President in the early years of USA
It was not an easy to be president in the USA's first years
Being the First President
Being President of the United States is a difficult job, you have to run a campaign to get elected, then, you have to make important decisions that effect the whole country. Make the wrong choice, and your country could go to war, go in debt, or you could hurt the environment. It doesn't make it any easier that no matter what you choose to do, there will be someone who is upset. You can't please everyone, there will always be those people who don't agree with you. Now, imagine how hard it was for George Washington, the first person to have this difficult job. Nobody was entirely sure how his job would work. What would he be payed? What departments of government should advisers be in? Should we have advisers at all? What exactly does a president do? And how long should he be in office? The only way to answer these questions, would be to just try different things to see what would work. Washington had a whole country on his shoulders, it must have been very stressful.
International pressures
Being the president while the US was a new country was hard, but the countries around us made it even more difficult. Just a few years after the American Revolution, Great Britten and France started fighting. Since the US had been trading with both, they were dragged into it. Neither country wanted to stop trading with the US, but they didn't want the US to trade with their enemy either. They ended up destroying US trading ships that were headed to the other country. This made it very difficult for the US because they needed the supplies and money they were trading for. The US president had to make a tough decision on what to do, making his job even harder and more confusing. Also, the French Revolution was going on, and it was a disaster! There new country was falling apart. Many American's started wondering if that would happen to them too, and they started losing faith in their leader. The rest of the world made the president's job very difficult.
Problems within the states
As if being the president and international problems weren't bad enough, America was having more problems of it's own. Even after Washington, there were still many questions about how a president should work. For example, what would happen if there was a tie during an election? This is exactly what happened when Tomas Jefferson was trying to get elected. He tied with his opponent, what should they do? They decided to let the House of Representatives make the decision. The House of representatives voted, and Tomas Jefferson got elected. That is how the country decided to do many things, when a new problem came up, they got together, and tried something, if that didn't work, they would try something else. It was very hard to run a country this way.