and effective.  He was governor of Massachusetts, and very proud of that proud old commonwealth as well as of her governor.  Within her bounds he was the representative of her sovereignty, and he felt that deference was due to him from the President of the United States when they both stood on the soil of Massachusetts.  He did not meet Washington on his arrival, and Washington thereupon did not dine with the governor as he had agreed to do.  It looked a little stormy.  Here was evidently a man with some new views as to the sovereignty of States and the standing of the union of States.  It might have done for Governor Hancock to allow the President of Congress to pass out of Massachusetts without seeing its governor, and thereby learn a valuable lesson, but it would never do to have such a thing happen in the case of George Washington, no matter what office he might hold.  A little after noon on Sunday, October 26, therefore, the governor wrote a note to the President, apologizing for not calling before, and asking if he might call in half an hour, even though it was at the hazard of his health.  Washington answered at once, expressing his pleasure at the prospect of seeing his excellency, but begging him, with a touch of irony, not to do anything to endanger his health.  So in half an hour Hancock appeared.  Picturesque, even if defeated, he was borne up-stairs on men’s shoulders, swathed in flannels, and then and there made his call.  The old house in Boston where this happened has had since then a series of successors, but the ground on which it stood has been duly remembered and commemorated.  It is a more important spot than we are wont to think; for there it was settled, on that autumn Sunday, that the idea that the States were able to own and to bully the Union they had formed was dead, and that the President of the new United States was henceforth to be regarded as the official superior of every governor in the land.  It was a mere question of etiquette, nothing more.  But how the general government would have sunk in popular estimation if the President had not asserted, with perfect dignity and yet entire firmness, its position!  Men are governed very largely by impressions, and Washington knew it.  Hence his settling at once and forever the question of precedence between the Union and the States.  Everywhere and at all times, according to his doctrine, the nation was to be first.[1]

[Footnote 1:  The most lately published contemporary account of this affair with Hancock can be found in the Magazine of American History, June, 1888, p. 508, entitled “Incidents in the Life of John Hancock, as related by Dorothy Quincy Hancock Scott (from the Diary of Gen. W.H.  Sumner).”]

So the President traveled on to the North, and then back by another road to New York, and that excellent bit of work in familiarizing the people with their federal government was accomplished.  Meantime the wheels had started, the machine was in motion, and the chief officers were at their places.  The preliminary work had been done, and the next step was to determine what policies should be adopted, and to find out if the new system could really perform the task for which it had been created.