Around noon on April 14, 1789, Washington flung open the door at Mount Vernon and greeted his visitor with a cordial embrace. Once in the privacy of the mansion, he and Thomson conducted a stiff verbal minuet, each man reading from a prepared text. Thomson began by declaring, “I am honored with the commands of the Senate to wait upon your Excellency with the information of your being elected to the office of the President of the United States of America” by a unanimous vote.7 He read aloud a letter from Senator John Langdon of New Hampshire, the president pro tempore: “Suffer me, sir, to indulge the hope that so auspicious a mark of public confidence will meet your approbation and be considered as a sure sign of the affection and support you are to expect from a free and enlightened people.”8 There was something deferential, even slightly servile, in Langdon’s tone, as if he feared that Washington might renege on his pledge and refuse to take the job. Thus was greatness once again thrust upon George Washington.

Any student of Washington’s life might have predicted that he would acknowledge his election in a short, self-effacing speech, loaded with disclaimers. “While I realize the arduous nature of the task which is conferred on me and feel my inability to perform it,” he replied to Thomson, “I wish there may not be reason for regretting the choice. All I can promise is only that which can be accomplished by an honest zeal.”9 This sentiment of modesty jibed so perfectly with Washington’s private letters that it could not have been feigned: he wondered whether he was fit for the post, so unlike anything he had ever done. The hopes for republican government, he knew, rested in his hands. As commander in chief, he been able to wrap himself in a self-protective silence, but the presidency would leave him with no place to hide and would expose him to public censure as nothing before.

Because the vote counting had been long delayed, Washington felt the crush of upcoming public business and decided to set out promptly for New York on April 16, accompanied in his elegant carriage by Thomson and David Humphreys. His diary entry conveys a sense of foreboding: “About ten o’clock, I bade adieu to Mount Vernon, to private life, and to domestic felicity and, with a mind oppressed with more anxious and painful sensations than I have words to express, set out for New York . . . with the best dispositions to render service to my country in obedience to its call, but with less hope of answering its expectations.”10 He sounded like someone marching off, head bowed, to the gallows. Waving goodbye was Martha, who wouldn’t join him until mid-May. She watched her husband of thirty years depart with a mixture of bittersweet sensations, wondering “when or whether he will ever come home again.” She had long doubted the wisdom of this final act in his public life. “I think it was much too late for him to go into public life again,” she told her nephew, “but it was not to be avoided. Our family will be deranged as I must soon follow him.”11

Determined to travel rapidly, Washington and his entourage set out each day at sunrise and put in a full day on the road. Along the way he hoped to keep ceremonial distractions to a minimum, but he was soon disabused: eight exhausting days of festivities lay ahead. He had traveled only ten miles north to Alexandria when the townspeople waylaid him with a dinner, lengthened by the mandatory thirteen toasts. Adept at farewells, Washington was succinctly eloquent in response: “Unutterable sensations must then be left to more expressive silence, while, from an aching heart, I bid you all, my affectionate friends and kind neighbors, farewell.”12

Before long, Washington saw that his journey would form the republican equivalent of the procession to a royal coronation. As if already a seasoned politician, he left a trail of political promises in his wake. While in Wilmington, he addressed the Delaware Society for Promoting Domestic Manufacturers and imparted a hopeful message: “The promotion of domestic manufactures will, in my conception, be among the first consequences which may naturally be expected to flow from an energetic government.”13 Arriving in Philadelphia, he was met by local dignitaries and asked to mount a white horse for his entry into town. When he crossed a bridge over the Schuylkill, it was wreathed with laurels and evergreens; at one point a cherubic boy, lowered above him by a mechanical device, popped a laurel crown onto his head. Recurrent cries of “Long Live George Washington” confirmed what James McHenry had already told him before he left Mount Vernon: “You are now a king under a different name.”14

As Washington entered Philadelphia, he found himself, willy-nilly, at the head of a full-scale parade. Twenty thousand people lined the streets, their eyes fixed on him in wonder. “His Excellency rode in front of the procession, on horseback, politely bowing to the spectators who filled the doors and windows by which he passed,” reported the Federal Gazette, noting that church bells rang as Washington proceeded to his old haunt, the City Tavern.15 After the bare-knuckled fight over the Constitution, the newspaper editorialized, Washington had brought the country together: “What a pleasing reflection to every patriotic mind, thus to see our citizens again united in their reliance on this great man who is, a second time, called upon to be the savior of his country!”16 By the next morning Washington had grown tired of the jubilation. When the light horse cavalry showed up to accompany him to Trenton, they discovered he had sneaked out of the city an hour earlier “to avoid even the appearance of pomp or vain parade,” reported one newspaper.17

As Washington approached the bridge over Assunpink Creek in Trenton, the spot where he had stood off the British and Hessians, he saw that the townsfolk had erected a magnificent floral arch in his honor with the words “December 26, 1776” sewn from leaves and flowers. Another flowery sentence proclaimed, “The Defenders of the Mothers will also Defend the Daughters.”18 As he rode closer, thirteen young girls, robed in spotless white, walked forward with flower-filled baskets, scattering petals at his feet. Astride his horse, tears standing in his eyes, he returned a deep bow and noted the “astonishing contrast between his former and actual situation at the same spot,” declaring he would never forget the present occasion.19 With that, three rows of women—young girls, unmarried ladies, and married ones—burst into a fervent ode on how he had saved fair virgins and matrons alike. Beneath his public composure, the adulation only crystallized Washington’s self-doubt. “I greatly apprehend that my countrymen will expect too much from me,” he wrote to Rutledge. “I fear, if the issue of public measures should not correspond with their sanguine expectations, they will turn the extravagant . . . praises which they are heaping upon me at this moment into equally extravagant . . . censures.”20 There was no way, it seemed, that he could lower expectations or escape public reverence.

As Washington approached New York City, a parallel journey from Mount Vernon was in progress that, in many ways, was no less fascinating. Billy Lee, the slave and manservant with whom he had shared so many exploits, longed to join Washington for the inauguration. Once a physical specimen perhaps as imposing as his master, Lee had by now fractured both knees, but he still wanted to make the journey and serve in the presidential household, where he would have to climb three flights of stairs. Dubious that Lee could do it, Washington tried to dissuade him from coming. Nevertheless he always found it difficult to resist Lee’s pleas and finally consented that he should travel to the inauguration with Tobias Lear.