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White and Lee, agreed to change their votes, and Hamilton undertook to carry the other point."

Some historians have accepted Jefferson's account as final, but others, studying the inflexible purposes of Washington, believe that a controlling power more potent than the wine and compromises at a political dinner finally secured the vote for the Potomac site. Years before, when a young lieutenant, encamped with Braddock's army on Observatory Hill, Washington had "noted the beauty of the broad plateau" on which the Capitol was destined to be reared, and had "marked the breadth of the picture, and the strong colors in the ground and the environing wall of wooded heights which rolled back against the sky, as if to enclose a noble area of landscape, fit for the supreme deliberations of a continental nation."

The loftiest minds in Congress were swayed by Washington's judgment. They agreed with him that America should establish the splendid precedent of a nation locating and founding a city by legislative enactment for its permanent capital. Furthermore, they wished to honor their first President and the great general and counsellor who had made their independence