ECHOES OF EXCEPTIONALISM: A House, Not a Hope.

On the morning of September 18, 1793 – 233 years ago today – George Washington left Mount Vernon, came into view on the south bank of the Potomac near Alexandria, and crossed the river into a city that barely existed. Two years earlier, the governing commissioners of the city had named it after him. President Washington still referred to it as the Federal City.

The Alexandria artillery met Washington on the Virginia shore and crossed with him.

On the Maryland side, Washington was met by a band, which struck up a tune. The column marched past the unfinished house of the executive – the future White House – to a muddy trench on Jenkins Hill. It was the first parade the Federal City ever staged.

There was no dome. There were no marble corridors. There was just a president who had already helped ratify a Constitution and was now working to give that Constitution a house where its principles would be honored.

Washington, in Masonic regalia, stepped down into the foundation trench. He set a silver plate on the earth. The cornerstone was lowered onto it. Corn, wine, and oil were poured – emblems drawn from the 104th Psalm:

Wine that gladdens human hearts,
Oil to make their faces shine,
And bread that sustains their hearts.

President Washington struck the stone three times with a gavel.

The silver plate said what the day meant. It named the Capitol of the United States, “laid in the thirteenth year of American Independence, the first year of the second term of the Presidency of George Washington, whose virtues in the civil administration of his country have been as conspicuous and beneficial, as his Military valor and prudence have been useful in establishing her liberties.”

Nowhere does the dedication say the building would keep Americans free. That responsibility would fall to the men (and later women) who have occupied the Capitol building ever since. But the Capitol was nonetheless a concrete symbol of our shared obligation to honor each citizen’s liberty.

That is the American measure of civic virtue. It is not found in the trappings of power, or even in the office a person holds, but in the truths that must animate the use of power: a duty to protect liberty that follows from a thankful acknowledgment of the source of our rights and our worth – Almighty God. That truth, not the peculiarities of any one person, is the thing against which a nation is tested.

The day before, on our calendar, is Constitution Day. On September 17, 1787, thirty-nine delegates in Philadelphia signed a parchment that began not with the glory of the state but with “We the People.” They had spent a summer arguing over power because they did not trust power. They separated it, enumerated it, and left the rest with the states and the people. They were not constructing a temple. They were fencing a government so that human beings – already bearing a dignity government could not create – could live, fail, learn, recover, worship, speak, and grow.

Six years later, almost to the day, Washington put a stone under that idea. He had crossed the same river 12 years earlier as a commander on the way to victory at Yorktown. He crossed it now as a magistrate, to lay the first piece of the architectural heart of the American experiment.

While perhaps no one man better embodied the exceptionalism of the American spirit than Washington, his laying of the cornerstone was a passing of the torch of sorts. He would not allow the cause of liberty to die with his voluntary departure from office, but a piece of his service would nonetheless live on as the cornerstone.

Washington never saw Congress occupy the building. He died in 1799. The House and Senate did not move in until 1800. The British burned the Capitol in 1814. It was rebuilt, enlarged, crowned with a dome, fought over, and filled with the ordinary and extraordinary business of a republic: statutes, budgets, names read into the record, and, too often, the pretense that more procedure can heal what only character can.

The Architect of the Capitol still cannot prove the stone’s location with certainty. A large ceremonial block identified in the early 1990s is believed to be the cornerstone. The silver plate has never been found. Metal detectors failed. The dedication of the most photographed legislative building on earth is, in a literal sense, lost.

Nations can keep a building and forget its meaning. They can expand offices and multiply codes and still ignore why the first stone was laid by a man who would occupy an office rather than allow the republic to be located in his person. Washington’s generation did not confuse the Capitol with the country. The country was the people under a charter. The building was a tool. Tools are defined by the purposes we assign them. Persons are not.

The founders recognized a disabling temptation – to locate our hope in government. They built a Capitol because they knew government must have a place. They wrote a Constitution because they knew that place must not become an idol.

Our statutes are not Scripture – their authors cannot create human beings, as the Author of Scripture can. The authors of our laws written and passed in Congress can only decide whether they will choose to honor or flatten the dignity of the individual.

In that choice they reveal where they place the faith of a nation – a temporary title in the Federal City, or in the genius of kitchen tables, houses of worship, and communities where free people meet a problem and take responsibility for it.

The cornerstone is hidden from the public eye. The obligation it represents is not.