On April 30, 1789, George Washington arrived for his inauguration in a black carriage drawn by six white horses. New York’s Chancellor Livingston performed the ceremony on the gallery of old City Hall on Wall Street in New York City, the nation’s capital. A large crowd assembled below hoping to catch a glimpse of Washington taking the oath of office.
Washington wore a dark brown coat, waistcoat and breeches and white silk stockings. One reporter noted, “The cloth [of Washington’s suit] is of as fine a fabric and so handsomely finished that it is universally mistaken for a foreign manufactured superfine cloth.” Britain’s closely guarded mechanical technologies for spinning and weaving cloth were so advanced that English textiles dominated the market. The Hartford Woolen Manufactury, a water-driven mill in Connecticut, made the fabric for Washington’s suit in America.[1]
No one had thought to provide a Bible on which he could swear allegiance to the new Constitution. The marshal of the parade, a Freemason, dashed to the Old Coffee House at Wall and Water Streets where his lodge met to get its Bible. That Bible, unlike Washington’s suit, was not made in America, but in London in 1767. It was large and lavishly illustrated embellished with gold lettering. A bystander on the gallery opened it to a verse from Genesis, and placed it on a cushion of crimson velvet. Bowing his head, Washington put his right hand on the Bible and solemnly uttered the words that would make him president. An observer noted that Samuel Otis, secretary of the Senate, raised the Bible to Washington, who stooped to kiss it.[2]
Just four months earlier, in January 1789, Hugh Gaine, a New York publisher, had proposed that a consortium of printers manufacture a King James Version in America with support from Congress. The Bible was a best seller, and profitable, but it required large amounts of type, paper and labor to produce. A royal copyright on the King James Version prevented its printing and manufacture in America during the colonial period. During the American Revolution, when British Bibles were no longer available, Robert Aitken printed the first American edition of the King James Version in 1781. He secured a loan from Pennsylvania’s legislature, and received Congressional endorsement for it. After peace was declared, the British flooded the American market with their lower-priced, high-quality Bibles. Robert Aitken suffered severe financial losses from unsold stock.[3]
Robert Aitken (1734-1802) printed the first King James Version of the Bible in America. He nearly went bankrupt when British Bibles flooded the American market following the Revolution.
For years after Aitken’s experience, American publishers were reluctant to risk publishing the Bible, but when Gaine presented his scheme, instead of cooperating, printers leapt at the opportunity to seek subscriptions on their own. Several American editions of the King James Version appeared on the market.
TRANSITION TO PUBLISHER | Carey’s Edition of the Catholic Douai Bible
[1]Laura Rigal, “’Raising the Roof’ Authors, Spectators and Artisans in the Grand Federal Procession of 1788,” Theatre Journal, V. 48 N. 3 (October, 1996) 277.
[2] Paul C. Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) 41.
[3] Gutjahr, An American Bible, 20-3.