District of Columbia (until 1871)

Alexandria City and County were ceded back from the federal government to the commonwealth of Virginia in 1846, in a process known as retrocession, anticipating the 1850 ban on slave trading (but not slavery) in the district.

Washington and Georgetown retained their separate charters for seventy years, until the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871.

[1] Congress determined, in the Residence Act of 1790, that the nation's capital be on the Potomac, between the Anacostia River and today's Williamsport, Maryland, and in a federal district up to 10 miles square.

The exact location was to be determined by President George Washington, familiar with the area from his nearby home and properties at Mt.

Virginia lobbied for the selection, an idea opposed by New York and Pennsylvania, both of which had previously housed the nation's capital.

The U.S. House created a permanent Committee on the District of Columbia in January 1808, and the U.S. Senate established its counterpart in December 1816.

The language of the establishing act of 1801 omitted any provision for district residents to vote for local, state-equivalent, or federal representatives.

One voice from a public meeting in January 1801, before the bill's passage, compared their situation to those who fought against British taxation without representation in the Revolutionary War—20 years prior.

The district still has no voting representation in Congress, and the decisions of its long-sought local government established in 1973 are still subject to close congressional review, annulment, and budget control.

One leading figure in the fight to retrocede through the 1820s was Thomson Francis Mason, who was elected mayor of Alexandria, D.C., four times between 1827 and 1830.

[12] Southern senators and congressmen resisted banning slavery altogether in the District, to avoid setting a precedent.

By this time the county also contained other small settlements and nascent suburbs of Washington outside its bounded limits, such as Anacostia, which had been incorporated in 1854 as Uniontown; Fort Totten, dating at least to the Civil War; and Barry Farm, a large tract bought by the Freedmen's Bureau and granted to formerly enslaved and free-born African Americans in 1867.

[14] The first vice-chair of that Board of Public Works was real-estate developer Alexander Robey Shepherd, the architect and proponent of the consolidating legislation.