Washington Burning by Les Standiford

Not so long ago, Les Standiford was best known as the author of a well-reviewed series of Miami-based crime novels featuring a building contractor-sleuth named John Deal (Done Deal, Raw Deal, Deal With the Dead — you get the idea). Alas, sales were modest.

Then Standiford wrote Last Train to Paradise (2003), a nonfiction book about tycoon Henry Flagler’s quixotic development of the overseas railroad from Miami to Key West.

Voila! The book outsold his mysteries. Suddenly Standiford, founding director of the creative writing department at Florida International University, found himself with an unexpected nonfiction career.

Standiford’s skills are evident in his third popular history book, Washington Burning, an account of the founding and development of Washington, D.C., that focuses on the troubled genius Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French-born civil engineer who designed the city, but lost the chance to build it. Like any ethical armchair historian, Standiford makes no pretense of original research: “Given the amount and quality of scholarship devoted to the founding of this country, I have not aimed to unearth a welter of unreported details but rather to offer a fresh appreciation of this dramatic story. And, because I came to the writing life as a maker of novels, the dictum that all stories spring from character guided me as I went about the telling of this factual one.”

Yet Standiford does more than retell the story with improved readability. An index, bibliography, and lengthy notes testify the labor that went into this book, enabling Standiford to write in a bold, authoritative voice, and giving him the confidence to make sure-handed assumptions when the historical record is inconclusive.

“It is likely that L’Enfant felt no obligation to assume the duties of a politician, though if it had been Washington himself who had asked him to moderate his enthusiasm for the good of the project, the response might have been different.” This kind of guess work, however informed, can irritate in a work presented as scholarship, but here it proves no stumbling block, seeming always congruent with the facts as presented.

Tracking the story from the Revolution to the War of 1912, Standiford explores the fine grain of familiar history to good effect. The role real estate development played in the country’s early years may astonish, but will also seem familiar. The fight over the capital’s location between the slave-holding South and the industrial North prefigures the Civil War by 70 years.

L’Enfant proves an endearing and exasperating figure, defeated by his own artistic obstreperousness as much as the politicians and developers who outwitted him. But Standiford is equally adept at portraits of Washington (a born leader of supreme gravity, but also vain) or Jefferson (admirably brilliant, but sneaky and self-serving, almost a villain in this story). All, Washington included, were skilled and ruthless politicians.

Standiford’s most daring gambit is his depiction of England’s burning of Washington during the War of 1812 as a terrorist act equal in atrocity to 9-11 — intended “to instill fear in the hearts of the populace and deliver an unequivocal message: Submit or die.” On the contrary, the outrage united Americans behind the capital city as never before.

Despite L’Enfant’s sad fate, his vision for the capital city triumphed. In 1901, a joint congressional task force, including such luminaries as landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and architect Charles F. McKim, convened to chart the capital’s future needs. It concluded “the perfect plan was already in place.” Today’s Washington is nearly identical to what L’Enfant proposed in 1790.