The First Family Moves In

A City That Wasn't There

Most nations grow a capital over centuries. The United States decided to build one from nothing.

In 1790, Congress passed the Residence Act. The permanent seat of government would go on the Potomac River. Why there? Part of the answer was a political bargain. Southern leaders wanted the capital closer to them. Alexander Hamilton wanted the federal government to take over the states' war debts. The two sides struck a deal, and the capital went south.

George Washington picked the exact spot. A French-born engineer named Pierre L'Enfant drew the plan. Wide avenues. Grand open spaces. A Capitol on one hill, and a little more than a mile away, a house for the president.

But on the ground, almost none of it existed. Farms, woods, swampy land and a few scattered buildings. The city of Washington was mostly an idea.

So the deal came with a clock. The government would spend ten years in Philadelphia. Then, in 1800, it would move. Ready or not.

Stone and Whitewash

In 1792, the city's commissioners held a contest to design the President's House. The winner was James Hoban, an Irish-born architect working in Charleston, South Carolina. His plan was a stately stone house. Washington approved it, and the cornerstone went down on October 13th, 1792.

Then came eight years of hard work. Hoban brought in skilled craftsmen from as far away as Scotland, and he oversaw a labor force of free and enslaved workers. Enslaved men cut stone in the quarries, dug the foundations, and did much of the heavy labor. Scottish masons carved the decorations around the windows and doors. That's part of this house's story too, and it deserves to be told.

The walls were sandstone. To protect the stone from water and freezing, it was coated with whitewash. People started calling it the white house long before that was its official name.

Washington chose the site. He approved the design. But he never slept under its roof. He died in December of 1799. The first man to live there would be his successor. And when that man arrived, the house still wasn't finished.

One Day In

That successor was John Adams of Massachusetts, the second president. A revolutionary who argued for independence, then spent years in Europe trying to keep the young country alive.

In the fall of 1800, Adams was in the middle of a bitter campaign against his own vice president, Thomas Jefferson. And he was heading for the new capital.

At about one o'clock in the afternoon on November 1st, 1800, John Adams walked into the President's House.

What he found was a work site. Workmen were still on the job. The main stairs weren't up. Fresh plaster was drying on the walls. The yard was bare dirt, with no fence. Only a handful of rooms were ready to live in. Around it, the capital was boarding houses, half-built streets and open fields.

Adams dined there and slept there. The next day, November 2nd, he wrote to his wife, Abigail, who was still on the road from Massachusetts. "The Building is in a State to be habitable," he told her.

Not exactly a glowing review. Any sailor recognizes that kind of letter. It's the one you write home when the ship is still afloat. You don't brag. You report.

But near the end, Adams stopped reporting. He wrote one more sentence, and it had nothing to do with plaster or stairs. Hold on to that. We'll get there.

The Drying Room

Abigail Adams was one of the sharpest writers of her time, and her letters tell us what that house was really like.

She arrived on Sunday, November 16th.

Five days later, she wrote to her daughter. The house was built on a grand and superb scale. It would take about thirty servants to run it. Yet, in her words, "there is not a single apartment finished." There were no bells anywhere to call the staff.

And there was no firewood. The house was surrounded by forest. But nobody could be found to cut the wood and haul it. Most of what little they got went into fires just to dry out the damp plaster. Winter was coming.

Still, Abigail being Abigail, she made the best of it. If they would put up some bells and give her wood enough for fires, she meant to be pleased. She called the setting a beautiful spot, capable of every improvement.

Which brings us back to that laundry. With no fence around the house, there was no decent, private place to hang the wash outside. So she used the biggest room in the house. In her words, "the great unfinished audience-room I make a drying-room of, to hang up the clothes in."

The East Room. Where presidents now host state ceremonies. Its first job was drying the first family's laundry.

They didn't stay long. That fall, Adams lost the election to Jefferson. Early on the morning of March 4th, 1801, the day Jefferson was sworn in, Adams left Washington. The first family to live in the White House lived there for about four months.

But the house itself was about to face something far worse than wet plaster.

Only the Walls

During the War of 1812, British forces marched into Washington. On August 24th, 1814, they set fire to the President's House, the Capitol and other government buildings.

Before the British arrived, First Lady Dolley Madison and members of the household made sure the big portrait of George Washington was taken down and carried away to safety. But the house was gutted. Only the scorched stone walls were left standing.

So the government turned again to James Hoban, the man who had designed it. To move faster, he framed many of the interior walls in timber instead of brick. Even so, it took about three years. President James Monroe moved into the restored house in 1817, and it opened to the public again on New Year's Day, 1818.

Here's what a sailor notices about that. When a ship takes a hit, the first question is whether the hull holds. Almost everything else can be rebuilt. This house's hull held. The stone walls Hoban raised in the 1790s, the walls John Adams saw in 1800, are still standing inside the White House today.

And that one sentence from Adams's letter? For well over a century, it just sat on paper. So what did he write? And why would a president carve it in stone in the middle of a world war?

One More Sentence

In 1945, in the last year of World War Two, President Franklin Roosevelt had the sentence carved into the stone fireplace of the State Dining Room.

Think about that moment. The country was finishing the greatest war in its history. And Roosevelt chose to put up words written by a tired old patriot in a half-built house, on his first full day there.

Here they are, just as John Adams wrote them to Abigail on November 2nd, 1800.

"I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof."

One day in the house. And that's what he wanted for it. Not grandeur. Not power. Honest and wise men.

During the Truman renovation, that mantel was replaced. But in 1962, the Kennedys installed a replica, with the blessing carved in once again. It's still there, right below the portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Every guest at a state dinner sits within sight of those words.

As a Navy veteran, I took an oath to the Constitution, not to any one person. I think John Adams would have understood that. The house belongs to the people. The prayer is for whoever happens to live in it. Honest and wise. That was the hope from day one.

Down the hall from those carved words is the East Room, where one damp November, a first lady hung her family's wash to dry.

Tomorrow: the eleventh hour of the eleventh day, and how one day of remembrance grew to include every American who served. The Daily Muster is supported by Parcaut Supply Co. Hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Muster's done. Fair winds. I'm Ed Parcaut, and I'll see you tomorrow.