The rent of Morris's house was at last fixed at three thousand dollars a year; and on the twenty-second of November Washington set out for Philadelphia, accompanied by his family, in a chariot drawn by four horses. They were allowed to travel without parade, and on reaching Philadelphia, on the twenty-eighth, they found their house ready for their reception. Yet it was nearly a month before they were prepared to receive company. Mrs. Washington's first _levee_ or reception in Philadelphia was on Friday, the twenty-fifth of December, where, according to eye-witnesses, there was an assemblage of "the most brilliant, beautiful, well-dressed, and well educated women that had ever been seen in America."
The season opened gayly. "I should spend a very dissipated winter," wrote the vice-president's wife to a friend, "if I were to accept one half the invitations I receive, particularly to the routs, or tea-and-cards." The city, for a few weeks after the assembling of Congress, appeared to be intoxicated. But Washington and his wife were proof against the song of the syren. They could not be seduced from their temperate habits in eating, drinking, and sleeping, by the scenes of immoderate pleasure around them. They held their respective _levees_ on Tuesdays and Fridays, as in New York, without the least ostentation; and Congressional and official dinners were served in a plain way, without any extravagant displays of plate, ornament, or variety of dishes. Mrs. Washington's _levees_ always closed at nine o'clock. When the great clock in the hall struck that hour, she would say to those present, with a complacent smile, "The general always retires at nine, and I usually precede him." In a few minutes the drawing-room would be closed, the lights extinguished, and the presidential mansion would be as dark and quiet before ten o'clock as the house of any private citizen.
Washington entered upon his public duties with great energy on his arrival in Philadelphia. His health was almost perfectly restored, and subjects of profound interest demanded the attention of Congress. That body assembled on the sixth of December, and on the eighth, in the presence of both houses sitting in the senate-chamber, the president delivered, in person, his second annual message. He opened by congratulating Congress on the financial prosperity of the country, the import duties having produced, in a little more than thirteen months, the sum of one million, nine hundred thousand dollars. He had without difficulty obtained a loan in Holland for the partial liquidation of the foreign debt; and, in consequence of the increasing confidence in the government, certificates of the domestic debt had greatly increased in value. He informed them that Kentucky was about to ask for admission into the Union as a sovereign state. He called their attention to the Indian war commenced in the northwestern territory; and after some allusion to the disturbed state of Europe, growing out of recent events in France, he suggested measures for the protection of American commerce in the Mediterranean sea, where it was continually exposed to the depredations of corsairs of the Barbary powers.
