Fairly Out, Fairly In

On 4 March 1797, in the House of Representatives chamber on the ground floor of Congress Hall, John Adams took the presidential oath from Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth with George Washington looking on, the first time the presidency passed from one person to another. Adams, who arrived in a new carriage he had just bought, was the first president sworn in by a chief justice. The chamber held both houses of Congress, the justices of the Supreme Court, foreign ministers, the heads of departments and a crowd of Philadelphians. Thomas Jefferson took the vice presidential oath the same day from William Bingham, the Senate's president pro tempore, and gave his address to the Senate in its chamber upstairs.

The next day Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that he had never had a more trying day. Washington's face, he wrote, was as serene and unclouded as the day, and there was scarcely a dry eye in the room but Washington's. He seemed to Adams to enjoy a triumph over him, and Adams imagined him thinking, 'Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in!' Everyone agreed, Adams reported, that taken all together it was the sublimest thing ever exhibited in America. Washington left Philadelphia for Mount Vernon on 9 March.

Four years earlier, on 4 March 1793, Washington had begun his second term in the Senate chamber, the first inauguration held in Philadelphia. Associate Justice William Cushing gave the oath, and Washington's inaugural address ran 135 words, the shortest on record. The building, begun in 1787 as the Philadelphia County Courthouse, housed Congress from December 1790 to May 1800, and the House chamber has been restored to its appearance in 1796.