Gazette Of The United States

PROVIDENCE, August 20, 1790.

ADDRESS
TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

SIR,

We the inhabitants of Providence beg leave to offer you our congratulations, on your safe arrival in this place.

We are sensibly affected by the honor conferred on the State, and on us in particular, in the present visit: And be assured, Sir, we shall think ourselves peculiarly happy, if, by our utmost attentions, it can be made agreeable to you.

We gladly seize the first opportunity to express the most sincere satisfaction in your election to the Presidency of the United States.

—The unbiased voice of a great nation, which unanimously called you to that important trust, is an event, of which the annals of history afford no example; nor will future time see it followed, unless the most transcendent merit and the clearest fame should be united in the same person.

As general of the armies of the United States, and as their President, we are attached to you by every motive of gratitude and affection.—to the conduct and magnanimity of her Commander in Chief, uniformly displayed in the course of a long and arduous war, America is indebted, under the smiles of Heaven, for her freedom and independence: And the consummate prudence and ability, manifested in the exercise of the powers delegated to the President of the United States, exhibit to the world a character of no less celebrity in the cabinet than in the field.

From our most excellent constitution, and the benign influence of those virtues which characterize your administration, we entertain the most pleasing hopes of the extension of commerce, the encouragement of agriculture and manufactures, and of the establishment of public faith, and private credit; and that the liberties of America will be transmitted to very late posterity.

We ardently pray that a life so conducive to the welfare of millions may be long protracted; and that, when the fatal shaft shall be sped which will deprive America of her great benefactor, you may ascend those regions where only exalted virtue will be fully rewarded.

Done in Town-Meeting, legally assembled, this Seventeenth Day of August, A. D. 1790, and in the Fifteenth Year of Independence.

Signed, at the request of the town by

JABEZ BOWEN, Moderator.

DANIEL COOKE, Town-Clerk.

THE PRESIDENT'S ANSWER.

TO THE INHABITANTS OF PROVIDENCE.

GENTLEMEN,

For your attentions, and endeavors to render the town agreeable to me, and for your expressions, of satisfaction at my election to the Presidency of the United States, I return you my warmest thanks.

My sensibility is highly excited, by your ardent declarations of attachment to my person, and the constitution.

As, under the smiles of Heaven, America is indebted for freedom and independence rather to the joint exertions of the citizens of the several States, in which it may be your boast to have borne no inconsiderable share, than to the conduct of the Commander in Chief—so is she indebted for their support rather to a continuation of those exertions, than to the prudence and ability manifested in the exercise of the powers delegated to the President of the United States.

Your hopes for the extension of commerce, of agriculture and manufactures, and the establishment of public faith, as reared upon our constitution, are well founded; and it is my earnest wish that you may extensively enjoy the benefits arising from them.

I thank you, gentlemen, for your prayer for my future welfare, and offer up my best wishes for your individual and collective happiness.

G. WASHINGTON.