Tag: John Adams

On the Building of Washington, D.C.

You’re probably aware that George Washington is the only US President who never lived in Washington, D.C., during his time in office. While the Father of His Country did lay the cornerstone to what would become the White House (wearing his Masonic apron, no less), the first President to live there was John (and his wife, Abigail) Adams who stayed in the unfinished and freezing cold mansion a short time before the newly-elected Thomas Jefferson took office. And every Chief Executive since then has resided there.

The story of the building of the city is as interesting as it is long. We won’t delve into that in this format, but you should know that the plan to build a permanent and new capital city for the new nation was approved while Washington was still in office. The next step after the approval of the (swampy) land was the design. Thomas Jefferson, ever the designer/architect and Washington’s Secretary of State, put in his two cents regarding building design, but it was a French military officer who had fought with the Americans against the British over a decade earlier who conceived not only of a general style for the architecture of the buildings but also of the overall plan for the city as a whole. His name is Pierre L’Enfant.

L’Enfant’s plan has undergone several changes over the past 220+ years, but the essential heart of the city’s layout and building design is his. As far as cities built as national capitals go, the capital city of the United States remains one of the most beautiful and beautifully designed. The nations of Brazil (Brasilia), Myanmar (Naypyidaw), and Pakistan (Islamabad) all have purpose-build capital cities with varying levels of beauty and livability. Washington remains one of the most beautiful (St. Petersburg, Russia, was also purpose-built as Peter the Great’s capital city, and it is absolutely beautiful, but the Soviets moved the capital to Moscow).

But there’s an irony to the building of the US capital city as you will soon see. L’Enfant’s plan called for the use of sandstone, a plentiful, nearby, and (relatively) easy to manipulate stone building material. While later builders in the city used marble and other stones, much of the original construction of the major buildings of Washington were made of sandstone. The stone was cut, shaped, loaded, hauled, unloaded, shaped again, and then laid to construct the buildings we know so well today. Many of the masons who did the laying stonework were Scots. Scottish stone masons are famed for their craft, and some were “imported” to the United States just for this purpose. However, the Scots, as important and as skilled as they were, did not do the heavy lifting.

No, the backbreaking work of building Washington, D.C., the capital of a nation built, as Abraham Lincoln would say several decades later, on the proposition that all men are created equal, was largely performed by African slaves. It is said to have grieved the abolitionist Adams to see enslaved persons working on liberty’s capital, specifically the executive mansion.

Interesting, isn’t it? For a nation where many people attempt to define what it means to be an American by having been born here or by displaying a certain cultural, ethnic, or linguistic identity, to have the capital city of that nation designed and built by people from Africa, France, and Scotland (among other places).

So, to argue that foreigners and immigrants built this nation, it is true–and literally in the case of the nation’s capital city.

On a Violent Confrontation

The United States has seen its share of confrontations between police and crowds of protestors. We sit, shocked, in front of our phones or TVs or however we consume news, and sometimes marvel that more people weren’t killed in these acts of violence such as the Capitol Riots on January 6, 2021. And we make choices about which side is right and which is wrong based on a completely subjective metric that is usually influenced by the very media that tells us the story in the first place.

One particular confrontation still rankles many today. And you know the two sides—the protestors marching against unpopular government action verses the miliary called out to keep the peace and protect the general populace from the possibility of violence from the marchers. In this particular case, five Americans died and eight were severely injured when the government opened fire on the protestors.

The military’s side of that story was told at the trial of the men who fired on the crowd. To hear the soldiers tell it, the mob had hit them with clubs and threw rocks and other projectiles at them. The young troops felt endangered by the attacks.

As you can imagine, the actions of the troops in the taking of lives and severely wounding others in this confrontation led to calls that the military be disbanded and defunded. After all, doesn’t every American have the right to protest?

There is definitely such a thing as mob mentality. Ordinarily sane people will often act completely counter to their personalities when surrounded by other angry people. There is something both empowering and emboldening about being in a crowd. Perhaps you have been in a sports crowd and booed mightily at some play or some referee’s poor call—an action that you would never normally do on your own. Magnify that by several exponents, and you have the idea of what mob mentality can do to a normally placid person. So, while the accusations that the crowd pelted the soldiers with objects was generally agreed to have happened, the people in the crowd said they were only responding to a threat they felt from the soldiers and that they, not the soldiers, were acting in self-defense.

The crowd was made up of people from all walks of life, albeit mostly male, but also from all social and economic groups as well. So, it was not that only certain members of the crowd felt threatened while others did not. If anything, almost all members of the crowd argued, seeing the troops called out only made things worse, not better. No one felt safer having a group of soldiers with guns being pointed at them.

In response, the attorney for the soldiers caused a public outcry when he claimed that the mob was made up of foreigners and added that the word “mob” was too respectable for this rabble who attacked the brave soldiers who, after all, were only doing their duty against these foreign undesirables.

Perhaps it was this not-so-subtle appeal to the jingoists in the jury that caused them to acquit most of the solders and find only two of them guilty of manslaughter. When the jury verdict was announced, that’s when the media increased the churning out of its anti-government propaganda that, in turn, stirred even more people to get out into the streets and protest. The newspapers, especially, exaggerated the violence of the soldiers and minimized the actions of the crowd. They falsely labelled what the soldiers did a massacre.

The Boston Massacre, in fact.