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7 - A City and a State

Governing the District of Columbia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2012

Robert Harrison
Affiliation:
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
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Summary

“A Badly Governed City”

Congress, according to the Constitution, possesses an “exclusive” legislative power over the District of Columbia. However, for most of the nineteenth century, the national government was willing to permit local authorities in the cities of the District and the surrounding Washington County to exercise many of the powers of municipal government, and, within certain broad but ill-defined limits, it was willing to leave them to their own devices. Chiefly preoccupied with the construction and maintenance of federal buildings and federal spaces, it paid only intermittent attention to the governance of the capital city that grew up around them. The city governments of Washington and Georgetown and the Levy Court that managed the affairs of the county were allowed to pass municipal ordinances, to raise taxes and set budgets, to improve streets and construct sewers, and to make provisions for the health and safety of their citizens. They stood in the same constitutional relation to the federal government as cities elsewhere did to the states. As municipal corporations, those cities possessed no powers that were not derived from the superior authority of the state, but, in practice, state legislatures were usually prepared to acknowledge the peculiarly local elements that entered into the governance of cities and to defer often to the wishes of their representatives in passing laws that concerned them. Washington differed from other cities in that it enjoyed no representation in the national legislature, whereas the nation's legislators were much less inclined to take account of local opinion when making decisions concerning the District.

Type
Chapter
Information
Washington during Civil War and Reconstruction
Race and Radicalism
, pp. 211 - 269
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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  • A City and a State
  • Robert Harrison, University of Wales, Aberystwyth
  • Book: Washington during Civil War and Reconstruction
  • Online publication: 05 February 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511993381.009
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  • A City and a State
  • Robert Harrison, University of Wales, Aberystwyth
  • Book: Washington during Civil War and Reconstruction
  • Online publication: 05 February 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511993381.009
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

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  • A City and a State
  • Robert Harrison, University of Wales, Aberystwyth
  • Book: Washington during Civil War and Reconstruction
  • Online publication: 05 February 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511993381.009
Available formats
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