Robert Brent: Thomas Jefferson’s Friend and Washington’s First Mayor

On June 3, 1802, Thomas Jefferson sat down at the President’s House and wrote a short letter to his friend Robert Brent.

“The act of Congress incorporating the city of Washington has confided to the President of the US. the appointment of the Mayor of the city,” Jefferson wrote. “As the agency of that officer will be immediately requisite, I am desirous to avail the city of your services in it, if you will permit me to send you the commission.”

Then, almost as a postscript: “Will you also do me that of dining with me the day after tomorrow (Friday) at half after three?”

Brent said yes on both counts. He took the commission, came to dinner, and became the first mayor of the City of Washington.

Who Brent actually was

Robert Brent was born in 1764 at Woodstock, the family estate at Aquia, in Stafford County, Virginia. The Brents were Catholic in a colony where Catholic worship had been driven into private houses. They had moved south from Maryland a century earlier after a falling out with the Calvert proprietors and held on to their faith quietly.

The family was wired tightly into the Maryland Catholic gentry. Brent’s mother, Anne Carroll Brent, was a daughter of Daniel Carroll the Elder. Her brother John Carroll became the first Catholic bishop in the United States and the founder of what is now Georgetown University. Her other brother, Daniel Carroll II, signed both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. In 1791, President Washington named him one of three Federal Commissioners assigned to lay out the new District of Columbia.

Robert Brent grew up inside that network. In 1787 he married Mary Young, daughter of Notley Young, one of the eighteen original proprietors of the land that became the District. Through the Carrolls the couple were also first cousins: Mary’s mother, Mary Carroll, was Anne’s sister.

The Brents lived on the Young family estate in the southwest corner of the new city. Brent took over his father’s stake in the Aquia sandstone quarry, the source of stone for the White House and the U.S. Capitol. By the time Jefferson’s June 1802 letter arrived, Brent was one of Washington’s leading merchants, with property in Stafford County, in Montgomery County, Maryland, and across what was then called Washington County in the District.

The 1802 charter and what the mayor’s job actually was

From 1791 to 1802, Washington had been run by a three-man Board of Commissioners. Congress dissolved that arrangement on May 3, 1802, when Jefferson signed an act incorporating Washington as a municipality on the same legal footing as Georgetown and Alexandria.

The charter put a mayor at the head of the city. The President appointed him each year. Voters elected a twelve-man council, split between a chamber of seven and a chamber of five. The electorate was free white male inhabitants over twenty-one who had lived in the city for at least a year and had paid that year’s taxes.

Brent’s commission, signed by Jefferson and James Madison, was dated June 1, 1802. The first council election was held on Monday, June 7. Twelve men were chosen to fill the two chambers. The new city government got to work.

What Brent did with the job

There was no City Hall. There were no markets. There was no police force, no fire department, no public school system, no tax structure. Brent built all of it from scratch over the next ten years. James Goode’s Capital Losses credits him with laying out streets that Pierre L’Enfant had not finished surveying before his dismissal.

He refused a salary in any of his ten one-year terms.

One of the new council’s first ordinances, in October 1802, regulated the size of bricks. After January 1, 1803, any brick sold in Washington had to be eight and three-quarter inches long and four and one-quarter inches wide. The penalty for noncompliance was one dollar for every thousand bricks made, sold, or offered for sale.

Brent and Jefferson kept up a working correspondence about the city. In March 1807, Brent wrote asking Jefferson to release part of a recent congressional appropriation for avenue and road work in the District. Jefferson’s reply on March 10 explained why he was reading the law narrowly.

The last appropriation was in terms much more lax, to wit, “for avenues and roads in the District of Columbia.” This, indeed, would take in a large field, but besides that we cannot suppose Congress intended to tax the people of the United States at large, for all the avenues in Washington and roads in Columbia… With this view of the just and probably intention of the legislature, I shall not think myself authorized to take advantage of a lax expression, forced on by circumstances, to carry the execution of the law into a region of expense which would merit great consideration before they should embark in it.

The president then signed off, “Accept my friendly salutations, and assurances of great esteem and respect.” It is the kind of letter you write to a colleague, not a subordinate.

The other job: Paymaster General of the Army

On July 1, 1808, Jefferson appointed Brent Paymaster General of the United States Army, succeeding Caleb Swan. Brent kept the post simultaneously with the mayoralty. He held it through the War of 1812 and into the second term of James Monroe, working alongside whichever mayor came after him.

He resigned the Paymaster General job on August 28, 1819, and was succeeded by Nathan Towson of Maryland. Per the U.S. Army Center of Military History’s record of the Pay Department, Brent’s tenure ran eleven years and one month.

Slavery, plainly

Brent came from a slaveholding family and was himself a slaveholder. His Brent ancestors ran Virginia plantations with enslaved labor. His father-in-law, Notley Young, was one of the largest enslavers in the area that became the District of Columbia. The Young estate where Brent and his wife first lived in the new federal city was worked by enslaved people.

The 1810 federal census schedules for the District of Columbia did not survive, so Brent’s specific count in that year is not on the record. Family accounts indicate he freed at least one enslaved person in his will. The fuller record of who he held, where, and what happened to them after his death is incomplete.

Stepping down in 1812

In May 1812, Congress amended Washington’s charter. The mayor would no longer be appointed by the President. Going forward he would be chosen each June by the two chambers of the council, sitting jointly.

Brent had been reappointed seven times by Jefferson and three times by Madison. He stood for the new council vote in June 1812, against printer and bookseller Daniel Rapine. The result tied. The councilors broke the tie with a coin toss. Rapine won.

Brent stepped down after ten years as Washington’s only appointed mayor. (The 2012 version of this post, drawing on older sources, dated his departure to June 1811. That is wrong; the correct year is 1812. The transition from appointed to elected mayor is what makes the date matter.)

Brentwood Mansion, 1817

In 1817 Brent began construction of Brentwood, a country house for his daughter Eleanor and her husband, North Carolina Congressman Joseph Pearson. The site sat northeast of Boundary Street (now Florida Avenue), on a hill that looked back at the city. The Washington Post would later say there was “no one spot near the city from which a better view can be obtained.”

The mansion was a two-story Greek Revival in stuccoed brick, with two long single-story wings. At its center was a domed hall rising the full height of the house, ringed by a second-floor gallery and topped by a cupola that let daylight down through the structure. Dining and reception rooms opened off the central hall on three sides.

The design has traditionally been attributed to Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who knew Brent and who had designed both the Decatur House and St. John’s Church on Lafayette Square. A newspaper advertisement in 1838 called Brentwood “one of Latrobe’s most tasteful plans.” The attribution is no longer secure, though.

Latrobe scholar Michael Fazio, writing with Patrick Snadon in The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (2006), flagged several details that do not appear in Latrobe’s documented work: the placement of the stairs and hallways, and the dentil trim on the exterior. Latrobe’s records for these years are also thin. As Streets of Washington reads it, the house may have started as a Latrobe design and been modified during construction.

Brent never lived to see Brentwood finished. Eleanor died before her father did. The mansion’s first occupants were Joseph Pearson and his second wife, Catherine Worthington of Georgetown, who began the run of elegant entertainments that the house became known for through the rest of the nineteenth century.

Death and an unquiet grave

Brent suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. He resigned the Paymaster General job on August 28, 1819. Ten days later, on September 7, 1819, he died at home in Washington at the age of fifty-five.

He was buried in an Egyptian Revival mausoleum he had built on the Brentwood grounds in 1818. He rested there for nearly a century. Then, in 1915, vandals broke into the mausoleum looking for jewelry that rumor said was hidden on the property. They pried the slabs off the tombs, opened the caskets, and pulled the nameplates off as trophies. The remains were so scrambled the families could no longer match bones to individual graves.

What was left of Robert Brent, his daughter Eleanor, and four other family members was reinterred at St. John the Evangelist Catholic Cemetery, also called the Carroll Cemetery, in Forest Glen, Maryland. His gravestone there is shared with Eleanor Brent Pearson. The Brentwood mausoleum was bricked up.

What is left on the map

The southeast corner of 12th Street and Maryland Avenue SW, where Brent lived and died, is now buried inside L’Enfant Plaza. The Brentwood mansion itself was largely destroyed by fire in late 1915, just months after the mausoleum was sacked. Parts of the shell still stood into the early 1920s.

During the First World War, the Army’s Quartermaster Corps put Camp Meigs on the cleared estate, with eighteen barracks, six mess halls, a hospital, and assembly fields for tradesmen heading to Europe. After Camp Meigs closed in 1920, the site went through stints as a circus lot and a Ford tractor showcase. In February 1931, one month after Center Market downtown closed for good, the new Union Terminal Market opened on the old Camp Meigs tract. That is the wholesale market that is now Union Market.

The mansion site itself sits inside the campus of Gallaudet University near 6th and Florida Avenue NE, roughly where Cogswell Hall stands today. The DC neighborhood of Brentwood takes its name from Brent’s house on the hill. So do the Prince George’s County towns of Brentwood and North Brentwood, on land that was once part of the same estate. The Robert Brent Elementary School on Capitol Hill carries the name too.

For the man himself, the closest thing to a monument is a small headstone in a Catholic cemetery in suburban Maryland, shared with a daughter who died before him.