The Octagon: The Washington House Where Madison Signed the Treaty of Ghent

The Octagon today. Image from the National Park Service's page.

On the afternoon of August 24, 1814, First Lady Dolley Madison hurried to save what she could from the White House as the British army marched into Washington. She got away with valuable works of American art before the enemy arrived and set the house on fire. The British held the city for only 26 hours, but when President James Madison returned, the White House was uninhabitable. Despite calls to move the capital elsewhere, the Madisons stayed — and moved into The Octagon, one of Washington's first great houses, close to the White House at 18th Street and New York Avenue. From there the president ran his administration and the first lady ran Washington society.

(Historic American Buildings Survey, National Park Service)

A capital born of a bargain

During the Revolutionary War, each state borrowed to pay for the fighting. By 1790 the southern states had paid off most of their debts, but the northern states had not, and many northerners wanted the federal government to cover the states' war debts with taxes — which southerners thought unfair. At the same time, Congress could not agree on a permanent capital. Between 1774 and 1800 the body that became the federal government met in eight cities in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Maryland.

The Constitution lets Congress create a capital district separate from any state but does not say where. Since the states next to the district would have influence over the capital, and so over the government, the location became a bargaining chip. In the Compromise of 1790, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, a northerner, lined up northern votes for a southern capital, while southerners James Madison and Thomas Jefferson lined up southern votes for federal payment of state debts. The Residence Act of 1790 followed.

President George Washington chose a site on the Potomac River that took in the existing river ports of Alexandria and Georgetown. Apart from the ports, the land was undeveloped; fewer than 800 people lived in the part that became the City of Washington, most of them enslaved people working on large farms. A year after the act, the commissioners named the district "Columbia," after Christopher Columbus.

Washington asked Peter L'Enfant — his friend, a Revolutionary War veteran and an artist who had lived in Paris — to design the city. L'Enfant imagined broad avenues, open spaces for parks and monuments, a Capitol a mile from the President's House, and private house lots near government buildings for foreign diplomats and powerful Americans.

The plan struggled. Construction was slow, the commissioners quarreled with architects and planners, and the lot auctions meant to pay for the city drew fewer buyers than expected. The commissioners also preferred to use enslaved laborers, which L'Enfant and others opposed. Northern states such as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts had abolished slavery and new western territories barred it, but the capital, carved from a slave state, kept it legal. Congress moved in in 1800, before the Capitol was finished. Senator Gouverneur Morris of New York joked that the city had everything but "houses, cellars, kitchens, well-informed men, amiable women, and other little trifles of this kind." People called it "the city of magnificent distances" and "the city of streets without houses."

A house for an awkward lot

Colonel John Tayloe III, a wealthy Virginia planter who bred racehorses at his estate, Mount Airy, wanted a grand winter home where he could entertain the capital's powerful. He weighed Philadelphia, the former capital, and Annapolis, his wife Anne Ogle Tayloe's birthplace, before George Washington, a family acquaintance, steered him to the new city.

Tayloe paid $1,000 for Lot 8 in Square 170, between New York Avenue and 18th Street, two main routes through the city. In 1800 the lot sat on a bluff looking out over the Potomac River and Tiber Creek, toward today's National Mall: the house would see the city, and the city would see the house. But the sharp angle where the two streets met made it hard to design for.

The White House neighborhood in the early 21st century, with The Octagon circled. Historic American Buildings Survey, National Park Service.

Tayloe consulted two leading architects. Benjamin Henry Latrobe's symmetrical Federal-style design, fashionable for elite homes, did not suit the lot. Dr. William Thornton — the first Architect of the Capitol, born in the British West Indies, trained in medicine in Scotland, and also an inventor, painter, poet and writer on subjects from astronomy to government — produced a design that worked with the angle of the streets and the shape of the lot while serving both family life and entertaining.

Plans of The Octagon's first and second floors. Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress.

Construction ran from 1799 to 1801 and cost $35,000. In 1801 an "amity button," a small ivory button, was set into the newel post at the foot of the main stair to show that owner and builder had parted on friendly terms. The Tayloes, their free servants and the people they enslaved moved in that fall. Food came from the family's nearby farm, Petworth, and from the city's market, shops, street sellers and auctions of produce off ships.

"A view near the President's house in the City of Washington," by S. Lewis, 1813. The Octagon is the brick house at right, behind the tall trees. The Octagon Museum.

The president's house, 1814–1815

After the British burned the Capitol and the President's House, Tayloe offered The Octagon to the Madisons. They moved in on September 8, 1814, and stayed until March 1815. By living there, the president showed the nation he would not abandon the burned capital, and Dolley Madison kept up her parties. The war ended during their stay: Madison signed the Treaty of Ghent in the circular second-floor parlor above the entrance hall.

Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, the colonel's eldest son, recalled in an 1864 memoir that when the British came, his father was commanding the District's cavalry and was sent to bring up Virginia militia, while his mother left the house and persuaded the French minister, Monsieur Serrurier, to occupy it to protect it. He remembered the young city as rus in urbe:

containing but a few thousand inhabitants, scattered about in single houses, apart from each other, or in occasional groups, chief in the vicinity of the public buildings, from Georgetown to the Navy Yard.

The household

In 1870 the colonel's son William Henry Tayloe described the house for his own son. Steps with iron rails led to a portico and a round, marble-floored hall once heated by two imported coal stoves. A winding stair climbed to the top of the house, while a private stair ran behind the dining room from the basement, which held the housekeeper's room, storerooms, a wine cellar, the servants' hall and a kitchen with its own well. Behind a walled garden stood a two-story laundry and servants' building, a paved stable yard, a long stable, cow stables, a smokehouse and an ice house. Much of the furniture was imported. Of the servants' livery he wrote:

The Octagon's dining room, recreated with some of the Tayloes' own furnishings. Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress.

(Library of Congress)

The Servants wore Blue Quaker Cut Coats turned up with Red Collars and Pockets gold laced.

He also noted that the table on which the peace treaty was signed was by then in the hands of Anne Ogle Lewis, his son's aunt.

After the Tayloes

The family made The Octagon their year-round home sometime between 1815 and 1817. John Tayloe died in 1828 and Anne Tayloe lived there until her death in 1855. The house later served as a Catholic school, government offices and apartments. The American Institute of Architects bought it in 1902, and its foundation now runs it as a museum at 1799 New York Avenue NW.

Sources

• National Park Service, Teaching with Historic Places: "The Octagon of Washington, D.C.: The House that Helped Build a Capital," written by Adam Auerbach of the American Institute of Architects Foundation and edited by program staff, based on the National Historic Landmark registration form for The Octagon and The Octagon Museum Archives. It quotes William Henry Tayloe's 1870 letter and Benjamin Ogle Tayloe's Our Neighbors on La Fayette Square (1872).
• The lesson dates the Tayloes' move to the fall of 1801; Benjamin Ogle Tayloe's memoir says his father took possession in 1800. The lesson's questions and classroom activities are left out. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26. S. Lewis's 1813 painting is in the public domain; The Octagon Museum supplied the lesson's copy.