Chapter 11 of 25
A Government Begins
In April 1789, in New York City, George Washington took the oath of office. He had led the Continental Army through eight hard years of war. Of the many things George Washington is famous forQ86, the best known is that he became the first president of the United States.
Washington quickly found he needed help. The executive branch has many partsQ46; two of them are the President and the Cabinet. The President's CabinetQ47 advises the President. Washington's first Cabinet had just four members, including Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Today it includes the heads of 15 departments. Two Cabinet-level positionsQ48 are the Secretary of Agriculture, created under Lincoln in 1862, and the Secretary of Commerce, whose department began in 1903.
As the first Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton built a national bank and paid off the war debts. He drew on ideas Adam Smith had published in 1776: free markets, private property and competition create prosperity. Those ideas shaped the economic system of the United StatesQ12: capitalism, often called a market economy, in which people and businesses, not the government, own most property and decide what to make and sell.
In 1790, Congress agreed to build a brand-new capital on the Potomac River, between the Northern and Southern states. Washington chose the site, and the city was named for him. The capital of the United StatesQ119 is Washington, D.C. "D.C." stands for District of Columbia, a federal district that belongs to no state. The government moved there in 1800.
That same year, Congress passed the first naturalization law, setting out how people can become United States citizensQ68: they naturalize, a path millions of immigrants have followed since.