Newspapers in all parts of the country echoed these depressing reports, accompanying them with demands that the Government move again, this time to some already well-populated and civilized region. Indeed, of several resolutions to that end introduced in Congress, one was actually carried to a vote and barely escaped passage. It may have been this accumulation of discouraging elements which caused the delay in the arrival of the Supreme Court from Philadelphia; or it may have been the paucity of business before that tribunal, whose first Chief Justice, John Jay, had resigned his commission to become Governor of New York, because he had come to the conclusion that the Court could not command sufficient support in the country at large to enforce its decisions! Whatever the reason, the Justices did not find their way to Washington till well on in the winter, or open their work there till February. They were assigned the room in the basement of the Capitol now occupied by the Supreme Court library.
Even when the first acute discomforts incident to removal had passed away, the general depression was little relieved. Most of the earlier citizens of Washington had entertained hopes of its becoming a commercial as well as a political center of importance. They reasoned that since Alexandria and Georgetown had already built up some trade with the outside world, Washington, much more eligibly situated than either, ought to attract a correspondingly larger measure of profitable business. But all these bright anticipations were doomed to disappointment: the progress of the city was as inconsiderable as if its feet had become mired in one of its own marshes. The Mall, which on L’Enfant’s map appeared as a boulevard fringed with fine public buildings, soon degenerated into a common for pasturing cows. There was good fishing above the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue from Sixth Street to Thirteenth. Wild ducks found a favorite haunt where the Center Market now stands. The whole place wore an air of suspended vitality in striking contrast with the generous face of nature. “I am,” wrote a visiting New Yorker to his wife, “almost enchanted with it--I mean the situation for a city, for there is nothing here yet constituting one. As to houses, there are very few, and those very scattering; and as to streets, there are none, except you would call common roads streets. The site, however, for a city, is the most delightful that can be imagined--far beyond my expectation.”