A Capital Built to Belong to No State

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The United States capital exists on land that belongs to no state at all, and that was the point from the start. The Residence Act of 16 July 1790 authorized a federal district along the Potomac River precisely so the seat of government would not sit inside, or owe anything to, any single state; Maryland and Virginia each donated land to build it. The commissioners overseeing construction named the new city Washington, after the sitting president, on 9 September 1791, while the surrounding federal district took the name Columbia, a poetic name for the country then in wide use. The arrangement still holds: Washington, D.C. remains coextensive with the District of Columbia today, a status that gives its residents no voting representation in Congress and no state government of their own, a tradeoff built into the capital design from the beginning rather than an oversight discovered later.