Established on land ceded by Maryland and Virginia, Washington initially deferred to these states’ jurisdictions, advising residents who lived east of the Potomac River to vote in Maryland’s elections and those who lived west of the river to vote in Virginia. In 1801, however, the Federalist-dominated Congress passed a law placing Washington exclusively under congressional and presidential control. Its population at the time was about 14,000 residents, nearly one-fourth of them enslaved Black laborers.
“No longer were the residents of these areas considered citizens of Maryland or Virginia,” write Musgrove and Asch in Chocolate City. “No longer could they vote for president; no longer could they help choose representatives in Congress. … Just a generation after ‘no taxation without representation’ had been the rallying cry for the Revolutionary War, District residents lost the right to vote in all elections.”
In response to complaints by locals, the new Democratic-Republican-controlled Congress allowed Washington to form a municipal government in 1802, with a mayor appointed by the president and a council elected by white male landowners. (Much as today, Congress held veto power over this council.) Over the subsequent decades, the federal government made multiple concessions to Washington residents, eventually allowing them to elect their mayor directly and vote for public officials like a board of assessors and a registrar.
After the Civil War, Congress’ Radical Republican faction pushed to extend voting rights to African American men living in Washington, hoping to use the city as a test case for the argument that emancipation from slavery should be coupled with enfranchisement. In 1867, they succeeded, passing the U.S.’s first law granting Black men the right to vote—three years before the 15th Amendment extended the franchise nationwide. In 1868, Black voters helped secure the election of Republican Sayles J. Bowen as Washington’s new mayor.
“That enraged a lot of white men in power, who claimed that Washington, D.C. had become a financial mess—that white men were being marginalized, that the city was being ‘Africanized,’” wrote columnist Petula Dvorak for the Washington Post earlier this year. “So Congress took [the city] over in 1871,” passing an act that designated Washington as a territory and replaced its elected mayor and council with a governor and council appointed by the president. Capital citizens could still vote for members of a 22-seat House of Delegates, but they lost this right with another reshuffling in 1874. Finally, in 1878, Congress established a permanent form of government for the city, defining it as a municipal corporation overseen by three presidentially appointed commissioners. Washington’s population at this point was more than 177,000 residents.
“Three white men would run the city by themselves, being overseen by Congress, for the next 100 years,” Musgrove told DCist in 2024. “And so we effectively have the end of local democracy for three generations in the District of Columbia at that point.”