“…The Best of Blessings on this House…”

“The immense house was still unfinished.  It reeked of wet plaster and wet paint.  Fires had to be kept blazing in every fireplace on the main floor to speed up the drying process.  Only a twisting back stair had been built between floors.  Closet doors were missing.  There were no bells to ring for service.  And though the furniture had arrived from Philadelphia, it looked lost in such enormous rooms.  Just one painting had been hung, a full-length portrait of Washington in his black velvet suit, by Gilbert Stuart, which had also been sent from Philadelphia.

The house stood in a weedy, wagon-rutted field with piles of stone and rubble about.  It all looked very raw and unkempt.”

I don’t usually borrow large chunks of text from books I read, but this seemed so appropriate.  Taken from David McCullough’s masterful John Adams, it shatters the stereotypical minds-eye view that we usually have when the White House is mentioned in conversation.  We see cherry trees in blossom, the impeccably manicured South Lawn, and the flower gardens.  Maybe we think of that big fence were people with a point to make (and signs to prove it) will often gather.  Possibly, we hear the “whump, whump” of Marine One as it prepares to touch down, pick up the President, and whisk him to Air Force One and more high-level meetings across the globe.

Whatever our image, it bears little resemblence to what McCullough described, and what President John Adams saw when arrived by unescorted stage to his new home shortly after 1pm on November 1, 1800.  But that’s what greeted Adams…a big house pretty much in the middle of nowhere.  One imagines that it was a lonely site for the 2nd President, which likely added to his own feelings of melancholy.

Adams had been largely marginalized by his own Federalist Party, trivialized by the opposition Anti-Federalist Party, and just weeks before, villianized by fellow Federalist Alexander Hamilton, who in a fit of I-don’t-know-what (rage, vengeance, jealousy, ??) published a 50+ page pamphlet that called the President everything but a deranged lunatic.  Even Anti-Federalists (to say nothing of the Federalists) were aghast at Hamilton’s stunning move, which was nothing short of political suicide.

What little chance Adams had against his opponent, the scheming Thomas Jefferson, in the upcoming election largely vaporized.  News of a peace treaty with France might have swayed the vote, but there was still no word, and the election was right around the corner.

McCullough’s thought continues…“Yet the great white-washed stone building, the largest house in America – as large as the half of the capital that had been erected – was truly a grand edifice, noble even in its present state.”

The words speak of better things to come, and apparently our country’s 2nd President largely saw that hope through the clouds of his own political despair.  The next morning, he would write to his wife back home those famous words:  “I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit.  May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”

The Executive Mansion has been lived in, burned down, rebuilt, lived in, completely rennovated, and lived in some more.  But Adams’ words remain our desire, constant more than 200 years later.

Recommended Reading: John Adams