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overseeing three commissioners charged with surveying and constructing the new city, and he was to exert an incalculable influence on its development. In a proclamation that January that shocked nobody, he announced the choice of a site just north of Mount Vernon. There was muted grumbling about Washington’s conflict of interest here. Long after Washington died, John Adams stated baldly that Washington had profited “from the federal city, by which he raised the value of his property and that of his family a thousand percent at an expense to the public of more than his whole fortune.”12 Washington was also accused of high-handed behavior in arrogating the right to pick the spot instead of yielding to his three commissioners. Maclay seemed overwrought: “I really am surprised at the conduct of the president . . . To take on him to fix the spot by his own authority, when he might have placed the three commissioners in the post of responsibility, was a thoughtless act.”13 The controversy shattered some magic spell that had spared Washington from criticism, and people no longer felt muzzled about challenging him directly.

Whatever his bias in choosing a southern capital, Washington still took to heart his position as president of all Americans. So long as Rhode Island had refused to ratify the Constitution, it had been ostracized as a renegade state, and Washington had boycotted it during his northern tour. As soon as the state joined the Union in May 1790, however, Washington was eager to remedy that omission. A few days after Congress adjourned on August 12, Washington set out for Rhode Island, accompanied by Jefferson and New York governor George Clinton, sailing out through Long Island Sound. The first stop was Newport, where a Jewish merchant and fellow Mason, Moses Seixas, greeted the president on behalf of Congregation Yeshuat Israel, assuring him that the Lord had “shielded your head in the day of battle” and protected him as “chief magistrate in these states.”14 As if seeking words of reassurance, Seixas noted that the Jewish congregation had formerly been deprived of “the invaluable rights of free citizens.”15 This elicited from Washington a letter to the Hebrew Congregation that ranks as his most beautifully enduring statement on religious toleration, showing that he had no notion of foisting a Christian state on the nation:

All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens . . . May the children of the stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants.16

Three months earlier Washington had shown similarly affectionate respect for the Jews in writing to a congregation in Savannah, Georgia. With deft artistry, he identified both American Christians and ancient Jews as recipients of God’s mercy in their days of bondage: “May the same wonder-working deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors, planted them in the Promised Land—whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation—still continue to water them with the dews of heaven.”17 As patriarch of the nation, Washington naturally fell into biblical phraseology that encompassed elevated language from both the Old and New Testaments.

The next day, having arrived in Providence in time for a private dinner, Washington was on the verge of turning in for the night when he was informed that students had lit up the windows of Rhode Island College (later Brown University) in his honor. As one host recalled of Washington’s exceedingly courteous response, the students said they “would be highly flattered at the president’s going