This past weekend, in a column about my new book “The First Congress,” New York Times writer Sam Roberts picked up on the fact that the First Congress is also a New York story. When Congress met there, in 1789-1790, nearly all Manhattan Island was still farmland. But the city’s sophistication seemed like a trap to many members, who worried that they might never be able to pry the national capital away. (Sam Roberts is also the author of “Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America” — well worth reading.)
Read the full article titled “City History, and Vantages, Often Overlooked” by Sam Roberts here. The First Congress will be out tomorrow as well and you can find it here.
“America begins in New York,” Kenneth T. Jackson, the Columbia University professor and editor of the Encyclopedia of New York City, likes to say. Now comes the journalist and author Fergus M. Bordewich to engagingly revive the forgotten story of the nearly 18 months that New York was the nation’s first capital in “The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government” (Simon & Schuster, $30).
As the author instructively recalls, that first Congress fleshed out the bare bones of the recently ratified Constitution in two sessions that were probably the most productive in its history — a claim vindicated through prodigious research by the First Federal Congress Project at George Washington University.
Congressmen, representing only 11 states, convened at Peter Charles L’Enfant’s renovated Federal Hall downtown. These learned men loftily managed to compromise on most issues (though closing their eyes to others, like the slave market practically across the street) while enduring the clatter of horse-drawn traffic outside their windows and the noise of insatiable spectators cracking nuts in the public gallery of the House of Representatives.