White and Lee, agreed to change their votes, and Hamilton undertook to carry the other point."
Some historians have accepted Jefferson's
account as final, but others, studying the inflexible
purposes of Washington, believe that
a controlling power more potent than the wine
and compromises at a political dinner finally
secured the vote for the Potomac site. Years
before, when a young lieutenant, encamped
with Braddock's army on Observatory Hill,
Washington had "noted the beauty of the
broad plateau" on which the Capitol was
destined to be reared, and had "marked the
breadth of the picture, and the strong colors
in the ground and the environing wall of
wooded heights which rolled back against the
sky, as if to enclose a noble area of landscape,
fit for the supreme deliberations of a continental
nation."
The loftiest minds in Congress were swayed by Washington's judgment. They agreed with him that America should establish the splendid precedent of a nation locating and founding a city by legislative enactment for its permanent capital. Furthermore, they wished to honor their first President and the great general and counsellor who had made their independence
