Last updated: November 3, 2020
Article
Chief Executives on the Village Green: St. Paul's and the Presidents
( Text of an exhibition that was on display in the visitors' center museum, at St. Paul's Church N.H.S., in Mt. Vernon, NY, from Feburary 2011 - January 2013. )
Introduction:
George Washington never slept here, but he rode past St. Paul’s Church on two occasions, separated by 13 years. John Adams briefly lived around the corner and worshipped here. His son, John Quincy Adams, attended a funeral service in the church. Franklin D. Roosevelt gave an important speech just outside this building. A surgeon who tried to save Abraham Lincoln is interred in the St. Paul’s burial yard.
These weren’t ceremonial visits of chief executives to a historic shrine. Rather, they were connections based on geography, heritage, family ties, and patterns of residence. As a centuries-old church, village green and burial yard located at an important crossroads of southern Westchester County, just north of New York City, St. Paul’s bisected the lives, deaths and public careers of these five American presidents. The interesting and varied connections of these men to St. Paul’s from the 1700s to the 1900s form the story line of this exhibition.
The exhibition also spotlights the juncture in the lives of these political leaders when they overlapped with St. Paul’s. Washington’s is perhaps the most interesting: he traveled past the church at the depths of his military years in October 1776, and at the pinnacle of his political career in October 1789. The associations of the other men to the church occurred while they were on the rise to greatness (F.D.R), in the midst of grave challenges (John Adams), at times of personal tragedy (John Quincy Adams), or literally at the end of their life (Abraham Lincoln).
We invite you to explore the lives and connections to St. Paul’s of these five Presidents through historic prints and documents, art work, photographs, sound, models, text and artifacts. The exhibition was made possible by:
National Park Service/Department of the Interior
New York Council for the Humanities
John and Jean Heins
Society of the National Shrine of the Bill of Rights
Ball, Chain, Inc.
Washington’s Two Journeys Past St. Paul’s Church
What a difference 13 years can make.
In mid October 1776, George Washington traveled past St. Paul’s Church. He was on a reconnaissance mission, riding over from his main base with the American army in northern Manhattan and inspecting defensive positions. His troops stationed near St. Paul’s, under the command of Colonel John Glover of Massachusetts, were using the church building to store pork and flour in large wooden barrels. The British were attempting to flank the American position and had landed a large force at Westchester Square (today’s Bronx) on October 12. That assault had been repulsed, but there was little doubt the Redcoats would attempt another landing, probably north of the initial location. Ever mindful of topography and geography, though, Washington thought the area was “defensible, being full of Stone fences, both along the road and across adjacent Fields.”
The commander-in-chief was 44, and had led the Patriot army for 16 months. But as he trotted near St. Paul’s that fall day, the situation for his forces, and indeed the independence movement, was desperate. Over the previous seven weeks, American armies had been routed in Brooklyn and Manhattan by superior British forces. Washington himself was nearly captured at the Battle of Kip’s Bay on September 15. The tall Virginian was deeply frustrated with problems of maintaining his army, as well as the inability of the civilian government, the Continental Congress, to adequately provision his forces in the field. In a letter to his brother around this time, he flatly stated that “I was never in such as unhappy, divided state since I was born.”
In mid October 1789, Washington once again visited the St. Paul’s vicinity, and the world seemed quite different. He was 57, serving his first term as President of the United States. The nation’s first chief executive was on a goodwill tour of the new country, heading up to the New England states from the capital at Federal Hall on Wall Street in lower Manhattan by taking the Boston Post Road through lower Westchester County. All the challenges of the war, culminating in the victory over the British, were behind him. It’s difficult to imagine that Washington did not reflect back on his journey to the area 13 years earlier, when the landscape of the future looked much different. But, ever the Virginia planter, his diary entry for October 15, 1789 reveals a farmer’s perspective on traveling through country he had not seen in some years, emphasizing the rocky terrain:
“The Road for the greater part, indeed, the whole way, was very rough and Stoney, but the Land strong, well covered with grass and a luxuriant Crop of Indian Corn intermixed with Pompions (pumpkins) which were yet ungathered in the fields. We met four droves of Beef Cattle for the New York Market (about 30 in a drove) some of which were very fine -- also a flock of Sheep for the same place. We scarcely passed a farm house that did not abd. (abide) in Geese. Their Cattle seemed to be of good quality and their hogs large but rather long legged. No dwelling Ho. (house) is seen without a Stone or Brick Chimney and rarely any without a shingle roof -- generally the Sides are of Shingles also. The distance of this days travel was 31 miles, but as these places (though they have houses of worship in them) are not regularly laid out, they are scarcely to be distinguished from the intermediate farms in which are very close together and separated, as one Inclosure from another also is, by fences of Stone, which are indeed easily made, as the County is immensely Stony.”
The President, Yellow Fever and St. Paul’s
A combination of yellow fever and family ties led to the residence of President John Adams in the shadows of St. Paul’s Church in the summer and fall of 1797.
The dreaded mosquito-borne viral disease, yellow fever often ravaged Philadelphia in the 1700s, and the epidemic that struck the City of Brotherly Love in 1797 was among the most deadly; even the city’s Mayor perished. President and Abigail Adams abandoned Philadelphia -- the nation’s capital at the time -- and refugeed with their daughter Abigail (nicknamed Nabby) and son-in-law William Smith, a Revolutionary War officer. The Smiths lived in a large house on the road to Westchester Square, near today’s intersection of E. 233rd Street and Provost Avenue in the Bronx, ¼ mile from St. Paul’s, part of the historic Town of Eastchester.
One of the real heroes of the American Revolution, Adams was 62 and barely into his term as the nation’s second President, after serving as George Washington’s vice president for eight years. The Federalist candidate, Adams had defeated former friend and Republican standard-bearer Thomas Jefferson in 1796 in the first seriously contested election for President. Controversies spawned during that canvass, especially different views of the French Revolution, continued to shape the country’s public life. Additionally, Adams faced the dilemma of a divided cabinet, with several secretaries more loyal to Federalist party chief Alexander Hamilton than to the President.
When President Adams lived near St. Paul’s, and attended Sunday services, his major international challenge was the undeclared naval war with France. In case of urgent business, Adams informed his Secretary of State that he had “arrived here at Col. Smith’s last night with my family and I shall make this house my home till we can go to Philadelphia with Safety. If you address your letters to me at East Chester and recommend them to the care of Charles Adams, Esq. of New York (one of the President’s sons), I shall get them without much loss of time, but if a mail could be made up for East Chester, they might come sooner. I know not whether this can be done without appointing a postmaster at this place, and I know of no one to recommend. I shall divide my time between New York and East Chester till the meeting of Congress.”
The domestic situation in the Smith house was tense. Nabby and William had become engaged in a whirlwind European romance, but married life was not charmed. William was frequently away, aboard, pursuing various schemes to wealth which did not materialize, and his absences bore heavily on Nabby. Their residence at the Eastchester house was actually supposed to be a temporary situation while William constructed a mansion in New York City. Abigail anguished over her daughter’s emotional health.
Accustomed to the excitement of the nation’s capital, the First Lady also found her neighbors in the St. Paul’s vicinity provincial and limited, as she informed her sister: “I have not yet been into New York, and one might as well be out of America as in this village only 20 miles distant from New York, for unless we send in on purpose we cannot even get a Newspaper out. Yet are we in sight of the post road. It is quite a village of Farmers who do not trouble their heads about anything, but the productiveness of their Farms.”
The President’s Son
Over the years, St. Paul’s Church National Historic Site has been linked with many famous people, and witnessed many somber occasions. No episode so clearly combines those two themes as much as a funeral service held in the church on June 22, 1829.
John Quincy Adams had just been defeated by Andrew Jackson in his bid for a second term as President, ending a stormy and difficult tenure as the nation’s chief executive. Years later Adams would return to public life as a crusading abolitionist Congressman. But on that June afternoon, when Adams and his wife came to the church for a late Sunday afternoon service, he was a grief stricken father, mourning the loss of one of their sons, 28-year-old George Washington Adams.
The church bore similarities to the edifice that exists today, particularly the 18th century stone and brick façade. The steeple President Adams observed would have been the wooden, largely open belfry erected after the Revolutionary War. The eastern addition was constructed in the 1850s along with the ornamental black iron fence that today guards St. Paul’s. The President and Mrs. Adams walked in the entrance used today, greeted by the tall boxed pew arrangement that occupies the interior.
A Harvard educated lawyer and member of the Massachusetts state legislature, George Washington Adams was the son and grandson of Presidents, and perhaps the press of expectations bore too heavily on him. He was a deeply troubled young man with a tendency toward heavy drinking. In a probable suicide, he drowned in Long Island Sound, toppling overboard from his passenger ship on April 30. Five weeks later his lifeless body washed up on City Island, and was transferred to St. Paul’s Church, the nearest cemetery. He was interred in a wooden coffin in the Drake vault, the only underground chamber in the burial yard. Entries in the church Sexton’s book record opening the vault several times on June 11 and 12 for “the President’s son”.
Aware of the episode, President and Mrs. Adams had been expecting the worst news, and they were in the New York City area in mid June when they received word about their son’s fate. They traveled to Eastchester by horse-drawn carriage on the Post Road. The Rev. Lawson Carter led the religious service that afternoon and joined the President in the Drake vault where a brief prayer was offered, although the President could not bear to look inside the coffin.
To avoid moving the body in the warm weather, the coffin bearing Adams remained in the vault until November, when it was transported to the Adams home in Quincy, Massachusetts, where it was buried in the family cemetery. As a token of thanks for the parish’s services in the family’s hour of grief, Mrs. Adams donated a lovely silver chalice to St. Paul’s.
Lincoln’s Attending Surgeon, Mt. Vernon retiree
Location, timing and coincidence are certainly pivotal elements in the intersection of people’s lives with great historical moments. The connection of Dr. Charles S. Taft with one of the most tragic events in our nation’s history -- the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln -- was clearly a matter of timing and location, but not really coincidence.
The 30-year-old army surgeon from upstate New York attended the performance of “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865, because he wanted to see the President. The Civil War had ended days earlier in Union victory, and Lincoln was a hero of monumental proportions. In the air of patriotism and celebration that swept the nation’s capital that week, people wanted to share the great moment with the commander-in-chief, and word spread around town that the President would be at the theatre that night.
“All went on pleasantly until half past ten o’clock, when, during the second scene of the third act, the sharp report of a pistol rang through the house,” Taft wrote the next day. “The report seemed to proceed from behind the scenes on the right of the stage, and behind the President’s box. While it startled everyone in the audience, it was evidently accepted by all as an introductory effect preceding some new situation in the play, several of which had been introduced in the earlier part of the performance. A moment afterward a hatless and white-faced man leaped from the front of the President’s box down, twelve feet, to the stage. As he jumped, one of the spurs on his riding boots caught in the folks of the flag draped over the front, and caused him to fall partly on his hands and knees as he struck the stage. Springing quickly to his feet with the suppleness of an athlete, he faced the audience for a moment as he brandished in his right hand a long knife, and shouted, “sic sempter tyrannis.” Then, with a rapid stage stride, he crossed the stage and disappeared from view.”
The man -- the assassin -- was John Wilkes Booth, a rabid Southern sympathizer and well-known stage actor who had just shot the President with a Derringer pocket pistol from point-blank range. “I leaped from the top of the orchestra railing in front of me upon the stage, and, announcing myself as an army surgeon, was immediately lifted up to the President’s box by several gentlemen who had collected beneath,” Taft recalled. Dr. Taft was well acquainted with the commander in chief that he was about to try to save. Lincoln often visited the military hospital on H street -- not far from the White House -- where Taft was the chief doctor, and led the President around the ward beds while Lincoln spoke briefly but sympathetically with the wounded soldiers.
The dark-haired, bearded surgeon helped to diagnose the wound, declared it to be mortal, and assisted in carrying Mr. Lincoln to a back room in a boardinghouse across the street. Through the long night and vigil, in an oppressively stuffy, small room filled with government officials, Lincoln’s wife and son, and physicians, Dr. Taft assisted with various medical procedures, mostly monitoring the President’s pulse and heart beat. In a famous painting of the deathbed scene, Dr. Taft is shown holding the President’s head.
The son of a Congressman, Dr. Taft also held the appointive position of Postmaster of the Senate, partly based on his connection to Lincoln. He served in that position through 1876, and was posted as an Army surgeon in the South through 1885, before leaving the service and building a private medical practice in New York City. Relocating to the more tranquil setting of Westchester County, Dr. Taft, his wife and daughter purchased a home on South 7th Avenue in Nt. Vernon, in May 1899; doctor’s row. This large wooden house still stands. He attended the First Baptist Church and was active in the Farnsworth Post of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Civil War veterans’ organization.
But he was forever linked to that tragic episode on Good Friday at Ford’s Theatre. Months before his death, 35 years after the assassination, a reporter for a New York City daily paper tracked down the aging Mt. Vernon doctor and urged him to recall -- once again -- the narrative of that evening. Dr. Taft died of throat cancer in his home at age 65 on December 18, 1900 surrounded by his family, and was interred the following day in the City section of the St. Paul’s graveyard.
F.D.R. and St. Paul’s
A funny thing happened on the way to the White House: Franklin D. Roosevelt visited St. Paul’s Church. Serving his second two-year term as Governor of New York, Roosevelt came to Mt. Vernon on June 14, 1931 to participate in an important descendant’s day event, which turned out to be one of the largest gatherings in the centuries-long history of the parish.
The Democratic Governor from Hyde Park who visited St. Paul’s on Flag Day was a political leader in transition. By then, he had completed the hiatus from government that followed his contracting polio in 1921, returning to office as governor of the nation’s largest state in 1928. When he visited the historic village green that spring day, Roosevelt was also emerging as a national leader with his sights set on higher office. F.D.R’s. public works projects in the Empire State, attempting to create employment and stabilize the economy in the face of the Great Depression, had drawn wide attention, strengthening his position as a contender for his party’s 1932 Presidential nomination to face a vulnerable Republican incumbent, Herbert Hoover.
The 49-year-old governor, who was invited to give the keynote speech at the celebration, was also descended from an early worshipper at the historic church which was honored that day. F.D.R. was descended from a cousin of Jacobus Roosevelt, who attended services at St. Paul’s in the late 18th century. Displaying his customary wit, the governor pointed out that he came “not as a direct descendant of the Jacobus Roosevelt, one of the original pew holders in this congregation, but as a descendant from a cousin of the pew holder, another Jacobus. Sometimes I think it is a pity we have not continued the old names like Jacobus.”
But, perhaps more importantly, F.D.R. understood the value of linking his political profile with the compelling combination of religion, heritage and history that was on display at St. Paul’s. Pageants depicting significant local episodes from colonial and Revolutionary times were performed by dozens of costumed volunteers under the direction of a Broadway professional. F.D.R. was especially pleased with references to his ancestor Anne Hutchinson, the famed religious dissenter who lived near the church in the 1640s. The event was also part of a broad campaign to achieve national historic site designation for St. Paul’s and to raise funds to restore the interior of the church to its original 1787 appearance.
“In honoring this place we are doing honor to a spirit which made this nation what it is,” the Governor told a crowd of more than 7,000 people who packed the area around the church, “not simply honoring Eastchester, Westchester County, or New York State, but the whole country. There are thousands of persons descended from those who had something to do with this very spot. But it is not because of their time alone that we honor these pioneers. It is because they were prudent, decent human beings who helped to make this country possible for us. So I hope as years go by that St. Paul’s will be recognized as a symbol in America in all the years to come. Not just those in charge today but to those of all faiths and creeds -- something which will lead us to be better Americans.”