Washington [447]
On March 20, 1791, Washington departed from Philadelphia in his carriage with a train of servants. A big, rough-hewn Hessian named John Fagan drove the coach, with James Hurley as the postilion. Major William Jackson, presidential porter John Mauld, and valet William Osborne trotted alongside on horseback. Washington’s slave Giles drove the baggage wagon with two horses, while his other slave in the rear, Paris, rode the white parade horse, Prescott, that Washington would ride into towns. In a playful touch, Washington included his greyhound, which he had named Cornwallis. In New York and Philadelphia, Giles and Paris had served as coachman and postilion, and their demotion to the back of the presidential procession may have been designed to placate southern sensibilities. It may also have reflected Washington’s displeasure with the two men. By the end of the tour, Washington would drop Paris from his presidential household, describing him as “lazy, self-willed, and impudent,” while Giles developed an injury that made it impossible for him to ride a horse.34
Washington’s diaries for the early stages of his southern trip sometimes read like a disaster chronicle. The succession of horrors started with the sail down Severn River in Maryland. Washington had borrowed a large boat manned by an incompetent crew, and in the course of a dark, stormy night, with “constant lightning and tremendous thunder,” the boat ran aground twice. The befuddled crew had no notion where they were. All the while the president lay curled up in a bunk below-decks, so cramped he could not fully stretch out. The nightmare ended with the boat’s arrival at Annapolis, where Washington was installed in the familiar comfort of George Mann’s Tavern.
At this point Washington paused for an important piece of public business: he officiated at a meeting of property owners in Georgetown and Carrollsburg who were competing to have government buildings for the new federal district erected on their land. In a pleasant surprise to the two warring groups, Washington informed them that the ten-mile-square district would encompass land in both their domains. In his usual tactful style, he urged the landowner groups to cooperate rather than compete and also pored over a survey of the new federal district prepared by Andrew Ellicott, as well as preliminary plans drawn up by Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, the French engineer tapped to design the federal city.
Washington gave himself a week’s respite at Mount Vernon and made the daily rounds of his five farms for the first time since the previous fall. On April 7, with the horses “well refreshed and in good spirits,” his entourage resumed the journey, and as they boarded the Colchester ferry, Washington hoped things would go smoothly. During this crossing he decided to keep the four horses harnessed to his coach. But one horse got skittish and dashed off the side of the boat, pulling the other startled horses with it. Fortunately the boat had drifted close enough to shallow water that the horses could be saved and the coach prevented from plunging in.
As the presidential cavalcade approached Fredericksburg on April 8, the townsfolk were taken aback to see Washington—he had concealed his arrival to avoid any fuss. One paper noted that the citizens, “not being apprised of his approach, were disappointed in the opportunity of evincing their respect . . . by meeting him previous to his arrival.”35 After a festive welcome in Richmond, Washington proceeded to Petersburg, where several thousand people greeted him and threw up clouds of dust that irritated his throat. To avoid a repetition of this problem, Washington let it be known that he would leave town at eight the next morning, “but I did it a little after five,” he confessed in his diary, perhaps with a guilty