Route Card: The Capital Block, 1790–1800
1From 1790 to 1800, Philadelphia was the capital of the United States. On this route card’s map, Market Street runs east–west, and Chestnut Street runs beside it one block to the south. Fifth and Sixth Streets run north–south, with Fifth Street to the east. The route starts at the President’s House, on the south side of Market Street at Sixth Street. Three buildings stand in a row on the south side of Chestnut Street: Congress Hall at the Sixth Street corner, the State House in the middle and Old City Hall at the Fifth Street corner. Behind them, to the south, lies the walled State House Yard.
2Stop 1, the President’s House. George Washington lived and worked here from 1790 to 1797. In April 1792 he used the first presidential veto, rejecting a bill that divided seats in the House of Representatives among the states, because he judged that it broke the Constitution’s rules. A Pennsylvania law of 1780 had begun to end slavery in the state, and it let enslaved people brought into the state by visitors claim freedom after six months. Washington held enslaved people in this house, and his household sent them out of Pennsylvania before six months passed.
3Walk one block along Sixth Street to Stop 2, Congress Hall. The House met on the first floor and the Senate upstairs. Here the House voted on Washington’s veto. Here, too, Congress passed a 1792 law letting the President call out state militias to enforce national laws, but only after a federal judge certified that the courts and marshals could not enforce them alone.
4Walk east to Stop 3, the State House, where the Constitution was written in 1787. In the 1790s Pennsylvania’s own legislature met here, making laws for the state while Congress met next door.
5Continue east to Stop 4, Old City Hall. The Supreme Court met here from 1791 to 1800. In Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), a South Carolina man sued the state of Georgia over a debt, and the Court ruled that a citizen of one state could sue another state in federal court. Many states were alarmed. Congress proposed the Eleventh Amendment, and by 1795 the states had ratified it, so federal courts could no longer hear such suits.
6In August 1794, Justice James Wilson certified that farmers in western Pennsylvania were blocking the collection of a national tax on whiskey. Washington then called up about 13,000 militia from four states, and the protest ended without a battle.