From Hilltop to Downtown

This account of The George Washington University over the years is both circumstantial and straightforward. Thus, it begins with a short section that would probably make a public relations executive shudder—it is the equivalent of an adventure story, which opens with the stalwart hero mounting his horse and falling off, several times.

The early days of Columbian College, the forerunner of GW, were difficult. Columbian was not brought into the world by rich benefactors making generous donations; eminent men in Washington, including President James Monroe, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, and Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford, among others, all contributed to the purchase of land for the new college, the typical gift being about $25; at the time, $200 was considered a “substantial” amount. The College was chartered by Congress, which never gave it a cent for endowment or expenses, but occasionally helped it with debt relief.

It was not quite orphaned at birth: former President Monroe; the Marquis de Lafayette, the old hero of the Revolutionary War; and President John Quincy Adams attended the first graduation in 1824. The great and famous often visited and still do. But Columbian College, like a child of absent or preoccupied parents, struggled to make ends meet and find its real identity (or mission, in the current phrase) for many, many years. Things did not immediately improve when the name became Columbian University or The George Washington University.

It is a matter of historical pride that Columbian and GW endured hardships and finally overcame them to become the thriving university it is today. There is no sense in trying to hide history or revise it, especially when early difficulties helped set the stage for the individuals, events, and activities that have bound the institution and the city together for more than 180 years. There is no advantage, either, in dwelling on problems more than necessary, so the section dealing with difficulties is brief. The intimacy and integration that have worked to the profit of both the District of Columbia and GW are the main subjects of this account.

George’s Hope
The father of his country was not the father of the university that bears his name today.

George Washington hoped to see a “national university” in the capital city. But the institution that claims him now came into the world 22 years after George Washington had left it. The bequest of stock in Washington’s will to endow the school turned out eventually to be worthless. The congressional charter of 1821 created a college, not a university. And the first name of the new college was not National or Washington, but Columbian.

A national university was a preoccupation of the last years of Washington’s presidency and life: he mentioned it not only in his will but in his last address to Congress as well. He wrote about it to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton. He made his most forceful statement in a letter to the Commissioners of the District of Columbia:

It has always been a source of serious reflection and sincere regret with me, that the youth of the United States should be sent to foreign countries for the purpose of education. Altho’ there are doubtless many under these circumstances who escape the danger of contracting principles, unfriendly to republican government, yet we ought to deprecate the hazard attending ardent and susceptible minds, from being too strongly, and too early prepossessed in favor of other political systems, before they are capable of appreciating their own.

Washington hoped that the commissioners would do “something handsome” by way of endowing the university. He also hoped that the young, by attending a national university in the capital city, “would be enabled to free themselves in a proper degree from those local prejudices and habitual jealousies…which, when carried to excess, are never failing sources of disquietude to the Public mind, and pregnant of mischievous consequences to this Country.”

Washington’s hopes had to wait many years. They were sound, even noble. But neither the new college nor the city of Washington was ready or able to fulfill those hopes in 1821 or for many years to come.

The congressional charter that created Columbian College gave its governance to the Baptist ministers and missionaries who had proposed it, but with the proviso that the school should not be sectarian. Without funds from Congress and without a denominational value to the Baptists, the new college was hungry from its first day and remained so for its first century. Let one example suffice for many: In the spring of 1827, Columbian closed its doors for a year because it had no money. A year later, it opened for a three-month semester—immediately after which the Law School vanished and did not return until after the Civil War.

The school was ill funded, but also small and parochial. While the first commencement in 1824 boasted a president, an ex-president, and more tellingly student speakers from Virginia, the District, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, Columbian recruited most of its students from the South, doing little to make the school’s complexion “national” or to overcome local prejudices. In 1847, a student named Henry Arnold was immediately expelled and nearly assaulted by fellow students for trying to free a slave belonging to the College steward. Considering that Columbian’s fund raising was most energetic and successful in the South, this is not surprising.

The city itself was not ready for Columbian College, let alone the hopes Washington had pinned on it. The commissioners who governed the city never did anything “handsome” or even helpful. Washington city at the time was a swamp striving to become a mud puddle. “A city of magnificent distances” was the more diplomatic description of the capital offered by the Abbé Correia, Portugal’s ambassador to the United States. Like other members of his profession, he was entitled to hardship pay, and one of his colleagues famously and publicly beseeched God to tell him what offense he had committed to be posted to Washington.

Washington city’s population in the early 1820s was small; Georgetown and Alexandria were separate towns within the District of Columbia, which at the time was considered a county. The city proper had about 13,000 residents, including 2,000 slaves, most of whom lived and worked along an east-west line running from the White House, past the public market at 7th Street, to Capitol Hill. The northern limit of Pierre L’Enfant’s original plan of the federal city was at Boundary Road, now Florida Avenue. North of Boundary Road were woodlands, a few farms, and orchards; south of it, spotty development. The Columbian campus was on College Hill, on the far side of Boundary Road at 14th Street—outside the city limits and in the country. The school was over two miles from the heart of downtown as the crow flies; but as the student walked, it was a slow hike on unpaved streets (Columbian students were not allowed to keep horses). Like its finances, the location of the College was marginal.

The choice of site defeated the intimacy and interplay between town and gown, which would have benefited both. The campus was, moreover, self-contained: students studied, slept, ate, and played on College Hill. They needed faculty permission to go into the city and were forbidden to leave the campus on the Sabbath. Life on College Hill was completely unlike life on the modern GW campus, which is snugged into Foggy Bottom. Today’s GW puts students into the city as soon as they walk out the door of a classroom building or residence hall. Unless they made it their business and got permission, Columbian students 180 years ago had little spontaneous occasion to bump into the activities of the city of Washington—into the business of “republican government” or the daily business of its ordinary citizens—that was part of George Washington’s original hope and remains a large part of GW’s allure today.

Isolated, perennially down at the heels, and regional, Columbian College in its first days—and in truth in its first 60 years—did not either reflect George Washington’s hopes or foreshadow the modern GW. But it survived and in time began to find its identity as an institution in and of the city of Washington. In its connection and service to the national capital, and in more recent years to the nation, GW has certainly measured up to Washington’s ideas and allows us to look at him as the University’s godfather and to see GW as worthy of both his hopes and his name.

Down From the Hill
After the Civil War, Columbian College came down from the hill. The move progressed one step at a time and chiefly, at first, in the minds of Columbian’s administrators, with their interest in the move rising and falling with the real estate market. Seventeen years after the war had ended, Columbian headed down the hill.

The Law and Medical Schools had always been downtown. The Medical School in the 1820s constructed a building on the corner of E and 10th Streets, four doors down from Ford’s Theatre. It was a prime location then and now: a Hard Rock Café occupies the site today in the city’s Northwest quadrant (all Columbian and GW addresses are NW). The separate location reflected a separate identity; the Medical School had its own budget and was intended to be self-supporting—an end it pursued aggressively and successfully by thwarting the efforts of Georgetown College to open a competing medical school nearby. The Medical School moved in 1844 to the Washington Infirmary, a former insane asylum, just east of the center of the old downtown in Judiciary Square. The building burned down in 1861. When Columbian revived the Law School in 1865, it joined the Medical School on H Street in the financial district just a couple of blocks east of the White House.

On the eve of the Civil War, the population of Washington city was 61,000. During the war, it naturally swelled, but—then as now—many who came to Washington for a tour of duty of a few years stayed and stayed and stayed. And the government—then as now—had grown and showed no signs of wanting to reduce forces. In 1870, the city’s population was 109,000, an increase of nearly 75 percent in just 10 years. It was no longer a small town. Washington city began in earnest the process of occupying the entire District of Columbia: empty lots were filling up with shops, industrial lofts, private residences, office buildings, hotels, and boarding houses.

The city was becoming the government’s company town. The permanent army of government employees was principally made up of young men with a lots of time to spare. The working day ended officially at 3:00 in the afternoon and practically much earlier. Thus, the reasons offered for reopening the Law School nearly 40 years after it first closed were these: its “strategic location” in Washington and the “presence here of many young men with college degrees or literary backgrounds, working in the government, but with much time on their hands and looking forward to law,” in the words of a committee report to the president.

These reasons could have been offered for moving the entire Columbian College down from the hill. Infinitely more important, the move gave the school a new identity as well as improving its chances of survival by appealing to a wider pool of students. The move, as it turns out, did both. And both reasons must have been in the mind of James Clarke Welling, the first Columbian president who was not a Baptist minister. Unlike his predecessors who looked for funds from Baptists nationally, Welling set about cultivating local benefactors, especially William Corcoran, and used their generosity to find ways to house the new Scientific School as well as the long-standing departments of Columbian in the heart of the city. He sold off the property on College Hill.

By the 1880s, the College was established downtown in an imposing new building at 15th and H Streets; in 1873, it had changed its name to Columbian University, and the Baptists who had guided the school for 50 years had given up control to a secular board of trustees (the Baptists returned at the very end of the century, then retired from the school completely and forever).

The charter changing Columbian from a college to a university was not cosmetic; moreover, it added significance to the move downtown. The Medical and Law Schools had been separate both physically and financially—isolated from College Hill and sinking or swimming on their own. For the first time, the College and the Preparatory School were next door to the Medical and Law Schools, the new Scientific School, and the Dental, Comparative Jurisprudence, and Veterinary Schools that were added soon after.

Being near one another, they could foster interdepartmental collaborations. Being all together on one of the busiest streets in the city, they presented a unified picture—for the first time—of a substantial institution of higher learning in the city, not a marginal campus few had ever seen or an institution of scattered and seemingly unrelated parts. And being all downtown together, they could draw on the new population of would-be students and on part-time instructors from government and business.

Secular day-to-day control of the University may have meant little to most potential students. But as the commitment of resources to teaching dental surgery, jurisprudence, and science illustrates, the Baptist focus on producing preachers was displaced by a more worldly—and more widely inviting—curriculum.

These changes were significant, but they did not provide a secure future for the College. It continued to have severe financial problems. President Ulysses S. Grant and his entire cabinet attended the banquet inaugurating Columbian as a university, but this was a social event, not a revival of George Washington’s hope for a national university with the blessing and support of the federal or District government.

Nevertheless, the urban location, the new status, and the non-denominational control set the stage for the beginnings of traditions and trendlines that redefined the new Columbian University and continue to define the modern George Washington University’s commitment to learning and service in the city of Washington.