1791 State of the Union Address
address by President Washington
The state of union is an address, in the United States, given by the president to a joint session of Congress, the United States House of Representatives and United States Senate. The United States constitution requires the president "from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union." Today the state of the union address is given as a speech, though this is not a requirement of the constitution. George Washington chose to address the Congress in a speech annually; on October 25, 1791, he gave his third speech.
Historical background
Government
A major concern at the time was the raising of taxes, as Congress were arguing whether they had the constitutional power to do so. Revenues for the Federal Government were at that time mostly collected on import duties. Alexander Hamilton, the then Secretary of the Treasury, felt these had been raised to as high a level as was reasonable, and a new income stream was necessary.
Before the speech, Congress had been debating where to put the capital. Finally, through a deal made between Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, they came to a conclusion. This deal is known as the Compromise of 1790.
Westward movement and Census Act
At the time the U.S. was in possession of the original thirteen colonies, along with the land gained in the Treaty of Paris.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “1791 State of the Union Address” as address by President Washington. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as address by President Washington. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17507463. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1791 and 1790.
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This entry incorporates text from “1791 State of the Union Address” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.