Washington [386]
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