The family now set up housekeeping. Like most families in the United States, they were at the outset poor. They were especially low in credit; for in consequence of the issue by the Continental Congresses, during the war, of about $300,000,000 of paper money, its value had so depreciated that it became of little use except to line trunks or to patch up chambers as ruinous as itself. They were also greatly in debt, owing at home and abroad $79,463,476,—a debt which, instead of being paid off or even reduced, grew, in spite of every economy, good judgment, and excellent management, for the next seventeen years, and was not fully discharged until 1824. This debt amounted to about nineteen dollars per head for every man, woman, and child of all colors in the United States at that period. Still, they were not in circumstances as discouraging as are we, their descendants, eighty years later; for, estimating our population now at thirty-eight millions, each man, woman and child now owns a right to pay as his share of the national debt, sixty-eight dollars, besides a large, comfortable sum for State, county, city, and town indebtedness, which never figured themselves upon the purses or imaginations of our golden-aged ancestors. This latter ownership is so much the more wonderful as it represents shares in obligations, not wrought from outlays of blood or money in the country’s service, but blood and money sucked by corporate and private straws from our ever-troubled and ever-bubbling public treasuries. Washington, after a laborious journey, reached New York, and, on the 30th of April, 1789, took the oath of office as President, on the spot now covered by the United States Treasury in Wall Street. The bulls and bears of that day,—mere calves and cubs,—not strengthened by the pushing horns and large squeezing powers which have added such force to their descendants, might have heard, in the intervals of their rough play, the solid, honest, heart-felt words of his Inaugural, in which, among other things, he uttered those now strange, old-fashioned wishes and expectations, that “all employed in the administration of the Government would execute faithfully and with success the functions allotted to their charge.”