Washington's First Presidential Address
Good morning, it’s April 30, a consequential date in the history of presidential communications. On this day in 1789, George Washington delivered the first inaugural address.
If you cover the White House, as I did for 15 years, it’s astonishing how many of the precedents of the presidency were started by the first man to hold the office. The Constitution required the new chief executive to take an oath of office, but said nothing about an address to the nation. But George Washington, who possessed a talent for looking around historic corners, perceived the need for such a speech. So he endeavored, as he always did, to do his duty.
In the first inaugural address, delivered on April 30, 1789, George Washington spoke in a deep voice that one observer wrote revealed the new president’s “manifest embarrassment.” More likely, Washington was seeking what we’d now call a “presidential” affect. Remember, the man was making it up as he went along.
His speech was delivered to a joint session of Congress in the old Senate chamber in New York City’s Federal Hall, located on Wall Street. From the opening lines, Washington employed the flowery prose he believed befitted such a momentous occasion.
“Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month,” he began.
Washington was talking about being called to service, once again, upon being elected president. He hadn’t campaigned, of course, but he was the obvious choice, even though his preference would have been to enjoy his retirement in Mount Vernon.
“I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love,” he continued, “from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years.”
Washington mostly avoided specifics in the speech, preferring to set a lofty tone. He asked, in what he called his “first official act,” for blessings for the United States from “that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect.”
Expression of piety notwithstanding, the first president also made it clear in whose hands the United States’ future really rested.
“The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government,” he reminded us, is nothing less than “the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”
