Who ruled Washington, D.C.?

Washington, D.C., lies on the north bank of the Potomac River where it meets the Anacostia, at the head of navigation on the edge of the Atlantic coastal plain. Unlike most capitals it did not grow into its role: it was created from scratch in the 1790s as a seat of government standing outside any state. That origin explains its formal plan of avenues and monuments, and also its unusual political status, since its residents still lack voting representation in Congress.

Before Europeans arrived, the Nacotchtank (Anacostans), an Algonquian-speaking people, lived along the Anacostia, and English traders and settlers reached the area in the 17th century. In the colonial period the land belonged to Maryland, and tobacco ports grew up at Georgetown, founded in 1751, and Alexandria across the river in Virginia.

After the American Revolution, Congress met in several cities before deciding on a permanent home. The Residence Act of July 1790, part of a bargain in which southern members accepted Alexander Hamilton's plan for federal assumption of state debts, placed the capital on the Potomac. George Washington chose the exact site, a square of ten miles a side taken from Maryland and Virginia. The French-born engineer Pierre Charles L'Enfant drew up a plan in 1791 that laid diagonal avenues over a street grid, linking the Capitol and the President's House across open space. The surveyor Andrew Ellicott, assisted by the free Black astronomer Benjamin Banneker, marked out the boundaries. Congress moved in from Philadelphia in 1800, into a half-built town of muddy streets.

During the War of 1812 British troops captured the city on 24 August 1814 and burned the Capitol, the White House and other public buildings. In 1846 Congress returned the Virginia portion, including Alexandria, to Virginia. Washington was also a slave-trading centre until the trade was banned there in 1850; slavery itself was abolished in the District in April 1862, months before the Emancipation Proclamation.

The American Civil War turned Washington into a fortified camp ringed by forts, crowded with soldiers, hospitals and formerly enslaved people seeking freedom. Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre on 14 April 1865 and died the next morning. After the war the population grew quickly, including a large and influential Black community. Congress abolished the District's elected local government in 1874 and ran the city through appointed commissioners for nearly a century.

The McMillan Plan of 1902 revived L'Enfant's vision, clearing the National Mall and leading to memorials such as the Lincoln Memorial, dedicated in 1922. The New Deal and the Second World War expanded the federal workforce enormously. On 28 August 1963 the March on Washington drew some 250,000 people, and Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Riots after his assassination in April 1968 devastated several commercial corridors.

The 23rd Amendment gave residents votes in presidential elections from 1964, and the Home Rule Act of 1973 restored an elected mayor and council, though Congress keeps the power to overrule them. The city of about 700,000 people sits at the centre of a metropolitan region of more than six million, and remains the seat of the federal government of the United States.