# 1301.7a - Washington and the First Congress

**Channel:** Chad Tomaselli
**Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIKNeX-zm-U
**Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/iIKNeX-zm-U

## Chapters

- 0:00 — Early Challenges for the New Government
- 2:34 — Washington and the First Cabinet
- 6:24 — Cabinet Roles and Early Precedents
- 9:30 — Tariff of 1789 and Federal Power
- 12:33 — Judiciary Act and Court Structure

## Transcript

**[0:00]:** the new constitution was approved by the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 but it took another year for it to be ratified we talked about this with the Federalist the Anti-Federalists and The Federalist Papers but once that new constitution was approved they could start putting it into action and with that we get the election of the first president and the election of the first Congress now this was a new government but it was old problems could the nation gain respect from foreign countries could the government balance security and Liberty and this is something I've talked about before without specifically naming the more security you have the less Liberty you have the more Liberty you have the less security this is a on the government level a balancing act the more things you put in place to create more security more safety that lowers your amount of Liberties uh you know most of you weren't alive before 9

**[1:02]:** 11 but the difference in just for an example airport security before and after we have more security at airports now but we also have less or fewer Liberties can't take you know can't bring in outside food or drinks into you know the the past security right things like that so it may even be small but this is a thing that they had already been balancing coercive acts the station of troops in the new world or in the 13 colonies after the French and Indian War even you know the the you know I'm blanking on another example uh but you get the idea you get the idea so that was one of the things they also had to figure out if the government could survive the creation of political parties without fighting each other remember the Constitution was created without political parties in mind they didn't exist whether it was the colonies or in Britain or

**[1:59]:** now the U.S they didn't exist under the Articles so but we know they do now and as these parties start to come together they're going to have to hope the system holds and doesn't tear itself apart or that the people don't tear the country apart by fighting they still had the massive amounts of debt to pay they still had to deal with the native nations right as America expands they take territory and resources land and resources away from the natives so that's a constant threat they have to deal with as well

**[2:34]:** this new government was also marked by the establishment of the first president being Washington obviously Washington hated politics he didn't did not want to be president he didn't want to be involved in any of this but the country needed someone they could trust to hold this position for the first time because if someone was power hungry or untrustworthy then it would wreck the whole system right they gather power for themselves as president and then before you know it you've got another monarch so Washington becomes the first president he wins the election in 1788 with a unanimous victory in the Electoral College he won every electoral vote second place remember the way this works is that the second place becomes the vice president was John Adams so the first president was George Washington the first vice president was John Adams Washington when asked about taking over the presidency uh uh when when he was traveling to New York after the election because

**[3:42]:** New York was the capital at this point Washington DC didn't exist yet he is said to have remarked that he quote felt like a culprit going to the place of his execution doesn't sound like someone who's eager to take over a job right if you feel like you're on death row now Washington understood that he wasn't the most intelligent person not that he didn't think he was dumb or anything but he just understood that he uh wasn't an expert on things and and that there were people around him who were experts so what he decided to do was to rely on the people he that were appointed or that he appointed into his government for advice let the experts tell him uh what's going on with their particular field of expertise it was a financial issue you talked to the person who knows that and so what he did was create what we call the

**[4:36]:** cabinet it's all of the heads of the various departments within the executive branch meet with the president give them advice and form them of information this wasn't in the Constitution Constitution only says that the President should seek advice but as far as creating a Advisory Board like this this was not in the Constitution so technically the first person to do something first high-level government official to do something that wasn't in the Constitution was George Washington nothing again nothing about this is in the Constitution now here are the four positions in the cabinet I'm going to give you the four positions I'm give only going to you two of the people who were there but they're vitally important you have the Secretary of War they handle well War military affairs uh not foreign policy just War we don't have a war department anymore we now have the Department of Defense they changed that name after World

**[5:39]:** War II as part of the Cold War just so the US didn't seem like the aggressor propaganda then he had the Attorney General they handled the law their head of the Department of Justice which oversees things like the FBI the Attorney General then you have the Secretary of the Treasury may handle the financial stuff and that was Alexander Hamilton who we're going to talk about quite a bit so Alexander Hamilton was the Secretary of the Treasury and then you have the Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson now what did state do at this point in time here in this in late 1780s early 1790s state did everything else

**[6:24]:** so you have the war does the military stuff and War treasury does Finance attorney general does law the everything else falls under state now the cabinet is somewhere around 20 different positions here in in our time those three stayed the same all right the first three I mentioned state is now broken down into all of those other cabinet positions we have today now obviously the world was not as complex in this regard you know there was no necessarily a need for a Department of Homeland Security which is the most recent cabinet creation back after uh in the early 2000s after 9 11. but all of those other things Transportation Health and Human Services all uh Homeland Security all of them essentially were under the umbrella of Secretary of State for much of the US's history what does state do today and what was State's primary position even in the original cabinet that was foreign policy so if the U.S needed to negotiate a treaty it would be the secretary of state that would lead that and again that was Thomas Jefferson this

**[7:33]:** is probably the most able cabinet we've ever had even with cabinets that were much bigger that had experts on many fields you've got Hamilton and Jefferson and despite all of their many many flaws they were experts foreign policy for Thomas Jefferson he he had done that many times over and Hamilton well there's a reason he's on the 10 Bill we'll talk again we'll talk about him in finance later so that's Washington you know his sort of initial setup here for the new government now we're switch going to to the first Congress everything much like Washington everything the first Congress did set a precedent there are many questions and vagaries in the Constitution they wanted to keep their options open they didn't want to set a strict document because they needed room for interpretation right trial and error that's what hap that's how we got from the Articles to the Constitution they spent a lot of

**[8:31]:** time arguing over what appears to be trivial trivial not trivial trivial to us like Washington's title they hadn't settled on what the executive position uh position positions title would be and they tossed around things like his majesty his Excellency president of the United States and Congress assembled which goes back to the um uh the articles there was another long one like that but they settled on President of the United States which on the slide here p-o-t-u-s POTUS president of the United States so when you're taking notes you don't have to write president all over he could write POTUS little initialisms are uh an acronyms or acronyms not an acronyms acronyms are shorthand it's really good for note-taking if you haven't figured that out already they wanted to get these things right the first time because if they got them wrong and they became precedent it would cause a lot of trouble down the road now

**[9:30]:** there's a few important things that this first Congress did that I want to specifically discuss we're single going to out two acts of the first Congress the Tariff of 1789 and the Judiciary Act of 1789. the Tariff of 1789 well first of all a tariff is a tax on trade primarily foreign trade but its imports and exports it's trade going in and out of the country there can be certain tariffs between states on certain products but those are much more rare there's different types of tariffs tariffs could also be used to protect U.S trade or prohibit trade from others so you could make foreign Goods more expensive and the domestic Goods cheaper we talked about an example of a tariff I just didn't call it a tariff or maybe I did I don't remember the Sugar Act the Sugar Act which made french molasses much more expensive and the British molasses cheaper

**[10:31]:** is a protective tariff or a high tariff that's what a tariff does is they tax on trade this was a reaction to British mercantilism one of the problems under the Articles where they were flooding their goods into the U.S and and harming U.S markets tariffs were also the primary way that the government raised money income taxes like we know today will not be a thing until after the Civil War and they won't be the primary way that government raised money until the Great Depression which is the 1930s so from 1789 until the 1930s tariffs were the primary way the government raised money the income tax doesn't become the primary way until the Great Depression and this was a good switch now what was this tariff on how what was the the price difference all that doesn't We're Not Gonna care about that what's important the significance of the Tariff of 1789.

**[11:33]:** is that it established two things for not only Congress but for the national government it established the new government the new congress's right to regulate trade and congress's power to tax both of those things that the national government couldn't do under the Articles the right to regulate trade or the power to regulate trade and the powered attacks so this is important because it's ticking off those powers that were listed in the Constitution but just because remember there's the idea of the of the law and the implementation of the law it's one thing to say we have this power on paper you still have to make it happen in action and that's what the Tariff of 1789 does is the Constitution says the US government has the right to regulate trade and the right to tax and the Tariff of 1789 was making those happen in reality you got to make it happen in reality on

**[12:28]:** top of have it happening on paper so that's a tariff of 1789.

**[12:33]:** the other one here the judicial act or Judiciary Act of 1789 to find the national court system which was only vaguely defined in the Constitution it create a system of national courts right there was no judicial branch under the Articles now there is and the Constitution says there will be courts and they interpret the law Judiciary Act is figuring out the first part what these courts are and it create that tiered or layered system of national Courts at the top the Supreme Court the next layer down they called circuit courts now we call them appeals courts circuit slash appeals and then below that district courts think of it like a wedding cake you have the Supreme Court at the top then you have the next larger layer or the circuit slash appeals circuit then appeals now then the big bottom piece of the of the cake are the district courts there's one Supreme Court 13

**[13:31]:** today 13 appeals courts and then like two or three district courts per Circ per uh appeals court it varies so roughly 30 district courts probably more maybe I don't know the exact number you don't have to know the exact number you don't know any of those numbers but just to give you an idea so it set up that tiered system of quartz it also more specifically defined the Supreme Court itself it's established the number of justices or judges on the court at six now it's nine it also established that the person in charge of the Supreme Court would be the chief justice so they're one of the six now nine but they essentially are like the committee chair they can't tell the other Justice what to do but they essentially make sure the rules are followed decide all the the administrative stuff so a chief justice now there's one part of this law of the

**[14:35]:** Judiciary Act of 1789 that I need uh to specifically talk about and that's section 25. section 25 of the Judiciary Act established that almost any case can be appealed to the Supreme Court with very few limits essentially it has to be above a certain amount of money and that certain amount of money is not high what this basically says is that unless it's something that would end up on like daytime Court TV like Judge Judy or the hot bench or whatever other shows are out there these days unless it's a low dollar amount or a few other restrictions you can appeal your case all the way up to the Supreme Court in other countries during this time and even today that ability was limited to based on your wealth or uh your status in society maybe nobility versus non-nobility that was not the case here it was only that very low limit for money and a few other things this is crucially important section 25 because without section 25 the Supreme

**[15:42]:** Court doesn't function as it has today most of the cases that have made the country what it is like Brown versus Board of Education which is desegregated schools that was just a mom assuming on behalf of her daughter because the school wouldn't let her enroll because of her skin color and a lot of other countries at this time that would have never made it to the Supreme Court and that was until the 1950s but again section 25 is critical for for how the court functions so it established the national courts now what it did not do what it did not do was clarify what it means for the courts to interpret the laws that will not happen for another 14 years and we'll eventually get to that so what does it mean for the court to interpret the law they haven't figured it out yet they will but it's not in the Judiciary Act what

**[16:36]:** the Judiciary Act does is established what the courts were how they looked how they functioned you know how many of them there are how many judges are on the court that's what that does it establishes the judicial branch which didn't exist under the Articles so that's the essentially the basic structure of this new government right the Washington is setting precedence the first Congress is setting precedence establishing some basic laws what we're going to turn to next is looking at the most dangerous problem which is debt which means we're going to turn to Alexander Hamilton