Question: Has there ever been a proposal to move the US federal capital?

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I was thinking about America's big cities as well and came up with an idea for federally recognised special cities that are still technically part of a state, but have their own government devolved from the state government and appoint their senators/representatives separately from the rest of the state (though they'd still count as coming from said state).

So, a similar system to the Filipino component city system?
 
I wouldn't go with St Louis. Too close to the New Madrid fault.

And DC is too close to hurricanes.

Okay, honestly it depends a great deal on how much the politicians see a potential earthquake as a threat vs other threats. Until the seismograph in the 20th century showed that they clustered in specific areas, an Earthquake would have been seen as some random event that could happen anywhere.


If we're dinking around with the constitutional structure anyway, it might be interesting to look into making a few of the biggest cities into states. Maybe New York, LA, and Chicago. All are very different culturally and politically than the rest of the states they are in, and those differences lead to very dysfunctional state governments.

It depends on what you mean by dysfunctional. This dichotomy has caused a lot of political problems of late, but there are also some advantages. Without Chicago, the rest of Illinois essentially has a GDP on a level ranging anywhere from Iowa to West Virginia, depending on where your statistics come from. And, without Illinois, Chicago has... hmmm... I'm sure there's something that Chicago is getting out of the deal, just can't think of it... :)
 
I am curious what a new/second capital would be named.

I am assuming that a new/second capital would be a planned and created city in the Jeffersonian vain and so would probably be near a city like St. Louis or Chicago but developed like D.C. as a city specifically created to be a seat of government.

So assuming that there is a going to be a new settlement in this process, how would it be named?
 
It is highly unlikely that the U.S. Capital could be moved now (or, even in the past as early as the 1870s!) due to the strong establishment of government offices and the growth of the bureaucracy. Think about all the millions of people who live in DC and work in or near DC because of the government and military. And of course it grows every year.

UNLESS, of course, the Capital were to be seriously destroyed. At this point, it would probably take a direct nuclear hit, but we can surely imagine an alternate universe where a Spanish-American War, World War I (or II), or another war with no parallel laid non-nuclear siege to the city and destroyed it.

I have always thought either Kansas City of St. Louis would make the best centralized capital, especially St. Louis (already a major hub for air/rail/road travel, and they already have one well-known monument!) I like to think it would be renamed St. George (rather than Washington...) in the vein of St. Petersburg.
 
There was suggestions in the early days of independence to make it Boston.

Yea but that was stopped by the southern states because they felt it gave to much importance to the north over them hence why it eventually ended up kind of where the north and south split.
 
Were there contingency plans during ACW. DC was a bit vulnerable looking

Eh, I don't think DC was ever under serious threat after the first few weeks of the war. Maryland was kept pretty firmly in the Union camp and DC was absurdly heavily fortified-in fact, if you go around DC/Maryland/Virginia and visit the right places you can still see parts of the civil war fortifications in varying degrees of preservation.
 
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