Aside from trimming the number of diagonal streets, Washington gave L’Enfant an unrestricted hand to pursue his plan. At the close of his southern tour, he rode across the federal district with L’Enfant and Andrew Ellicott to experience the elevations chosen for Congress and other public buildings. While he endorsed Jenkins Hill for Congress, he balked at a site chosen for the executive mansion and opted for higher ground farther west, thereby asserting executive power and giving it visual parity with the Capitol. In endorsing the spot for the future White House, L’Enfant cunningly played to Washington’s interests by observing that it would possess an “extensive view down the Potomac, with a prospect of the whole harbor and town of Alexandria”—that is, it would face Mount Vernon.³⁶ The entire project gratified Washington’s vanity on another level: people assumed that the new city would be named either Washington or Washingtonople. In September Washington learned that the commissioners had indeed decided, without fanfare, to call the city Washington and the surrounding district Columbia, giving birth to Washington, D.C. Washington would never have signed the original Residence Act had the capital then been called Washington—it would have seemed supremely vain—but now he was merely acceding to the will of the three bureaucrats he had appointed.

That October Washington sneaked in a monthlong stay at Mount Vernon before Congress reconvened. The health of his tubercular nephew and estate manager, George Augustine Washington, had deteriorated so sharply that he had gone to Berkeley Springs for rest. He was a likable young man who pleased many visitors; one praised his “gentle manner and interesting face” and another described him as a “handsome, genteel, attentive man.”³⁷ By this point, however, he could scarcely ride a horse, much less manage an estate, and Washington named his secretary, Robert Lewis, as temporary manager of Mount Vernon. Lewis would eventually be succeeded by Anthony Whitting.

In the federal district L’Enfant, schooled in a European tradition where master builders ruled entire projects, refused to take direction from anyone. The first lots were auctioned off in Georgetown on October 17, with Jefferson and Madison in attendance; L’Enfant declined to show anyone his map, afraid that buyers would shun parcels in sections distant from the main government buildings. The most he deigned to share with bidders was a verbal description of the town layout. Washington had expected to be on hand for the three-day sale but was caught in an embarrassing error. In planning his return trip to Philadelphia, he knew that Congress would meet the fourth Friday of October, which he calculated as October 31. He was mortified to discover that he had miscalculated and that Congress would meet October 24. “I had no more idea of this than I had of its being doomsday,” he told Tobias Lear.³⁸ Thrown for a loop, he departed hastily for Philadelphia to give his annual address to Congress and arrived in time to deliver an upbeat assessment of the state of the Union, noting “the happy effects of that revival of confidence, public as well as private, to which the Constitution and laws of the United States have so eminently contributed.”³⁹ L’Enfant had been instructed to bring to Philadelphia a plan of the federal city, which Washington would submit to Congress with his annual message, but the mercurial Frenchman never delivered it.

In late October the three commissioners informed Washington that L’Enfant’s high-handed refusal to turn over his plans had impeded the auction; scarcely more than thirty lots had been sold. Washington replied angrily that while he had suspected that L’Enfant might be obstinate in defending his plan, he had not thought he would go so far as to sabotage the sale. Clearly L’Enfant would make no concessions to attract real estate speculators and considered himself answerable only to the president. His feud with the commissioners festered. At one point, when L’Enfant demolished a building erected by a commissioner because it intruded on one of his grand avenues, the clash erupted into open warfare. Washington confidentially told Jefferson that he could tolerate the French prima donna up to a point, but “he must know there is a line beyond which he will not be suffered to go.”⁴⁰ Much as he hated losing L’Enfant, Washington knew that, unless he reined him in tightly, he might lose his three commissioners. He had Jefferson draft a stern reprimand to the Frenchman, to be sent out under his own signature. “Having the beauty and harmony of your plan only in view,” Washington wrote, “you pursue it as if every person and thing was obliged to yield to it, whereas the commissioners have many circumstances to attend to, some of which, perhaps, may be unknown to you.”⁴¹

L’Enfant seriously misread Washington, who wanted harmony and cooperation among those involved in planning the new capital. In January 1792 the self-important L’Enfant submitted a lengthy memorandum to Washington, which was a barefaced attempt to push aside the commissioners and take sole control of the project. After proposing a one-million-dollar expenditure and a workforce of a thousand men, L’Enfant ended by saying, “It is necessary to place under the authority of one single director all those employed in the execution.”⁴² Washington grew apoplectic. “The conduct of Maj[o]r L’Enfant and those employed under him astonishes me beyond measure!” he told Jefferson, who drew up an ultimatum in which he asked L’Enfant point-blank whether he intended to subordinate himself to the commissioners.⁴³ Always eager to compromise, Washington sent Tobias Lear to patch things up with L’Enfant, but the latter blustered that he needed complete freedom from the commissioners. On February 27, 1792, bowing to the inevitable, Jefferson terminated L’Enfant’s services. Washington ended up feeling bitter toward L’Enfant for his imperious treatment of the commissioners. Nevertheless, the broad strokes of L’Enfant’s design for Washington, D.C., left their imprint on the city. As John Adams concluded years later, “Washington, Jefferson, and L’Enfant were the triumvirate who planned the city, the capitol, and the prince’s palace.”⁴⁴

Philadelphia’s citizens were by no means resigned to their city being only a temporary capital and continued to throw up new government buildings, hoping to sway legislators to stay. When they tried constructing a new presidential residence, Washington saw their secret intent and insisted that his current house was perfectly satisfactory. Sensing an even split in public opinion about moving the capital to the Potomac, he divulged his fears to Jefferson: “The current in this city sets so strongly against the Federal City that I believe nothing that can be avoided will ever be accomplished in it.”⁴⁵ Washington grew paranoid about the wily Philadelphians, even imagining that local printers stalled in producing engraved designs of the Potomac capital. Any delays, he feared, might doom the enterprise. He pressed for buildings in the District of Columbia that would foreshadow America’s future might and rival the great cities of Europe. “The buildings, especially the Capitol, ought to be upon a scale far superior to anything in this country,” he insisted to Jefferson. The house for the president should be both “chaste” and “capacious.”⁴⁶ In time the city of Washington would come to justify the grandiose dimensions envisioned by both Washington and L’Enfant.

AS EARLY AS THE FALL OF 1789, Washington emphasized to General Arthur St. Clair, first governor of the Northwest Territory, that he preferred a peace treaty with the hostile Indians of the Ohio Country to war. On the other hand, as long as those tribes, instigated by the British, pursued depredations on frontier communities, the government would be “constrained to punish them with severity.”⁴⁷ During the summer of 1790 the Miami and Wabash tribes flouted peace overtures from the government and conducted fierce raids against American traffic on the Ohio and Wabash rivers. In response, Washington and Knox instructed St. Clair to summon the militia and destroy crops and villages of the offending Indians, hoping a show of strength would prod them into a negotiated peace. Selected to command the fifteen-hundred-man force, made up mostly of militia, was Brigadier General Josiah Harmar, a Revolutionary War veteran whose drinking habits caused concern in Philadelphia. Henry Knox scolded Harmar for being “too fond of the convivial glass” and pointed out that Washington was aware of this problem.⁴⁸