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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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Washington:
The Making of the American Capital by Fergus Bordewich |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Complications Fergus
Bordewich’s new book, Washington:
The Making of the American Capital, tells the story of the selection and
creation of the capital of the United States. This is a political tale about
the characters and the issues that swirled around in the late 18th
century. Bordewich presents the impact of individuals, both those well-known
and those unknown to general readers, and is likely to present information
that a reader hasn’t come across elsewhere. I was enlightened, for example,
by what I learned about Pierre L’Enfant, and what he did and didn’t do for
Washington. At times, the story becomes tedious, and readers looking to learn
about the challenges of construction and building won’t find much here. For
insight into people and issues, this book soars. Tales of money, power, and scheming
offset those times the book seems tedious or repetitive. Here’s an excerpt, from
the end of Chapter 5, “The Metropolis of America,” pp. 122-124: As the activists of the
Pennsylvania Abolition Society worked to create a place for freed slaves in
America, William Thornton continued to dream of leading them back to Africa
in clouds of glory. In October 1790 he left his new fifteen-year-old wife,
Anna Maria, in Philadelphia and returned to Tortola to see his dying mother;
he remained there for two years. There had been changes since his boyhood.
Quaker influence had faded, weakened by isolation, intermarriage with
non-Quakers, and the growing conflict between Quaker antislavery and the
economic imperatives of the plantation economy. The atmosphere was tense.
Just before Thornton's return, slaves on a local plantation had rioted when
false reports of a general emancipation circulated and were savagely put
down. Thornton shocked the island's colonial council by attempting to
convince them to enact an emancipation plan for the island's slaves. They
"hint me to be a dangerous member of society when I mention things
concerning the blacks," he wrote with a twinge of amusement (and per-
haps pride) to the British abolitionist Granville Sharp. While on Tortola, Thornton
received the unwelcome news from friends in England that the colony of former
British slaves they had dispatched to the coast of Sierra Leone had proved a
disaster of monumental proportions. Of the first contingent of 450 settlers,
84 had died from sickness before the ships even left England. Another 96 had
died from illness and exposure soon after their arrival. Others were captured
by native rulers and sold back into slavery. Many of the settlers who
remained had abandoned the colony and relocated for safety—to the unutterable
dismay of the philanthropists who had organized the settlement—to slave
factories elsewhere on the coast. Even the whites who had been sent out to
serve the colony had entered the service of slave traders, lured by large
salaries. Sharp warned Thornton that this catastrophe must dissuade him from
all thought of moving to Africa. But Thornton's unquenchable optimism
remained undiminished. Destiny had touched his shoulder. Nothing, including
his most amiable d affectionate wife, he wrote back to Sharp, could
"have any effect in ying my soul in any part of the world except
Africa." It
was also at this time that Thornton learned of the design competition for
the United States Capitol. He threw himself into the project, which brought
him welcome distraction from the continuing mockery of his fellow island
whites. The pungent smell of sugar being rendered into
molasses and rum
filled the humid air as, day and night, he worked at his sketches, oblivious
to the thrum of rain on the giant bulletwood trees, and the thud of waves on the shore of nearby Sea Cow
Bay. From his room, he could see beyond the plantation's wattle-and-daub
slave quarters and squat whitewashed warehouses to mountainsides silvery and undulating
with sugarcane, and the turquoise expanse of the Caribbean, where islands
shimmered like dream images in the haze. Thornton later described his
creative process to a friend, Anthony Fothergill: /’First
I thought of the
amazing extent of our country, and of the apartments that the
representatives of a very numerous people would one day require. Secondly, I
consulted the dignity of appearance, and made minutiae give way to a grand
outline, full of broad prominent lights and broad
deep shadows.
Thirdly, I sought
for all the variety of architecture that could be embraced in the forms I had
lain down, without mixing small parts of the large of the same kind; and
keeping the whole regular, in range, throughout the building. Finally I
attended to the minute parts; that we might not be deemed deficient in those touches
which a painter would require in the finishing." In his lively imagination, the
clean classical lines of democracy's temple-to-be on the Potomac perhaps lent
something of their grandeur to his dreamlike vision of a black colony on the
African coast: twinned images of better worlds, one white, one black, united
by idealism, but bifurcated irrevocably by race. For Thornton, as for his
friend Thomas Jefferson, the vision was a comforting refuge from sordid
reality, and from the guilt and fear that freighted every scheme for
emancipation. As long as Thornton conceived of African Americans as a problem
to be solved, like the design of the Capitol's entablature, or the
disposition of its water closets, he felt himself on firm moral and emotional
ground. Like nearly all white men of his time, he could not see former slaves
as people capable of charting their own destiny, with their own voices that
deserved to be heard. Blinkered by his own ambitions for black Americans, he
failed to understand the extraordinary revolution that was taking place in
Philadelphia, which would become the national capital by default if the
promoters on the Potomac failed to achieve their goal. There, former slaves
were making clear that they had much to say indeed. The
role of slaves is one area in which Bordewich helps complete the historical
record, and provide information for readers that may have been glossed over
or ignored by others. Washington:
Making the American Capital tells a fascinating story of special interest
to those who can’t get enough about the founders of the United States and the
challenges they overcame. Steve
Hopkins, July 18, 2008 |
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Buy Washington: The Making of the American
Capital @ amazon.com |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the August 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Washington The Making of the
American Capital.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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