Washington: A Life

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 ma

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 thrill, “by which means I avoided the inconveniences” of the dust.36

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 di

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, ma

The southern tour turned into a marathon as the cavalcade crossed the Georgia pine barrens. The “abominably sandy and heavy” roads wore down the horses, including Prescott.48 The journey was a heroic labor for Washington, who had to deal with the hazards of the road coupled with the tiring social demands. From Georgia, he wrote to Tobias Lear that he was so busy in each town that it “scarcely allowed me a moment I could call my own.”49 He pushed on to Augusta, where the local newspaper stated that the presidential ball was attended by “the largest number of ladies ever collected at this place.”50 The presidential co