Amid all this uproar which proceeded from his cabinet, only Washington remained calm. No other American at that day nor since could have remained neutral and guided the ship of state through such breakers of discontent. He was the safe middle water between the dangerous reefs of concentration and State sovereignty. Had not the Federal party been the victim of many unfortunate circumstances, it would certainly in time have become popular in the nation. It was beyond question Washington's party, and, notwithstanding the false charges of monarchism and British sovereignty, it was patriotic. Had it existed forty or fifty years longer, until that incubus which haunted Jefferson's brain had passed away, and the republic become so firmly established that people would no longer fear British dependency, the Federal party would have been a firmly fixed institution. Had Federal ideas been fully inculcated instead of Jeffersonianism and Calhounism, the rebellion of 1861 would not have occurred; but Aaron Burr murdered Hamilton, the friend of Washington, the bright genius of American politics and the hope of the Federal party, and the Federalists were left without any great leader. When the war of 1812 came, the Federalists were so embittered against the Democrats, then in power, that they became lukewarm and threw so many obstacles in the way of the patriots who were making the second fight for freedom, as to almost confirm the suspicion that they were the friends of Great Britain rather than America. This forever blighted the Federal party. In the year 1800, Thomas Jefferson was elected the third president of the United States, and the first of Democratic proclivities. Although the city of Washington, the great American capital, had been laid out on a magnificent scale, in 1791, and George Washington, with masonic ceremonies, laid the corner-stone of the capitol building in 1793, the seat of government was not removed there until the year 1800. The site for the city was a dreary one. At the time when the seat of government was first moved there, only a path, leading through an alder swamp on the line of the present Pennsylvania Avenue, was the way of communication between the president's house and the capitol. For a while, the executive and legislative officers of the government were compelled to suffer many privations. In the fall of 1800, Oliver Wolcott wrote: "There is one good tavern about forty rods from the capitol, and several houses are built or erecting; but I don't see how the members of congress can possibly secure lodgings, unless they will consent to live like scholars in a college or monks in a monastery, crowded ten or twenty in one house. The only resource for such as wish to live comfortably will be found in Georgetown, three miles distant, over as bad a road in winter as the clay grounds near Hartford.