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 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 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, the women wore bandeaux upon which his image had been sketched or that were stamped with the words “Long life to the President” or “Welcome to the hero” in golden letters.⁴⁷

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 connoisseur estimated the female turnout at between “60 and 70 well dressed ladies.”⁵¹ While there, Washington also engaged in more serious business, meeting with Governor Edward Telfair and handing him dispatches for the Spanish governor of East Florida, warning him to stop providing a safe haven for runaway American slaves.