The radical treatment which the situation called for was aided by a general feeling in Congress that arrangements should be made for the President different from those under the Articles of Confederation.  It had been the practice for the President to keep open house.  Of this custom Washington remarked that it brought the office “in perfect contempt; for the table was considered a public one, and every person, who could get introduced, conceived that he had a right to be invited to it.  This, although the table was always crowded (and with mixed company, and the President considered in no better light than as a maitre d’hotel), was in its nature impracticable, and as many offenses given as if no table had been kept.”  It was important to settle the matter before Mrs. Washington joined him in New York.  Inside of ten days from the time he took the oath of office, he therefore drafted a set of nine queries, copies of which he sent to Jay, Madison, Hamilton, and John Adams, with these sensible remarks: 

“Many things, which appear of little importance in themselves and at the beginning, may have great and durable consequences from their having been established at the commencement of a new general government.  It will be much easier to commence the Administration upon a well-adjusted system, built on tenable grounds, than to correct errors, or alter inconveniences, after they shall have been confirmed by habit.  The President, in all matters of business and etiquette, can have no object but to demean himself in his public character in such a manner as to maintain the dignity of his office, without subjecting himself to the imputation of superciliousness or unnecessary reserve.  Under these impressions he asks for your candid and undisguised opinion.”

Only the replies of Hamilton and Adams have been preserved.  Hamilton advised Washington that while “the dignity of the office should be supported ... care will be necessary to avoid extensive disgust or discontent....  The notions of equality are yet, in my opinion, too general and strong to admit of such a distance being placed between the President and other branches of the Government as might even be consistent with a due proportion.”  Hamilton then sketched a plan for a weekly levee:  “The President to accept no invitations, and to give formal entertainments only twice or four times a year, the anniversaries of important events of the Revolution.”  In addition, “the President on levee days, either by himself or some gentleman of his household, to give informal invitations to family dinners ... not more than six or eight to be invited at a time, and the matter to be confined essentially to members of the legislature and other official characters.  The President never to remain long at table.”  Hamilton observed that his views did not correspond with those of other advisers, but he urged the necessity of behaving so as “to remove the idea of too immense inequality, which I fear would excite dissatisfaction and cabal.”