Washington was invented so no state owned the capital
After soldiers mutinied in Philadelphia, James Madison argued the young republic needed a district Congress alone controlled. The 1790 Residence Act put that federal city on the Potomac; L’Enfant’s 1791 plan still fans out from the Capitol in four quadrants.
Washington, D.C.—the District of Columbia—is the United States’ federal capital and only federal district, on the Potomac’s northeast bank facing Virginia and wrapped by Maryland. Columbia personified the nation; the Constitution of 1789 demanded a seat under exclusive congressional jurisdiction, not belonging to any state. The 2020 census counted 689,545 residents in a city of 131 neighbourhoods, though weekday commuters from Maryland and Virginia swell the daytime population.
Nine cities hosted the Continental Congress before independence; New York briefly served as first capital under the Constitution. The Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783 pushed Congress to Princeton and, on 6 October, to seek a permanent site. Madison’s Federalist No. 43 (23 January 1788) insisted the federal government must control its capital for safety. Article I, Section 8 capped such a district at ten miles square, formed by state cessions.
Congress passed the Residence Act on 9 July 1790; George Washington chose the Potomac location. The territory absorbed Georgetown (1751) and Alexandria (1749). Andrew Ellicott’s team surveyed the diamond; Pierre Charles L’Enfant designed the new city in 1791 with quadrants meeting at the Capitol. On 9 September 1791 commissioners named it for Washington. The Organic Act of 1801 placed the whole district under federal control, crystallising the experiment of a capital owned by the Union itself. Algonquian Piscataway and Nacotchtank peoples had lived along the Potomac long before commissioners named the federal city for Washington.
Source: Washington, D.C.
