The MagazineWashington Slept Here?What happens when propaganda replaces history.Mar 7, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 24
• By RYAN L. COLE
 Philadelphia  President Washington’s residence, 2010 AP Images In 1790, when the capital temporarily relocated to Philadelphia, financier Robert Morris offered his home to President Washington. The chief executive, who regarded the property as “the best single house in the City,” gladly accepted. During the following decade, Washington, and then John Adams, conducted the fledgling nation’s business, and established the traditions of the presidency, in Morris’s mansion near the corner of Sixth and Market Streets. After the federal government moved to its new capital city on a swampy patch of land by the Potomac River in 1800, the house passed through the hands of various owners before being demolished in 1832—and subsequently lost to memory. Today, however, almost two centuries after it was reduced to rubble, the Philadelphia White House—or a vague approximation of it—has been resurrected. Officially unveiled in December, the President’s House partially reconstructs the building’s skeleton in an effort to chronicle life in the first executive mansion. But the saga behind the reconstruction—a battle over whom and what to honor—is a story unto itself, one that offers a cautionary lesson for those who attempt to see the past through the politicized lens of the present. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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