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By Root 7792 0

Inauguration Day, and the city awakened at dawn to a salute from the guns on the Battery. At nine o’clock, hour-long services got under way in all churches. Congress assembled at noon and dispatched a party of dignitaries to fetch the president-elect from his Cherry Street residence. After some inevitable confusion over the formalities—there were no precedents to rely upon, after all, and nobody remembered to bring a Bible—Washington stepped out on the second-floor balcony of Federal Hall, dressed for the occasion in a plain suit of “superfine American Broad Cloth” from a mill in Hartford, Connecticut. He hoped, he had said, that it would soon “be unfashionable for a gentleman to appear in any other dress” than one of American manufacture.

“The scene was solemn and awful beyond description,” wrote one spectator. Chancellor Livingston administered the oath of office, then, overcome by emotion, bellowed, “Long Live George Washington, President of the United States!” The densely packed crowd below responded with “loud and repeated shouts” of approval, and Washington went back inside to deliver his inaugural address. Afterward, he and the members of Congress walked up to St. Paul’s on Broadway for a worship service.

That evening, visitors and residents jammed the streets to gawk at “illuminations”—huge backlit transparent paintings of patriotic subjects erected here and there around the city. One, at the lower end of Broadway, showed Washington with the figure of Fortitude, flanked by the Senate and House and surmounted by the forms of Justice and Wisdom. Another, displayed at the John Street Theater, showed Fame descending from heaven like an angel to bestow immortality on the new President. Even the residence of the Spanish minister was bedecked with moving transparencies that depicted the past, present, and future glories of America. Bands played, houses and ships in the harbor blazed with candles, and the skies above crackled with a two-hour-long display of fireworks. Washington, who watched the show from Chancellor Livingston’s house, had to get home on foot because the streets were too full of people for his carriage to pass.

Inauguration of General George Washington as President, 1789. Engraving by Montbaron & Gautschi. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)

20

Capital City

New York had been the de facto capital of the nation since 1785, but the transition from Confederation to Constitution gave new snap and sophistication to life in the city. Trailing behind President Washington came a multitude of Revolutionary heroes and near-heroes—“the most celebrated persons from the various parts of the United States,” as the French reformer Brissot de Warville wrote in his New Travels in the United States (the first American edition of which appeared in New York in 1792). A brief stroll through the streets of lower Manhattan could bring residents face to face with Vice-President John Adams, Secretary of War Henry Knox, Attorney General Edmund Randolph, Congressman James Madison, or Senator John Hancock; Thomas Jefferson, currently American ambassador to France, would arrive in another six months or so to take up his duties as secretary of state. So many of the republic’s most famous men converged on New York over the spring and summer of 1789 that the painter John Trumbull moved to the city in December to finish the portraits on his monumental canvas The Declaration of Independence.

Washington drew numerous prominent New Yorkers into the new federal orbit. John Jay became the first chief justice of the Supreme Court. Alexander Hamilton was named secretary of the treasury on the recommendation of Senator Robert Morris (Hamilton was “damned sharp,” Morris told Washington, who surely knew it already); Hamilton in turn chose William Duer for assistant secretary of the treasury. Gouverneur Morris took the post of ambassador to France, General John Lamb became collector of the port, and Richard Harison got the office of U.S. attorney. Chancellor Livingston thought he deserved a cabinet-level appointment but