THE FOUNDING OF THE NATIONAL CAPITAL 245 



lots declared their property the most eligible, because situated 

 near the principal existing settlement, and boasted of the port 

 of Georgetown and its well-founded commerce, while Washing- 

 ton was a forest and swamp without a harbor. On the other 

 hand, Greenleaf's Point lot owners sang the praises of that situ- 

 ation as the most airy, healthful, and beautiful in the city. 

 Then came the Eastern Branch proprietors, who decried both 

 the Point and Georgetown, and claimed their location as the 

 best, because nearest to the Capitol and most likely to be settled 

 by the members of Congress, when that body should remove 

 here in 1800. Then, in the fourth place, came Capitol Hill 

 speculators in lots, who depreciated all other locations but their 

 own, as too remote from the political center where Congress 

 was to hold its daily sessions. 



Our traveller records about a hundred and fifty houses as 

 scattered over the vast surface of the city, each of the four con- 

 tending quarters having thirty or forty, at great distances from 

 each other. He said few lots had been sold to individuals 

 to be improved, though in 1796 forty houses had been begun 

 by the Morris syndicate, who had pledged their property in ad- 

 vance, and had no money to complete their extensive under- 

 takings. Not a single house had been built as yet, in 1796, on 

 Pennsylvania Avenue between the President's house and the 

 Capitol. 



After recording that the commerce of Georgetown had de- 

 clined from about $400,000 imports and exports in 1791, to 

 $189,000 in 1796, a decline he attributes to the diminished pro- 

 duction of tobacco and the absorption of the merchants in lot 

 speculations, the Duke concludes his sombre picture of the 

 prospects of Washington by saying that it was idle to imagine 

 that it would arrive at the execution of the tenth part of its plan, 

 before a dissolution of the Union should take place. "Federal 

 City," he says, " will never reach that degree of improvement to 

 render it even a tolerable abode for the kind of persons for whom 

 it was designed." We, who smile over the signal falsification 

 of this dire prediction, should allow that our infant capital, 

 cradled in a wilderness of woods a century ago, offered little 

 enough to countervail the forebodings of failure. 



