Walks about WashingtonLeupp, Francis E. (Francis Ellington)
History
Walks about Washington
Leupp, Francis E. (Francis Ellington)
Washington (D.C.) -- Description and travel; Washington (D.C.) -- History
Albeit Adams and Jefferson became, late in life, the warmest of friends,
no love was lost between them during the period when both were active in
politics. Adams, who would have been gratified to receive, like
Washington, a second term, was not disposed to “enact the captive chief
in the procession of the victor,” so he did not stay to see Jefferson
inaugurated, but at daylight of the fourth of March, 1801, left
Washington for Boston. There was no need for such haste to escape, for
Jefferson, as the high priest of democratic simplicity, had no
procession; though the cheerful little fiction about his riding down
Pennsylvania Avenue alone, and hitching his horse to a sapling in front
of the Capitol while he went in to be sworn, received its death-blow
long ago. The truth is, he had no use for a horse. He was boarding in
New Jersey Avenue, where he had lived for the latter part of his term as
Vice-president. A few minutes before noon on inauguration day he set out
on foot, in company with several Congressmen who were his fellow
boarders, and walked the block or so to the Capitol, where he was
escorted by a committee to the Senate chamber and there took the oath
of office and delivered his address. Then he walked back again to his
boarding-house, and at dinner occupied his customary seat at the foot of
the table. A visitor from Baltimore complimented him on his address and
“wished him joy” as President. “I should advise you,” was his smiling
response, “to follow my example on nuptial occasions, when I always tell
the bridegroom that I will wait till the end of the year before offering
my congratulations.”
The accommodations in the President’s House were somewhat better by the
time Mr. Jefferson moved in than they were when the Adams family opened
it, yet he seems to have been more or less cramped during most of his
two terms--owing, doubtless, to the continued presence of mechanics and
building materials in the incomplete parts of the house. When the
British Minister called in court costume to present his credentials, he
was received, with his convoy the Secretary of State, in a space so
narrow that he had to back out of one end of it to make room for the
President to enter at the other. One of the legation described Jefferson
as “a tall man, with a very red, freckled face and gray, neglected hair;
his manners were good natured and rather friendly, though he had
somewhat of a cynical expression of countenance. He wore a blue coat, a
thick, gray-colored hairy waistcoat with a red under-waistcoat lapped
over it, green velveteen breeches with pearl buttons, yarn stockings
with slippers down at the heels, his appearance being very much like
that of a tall, raw-boned farmer.” On the other hand, an admiring
contemporary insists that his dress was “plain, unstudied and sometimes
old-fashioned in its form,” but “always of the finest materials,” and
that “in his personal habits he was fastidious and neat.” So there you
are!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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