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By Root 8361 0

luxury, it is New York, where you can find all the English fashions.” One evening at dinner he encountered two ladies in “dresses which exposed much of their bosoms. I was scandalized by such indecency in republican women.” And was it really true, as a horrified Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania reported, that many New Yorkers still observed the King’s Birthday “with great festivity”? Or what about Mrs. John Jay, the former Sarah Van Brugh Livingston, handsome and high-spirited daughter of William Livingston (long-ago editor of the Independent Reflector and later revolutionary governor of New Jersey)? She had married Jay in 1774, accompanied him on his diplomatic missions to Spain and France (becoming a favorite of Parisian society), and had now made their house on lower Broadway the center of New York’s smart society. Had she actually thrown her doors open to Lady Kitty Duer, Lady Mary Watts, Lady Christiana Griffin, and other American matrons not yet reconciled to republican forms of address? And what manner of idolatry prompted the Common Council to hire John Trumbull to paint a portrait of Washington for City Hall? (“Flattery to the living rulers is always dangerous,” scolded “Vox Res Publica.”) If Thomas Jefferson is to be believed, when he arrived to take up his duties as secretary of state in the spring of 1790 he was the only republican in town.

Very worrisome indeed, notwithstanding the suit of plain brown broadcloth in which Washington took the oath of office, was the courtly style of entertaining adopted by the chief executive and his wife. His Tuesday afternoon levees and her Friday evening receptions were, as one observer wrote, “numerously attended by all that was fashionable, elegant, and refined in society; but there was no places for the intrusion of the rabble in crowds, or for the more coarse and boisterous partisan—the vulgar electioneer—or the impudent place-hunter—with boots and frock-coats, or round abouts, or with patched knees, and holes at both elbows. . . . Full dress was required of all.” When the president appeared in public, it was noted, bands sometimes struck up “God Save the King.” His lady, it was noted, always returned visits on the third day, preceded by a footman.

Not overlooked, either, was the president’s cream-colored coach, drawn by a team of six horses—reputedly the finest equipage in the city—or the “bountiful and elegant” dinners served up by Samuel Fraunces, now the president’s head steward, who also supervised a household staff of twenty servants, maids, housekeepers, cooks, and coachmen. It didn’t help that in 1790 Washington moved his official residence from Cherry Street to the mansion built by Alexander Macomb at Number 39 Broadway, an even grander house at a better address. The rent was a breathtaking twenty-five hundred dollars per year. To the Boston Gazette, New York was a “vortex of folly and dissipation” into which republican virtue and simplicity had long since vanished.

New York’s champions, numerous and articulate, pooh-poohed all the commotion. Oliver Wolcott (related to the Livingstons, after all) made the city sound like a bastion of propriety: “There appears to be great regularity here,” he testified; “honesty is as much in fashion as in Connecticut; and I am persuaded that there is a much greater attention to good morals than has been supposed. So far as an attention to the Sabbath is a criterion of religion, a comparison between this city and many places in Connecticut would be in favor of New York.” Other advocates of the city emphasized its beauty and temperate climate (notwithstanding an influenza epidemic and heat wave in 1789 that resulted in numerous fatalities). According to one newspaper, only a single member of Congress fell ill while in New York—a point that became the subject of an extended commentary by Dr. John Bard, a local physician and president of the Medical Society, who pronounced New York “one of the healthiest cities of the continent.” The proof of this assertion, he said, was readily visible “in the complexion, health and vigor