Southern Discomfort

In the spring of 1791, a horse-drawn carriage bounced through clouds of red Virginia dust, across the state line, and headlong into a rainstorm. Inside, trapped in the kind of muddy misery that not even revolutionary prestige can insulate you from, sat George Washington: general, president, father of the nation. 

He’d crossed the Delaware in a blizzard and outmaneuvered the greatest military empire on earth. None of that prepared him for the North Carolina roads.

Washington was on the southern leg of the first great American road trip—no Kerouac romanticism, no Route 66 mystique, no greasy diners with bottomless coffee. Just mud, pine trees, questionable accommodations, and the weight of a still-fragile republic pressing down on a man closing in on his 60th birthday. 

He’d already ticked a trip through New England off his national unity tour the previous fall, before a health scare paused his tour of the still-fresh nation. Fully recovered (or at least sufficiently stubborn), he was now embarking south through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and back again—a journey of three months and nearly 2,000 miles. 

Having the president visit was, to say the least, an event. People wept. Cannons fired. Galas were thrown. “He was kind of like a rock star,” said Warren Bingham, author of George Washington’s 1791 Southern Tour. “It was a big deal when George Washington was in your town.”

For Washington, the trip was less of a social event and more of a political calculus. The Constitution was ratified, but just barely. Several states, including North Carolina, remained skeptical of handing this much power to a central government. Washington’s road trip was, at its core, about pressing the flesh, showing the flag, and reminding everyone that this national experiment was worth believing in. 

A lifelong diarist, he documented the trip in unsentimental detail. You can read the full diaries thanks to the University of Virginia’s Papers of George Washington project. Washington, ever the meticulous surveyor, catalogued everything—terrain, commerce, troop formations, ballroom demographics, a tally of the number of women he saw at every juncture. 

I retraced Washington’s route last summer, this time from the comfort of a Toyota Corolla with climate control, satellite navigation, and a cooler full of Cheerwine. You could say most everything has changed in the intervening two and a half centuries. And yet, as I weaved my own path across the state, protestors were gathering to chant “No Kings.”

History has a sense of irony.

The Great Date Debate

Bingham described Washington as a man of spectacular contradictions. Rugged but patient. Selfless but ambitious. Annoyed by fanfare yet orchestrated it masterfully. He was, in other words, the original complicated American.

The comparison to today’s political figures is irresistible, if uncomfortable. Both Washington and Donald Trump have styled themselves as swamp-drainers, though Washington’s version involved actual swamps. Both could be described as federalists who believed in robust executive power. 

“We are in the presence of a mythical figure,” Sylvester Stallone, of Rocky and Rambo fame, declared of Trump in 2024. “We got the second George Washington.”

But in 1791, Washington didn’t have the benefit of modern media or transportation to get in front of the average American. The only way to get face time was to literally get in someone’s face. Patience wasn’t so much a virtue as a condition of existence.

One thing about the American Revolution many people don’t appreciate today: it was slow. We declared independence in 1776, but it took six more years of war before the British actually left and another six before colonists could agree on what kind of government to build. Washington wasn’t inaugurated until 1789. People were still getting to know him when he rolled into Halifax, N.C., on April 16, 1791. 

Nowadays, Halifax is a quiet town with only a few hundred residents. But back in the day, it was a nerve center for American independence. It’s where, on April 12, 1776, 83 delegates from across the colony gathered to authorize North Carolina’s three delegates to the Continental Congress to vote for independence from Britain. 

Those delegates—William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, and John Penn—were already up in Philadelphia, essentially killing time while waiting for a permission slip. Once copies of the resolution were rushed north to Philadelphia, others soon followed. Less than three months later: July 4.

The group that met in Halifax didn’t just sign on; they arguably threw the first punch with these Halifax Resolves, roughly 300 words noted in the minutes of the Fourth Provincial Congress, which signaled the beginning of the American Revolution.

The town’s history in the revolution is now marked in a tiny 18th-century taproom repurposed as a visitor center managed by North Carolina’s Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. That’s where I found Lucas McInnin, a historical interpreter, hand-sewing period-style shirt sleeves for an upcoming event. He had the calm, unhurried energy of a man completely comfortable in another century. I asked him about Washington’s visit.

“He just seemed tired,” McInnin said with a pleasant smile. By the time he got there, the president had already been on the road for weeks. He’d crossed bad terrain, slept in substandard beds, and endured more artillery salutes than any reasonable person should have to.

McInnin produced a photocopied map and highlighted 16 nearby places of interest. He noted that the date of the Halifax Resolves appears on North Carolina’s state flag, its seal, and license plates. I asked about the other date featured on a lot of state paraphernalia: May 20, 1775, which is when the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence was allegedly produced by citizens in Charlotte. That document reportedly burned in a fire. No original survives. Historians have been side-eyeing this claim for approximately forever.

“We don’t really talk about that other one,” McInnin said pleasantly.

Washington hadn’t come to Halifax to settle the “who was first” debate. He was there to let the citizens see the United States had a leader with a pulse. That this new government had been a good idea.

“It seems to be in a decline,” Washington observed of Halifax in his diary. And onward he went to the next town.

Leaves a Sour Taste

Here’s the thing about Washington’s relationship with North Carolina: he did not love it. His travel diaries make Yelp read like a gratitude journal. Too much dust. Too much rain. Poor roads. Terrible accommodations for human and horse alike. Labyrinths of longleaf pines stretching on and on. 

“The most barren country I ever beheld,” he wrote.

Bingham thinks his real complaints were left unsaid. “To me, Washington’s biggest dislike is that we were slow to accept the Constitution, which he found annoying,” he said. Of course, this is the main reason for his trip. To fix that.

One thing Washington reportedly did like: Cherry Bounce, a colonial-era spirit of cherries, sugar, and whiskey steeped into something allegedly medicinal. He had mentioned the drink in his own diary entries from previous expeditions, and a recipe for the elixir was found among his wife Martha’s surviving papers. ABV unknown. The 18th century self-medicated heavily.

I found exactly one person on this trip who had tried Cherry Bounce: Pam Edmondson, a Tarboro librarian who helped me dig through local archives for Washington-related material, though we didn’t find much. She was not impressed by the drink. “I am not attempting that stuff again,” she said. “It was gross.” 

After my Halifax stop, I continued south along US-17, which crosses the Neuse River and fishhooks into New Bern, where Washington’s account noted something resembling genuine hospitality. There would be feasting and dancing. Here, Washington wrote of “exceedingly good lodgings.” The longleaf pines Washington despised are largely gone now, sacrificed to the tar and pitch trade that made North Carolina economically relevant. Tall trees still line the road. Different trees. But still, the same general mood.

“In 1791, New Bern was a happening place,” Bingham told me. Bingham sits on the commission for the reconstructed Tryon Palace, but the original still stood in 1791. Washington attended a “dancing assembly” during his two-day stay in New Bern. Official lady count here: 70.

I stopped in several bars asking for Cherry Bounce. Each bartender offered the same expression, a particular scrunching of the nose reserved for questions about something obsolete, alcoholic, and possibly fictional.

“The only cherries I use are in an old-fashioned,” said Patrick Glynn, bar manager at Pourhouse 222. 

South of New Bern, in Hampstead, an enormous oak tree in front of a memory care facility features a marker the Daughters of the Confederacy placed in 1925 commemorating Washington’s passage. A few of these small bronze monuments dot the route, and reflect both the verified and the legendary accounts of his travels.

As the story goes, Washington stopped in Pender County wanting fish for supper. Hampstead, which sits on the Intracoastal Waterway and calls itself “seafood capital of the Carolinas,” did not have any fish that day. So Washington got ham instead. The town name is said to be a portmanteau of “ham instead.”

Washington did not record this in his diary. He did not write, “Wanted fish. Got ham. Named a town.” No evidence supports the tale. It is, in the most generous interpretation, local color—the kind of story that ties a community to something larger than itself.

It’s a fitting story for a man who is arguably the country’s greatest myth. His face is on the currency, his name is on the capital, and his image is now used to sell muscle cars. The real Washington—complicated, occasionally petty, a surveyor and slaveowner who counted women at parties and complained about pine trees—is lost in the retelling.

Almost Home

About a month after crossing into South Carolina and continuing down to Georgia, Washington looped back in late May. He stopped briefly in Charlotte, which he described as “trifling,” even before the toll lanes.

At the time, Charlotte wasn’t much more than a village with a population of a few hundred. According to the first federal census, taken in 1790, the entirety of Mecklenburg County numbered less than 12,000. 

Charlotte would, in time, become the banking capital of the South, home to the Panthers and the Hornets and a million or so people who probably wonder what Washington found so offensive about their city. Alas, he didn’t elaborate. 

By then, he was tired and ready to get home. Maybe Charlotte just caught him at a bad moment.

Salisbury lifted his spirits. He noted the texture of its red clay soil with something approaching appreciation (“very fine”), as well as the first meadows he’d seen since Virginia. His diary entries begin to soften here. You can feel the gravitational pull of home. He had tea with 20 ladies and left the next morning.

Washington arrived in Salem, part of what is now Winston-Salem, around 3 p.m. on May 31, 1791. Salem was a Moravian settlement, and the Moravians were pacifists, which presented a delicate protocol question: how do you welcome the commanding general of the Continental Army into a community defined by nonviolence? 

Answer: You ask him to enter town in civilian clothes via carriage, rather than riding his white parade horse in full military regalia. Washington complied, which is the detail of his account that most humanized him for me—the most powerful man in America quietly changing his outfit because he understood that good leadership sometimes means meeting people where they are.

The Moravians, it turns out, were also excellent at municipal infrastructure. Washington toured their waterworks, a sophisticated pipe system carrying water from nearby streams directly into every home, and was genuinely impressed_, according to records of the visit kept by the Moravians.

He also attended a singstunde, a Moravian song service featuring English hymns rather than the traditional German, specially imported for his visit. Custom hymns. Curated worship. Even in 1791, the concert rider existed.

Alexander Martin, a founding father and the state governor at the time, also made an appearance. The two had a substantive conversation, according to a letter Martin sent to Washington later that year, in which Martin assured the president that North Carolina’s opposition to the Constitution was fading.

Washington’s last noteworthy stop in the state was the Guilford Courthouse, in present-day Greensboro. One of the war’s decisive engagements had been fought here in 1781, between the British forces led by Lt. General Charles Cornwallis and colonial troops under the guidance of Major General Nathanael Greene, the city’s namesake. While the British claimed victory, they lost a number of men in the process.

“I examined the ground on which the action of Greene and Cornwallis commenced, and after dinner rode over where their lines were formed and the score closed in the retreat of the American forces,” going on to write “the British must have been sorely galded (sp?) in their advance, if not defeated.”

I assume he meant “galled,” but it was the president’s diary, and nobody was going to correct him.

Washington’s final night in the state, spent in Caswell County, is not mentioned in the diaries. Seemingly satisfied that the South would hold, he returned north.

Man and Myth

My own trip ended at the rotunda of the historic Capitol building in Raleigh, where a statue of Washington stands. Here he is young and improbably muscular, dressed in Roman robes, quill in hand like he’s about to sign something immortal. It is magnificent and completely absurd, a Caesar of the Carolinas.

I had passed an RV on the highway emblazoned with an image of Donald Trump’s face photoshopped onto a hypermuscular physique. Roman Washington, Rocky Trump—every generation heroizes its leaders into something the original person couldn’t recognize. 

It’s mythology, which is very different from history. Mythology tells us what we want to believe. The best we can do is hold both at the same time. 

The more accurate renderings of our first president—the ones in his own handwriting, obsessively noting terrain and crop yields and the number of women at a party—are the ones I find most compelling. Just a complicated man doing an unprecedented job and trying to make a record of it. 

Retracing his trip also reminded me that America is a story still being written, interpreted, and revised. Almost 70 years to the day after Washington crossed into North Carolina on his unity tour, Confederate guns opened fire on Fort Sumter. A century and a half after that, I drove these same roads while half the country chanted “No Kings” at the other half. The argument itself is our story.

The North Carolina Washington toured had done something remarkable and was still figuring out what came next. We all are.