From Biracial Democracy to Direct Rule: The End of Self-Government in the Nation's Capital, 1865-1878

There has always been something problematic, if not anomalous, about the political status of the District of Columbia. In theory, the federal government reigns supreme. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution allows Congress to "exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever" in the territory that houses the seat of government, but it is not clear whether that rules out some measure of popular representation in local government. For Congress to exercise exclusive authority over the capital of the Republic, in denial of the inhabitants' right to govern their own affairs, might seem a stark contradiction of the founding principles of American government. "This, happening at the seat of a nation which boasts of its democratic government," observed a writer in the Atlantic Monthly in 1909, during a period when the District was subject to direct federal control, "constitutes a solecism of the first magnitude."¹ Over the 204 years of its residence there, Congress has both allowed and disallowed local representation. For most of its first seventy years, Washington was governed by an elected mayor and councils. (The city of Georgetown and the rural sections of the District, known as Washington County, had their own separate governing arrangements.) The conduct of municipal government in the antebellum period was not dissimilar to that in other cities of comparable size, with the important distinction that Washington, like the rest of the District, was subject to the supreme authority of Congress. That authority, however, was exercised fitfully by a national legislature whose preferred stance toward the District was one of benign neglect. Whatever practical inconvenience might result from this arrangement was not judged sufficient to warrant a serious reconsideration, that is, until the Civil War and its aftermath drastically raised the stakes and altered the significance of governing the District.²

Washington, said the New York Times in 1870, should be "a fitting representation of what is best in our national character."³ After the Civil War many Americans believed that their nation's character and destiny had changed irrevocably. On the one hand, with the extirpation of slavery, it had taken on a new commitment to civil rights and a new responsibility for the welfare of the men and women that it had recently emancipated. Thus, during Reconstruction, congressional Republicans used the District of Columbia as a "proving ground" for their policies of black suffrage and equal rights.⁴ On the other hand, the nation entered the postwar era with a new sense of the possibilities of federal power and a new awareness of its own strength and importance, forged in the fires of internecine conflict. A victorious and powerful national government required a capital city commensurate with its stature, which Washington—"a third-rate southern city," as one northern visitor described it—quite clearly was not. Demands like that made by Harper's Monthly in 1859 for a program of improvements "to render the seat of government worthy of the nation" carried still greater force after the triumph of the Union.⁵ Such demands focused on the physical beautification of the capital rather than the attainment of racial justice. When the New York Times suggested that Washington should be "a fitting representation of what is best in our national character," it went on to explain that it should be made into "a model city, not only as regards architecture, but also as regards cleanliness, paving, police, lighting, sewerage and transportation"; it said nothing about civil rights or social justice. Competing visions of Washington's future reflected competing conceptions of national purpose.⁶

Although Republican leaders had envisaged the District of Columbia as a showplace for their Reconstruction policies, in 1871 Congress replaced the local municipalities with a territorial government in which the influence of the electorate, black and white, was severely curtailed; three years later it invested a three-man commission with governmental authority over the District and eliminated local democracy altogether; in 1878 the commission form of government was made permanent and home rule extinguished for close to a century.⁷ "In this District," noted...