It’s winter in Washington now, and as Congress reconvenes amid a protracted government shutdown, gray frowning airy visages belching bone-numbing drizzle loom over the chilled Capitol. The weather’s not so great either. But in a few weeks the cherry trees will begin to bud up and softer breezes heralding the advance of springtime will be felt. As always, tourists from around the country and the world will show up as the equinox comes and goes, and probably the majority of them will at one point find themselves in Lafayette Park, right across the street from the White House.

It is many a tourist who has ventured to the very center of Lafayette Park expecting, naturally enough, that the equestrian statue to be found there is a statue of the Marquis de Lafayette. But of course, on a horse! It’s his park after all; what could be more logical?

But this is Washington so, of course, it is not the Marquis at all. As Washington natives know, that’s no Frenchman on that brass horse’s ass. That there is brassy Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory himself. So perhaps, thinks the possibly Japanese gentleman tourist just come down yesterday from New York City, asking who is buried in Grant’s Tomb may not be a joke after all.

So what about that statue, then? How did Jackson end up at the center of Lafayette’s Park? There is an answer, but, as Damon Runyon used to say, a story goes with it.

What is today Lafayette Park, or Square, has a checkered history. During the 18^th century the seven-acre plot was used for a variety of purposes, among them a racecourse, a graveyard, an apple orchard, and a slave market. At the end of the century the government bought the square as it planned to build the White House and lay out its grounds. What is today Lafayette Park was used as a construction staging site beginning in 1792, when the White House cornerstone was laid, until the building’s completion in 1800.

During Jefferson’s presidency, what later became known as President’s Park occupied the farmer from Monticello. He took a direct hand in designing the grounds around the new structure. He had the land fenced in, and then directed that Pennsylvania Avenue be extended through the area, thus dividing the parcel in two. The part closest to the building is today joined with the rest of the White House lawn; the park across Pennsylvania Avenue is Lafayette Park.

President’s Park was a pleasant natural area for a few years, but after the British burnt the White House down during the War of 1812—on August 24, 1814, to be precise—the area again became a staging area for rebuilding the Executive Mansion. By 1816 the park had grown lush green again, but nothing special was done with or to it.

In 1824, the name Lafayette Park was attached to the area. The reason was the return of the great man to the United States for a year-long visit. Invited by President James Monroe, Lafayette became an instant celebrity in America. Much later, in the 1890s, four statues to honor non-American Revolutionary War figures were commissioned and erected: Lafayette first, and then Rochambeau, Kosciuszko, and von Steuben.

Marquis de Lafayette Statue, 1891 (Wikimedia Commons)

Andrew Jackson Downing (Wikimedia Commons)

Then, in 1850, pressed to beautify the city by notables associated with the newly founded Smithsonian Institution, President Millard Fillmore met in November with America’s best-known landscape designer, Andrew Jackson Downing. Fillmore commissioned Downing to develop new plans for the city’s park spaces, including Lafayette Square, which had been left blank in Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1792 master plan. Downing delivered his proposal just after the new year of 1851 had turned.

Downing’s plans were ambitious, extensive, creative, and, for the times, expensive. Fillmore accepted only part of them, and Congress later cut off funding for nearly all of what Fillmore had agreed to. Even so, the development of the parks around the White House more or less followed Downing’s general design. He emphasized a natural horticulture, really an arboretum spread among six parks—a “public museum of living trees and shrubs,” as he termed it—in contrast to the formal geometric patterns of the city’s French-born ur-designer. Downing essentially envisioned a national park before anyone had conceived the idea of such a thing, one that would serve as an influential model of the natural style of landscape gardening for which he was known.

So it was, for a while: The McMillan Plan of 1902 put paid to Downing’s grand concept. Right angles won the day. But Lafayette Park remained.

Now, Fillmore, who had become President upon the death of Zachary Taylor on July 9, 1850, was, like Taylor, a member of the Whig Party. And it is somewhat ironic that a Whig President would chose someone named Andrew Jackson Anybody to do anything anywhere near the White House. The Whigs, as students of American history know, formed their party in the 1830s to oppose Andrew Jackson and the Democrats. Inheritors of the Hamiltonian persuasion, the Whigs, led by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, fought for protective tariffs behind which to build a progressive industrial economy, national banking, national unity, and Federal infrastructure projects to physically knit the expanding country together.

Taylor/Fillmore campaign banner for 1848 presidential elections (Wikimedia Commons)

But Fillmore has never been known for possessing either much acumen or ideology. Having begun his political career with the anti-Masonic Party, Taylor had ignored him while President, and he was denied his own Party’s nomination for President in 1852 in favor of Winfield Scott (who lost). Fillmore then joined the “Know Nothings” of the American Party, hardly a Whiggish group.

Besides, Downing’s reputation overshadowed his name. He was an early American celebrity of sorts, a charismatic who had recently encouraged a young Frederick Law Olmsted to develop a plan for Central Park in New York City along the lines of Downing’s own naturalistic model. Besides, Downing and Fillmore were fellow New Yorkers at a time when kindred feeling based on birth state was more important than it is today.

In any event, Downing was not related to Andrew Jackson; his name derived from a typical accident of history. Downing was born in Newburgh, New York on October 31, 1815. That was just over nine months after the Battle of New Orleans, which took place on January 8 of that year. Downing’s parents, apparently reasoning that their son was conceived in the very wake of that great battle, resolved to name him after the war’s hero; and so they did.

Besides, Downing was not responsible for the Jackson statue having been commissioned in the first place. It is not clear that he even knew about it when he met Fillmore in November 1850, nor did he seem to know the artist, Clark Mills, though Mills was also a New Yorker, born in Onondago County in 1810 (quite near, it turns out, to Fillmore’s birthplace in Moravia, New York). The statue had been commissioned in May 1847, a little less than two years after Jackson’s death, during the Democratic Polk Administration. It was cast in 1852 while Fillmore was President, but not dedicated until January 8 (of course) 1853 by Senator Stephen Douglas, after the 1852 election and just as the term of Franklin Pierce, another Democrat, was about to begin.

All Downing did was design a park that offered an obvious place for a Democratic Administration to put a statue of its heroic forbear—a statue that Downing never saw. Alas, he died in a fire with 80 others on the Hudson River when the ship’s boiler exploded, on July 28, 1852. The name of the steamship? The Henry Clay. As it happened, Clay died on July 29, the very next day.

Henry Clay (Wikimedia Commons)

Now this is passing strange in a mystical sort of way special to politics. Clay had come this close in 1844 to winning the White House for his home, and had he won it is highly unlikely that he, unlike Polk, would have commissioned a statue of his nemesis. There would probably not have been the Mexican War either, the subsequent rapid expansion of slavery westward across the Mississippi River, and hence maybe there would never have been the calamitous Civil War that Clay did all he could to prevent, so long as he lived. If so the statue would not be there today, looking back across the street to the current resident of the Executive Mansion, who has been, quite absurdly, compared to Jackson.

Perhaps Clay, an intensely religious man, summoned the angel of death from his own deathbed to roam the land, looking to smite anyone associated with planning to put a statue of Jackson across the street from the White House. That the angel would happen upon a ship named the Henry Clay is too obvious to belabor. And though the statue wasn’t Downing’s doing, the park that sited it was. Maybe that was enough to seal his fate; what mortal can know how ethereal beings reason? So boom went the boiler. The angel escaped, and returned to claim Clay on the morrow.

The Historic Decatur House, 1822 postcard (Wikimedia Commons)

Decatur House, 1937 photo (Wikimedia Commons)

What is less speculative is that, had Clay lived another six months, the sight of the Jackson statue—which he would have been able to see clearly from the window of his Decatur Mansion home at the northwest corner of the Square—would probably have killed him anyway. Perhaps it’s best that he was spared the pain.

It’s just as well that the tourists don’t know such things. Current U.S. political realities are unfathomable enough as it is. Indeed, perhaps the incongruence of Andrew Jackson being at the center of the Marquis de Lafayette’s Park reflects a larger truth about American iconography: Consistency is not its forte.