by Ron Chernow
Because the vote counting had been long delayed, Washington felt the crush of upcoming public business and decided to set out promptly for New York on April 16, accompanied in his elegant carriage by Thomson and David Humphreys. His diary entry conveys a sense of foreboding: “About ten o’clock, I bade adieu to Mount Vernon, to private life, and to domestic felicity and, with a mind oppressed with more anxious and painful sensations than I have words to express, set out for New York . . . with the best dispositions to render service to my country in obedience to its call, but with less hope of answering its expectations.”10 He sounded like someone marching off, head bowed, to the gallows. Waving goodbye was Martha, who wouldn’t join him until mid-May. She watched her husband of thirty years depart with a mixture of bittersweet sensations, wondering “when or whether he will ever come home again.” She had long doubted the wisdom of this final act in his public life. “I think it was much too late for him to go into public life again,” she told her nephew, “but it was not to be avoided. Our family will be deranged as I must soon follow him.”11
Determined to travel rapidly, Washington and his entourage set out each day at sunrise and put in a full day on the road. Along the way he hoped to keep ceremonial distractions to a minimum, but he was soon disabused: eight exhausting days of festivities lay ahead. He had traveled only ten miles north to Alexandria when the townspeople waylaid him with a dinner, lengthened by the mandatory thirteen toasts. Adept at farewells, Washington was succinctly eloquent in response: “Unutterable sensations must then be left to more expressive silence, while, from an aching heart, I bid you all, my affectionate friends and kind neighbors, farewell.”12
Before long, Washington saw that his journey would form the republican equivalent of the procession to a royal coronation. As if already a seasoned politician, he left a trail of political promises in his wake. While in Wilmington, he addressed the Delaware Society for Promoting Domestic Manufacturers and imparted a hopeful message: “The promotion of domestic manufactures will, in my conception, be among the first consequences which may naturally be expected to flow from an energetic government.”13 Arriving in Philadelphia, he was met by local dignitaries and asked to mount a white horse for his entry into town. When he crossed a bridge over the Schuylkill, it was wreathed with laurels and evergreens; at one point a cherubic boy, lowered above him by a mechanical device, popped a laurel crown onto his head. Recurrent cries of “Long Live George Washington” confirmed what James McHenry had already told him before he left Mount Vernon: “You are now a king under a different name.”14
As Washington entered Philadelphia, he found himself, willy-nilly, at the head of a full-scale parade. Twenty thousand people lined the streets, their eyes fixed on him in wonder. “His Excellency rode in front of the procession, on horseback, politely bowing to the spectators who filled the doors and windows by which he passed,” reported the Federal Gazette, noting that church bells rang as Washington proceeded to his old haunt, the City Tavern.15 After the bare-knuckled fight over the Constitution, the newspaper editorialized, Washington had brought the country together: “What a pleasing reflection to every patriotic mind, thus to see our citizens again united in their reliance on this great man who is, a second time, called upon to be the savior of his country!”16 By the next morning Washington had grown tired of the jubilation. When the light horse cavalry showed up to accompany him to Trenton, they discovered he had sneaked out of the city an hour earlier “to avoid even the appearance of pomp or vain parade,” reported one newspaper.17
As Washington approached the bridge over Assunpink Creek in Trenton, the spot where he had stood off the British and Hessians, he saw that the townsfolk had erected a magnificent floral arch in his honor with the words “December 26, 1776” sewn from leaves and flowers. Another flowery sentence proclaimed, “The Defenders of the Mothers will also Defend the Daughters.”18 As he rode closer, thirteen young girls, robed in spotless white, walked forward with flower-filled baskets, scattering petals at his feet. Astride his horse, tears standing in his eyes, he returned a deep bow and noted the “astonishing contrast between his former and actual situation at the same spot,” declaring he would never forget the present occasion.19 With that, three rows of women—young girls, unmarried ladies, and married ones—burst into a fervent ode on how he had saved fair virgins and matrons alike. Beneath his public composure, the adulation only crystallized Washington’s self-doubt. “I greatly apprehend that my countrymen will expect too much from me,” he wrote to Rutledge. “I fear, if the issue of public measures should not correspond with their sanguine expectations, they will turn the extravagant . . . praises which they are heaping upon me at this moment into equally extravagant . . . censures.”20 There was no way, it seemed, that he could lower expectations or escape public reverence.
As Washington approached New York City, a parallel journey from Mount Vernon was in progress that, in many ways, was no less fascinating. Billy Lee, the slave and manservant with whom he had shared so many exploits, longed to join Washington for the inauguration. Once a physical specimen perhaps as imposing as his master, Lee had by now fractured both knees, but he still wanted to make the journey and serve in the presidential household, where he would have to climb three flights of stairs. Dubious that Lee could do it, Washington tried to dissuade him from coming. Nevertheless he always found it difficult to resist Lee’s pleas and finally consented that he should travel to the inauguration with Tobias Lear.
When Lear and Lee reached Philadelphia around April 19, Lee’s inflamed knees made it impossible for him to soldier on. Lear contacted Clement Biddle and asked if he could minister to Lee until the slave was ready to complete his journey. “Will appears to be in too bad a state to travel at present,” Lear wrote. “I shall therefore leave him and will be much obliged to you if you will send him on to New York as soon as he can bear the journey without injury, which I expect will be in two or three days. I shall pay his expenses . . . He dresses his knee himself and therefore will stand in no need of a doctor, unless it should grow worse.”21 In a remarkable act of faith in Lee’s fidelity as a slave, Lear left him in Philadelphia while he proceeded to New York. For more than a month, Biddle gave Lee excellent care, calling in two doctors to treat his knee. He even had a steel brace manufactured at “heavy expense” that enabled him to walk, though with difficulty.22 The care lavished on Billy Lee again confirms that Washington treated him in a singular way among his slaves and dealt with him as a man whose pride and feelings had to be taken into account. From his behavior, it is clear that Washington felt the need to reason with Lee, as if he were an employee, instead of simply bossing him about as a slave. Of course, Lee’s exceptional treatment only pointed up the powerless state of other slaves.
Although Lee missed the inauguration, he still yearned for a job in the presidential household. A few days after Washington was inaugurated, Lear wrote to Biddle and tried again to discourage Lee from coming to New York, pointing out that “he cannot possibly be of any service here” and expressing the hope that he would catch the “first vessel that sails for Alex[andri]a” after he recuperated.23 Lee remained obdurate. Submitting to the slave’s wish, Lear instructed Biddle that, if Lee was “still anxious to come on here, the president would gratify him, altho[ugh] he will be troublesome. He has been an old and faithful serv[an]t. This is enough for the president to gratify him in every reasonable wish.”24 On June 22 Lear informed Biddle that “Billy arrived here safe and well.”25 Again, Lear spared no expense with Lee, who was brought by coach from the ferry stop to the presidential mansion. To dress him up for his new duties, Lear went out and got him suitable stockings. Unwilling to spurn Lee’s demand for a place in the executive residence, Washington allowed him to work there, probably as a butler, during his first term, even though Lee had, by some accounts, become difficult and temperamental.
BY NOW SATED WITH ADULATION, Washington preserved a faint hope that he would be allowed to make an inconspicuous entry into
New York and pleaded with Governor George Clinton to spare him further hoopla: “I can assure you, with the utmost sincerity, that no reception can be so congenial to my feelings as a quiet entry devoid of ceremony.”26 But he was fooling himself if he imagined he might slip unobtrusively into the temporary capital. Never reconciled to the demands of his celebrity, Washington still fantasized that he could shuck that inescapable burden. When he arrived at Elizabethtown on April 23, an impressive phalanx of three senators, five congressmen, and three state officials awaited him. He must have intuited, with a sinking sensation, that this welcome would eclipse even the frenzied receptions in Philadelphia and Trenton. Moored to the wharf was a special presidential barge, glistening with fresh paint, constructed in his honor and equipped with an awning of red curtains in the rear to shelter him from the elements. To nobody’s surprise, the craft was steered by thirteen oarsmen in spanking white uniforms.
As the barge drifted into the Hudson River, Washington made out a Manhattan shoreline already “crowded with a vast concourse of citizens, waiting with exulting anxiety his arrival,” a local newspaper said.27 Many ships anchored in the harbor were garlanded with flags and banners. If Washington gazed back at the receding Jersey shore, he would have seen that his craft led a huge flotilla of boats, including one bearing the portly figure of Henry Knox. Some boats carried musicians and female vocalists on deck, serenading Washington across the waters. “The voices of the ladies were superior to the flutes that played with the stroke of the oars in Cleopatra’s silken-corded barge,” was the imaginative verdict of the New York Packet.28 These wafted melodies, enhanced by repeated cannon roar and thunderous acclaim from crowds onshore, again oppressed Washington with their implicit message of high expectations. As he confided to his diary, the intermingled sounds “filled my mind with sensations as painful (considering the reverse of this scene, which may be the case after all my labors to do good) as they are pleasing.”29 To guard himself against later disappointment, he seemed not to allow himself the smallest iota of pleasure.
When the presidential barge landed at the foot of Wall Street, Governor Clinton, Mayor James Duane, James Madison, and other luminaries welcomed him to the city. The officer of a special military escort stepped forward briskly and told Washington that he awaited his orders. Washington again labored to cool the celebratory mood. “As to the present arrangement,” he replied, “I shall proceed as is directed. But after this is over, I hope you will give yourself no further trouble, as the affection of my fellow-citizens is all the guard I want.”30 Nobody seemed to take the hint seriously.
The streets were solidly thronged with well-wishers, and it took Washington a full hour to arrive at his new residence at 3 Cherry Street, tucked away in the northeastern corner of the city, a block from the East River, near the present-day Brooklyn Bridge. One week earlier the building’s owner, Samuel Osgood, had agreed to lease it to Congress as the temporary presidential residence. The descriptions of Washington’s demeanor en route to the house confirm that he finally surrendered to the general high spirits, especially when he viewed the legions of adoring women. As Elias Boudinot told his wife, Washington “frequently bowed to the multitude and took off his hat to the ladies at the windows, who waved their handkerchiefs and threw flowers before him and shed tears of joy and congratulation. The whole city was one scene of triumphal rejoicing.”31
America’s second-largest city, with a population of about thirty thousand, New York was a small, provincial town compared to European capitals. Lavishly appointed carriages sped through streets heaped with horse droppings and rubbish. Rich and robust, New York already had a raucous commercial spirit that grated on squeamish sensibilities. “New York is less citified than Philadelphia,” said a French visitor, “but the bustle of trade is far greater.”32 Before the war John Adams, passing through town, huffed that “with all the opulence and splendor of this city, there is very little good breeding to be found. There is no modesty. No attention to one another. They talk very loud, very fast, and all together.”33 Although Vice President Adams had arrived before Washington, the town did not endear itself to him on this trip either. Congress had failed to locate a residence for the new vice president, who lodged with John Jay for several weeks.
New York had not yet recovered fully from the dislocations of the war. First Americans and then Britons had uprooted trees and fences for firewood, leaving weed-strewn lots in their path. In the aftermath of the British occupation, said Mayor Duane, New York resembled a place that “had been inhabited by savages or wild beasts.”34 The great conflagration that consumed a quarter of the city in 1776 had left behind blocks of rubble and skeletal houses, some of them yet to be razed. Like many ports, New York catered to a rough, brawling population of sailors and traders and boasted more than four hundred taverns. One French visitor in the 1790s expressed surprise that the city had “whole sections given over to streetwalkers for the plying of their profession” and that it was filled with “houses of debauchery.”35 With its wealthy merchants and brawny laborers, the city already presented a picture of vivid extremes.
THOUGH THE CONSTITUTION SAID NOTHING about an inaugural address, Washington, in an innovative spirit, contemplated such a speech as early as January 1789 and asked a “gentleman under his roof ”—David Humphreys—to draft one.36 Washington had always been economical with words, but the collaboration with Humphreys produced a wordy document, seventy-three pages long, which survives only in tantalizing snippets. In this curious speech, Washington spent a ridiculous amount of time defending his decision to become president, as if he stood accused of some heinous crime. He denied that he had accepted the presidency to enrich himself, even though nobody had accused him of greed: “In the first place, if I have formerly served the community without a wish for pecuniary compensation, it can hardly be suspected that I am at present influenced by avaricious schemes.”37 Addressing a topical concern, he disavowed any desire to found a dynasty, pleading his childless state. Closer in tone to future inaugural speeches was his ringing expression of faith in the American people. He devised a perfect formulation of popular sovereignty, writing that the Constitution had brought forth “a government of the people: that is to say, a government in which all power is derived from, and at stated periods reverts to, them—and that, in its operation . . . is purely a government of laws made and executed by the fair substitutes of the people alone.”38 Showing an Enlightenment spirit, he generalized the American Revolution into a movement blazing a path toward the universal triumph of freedom: “I rejoice in a belief that intellectual light will spring up in the dark corners of the earth; that freedom of inquiry will produce liberality of conduct; that mankind will reverse the absurd position that the many were made for the few; and that they will not continue slaves in one part of the globe, when they can become freemen in another.”39
This ponderous speech never saw the light of day. Washington sent a copy to James Madison, who wisely vetoed it on two counts: it was much too long, and its lengthy legislative proposals would be interpreted as executive meddling with the legislature. Instead, Madison drafted for Washington a far more compact speech that avoided tortured introspection. A whirlwind of energy, Madison would seem omnipresent in the early days of Washington’s administration. He drafted not only the inaugural address but also the official response by Congress and then Washington’s response to Congress, completing the circle. This service established Madison, despite his major role in the House, as a preeminent adviser and confidant to the new president. Oddly enough, he was not troubled that his advisory relationship to Washington might be construed as violating the separation of powers.
Washington knew that everything he did at the swearing-in would establish a tone for the future. “As the first of everything in our situation will serve to establish a precedent,” he reminded Madison, “it is devoutly wished on my part that these precedents may be fixed on true principles.”40 He would shape indelibly the institution of the presidency. Alth
ough he had earned his reputation in battle, he made a critical decision not to wear a uniform at the inauguration or beyond, banishing fears of a military coup. Instead, he would stand there aglitter with patriotic symbols. To spur American manufactures, he would wear a double-breasted brown suit made from broadcloth woven at the Woolen Manufactory of Hartford, Connecticut. 41 The suit had gilt buttons with an eagle insignia on them; to complete his outfit, he would wear white hosiery, silver shoe buckles, and yellow gloves. Washington already sensed that Americans would emulate their presidents. “I hope it will not be a great while before it will be unfashionable for a gentleman to appear in any other dress,” he told Lafayette, referring to his American attire. “Indeed, we have already been too long subject to British prejudices.”42 To burnish his image further on inauguration day, Washington powdered his hair and wore a dress sword on his hip, sheathed in a steel scabbard.
The inauguration took place at the building at Wall and Nassau streets that had long served as New York’s City Hall. It came richly laden with historical associations, having hosted John Peter Zenger’s trial in 1735, the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, and the Confederation Congress from 1785 to 1788. Starting in September 1788, the French engineer Pierre-Charles L’Enfant had remodeled it into Federal Hall, a suitable home for Congress. L’Enfant introduced a covered arcade at street level and a balcony surmounted by a triangular pediment on the second story. As the people’s chamber, the House of Representatives was accessible to the public, situated in a high-ceilinged octagonal room on the ground floor, while the Senate met in a second-floor room, buffering it from popular pressure. From this room Washington would emerge onto the balcony to take the oath of office. In many ways, the first inauguration was a hasty, slapdash affair. As with all theatrical spectacles, rushed preparations and frantic work on the new building continued until a few days before the event. Nervous anticipation spread through the city as to whether the two hundred workmen would complete the project on time. Only a few days before the inauguration, an eagle was hoisted onto the pediment, completing the building. The final effect was stately: a white building with a blue and white cupola topped by a weathervane.
