Washington names Jefferson to head a department that does not yet exist in practice
Five months into his presidency, George Washington still needed a chief diplomat for a government barely three years past its founding paperwork. On September 26, 1789, he appointed Thomas Jefferson, just back from five years as Minister to France, as the first United States Secretary of State. Jefferson accepted, though he would not take up the post until the following spring. The office he inherited had been created by Congress that same year and had no precedent to draw on.
Jefferson's appointment seeded the rivalry with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton that split Washington's cabinet and gave the country its first party system. That feud, born inside this new department, pushed Jefferson out of government in 1793 and toward founding the Democratic-Republican Party, a chain of events that ended with his own presidency in 1801.
QWhat newspaper did Jefferson quietly help fund while running the State Department?
Jefferson arranged for the poet and translator Philip Freneau to be hired as a State Department clerk, then backed him in starting the National Gazette, a newspaper that attacked Hamilton's financial policies almost daily. Hamilton retaliated by writing anonymous essays for a rival paper defending his own program. Two members of the same presidential cabinet were effectively running dueling press operations against each other while sitting across the table at cabinet meetings, a detail that scandalized Washington when he pieced it together.
QWho ran the Department of State's daily operations before Jefferson arrived to take charge?
For nearly six months after Washington's appointment, the young department had no secretary physically present to direct it, since Jefferson was still finishing personal affairs in Virginia. John Jay, who had been handling foreign correspondence under the old Confederation government, continued managing the department's business in the interim. Jay's caretaking kept the office functioning while the nation waited for its formally appointed chief to actually show up for work.
QWhat earlier role had Jefferson played in founding the country before Washington tapped him for the cabinet?
Jefferson was already a central figure in American governance well before 1789, having been a principal author of the Declaration of Independence during the Revolution. That earlier work made him one of the most recognizable political minds in the country by the time Washington needed a cabinet, and it is part of why Washington considered him a close political ally rather than a stranger to trust with a brand-new department. Jefferson's path to Secretary of State ran through the Continental Congress and the drafting rooms of Philadelphia years before it ran through Paris.
