Washington [448]
When he spent the night at Emporia, Virginia, in Greensville County, the rain had settled the dust hanging in the air. The next morning the rain resumed, but the president decided he would rather brave the elements than the admiring crowds: “Although raining moderately . . . I continued my journey, induced to it by the crowds which were coming into a general muster at the Courthouse of Greensville, who would, I presumed, soon have made the [house] I was in too noisy to be agreeable. ”37 When the dust-choked roads turned muddy, Washington wrote that “my passage was through water.”38
As the presidential cavalcade rattled along bumpy roads down the eastern seaboard, the slapstick comedy persisted. In Craven County, North Carolina, Washington stayed with a Colonel John Allen in the belief that his house was a roadside tavern. When the error was discovered, Washington concluded that “it was too late to rectify the mistake.”39 He then pushed on to New Bern, where the townsfolk threw him a public dinner, and he resumed his favorite pastime of counting the female attendees. These visits were elaborately prepared; the local citizenry presented welcoming addresses to Washington, who delivered replies composed by Major Jackson. Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, blasted this innocuous protocol in his Philadelphia newspaper, finding incriminating evidence of royalist tendencies: “We find by the southern papers that the president on his journey is still perfumed with the incense of addresses. However highly we may consider the character of the chief magistrate of the union, yet we cannot but think the fashionable mode of expressing our attachment to the defender of the liberty of his country favors too much of monarchy to be used by republicans.”40
Bache would have been appalled by the acclaim Washington received in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he mounted his white horse and threaded his way through town amid a fanfare of trumpets and “an astonishing concourse of people.” Ladies waved to him from windows and balconies, while ships in the harbor ran up streaming colors. He counted sixty-two ladies at the Wilmington ball; one newspaper observed that the president “appeared to be equally surprised and delighted at the very large and brilliant assembly of ladies whom admiration and respect for him had collected together.”41 In Georgetown, South Carolina, fifty ladies hosted him at a tea party. Here and elsewhere on his tour, Washington made a point of addressing local Freemasons, telling General Mordecai Gist, the grand master in South Carolina, “Your sentiments on the establishment and exercise of our equal government are worthy of an association whose principles lead to purity of morals and are beneficial of action . . . I shall be happy on every occasion to evince my regard for the fraternity.”42
Perhaps the most elegant reception Washington received came in Charleston, where twelve formally dressed ship captains, manning a barge with twelve oars, ferried him into town. About forty boats brimming with gentlemen and ladies bobbed around him, while others freighted with musicians sailed alongside to serenade him. One floating chorus sang, “He comes! he comes! The hero comes./Sound, sound your trumpets, beat your drums.”43 As Washington walked the streets, he submitted to hero worship such as no other American president has perhaps ever experienced. One observer said the crowds “look up to him as the savior of the country, all respect him as the founder of our states and cherish him as a father who would come to see for himself if his children are happy.”44 In the afternoon he was visited by “a great number of the most respectable ladies of Charleston,” but they paled beside the female contingent that evening.45 In his diary, Washington wrote that he had gone “to a concert at the exchange at w[hi]ch there were at least 400 lad[ie]s—the number and appearances of w[hi]ch exceeded anything of the kind I had ever seen.”46 To further his delight,