bers adjourned to the City Tavern, dined in good humor and he, after he had finished up some odd jobs with the secretary of the convention, "retired to meditate on the momentous work which had been executed." Those eleven words indicate about the extent to which the soul of the man will expand and flow—on paper.
The diaries of the first years of the Presidency seem, relatively speaking, of an absorbing interest to one who is trying to press nearer to the man. Of course, there was a big budget of national business without guiding precedents: diplomatic missions to be established, Moroccan affairs, Indian affairs, national militia, finance, ratification of state constitutions, Quaker slavery agitation, Spain and France threatening the flanks of the new nation, problems of uniting the seaboard and the Western frontier by land and water and by the ties of commerce. But, after all, this was nothing but national housekeeping, of which Washington had mastered the principles at Mount Vernon, in the Virginia House of Burgesses, and in the army. He conducts business now with Cabinet officers instead of overseers; but he goes at it in precisely the same thorough, methodical, orderly, realistic fashion. An able, un-agitated executive.
What strikes the student of the diaries is that the Presidential office made Washington conscious of himself and of Mrs. Washington as parts of a dramatic exhibition, which they were "putting on" for the edification of their countrymen. The Father of His Country obviously gave anxious thought to all the details of the visible spectacle when he made his appearance to deliver his first message before the two houses of Congress; and the diarist records the picture—his equipage and his costume, his entrance and his exit—
