Tea at Trianon: To Move the Nation’s Capital

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, November 9, 2021

To Move the Nation’s Capital

From Pocket:

The U.S. House of Representatives attempted to pass legislation in April 2021 calling for the District of Columbia to become the 51st state. It marks the farthest the push for D.C. statehood has gone in the more than 200 years of its existence. The bill’s fate [at the time this was written in April] in the U.S. Senate is unclear, though its prospects for passage are mixed, at best.

One of the consistent objections raised by the legislation’s opponents is that the residents of D.C. have an undue influence on Congress. Merits aside, unspoken by these opponents is a 160-year-old idea: Disassemble the Capitol building, the White House and the rest of the district’s government buildings and ship the entire headquarters of the federal government to the middle of the country. More specifically, St. Louis, Missouri. An absurd premise, perhaps, but one that was given a close look in the years after the U.S. Civil War.

“They imagined they would move the real buildings themselves,” says Adam Arenson, a historian at Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York, and author of The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War. “The image is kind of fantastical but also intriguing.” The idea of numbering the blocks of the Capitol building for reassembly hundreds of miles away was very much of its time.

“The whole thing is only thinkable in the aftermath of the Civil War, when you have had these kinds of massive logistical innovations and when they’ve moved so many people, but also so much stuff, around on the railroads,” says Walter Johnson, historian at Harvard University and author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States.

The fact that many people at the time could imagine that this might really work also suggests just how much the nation was in flux following the war. Johnson notes that D.C. may have seemed less inevitable as the nation’s capital given that Richmond, Virginia, the center of the Confederacy, had just hosted “a capital that a lot of people believed was a real capital.”

This was a nation that had just faced a very real threat to its continued existence, and fundamental aspects of its character were still in question. Would freed African-American men be permitted to vote? Would white southerners who had taken up arms against the country be allowed back into political life? How would the much-anticipated completion of the transcontinental railroad rearrange the economy? How far could white settlers go in expanding their presence across the continent? (Read more.)