Washington [442]
AT THE TIME Philadelphia became the temporary capital, it ranked, with 45,000 inhabitants, as America’s largest city, overshadowing New York and Boston in size and sophistication. Its spacious brick abodes and broad thoroughfares, illumined by streetlamps at night, gave the city an orderly air, matched by a rich cultural life of theaters and newspapers. Among its intellectual ornaments were the American Philosophical Society and the Library Company, both founded under the aegis of Ben Franklin. Having profited from wartime trade, the town’s wealthy merchants set the social tone—one French visitor said, “The rich alone take precedence over the common people”—and much of its political life centered on their brilliant affairs. 9 The social demands placed on George and Martha Washington grew apace as rounds of extravagant parties enlivened the new capital. One resident stood amazed at the sheer number of sumptuous gatherings. “You have never seen anything like the frenzy which has seized upon the inhabitants here,” he informed a friend. “They have been half mad ever since the city became the seat of government.”10 Notwithstanding the city’s Quaker heritage, its social life was quite racy and luxurious, with heavy gambling at many parties. The straitlaced Abigail Adams was scandalized by the daringly low-cut dresses exhibited by women at soirées: “The style of dress . . . is really an outrage upon all decency . . . Most [ladies] wear their clothes scant upon the body and too full upon the bosom for my fancy.”11 Even French émigré aristocrats were struck by all the finery, one marveling that the “women of Philadelphia wore hats and caps almost as varied as those of Paris and bestowed immense expense in dressing their heads.”12
Martha Washington felt emancipated by Philadelphia’s freer ways. In New York she had been inhibited by protocol, whereas in the new capital she was emboldened to pay visits on friends. She kept up her Friday-evening receptions, which came to be ridiculed as the Republican Court, even though Martha, the most unaffected of first ladies, frequently prepared tea and coffee for visitors herself. Of one crowded Friday reception, Abigail Adams wrote, “The room became full before I left it, and the circle very brilliant,” and she commented on the “constellation of beauties” present.13 She judged the president more unbuttoned in this new environment. “On Thursday last, I dined with the president in company with the ministers and ladies of the court,” she reported to her daughter. “He was more than usually social . . . He asked affectionately after you and the children and at table picked the sugarplums from a cake and requested me to take them for Master John.”14
Washington regained the vigor lost during his two illnesses and strode about town with Tobias Lear and William Jackson tagging behind him. He often presented a romantic image; the corner of his blue cape was flung back over his shoulder to reveal a scarlet lining, giving him the gallant bearing of a stage character. One Philadelphian remembered watching the Washingtons emerge from their High Street doorway and enter their majestic coach, hitched to a team of six bay horses. When the mansion door opened, Washington stepped out “in a suit of dark silk velvet of the old cut, silver or steel hilted small sword at left side, hair full powdered, black silk hose and bag, accompanied by Lady Washington, also in full dress, [who] appeared standing upon the marble steps—presenting her his hand, he led her down to the coach with that ease and grace peculiar to him in everything and . . . with the attentive assiduity of an ardent, youthful lover.”15
For all the loose talk of a Republican Court, those who had actually haunted the royal courts of Europe were utterly disarmed by the quaint simplicity of the executive residence. When the French writer Chateaubriand stopped in Philadelphia, he was startled by the absence of pretension, and his description is a salutary corrective to contemporary critics who saw Washington as aping