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Silk banner carried by the Society of Pewterers in the Federal Procession. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)

An express rider carried the news down to New York City on the evening of the twenty-sixth. Jubilant crowds again surged through the streets. One group ransacked the office of Greenleaf’s Antifederalist jbwrwal and made off with his type. Another paraded over to Governor Clinton’s residence, gave three hisses, and beat the rogue’s march; there was talk of going after John Lamb as well, but nothing came of it. More commotion followed a few days later when the Federalist delegation returned from Poughkeepsie. Cheering crowds greeted them at the waterfront, and eleven-gun salutes were fired before each of their houses.

INAUGURATION DAY

At the end of the summer of 1788, the Confederation Congress designated New York City as the temporary seat of the new federal government. Both it and the City Council then vacated City Hall so the building could be converted into a suitable capitol by L’Enfant. He gave it a complete facelift and turned its interior into a showcase of plush, some said extravagant, neoclassicism. In November, as elections for the new government got underway, the old Congress adjourned for good, leaving the country with no central government for the next five months.

L’Enfant’s work was substantially complete by March 4, 1789, when the new Congress convened in what was now Federal Hall—over which, in honor of the occasion, flew the flag of the “Federal Ship Hamilton.” After waiting anxiously for a month to get quorums, the Senate and House were at last able to count the ballots cast by presidential electors. To no one’s surprise, George Washington was the unanimous choice. Genuinely dismayed by the news, Washington left Mount Vernon for New York in mid-April, hoping to have “a quiet entry to the city devoid of ceremony.” He felt, he said, like “a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.”

His week-long journey to Manhattan proved anything but quiet. Every town, village, and hamlet marked the president-elect’s passage with ecstatic crowds, honor guards, booming artillery, ringing church bells, banquets, speeches, triumphal arches, and rose-strewn streets. New York churned with anticipation. “All the world here are busy in collecting flowers and sweets of every kind to amuse and delight the President in his approach and on his arrival,” one man wrote. Washington portraits went up everywhere. The initials G. W. appeared on front doors, buttons, and tobacco boxes. Local taverns and boardinghouses were besieged by excited visitors, many of whom had to settle for lodgings in nearby villages and campgrounds.

On April 23, Washington entered Elizabethtown, New Jersey, where an official welcoming committee from New York (Robert R. Livingston, Richard Varick, Egbert Benson) was waiting in a red-canopied barge to escort him across the Hudson River. As the barge pulled away from the New Jersey shore, rowed by thirteen harbor pilots in sparkling white uniforms, it was surrounded by a dense mass of vessels, one of which bore musicians and a chorus whose voices were barely audible above the roar of cannon from shore batteries and a Spanish warship in the harbor. One witness, who watched the barge pass the Battery, commented that the “successive motion of the hats” of cheering bystanders “was like the rolling motion of the sea, or a field of grain.” Governor Clinton and Mayor Duane greeted Washington at Murray’s Wharf at the foot of Wall Street on the East River. Clinton said a few words, which almost nobody could hear over the din, and then, preceded by a military guard and two marching bands, escorted Washington up Wall Street through throngs of well-wishers. Turning into Pearl Street, the procession moved slowly along to Cherry Street and the Presidential Residence, a private mansion that had been handsomely refurbished at a cost of twenty thousand pounds (all of it raised by private contributions).

Thursday, April 30, was