George Washington’s Final Battle: The Epic Struggle to Build a Capital City and a Nation by Robert P. Watson (review)

George Washington is known for many things, but Robert Watson confers another honor on the nation’s first president: city planner. George Washington’s Final Battle: The Epic Struggle to Build a Capital City and a Nation is part biography, part analysis of one of Washington’s last legacies: the construction of the United States capital. Watson argues that the placement and planning of Washington, DC, would not have come to fruition without Washington himself. From his childhood, Watson posits, Washington’s experiences as an American farmer, colonial and revolutionary soldier, and national leader influenced his opinions that assuaged the discontented Senate as it argued over the question of creating a national capital.

The text is composed of six sections divided into thirty-two small chapters. Rather than tracing the development of Washington, DC, for the arc of the book, it begins with the birth of George Washington and concludes with his death. Readers who wish to read about the “epic struggle” to create the nation’s capital must wait until Part III (“The Great Debate”) for the city to be truly introduced. Watson shifts the narrative from a history of a capital city to a history of the idea of constructing a new capital from scratch by having the first two sections of the book examine Washington’s youth. His life along the Potomac River and his time as a solider on the western frontier were two major experiences that made Washington a unique advocate for erecting a capital city. Watson marshals the details of Washington’s humble origins in Part I to emphasize his distinctly American ideas for the new nation. Unlike many of his peers during the revolutionary period, Washington did not study or travel to the European continent. He was a product of the colonies and embodied the ideas and struggles of the new nation.

Part II, “The Question of a Capital,” further leads the reader through Washington’s life. Instead of focusing on the actual question of picking an existing city as the nation’s capital or building one, much of this section details Washington’s role as captain and leader during the War for Independence and later as a major force in constructing the new nation’s government. Due to the physical limitations of his age, Washington was often portrayed as a passive participant in the events of the 1780s and 1790s. Instead, Watson has re-interpreted Washington’s quiet demeanor not as a limitation to his influence on the events of the new republic but as one aspect of his larger personality as a letter-writer and silent force of nature. Behind the pomp and circumstance of the new government’s meetings, Washington was slowly shaping the future of the new country through the letters he wrote to his colleagues.

Watson specifies the struggles to create Washington City throughout the last four parts of the book. He covers the debates over whether to name an existing city as a capital or build one from scratch and then subsequent struggles to determine the locale and size of what would become Washington City. In these parts, Watson explains the origins of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, the creation of the Residency Act of 1790, and the contest to design the capital. Through it all, Watson argues that Washington’s determination to build a new city would bring prestige and respect to the new United States, an infant country that was experiencing financial hardship and a crisis of identity.

Readers of this book can draw connections to another title published in 2020: Lindsay Chervinsky’s The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution (Cambridge, MA, 2020). Both Watson and Chervinsky deftly reanalyze the first decade of the early republic to argue that George Washington held...