America in 1790 wasn’t just a young nation — it was very much in its infancy. President George Washington had been inaugurated just the year before, the first executive to preside over the United States of America.

The debate over the United States Constitution had been resolved in 1788, but plenty of people still had objections. Efforts were underway to win broader acceptance through a series of amendments to clarify some of the government’s powers and the legal protections people would enjoy.

While the basic form of government was the same then as in the U.S. today, much was also different. The nation’s capital city was in flux, and it was in 1790 that the House of Representatives would vote to create what would become Washington, D.C.

The first Census was undertaken in 1790, and Congress imposed taxes for the first time.

That effort would lead to an early test of the nation’s unity when resistance to the taxes would flare up on the new nation’s frontier.

Through the course of the decade, many institutions still recognizable today started to take shape. And by the very end of the 1790s, the man who was most associated with the new nation — Washington, who led the army during the Revolutionary War and then become its first President — would be dead.

The nation he helped found, however, was just coming to life.

From 1789 to late 1790, the nation’s capital was New York, and the first several sessions of Congress were held in Federal Hall. But the capital was moved to Philadelphia in 1790 as Congress considered a permanent location.

In an essay about the selection of Philadelphia as the temporary capital, historian Hillary Kativa wrote Philadelphia had been one of many places Congress had convened.

“After departing Philadelphia in 1783, Congress convened in cities as varied as Princeton, N.J.; Lancaster, Pa.; and Baltimore, Md., before settling in New York in 1785,” she wrote. “As a candidate for the permanent capital, Philadelphia’s size, wealth, and central location weighed in its favor, yet congressmen from both New England and the Southern states considered Philadelphia too urban, as well as hot and prone to outbreaks of disease. By and large, sectional conflicts and whether or not the capital should be a commercial city animated the debate and guided Congress’ efforts to find a location ‘consistent with convenience to the navigation of the Atlantic Ocean, and having due regard to the particular situation of the Western Country.’”

But despite Philadelphia’s long connection to the cause of American independence, other considerations came into play when deciding where to place the new capital.

At the dawn of the new nation, there was disagreement about how things would be run and exactly how much power and influence the federal government would have compared to the states.

Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, wanted to give the federal government a strong fiscal position, and advocated for the federal government assuming the states’ debts from the Revolutionary War and the period before the Constitution was ratified.

Many Southern politicians felt such an arrangement would be unfair, though, and blocked passage of the bill in Congress. To find a way to get the bill to pass, Hamilton reached out to then Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who set up one of the most famous meetings of the early days of the nation.

In June 1790, Jefferson arranged a meeting between Hamilton and James Madison, who was then serving in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Hamilton again made his pitch to consolidate debts under the federal government. While he didn’t change Madison’s mind, he did change his position very slightly.

Several years later, Jefferson recalled the dinner.

“It ended in Mr. Madison’s acquiescence in a proposition that the question [i.e., assumption of state debts] should be again brought before the House by way of amendment from the Senate, that he would not vote for it, nor entirely withdraw his opposition, yet he would not be strenuous, but leave it to its fate,” Jefferson wrote. “It was observed, I forget by which of them, that as the pill would be a bitter one to the Southern states, something should be done to soothe them; and the removal of the seat of government to the (Potomac) was a just measure, and would probably be a popular one with them, and would be a proper one to follow the assumption.”

An act setting the location of Washington, D.C., came in July, and another to have the federal government assume state debts passed in August.

Once the site for the capital city was selected, the next step was to survey the ground and create a plan. The survey was managed by Maj. Andrew Ellicott, and he was assisted by a team that included African American astronomer and surveyor Benjamin Banneker.

The planning fell to French architect (and veteran of the American Revolution), Pierre Charles L’Enfant.

At the center of his plan, L’Enfant envisioned what would become the U.S. Capitol on what was then called Jenkins Hill — now Capitol Hill — with the city in a grid pattern around it.

Across the neat grid of East-West and North-South streets, L’Enfant placed diagonal avenues, broader and grander than other streets. They intersected the grid at a series of squares and circles that still give the city its distinctive character.

In August 1790, the government undertook the first U.S. Census, as called for in the Constitution. When it was published the next year, it found there were 3,929,326 Americans in the 14 states and the Southwest Territory. The Northwest Territory was excluded for logistical reasons. Vermont became a state in 1791, and the census for that state was conducted then.

Virginia was the most populous state, with 747,610 residents, and Pennsylvania was the second most populous, with 434,373 residents.

Although Vermont had been a British colony and fought for independence starting in 1775 with the rest of the United States, it hadn’t joined with the other 13 colonies, in part because of border disputes with neighboring New York and New Hampshire. Instead, in January 1777, Vermont declared itself an independent republic.

When the war ended, the British recognized Vermont as part of the United States, but Vermont continued to claim independence, though there were multiple attempts to get it to join the United States.

Finally, in 1789, when it became clear that Kentucky would soon split from Virginia and be admitted to the union as a state that allowed slavery, a movement grew to add Vermont as a state that barred slavery as a way to balance the political power of the two interests.

In 1791, Vermont became a state, and in 1792, Kentucky followed. In 1794, Congress passed a law authorizing a new flag with 15 stars and 15 stripes. Later laws would change the flag back to the original 13 stripes, with a star for each state.

The Constitution had been hotly debated in the late 1780s, and there were hard-fought compromises made to get the foundational document ratified. But from 1789, when the Constitution first took effect, it was clear that there were things missing.

One major concern for those who had been worried about the power of the new federal government was that nowhere in the Constitution laid out the basic rights of the people in the new nation.

In 1789, James Madison, one of the main authors of the Consitution, proposed 15 amendments that enumerated a range of rights for people.

He wasn’t alone. Washington mentioned the idea in his inaugural address.

“Whilst you carefully avoid every alteration which might endanger the benefits of an united and effective government, or which ought to await the future lessons of experience; a reverence for the characteristic rights of freemen, and a regard for public harmony, will sufficiently influence your deliberations on the question, how far the former can be impregnably fortified or the latter be safely and advantageously promoted,” he said to lawmakers in April 1789.

Eventually, Congress put forth 12 amendments and starting in late 1789, states began to debate them.

The proposed amendments would mostly be familiar to anyone who’s taken an American history class, apart from two. One, which is still awaiting approval today, would have set the number of Congressional Representatives at one per 50,000 constituents. Another, which was ratified in 1992 and became the 27th Amendment, prohibits Congress from raising its pay during a session.

In December 1791, Virginia became the 11th state to ratify 10 of the 12 proposed amendments, and what’s now the Bill of Rights came into force.

In April 1792, Congress passed the Coinage Act of 1792, sometimes called the Mint Act, because it established the nation’s first mint. The law also set the base unit of currency as the dollar and pegged its initial value to the Spanish dollar, a silver coin.

In all, the act created 10 coinage denominations. Three were gold, ranging in value from $10 to $2.50. Five were silver, with values from $1 to $0.05, and two were copper, with values of 1 cent and half a cent.

In a time before the telephone or telegraph, a letter was the only method of long-distance communication. And ensuring that letters got from the sender to the recipient was good for commerce and the spreading of news.

So it’s no surprise that there has been some sort of postal service in the U.S. for a long time. Before the Revolutionary War, the Royal Mail handled letters and packages, but starting in 1776, the Continental Congress created the position of postmaster general to oversee mail delivery.

One reason for the focus on the postal service was the importance of news traveling around the fledgling country.

A 2010 history of postage rates for periodicals written by the U.S. Postal Service, explained the emphasis on news.

“Because news was considered crucial to an informed electorate, the first major postal law, passed in 1792, provided for the carriage of newspapers to subscribers for the relatively rock-bottom rate of either 1 cent (for up to 100 miles) or 1.5 cents (for more than 100 miles),” the article reads. “Postage for letters, by contrast, cost at least 6 to 25 cents, depending on distance traveled. The 1792 law also allowed newspaper printers to send each other newspapers for free, facilitating the spread of national and foreign news outward from the seat of government.”

Slavery was widespread in early America, with the 1790 Census finding that 17.5% of the population was enslaved, the highest proportion it would ever be.

But by the time of the Revolutionary War and its aftermath, some states began to prohibit slavery in their borders. The divide between what were called free and slave states led to much of the rancor in the debate around the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

It was such a divisive topic that the word never appears in the Constitution, with the practice being alluded to instead of directly named. And a clause prohibited Congress from considering any ban on the international slave trade until 20 years after ratification.

The Constitution also guaranteed enslavers the right to have escaped enslaved people returned to them.

The Fugitive Slave Act, passed in 1793, put an enforcement mechanism in place to help ensure escaped enslaved people were returned and also provided for a fine for anyone who harbored a fugitive enslaved person.

In another 60 years, efforts to enforce an even more strict version of the law, one that required both state governments and individuals to help return fugitive enslaved people, would help sow even further division in the lead up to the Civil War.

Washington had been so popular after his victory in the American Revolution that he was unanimously elected president in 1788 and took office as a unifying figure.

By 1792, Washington was 60 and his health was failing. He’d planned to serve a single term and then retire to his beloved Mount Vernon, but he was convinced to serve a second term because of his ability to unify the Federalists and the emerging Democratic-Republicans.

By 1796, Washington was ready to step away from public life. His decision to stop after two terms would become an example to every president until Franklin Roosevelt ran for and won a third term in 1940, and would become the law of the land with the 22nd amendment, ratified in 1951.

John Adams signed the Declaration of Independence and was a key figure in the early days of the country. He served two terms as vice president under Washington and in 1796, he beat Thomas Jefferson and became the second president.

The two men, Adams and Jefferson, were the founders and public faces of the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties, the first political parties in the country.

In the same year the U.S. Constitution took effect, the monarchy in France fell and a period of upheaval followed. Relations between the U.S. and France, which had been very friendly because of French support for the American Revolution, began to deteriorate.

As France began to go to war with nearly every European power, America declared neutrality, hoping to stay out of the conflict and maintain commercial connections with France, Great Britain and other European nations.

France and Great Britain had other ideas, however. Both countries had powerful navies and seized the ships of neutral powers who traded with the other side.

The Jay Treaty was an attempt to ease tensions with Great Britain, but it inflamed tensions with France.

When American sent diplomats to negotiate a treaty with France, they were met with demands for a large loan to the French government and a bribe for one of the ministers.

They refused, and when the news reached the U.S., there was general outrage over the attempted shakedown.

The tensions between France and the U.S. would continue, leading to what historians call the Quasi-War, an ongoing naval fight between the two nations.

While the tensions led to violence on the high seas, it led to paranoia in Washington, D.C.

Congress would pass four laws that have come to be known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The laws gave the president the ability to jail people for spreading misinformation about the government as well as remove foreigners from the country if they were loyal to France.

In the 1790s, the world in general and the United States in particular, was an agrarian place. There were cities, but most people had some connection to farming in some way.

The industrial changes that would take place over the next 100 years were hard to see from that point, but one man had such vision.

Eli Whitney Jr., born in 1765 in Massachusetts, moved to the South as an adult and became familiar with cotton.

The fibers of the plant, which are used to make cloth, have to be separated, a labor-intensive process.

In 1793, Whitney would invent the cotton gin, a machine that used rotating combwheels to separate the fibers, making it possible to handle as much as 50 pounds of cotton in a day.

Revisions and improvements would contribute to the growth of cotton as a cash crop in the South, as well as possibly influence the continued growth of slavery as an economic system.

Whitney would do more than just invent the cotton gin, however. In 1798, he accepted a contract from the U.S. government to produce 10,000 rifles, to be made with interchangeable parts.

Historians credit the work he did with helping to create an industrial base that would help the North go on to win the Civil War in 75 years.

December 1799 marked the eve of a new century, which made it a fitting end point for the life of one of the old century’s most prominent figures — George Washington.

After leaving the presidency in 1797, Washington returned to his estate of Mount Vernon, where he set about trying to fix problems that had cropped up in his absence.

His retirement was short, however. In mid December 1799, Washington was working on Mount Vernon when he spent a day out in the sleet and snow. He felt sick the next day but continued to work, but on the day after that, things took a turn for the worse.

His doctors were called, but their efforts made no difference. On Dec. 14, just a day after he’d initially fallen sick, Washington died. He was 67, and had spent nearly the last quarter century dedicated to the American experiment.