On the evening of January 27, 1910, three hundred businessmen crowded into Armory Hall in Alexandria for the second annual banquet of the local Chamber of Commerce. American Beauty roses on the tables. Pink incandescent lights strung over the hall. Schroeder’s Orchestra tuning up.
The Washington Herald ran it on the front page the next morning:
“The keynote of the speeches, none of which was set, was retrocession.”
Senator Joseph W. Bailey of Texas rose to speak. He praised Mount Vernon. He praised Gunston Hall. He praised the Lee house on the Arlington hilltops. Then he pivoted, and the Herald caught him suggesting “that Washington be annexed to Alexandria.”
Alexandria’s own congressman, C. C. Carlin, stood up and opposed the whole idea.
The question in the room was whether Congress should pull Alexandria County back across the Potomac into the District of Columbia. It had been off the table for sixty-four years.
The Diamond
The District of Columbia was never a square. It was a diamond, tilted 45 degrees off true north, ten miles a side. Virginia ceded her portion in 1789. Maryland ceded hers in 1791. Nineteen local landowners, whose parcels underlay the land that is now the Capitol, the White House, and the Treasury, signed their plots over in March of 1791.
George Washington had done the negotiating himself.
The southern cornerstone of the whole federal territory was set at Jones Point in Alexandria on April 15, 1791, by the Masonic Lodge of Alexandria and Dr. Stuart, one of the commissioners. Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant drew up the city. Major Andrew Ellicott, assisted by the free Black mathematician Benjamin Banneker, ran the outer line. Ellicott reported back on January 1, 1793:
“It is with singular satisfaction that I announce the completion of the four lines comprehending the Territory of Columbia.”
Forty boundary stones along the line. Each one “of fine sandstone, one foot square and two feet in height.” They stood there for the next fifty-five years.
Retrocession, the First Time
Alexandria got out of the District in 1846 because Alexandria’s merchants were afraid of losing the slave trade.
The slave pen at 1315 Duke Street, operated by Franklin and Armfield and later by Price, Birch and Co., was one of the largest domestic slave-trading operations in the United States. Enslaved people were held there in iron-doored cells and then shipped south to the cotton fields. Abolitionists in Congress kept trying to ban the slave trade in the District.
The merchants wanted out before that happened.
The Office of Historic Alexandria and the historian Mark David Richards, writing in Washington History in 2004, both land in the same place: the 1846 retrocession act was, at its core, a move to save the slave-trading business. The Brady & Co. stereograph of the pen’s interior was taken after Union troops captured the building in 1861.
The Senate Fight
Senator William H. Haywood of North Carolina chaired the Senate District Committee. He reported the retrocession bill out of his committee with a recommendation that the Senate reject it. On June 30, 1846, he explained why:
“If there was any particular evil to be remedied by diminishing the extent of the 10 miles square, the committee had not been apprised of it; if any particular good to be attained, they were not apprised. When the retrocession was first suggested to the consideration of the Senate, doubts were entertained by many how far it was competent for Congress to recede what the Constitution had for a particular purpose authorized them to accept.”
Senator Miller followed him, and put the problem in one sentence:
“If Congress had the power to cede away any part of the District, they had power to cede the whole, and thereby entirely defeat the intention of the constitutional provision in regard to the seat of government.”
Thirteen senators joined Haywood. They lost. The Senate passed retrocession 32 to 14. The House had already passed it 96 to 65. Jefferson Davis voted against. Andrew Johnson voted for. President James K. Polk signed the act on July 9, 1846.
The merchants had their wish.
What the Referendum Cost
A local referendum followed in September 1846. Alexandria City voted 763 to 222 in favor of leaving the District. The surrounding county, which today is Arlington, voted 106 to 29 against. The city people wanted out. The county people wanted to stay.
The Alexandria Gazette ran a retrocession song on September 2, 1846. Its chorus: “Hurrah! We’ll retrocede.”
The free Black Alexandrian Moses Hepburn wrote to the abolitionist Gerrit Smith in the days after the vote. His description:
“The suppressed wailings and lamentations of the people of color were constantly ascending to God for help and succor in this their hour of need.”
Within a year Alexandria’s Black schools had closed. Virginia law returned. The Price, Birch pen on Duke Street is what survived.
1909: The Second Chance
In May of 1909, three blocks of the Alexandria waterfront burned. The Smoot and Fields lumber yards went up. More than $200,000 in damage. About forty men thrown out of work.
Alexandria’s mayor called DC for fire apparatus. DC sent it. Alexandria’s own fire department, on its own, could not have handled the blaze.
Within weeks Representative Everis A. Hayes of California introduced a retrocession bill in Congress. The Washington D.C. Chamber of Commerce produced a map proposing annexation of parts of Fairfax and Loudoun Counties. Amos B. Casselman published “The Virginia Portion of the District of Columbia” in the 1909 Records of the Columbia Historical Society, a long argument for undoing 1846.
President Taft let everyone know he was for it in principle.
Does Virginia Own Alexandria County?
On January 17, 1910, Senator Thomas H. Carter of Montana rose on the Senate floor and presented a 40-page constitutional brief written by Hannis Taylor, former U.S. Minister to Spain.
Taylor’s argument was that the 1846 retrocession was flat unconstitutional. His theory: the original cession of DC had been a “quadrilateral contract” among Virginia, Maryland, the nineteen local proprietors, and the federal government. Breaking that contract in 1846 meant Maryland and the proprietors could, in principle, claim back every foot of land they had given.
The Washington Herald put it on the front page the next morning:
“DOES VIRGINIA OWN ALEXANDRIA COUNTY?”
The lede from the Herald, January 18, 1910:
“If the retrocession to Virginia is to stand, he says, then the land underlying the Capitol, the White House, and the Treasury belongs either to Maryland or the local proprietors to whom it was granted. The nation can only be protected against that result by a judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States declaring the act of retrocession of 1846 to be null and void.”
That is as dramatic as a legal brief gets.
Back to the Banquet
Ten days after Taylor’s argument hit the Senate, the Alexandria Chamber of Commerce filled Armory Hall. The guest list explains a lot.
Senator Joseph W. Bailey of Texas. Senator Hernando D. Money of Mississippi. Senator Thomas S. Martin of Virginia. Former DC Commissioner H. L. West. W. T. Dabney, business manager of the Richmond Chamber of Commerce. And Alexandria’s own congressman, C. C. Carlin, who stood up at the front of his city’s own event and said the plan was wrong.
Bailey praised the neighborhood’s historic homes. Mount Vernon. Gunston Hall. Arlington. Then came the pivot:
“While he likes Washington, he couldn’t do both, and suggested that Washington be annexed to Alexandria.”
The room applauded.
That was the public face. The private fight was uglier.
The Chamber of Commerce vs. the Board of Trade
Washington’s boosters were split clean down the middle over method.
The Washington Board of Trade wanted to sue Virginia in the Supreme Court. That was the Taylor approach. The Washington Chamber of Commerce and the D.C. Commissioners wanted to negotiate with Virginia directly, for a smaller piece of land, without a lawsuit. That was the Casselman approach.
Amos B. Casselman wrote to Congress on June 14, 1910, and did not bother being polite about his ally. Taylor’s quadrilateral contract, Casselman said, was a fiction:
“There is no foundation for the theory that there was a ‘quadrilateral contract,’ with mutual covenants and obligations between the State of Virginia and the local proprietors in Maryland, a contract the existence of which was never suspected prior to its supposed discovery by Mr. Taylor one hundred and twenty years after the events referred to.”
That is an intramural takedown.
The D.C. Commissioners, led by their president Cuno H. Rudolph, recommended against a lawsuit. They wanted 7,300 acres of parkland along the Potomac. Not the city. Their language was direct:
“No one will seriously pretend that Alexandria city, with its 20,000 Virginians, situated in the extreme corner of the county, 6 miles from Washington, is needed as an addition to the seat of government.”
The motive, in their words, was visual:
“The military consideration has lost all practical importance. The esthetic consideration yearly gains in importance. Already quarries are disfiguring the green slopes and ravines of the Virginia shore.”
What the Commissioners actually wanted was a Potomac version of the New York and New Jersey Interstate Palisades Park, the one J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller had helped bankroll on the Hudson. Not Alexandria. The shoreline. The 1912 waterfront map shows what they were looking at.
The Lawsuit That Never Happened
In 1875 a private citizen named Phillips had tried to challenge the 1846 retrocession in the Supreme Court. The Court, in Phillips v. Payne, 92 U.S. 130, dismissed it on estoppel grounds. Too late to object. The justices never actually ruled on whether Congress had the constitutional power to give the land back in 1846.
That opening was what Taylor’s brief tried to pry back apart.
In the early months of 1913, Taft consulted with Attorney General George W. Wickersham about filing a fresh U.S.-led suit before he left office. They ran out of time. Wilson was inaugurated on March 4, 1913. Virginia’s congressional delegation killed any further push.
Taft was one lawsuit short of a Supreme Court showdown on whether DC’s boundary could ever legally be moved. If he had sued in February 1913 instead of consulting about it, the ruling might have come in 1914 or 1915, and the capital region might look very different. The 1847 map of Washington is, basically, the shape we still have.
What Remains
Taft admitted defeat in a 1915 National Geographic essay. He had approached Virginia’s congressional delegation about a negotiated re-cession, and he had come to understand that Virginia would never willingly give the territory back.
Old Town Alexandria is still in Virginia. The Palisades Park Casselman envisioned never got built as a single unit, but the Potomac shoreline did eventually pass into federal hands through the George Washington Memorial Parkway and the rest of the NPS acquisitions over the following half century. DC got its parkland. Just slowly.
Thirty-six of the original forty boundary stones survive. Most are planted in suburban yards or along suburban roads, quiet sandstone pyramids marking out George Washington’s diamond. Fred Woodward photographed all of them in 1906 on what he called a ramble. His photograph of Southeast No. 9 shows a stone standing in the shallows of the Potomac at Fox’s Ferry, pointed straight at Alexandria.
Casselman closed his 1910 letter to Congress with a line that reads more like a confession:
“It is not a lawyer’s controversy over a clause of the Constitution, or over a supposed dormant legal title. Its purpose is higher and broader than that.”
The south cornerstone of the original District of Columbia is still at Jones Point, in the seawall beside the old lighthouse. The Masonic Lodge of Alexandria laid it on April 15, 1791. The Army Corps of Engineers buried it behind a retaining wall in 1861. The Daughters of the American Revolution dug it back out in 1912. Its inscription has worn illegible. You can still see it through a pane of glass.