It required tact, firmness, and a sure judgment to establish proper relations with foreign ministers.  But once done, it was done for all time.  This was not the case with another and far more important class of people, whose relation to the new administration had to be determined at the very first hour of its existence.  Indeed, before Washington left Mount Vernon he had begun to receive letters from persons who considered themselves peculiarly well fitted to serve the government in return for a small but certain salary.  In a letter to Mrs. Wooster, for whom as the widow of an old soldier he felt the tenderest sympathy, he wrote soon after his arrival in New York:  “As a public man acting only with reference to the public good, I must be allowed to decide upon all points of my duty, without consulting my private inclinations and wishes.  I must be permitted, with the best lights I can obtain, and upon a general view of characters and circumstances, to nominate such persons alone to offices as in my judgment shall be the best qualified to discharge the functions of the departments to which they shall be appointed.”  This sentiment in varying forms has been declared since 1789 by many Presidents and many parties.  Washington, however, lived up exactly to his declarations.  At the same time he did not by any means attempt to act merely as an examining board.

Great political organizations, as we have known them since, did not exist at the beginning of the government, but there were nevertheless two parties, divided by the issue which had been settled by the adoption of the Constitution.  Washington took, and purposed to take, his appointees so far as he could from those who had favored the Constitution and were friends of the new system.  It is also clear that he made every effort to give the preference to the soldiers and officers of the army, toward whom his affectionate thought ever turned.  Beyond this it can only be said that he was almost nervously anxious to avoid any appearance of personal feeling in making appointments, as was shown in the letter refusing to make his nephew Bushrod a district attorney, and that he resented personal pressure of any kind.  He preferred always to reach his conclusions so far as possible from a careful study of written testimony.  These principles, rigidly adhered to, his own keen perception of character, and his knowledge of men, resulted in a series of appointments running through eight years which were really marvelously successful.  The only rejection, outside the special case of John Rutledge, was that of Benjamin Fishbourn for naval officer of the port of Savannah, which was due apparently to the personal hostility of the Georgia senators.  Washington, conscious of his own painstaking, was not a little provoked by this setting aside of an old soldier.  He sent in a sharp message on the subject, pointing out the trouble he took to make sure of the fitness of an appointment, and intimated that the same effort