Washington, D.C.

• 1. Introduction

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  Washington, D.C., is not part of any state, and it is not a state itself. It belongs to the United States Congress, which holds exclusive jurisdiction over it under Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution. The city sits on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, with Maryland wrapping its northern and eastern edges. It carries two names at once. Washington honors the first president, a Founding Father. Columbia honors a female personification of the nation itself. How does a capital come to exist where no state governs it, where the people who live there pay federal taxes but cannot vote on the floor of Congress? Who decided to carve a ten-mile square out of donated land and build a government city from scratch? And why, more than two centuries later, are its residents still fighting to become the fifty-first state? These are the questions that follow.

• 2. A Capital By Compromise

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  On the 6th of October 1783, after the Pennsylvania Mutiny forced Congress to flee Philadelphia for Princeton, New Jersey, the lawmakers resolved to find a permanent home. The next day, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts proposed buildings near Trenton on the Delaware, or near Georgetown on the Potomac. The mutiny had taught a hard lesson. The national government could not depend on any single state for its own safety. In Federalist No. 43, published on the 23rd of January 1788, James Madison argued that the federal government needed authority over its own capital to provide for its maintenance and security. The Constitution permitted a district not exceeding ten miles square, ceded by states and accepted by Congress, yet it named no location. The site emerged from a bargain. In the Compromise of 1790, Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson agreed that the federal government would assume each state's remaining Revolutionary War debts. In exchange, the new capital would rise in the Southern United States. Congress passed the Residence Act, which George Washington signed into law on the 16th of July 1790, a date considered the city's founding. The president himself would select the exact spot along the Potomac. Maryland and Virginia donated the land, a square ten miles on each side totaling one hundred square miles. Two ports already stood inside it, Georgetown, founded in 1751, and Alexandria, Virginia, founded in 1749.

• 3. Survey Stones And Slave Receipts

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  In 1791 and 1792, a team led by Andrew Ellicott walked the borders of the new federal district and set a boundary stone at every mile point, many of which still stand today. Among them was Benjamin Banneker, an African American astronomer whose parents had been enslaved, working alongside Ellicott's brothers Joseph and Benjamin. The labor that built the capital reflected the country it would govern. Both Maryland and Virginia were slave states, and slavery existed in the District from its founding. Slave receipts have been found for the White House, the Capitol Building, and the establishment of Georgetown University. The city itself became an important slave market and a center of the nation's internal slave trade. On the 9th of September 1791, three commissioners overseeing construction named the city in honor of President Washington. The federal district took the name Columbia, a feminine form of Columbus then used as a poetic name for the United States. Congress held its first session there on the 17th of November 1800. The District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801 placed the whole territory under federal control and split it into two counties, Washington to the east and north of the Potomac, Alexandria to the west and south. With that act, residents stopped being citizens of Maryland or Virginia, and their representation in Congress ended.

• 4. Fire And Retreat

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  On the 24th of August 1814, British forces marched into Washington after beating an American army at the Battle of Bladensburg. In retaliation for destruction American troops had caused in the Canadas, they set fire to the city's federal buildings. The Capitol, the Library of Congress, the Treasury Building, and the White House were gutted in what became known as the burning of Washington. The damage might have been worse. A storm forced the British to evacuate after just twenty-four hours. Most buildings were repaired quickly, but the Capitol, still under construction at the time, was not finished in its current form until 1868. By the 1830s, the district's southern territory of Alexandria had declined economically, neglected by Congress. Alexandria was a major market in the domestic slave trade, and pro-slavery residents feared that abolitionists in Congress would end slavery in the district. They petitioned Virginia to take back the land it had donated, a process called retrocession. The Virginia General Assembly accepted the return in February 1846. On the 9th of July 1846, Congress went further and returned all the territory Virginia had ceded. The district was left with only the portion Maryland had given. Confirming those Alexandrians' fears, the Compromise of 1850 outlawed the slave trade in the district, though not slavery itself.

• 5. Emancipation And Reinvention

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  President Abraham Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act in 1862, ending slavery in the district and freeing about 3,100 people nine months before the Emancipation Proclamation. The Civil War had swelled the federal government and the city's population, including a large influx of freed slaves. In 1868, Congress granted the district's African American male residents the right to vote in municipal elections. Growth outran infrastructure. By 1870, the district's population had grown 75 percent in a decade to nearly 132,000 people, yet the city still lacked paved roads and basic sanitation. Some in Congress proposed moving the capital farther west, but President Ulysses S. Grant refused to consider it. The Organic Act of 1871 repealed the charters of Washington and Georgetown, abolished Washington County, and created one territorial government for the whole district. In 1873, Grant appointed Alexander Robey Shepherd as Governor of the District of Columbia. Shepherd modernized the city with large projects but bankrupted its government, and in 1874 Congress replaced the territorial government with an appointed three-member board of commissioners. The city's first motorized streetcars began service in 1888, pushing development beyond the original boundaries. Georgetown's streets were renamed in 1895. Poor housing and strained public works made Washington the first city in the nation to undergo urban renewal under the City Beautiful movement, guided by the McMillan Plan, which replaced much of the old Victorian Mall with Neoclassical and Beaux-Arts architecture.

• 6. The Long Fight For A Vote

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  In financial year 2012, residents and businesses of Washington, D.C., paid 20.7 billion dollars in federal taxes, more than nineteen states and the highest federal taxes per capita. Yet the district has no voting representation in Congress. Its residents elect a single non-voting delegate to the House, who may sit on committees, join debate, and introduce legislation, but cannot vote on the floor. It has no representation in the Senate. The Twenty-third Amendment, ratified in 1961, gave the district three votes in the Electoral College, matching the least populous state, but stopped short of Congressional representation. A 2005 poll found that 78 percent of Americans did not know residents of Washington, D.C., have less representation than residents of the fifty states. The unofficial motto, End Taxation Without Representation, appears on the city's license plates. Polls indicate that between 61 and 82 percent of Americans believe the district should have voting representation. Opponents argue the Founding Fathers never intended District residents to vote in Congress, since representation must come from states, and that statehood would unfairly grant the Senate a single city. A 1978 voting rights amendment passed but expired in 1986 without ratification. The Twenty-third Amendment itself complicates statehood, since it would apply even to a shrunken federal district and could only be undone by another amendment.

• 7. Toward The Fifty-First State

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  After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the 4th of April 1968, riots broke out across the U Street, 14th Street, 7th Street, and H Street corridors, predominantly Black residential and commercial areas. The violence raged for three days until more than 13,600 federal troops and National Guardsmen stopped it, and rebuilding was not completed until the late 1990s. Local self-rule followed. The District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973 created an elected mayor and a thirteen-member council, and in 1975 Walter Washington became the district's first elected and first Black mayor. Still, Congress kept the power to review and overturn the council's laws. The statehood movement grew through the 1980s. In 2016, a referendum drew 85 percent support among voters for becoming the fifty-first state. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton introduced a statehood bill in March 2017, and the Washington, D.C., Admission Act passed the House in April 2021 before stalling in the Senate. The bill would create a state with one representative and two senators, named Washington, Douglass Commonwealth, preserving the abbreviation D.C. The federal district would shrink to roughly the size of the National Mall, satisfying the constitutional requirement that Congress operate from a district it controls. On the 11th of August 2025, President Donald Trump switched control of the Metropolitan Police Department from the city government to the federal government, invoking section 740 of the Home Rule Act and deploying the National Guard against what he called rampant crime.