a home for a nation's government. As early as 1783, even before that magnificent experiment on democratic government—the United States of America—came into being, the Continental Congress decided to set up a federal city as a permanent site for its meetings, but the issue of slavery made it difficult to choose a location. Slave-owning Southerners opposed Philadelphia as a site for the capital, because the Quakers of that city opposed slavery and favored abolition. Northerners did not want Congress to meet in a slave-holding area because they felt that it might seem that the United States favored slavery. In 1790, Alexander Hamilton skillfully worked out a compromise between the two factions and a bill was passed to locate the federal city on the Potomac River. President George Washington, who knew the area intimately from his years on his Mount Vernon plantation, was asked by Congress to to determine the exact location for the District of Columbia, and, of course, the capital city was named for him. The original plans called for exactly 100 square miles to constitute the District of Columbia—a ten-by-ten-mile square taken from the states of