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 possible, by conferring upon him the power to select for this Federal city the locality he had in prophetic fancy chosen as a suitable site for the capital of the Republic. In the act passed July 16, 1790, Congress expressed its faith in the President by permitting him to establish the capital anywhere along the Potomac between the East Branch and the Conogocheague, a distance of eighty miles. The boundaries of no other city were ever fixed by so illustrious a surveyor. It is recorded that, as he walked over the wilderness with his engineering instruments and corps, he was harassed by the “importunities of anxious residents and grasping speculators,” but not for a moment did he waver in his purpose to select the site whose majesty had appealed to him in former years as a fitting environment for the Federal home. Within nine months the confines of the federal territory were established. The corner-stone was laid with appropriate ceremonies at Jones’s Point, Alexandria, April 15, 1791, but the territory west of the river was retroceded to Virginia in 1846. Not a cent was advanced by Congress for buildings or grounds. In fact, with an empty treasury and no credit, Congress was unable to give financial aid. Washington himself drew up the original agreement by which the owners were to convey the land to the Government. The proprietors agreed that all lands necessary for streets, avenues, alleys, etc., should be surrendered free of cost. The building lots were to be equally apportioned between the Government and the individuals. For the larger plots necessary for public buildings and other government uses, the owners were to receive compensation at the rate of £25 per acre. Washington thought that by this arrangement the Government might sell the smaller lots and with the proceeds buy the large ones needed for public uses.