L. Around this square and along the
M. Avenue from the two bridges to the Federal House, the pavements on each side will pass under an arched way, under whose cover shops will be most conveniently and agreeably situated. This street is 106 feet in breadth, and a mile long.
The fifteen squares colored yellow are proposed to be divided among the several States of the Union, for each of them to improve, or subscribe a sum additional to the value of the land for that purpose, and the improvements around the squares to be completed in a limited time. The centre of each square will admit of statues, columns, obelisks, or any other ornaments, such as the different States may choose to erect, to perpetuate not only the memory of such individuals whose councils or military achievements were conspicuous in giving liberty and independence to this country, but those whose usefulness hath rendered them worthy of imitation, to invite the youth of succeeding generations to tread in the paths of those sages or heroes whom their country have thought proper to celebrate.
The situation of those squares is such that they are most advantageously seen from each other, and as equally distributed over the whole city district, and connected by spacious avenues round the grand federal improvements and as contiguous to them, and at the same time as equally distant from each other as circumstances would admit. The settlements round these squares must soon become connected. The mode of taking possession of and improving the whole district at first must leave to posterity a grand idea of the patriotic interest which promoted it.
Two months after the publication of those magnificent designs for posterity, Major L’Enfant was dismissed from his exalted place. He was a Frenchman and a genius. The patrons of the new Capital were not geniuses, and not Frenchmen, reasons sufficient why they should not and did not “get on” long in peace together. Without doubt the Commissioners were provincial, and limited in their ideas of art and of expenditure; with their colonial experience they could scarcely be otherwise; while L’Enfant was metropolitan, splendid, and willful, in his ways as well as in his designs. Hampered, held back, he yet “builded better than he knew,” builded for posterity. The executor and the designer seldom counterpart each other. L’Enfant worried Washington, as a letter from the latter, written in the autumn of 1791, plainly shows. He says: “It is much to be regretted that men who possess talents which fit them for peculiar purposes should almost invariably be under the influence of an untoward disposition.... I have thought that for such employment as he is now engaged in for prosecuting public works and carrying them into effect, Major L’Enfant was better qualified than any one who has come within my knowledge in this country, or indeed in any other. I had no doubt at the same time that this was the light in which he considered himself.” At least, L’Enfant was so fond of his new “plan” that he would not give it up to the Commissioners to be used as an inducement for buying city lots, even at the command of the President, giving as a reason that if it was open to buyers, speculators would build up his beloved avenues (which he intended, in time, should outrival Versailles) with squatter’s huts—just as they afterwards did. Then Duddington House, the abode of Daniel Carroll, was in the way of one of his triumphal avenues, and he ordered it torn down without leave or license, to the rage of its owner and the indignation of the Commissioners. Duddington House was rebuilt by order of the government in another place, and stands to-day a relic of the past amid its old forest trees on Capitol Hill. Nevertheless its first demolition was held as one of the sins of the uncontrollable L’Enfant, who was summarily discharged March 6, 1792. His dismissal was thus announced by Jefferson in a letter to one of the Commissioners: “It having been found impracticable to employ Major L’Enfant about the Federal City in that degree of subordination which was lawful and proper, he has been notified that his services are at an end. It is now proper that he should receive the reward of his past services, and the wish that he should have no just cause of discontent suggests that it should be liberal. The President thinks of $2,500, or $3,000, but leaves the determination to you.” Jefferson wrote in the same letter: “The enemies of the enterprise will take the advantage of the retirement of L’Enfant to trumpet the whole as an abortion.” But L’Enfant lived and died within sight of the dawning city of his love which he had himself created—and never wrought it, or its projectors any harm through all the days of his life. He was loyal to his adopted government, but to his last breath clung to every atom of his personal claim upon it, as pugnaciously as he did to his maps, when commanded to give them up. He lived without honor, and died without fame. Time will vindicate one and perpetuate the other in one of the most magnificent capitals of earth. His living picture lingers still with more than one old inhabitant. One tells of him in an unchangeable “green surtout, walking across the commons and fields, followed by half-a-dozen hunting dogs.” Also, of reporting to him at Port Washington in 1814 to do duty, and of first receiving a glass of wine from the old soldier-architect and engineer before he told him what to do. Mr. Corcoran, the banker, tells how L’Enfant looked in his latter days: “a rather seedy, stylish old man, with a long blue or green coat buttoned up to his throat, and a bell-crowned hat; a little moody and lonely, like one wronged.”
COLUMBIA SLAVE PEN. FREEDMAN’S SAVINGS BANK.
SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTE.
