The next day—the 29th of April, according to his story—Davy went to New York, by steamboat up the Delaware, thence by rail to Perth Amboy, and then again by boat. He says New York was certainly “a bulger,” and especially was he astonished by the forest of masts at the wharves. At the dock he was met by a committee and a crowd anxious to see him. After three cheers had been given and repeated, a committee representing the Young Whigs escorted him to the American Hotel, where many New Yorkers had gathered to meet him.
That afternoon Davy was taken to see the new fire-engine, and then saw Fanny Kemble play at the Park Theatre. He pays an honest tribute to that charming actress, when he says, “She is like a handsome piece of changeable silk: first one color and then another, but always the clean thing.”
While here, a sudden alarm of fire was heard. Davy jumped for his hat, and almost had to be held by his friends to keep him from rushing into the street. He told them that many a time he had ridden bareback to fires in his own neighborhood, and the city’s indifference to such exciting happenings was hard for him to understand.
During the 31st Davy visited some of the newspaper offices, among them those of the Courier, the Enquirer, and the Star. Then he saw Pearl Street, making his way with much dodging about through the boxes that covered the sidewalks. His party next took in the Stock Exchange, and before he left he made a speech from the steps leading down to the main floor. Returning to the hotel for dinner, he visited with friends until they all decided to go to Peale’s Museum. This, says Davy, was “over my head.” He makes no attempt to describe what he saw, but was filled with wonder at seeing “whole rows of little bugs and such like varments” set up in boxes, and could not see why they should be thought worthy of exhibition.
From the Museum Davy went to the City Hall, where he met the Mayor, who had once been a tanner, and Davy remarked to him that they “had both clumb a long way up from where they started.” Before leaving the City Hall he was invited to dine at Colonel Draper’s, where he met Major Jack Downing, then a great celebrity.
Next came an invitation to sup with the Young Whigs. “Well, now,” says Davy, “they had better keep some of these things for somebody else to eat, thinks I, for I’m sure I’m as full as a young cub.” But the invitation was accepted. After Judge Clayton, of Georgia, had made a speech that “made the tumblers hop,” Colonel Crockett was formally toasted as “the undeviating supporter of the Constitution and the Laws.” He responded to the toast in a short speech, in which he referred to the impossibility of plowing a straight furrow towards the cow that kept moving about. If he had followed Jackson, he said, his furrow would have been as crooked as the one made by the boy who had plowed all the forenoon after that kind of a cow.
The next day was the 1st of May, and while driving about in a barouche with Colonel S. D. Jackson, he was astonished at the number of loads of furniture he saw in the streets. When told that it was moving-day, he remarked that it would take a good deal to get him out of his own log-house; such restlessness was beyond his understanding. They then drove to the Five Points, which Dickens said could be backed, in respect to wretchedness, against Seven Dials or any other part of St. Giles’s. The sight of so much squalor and misery made Davy wonder what could induce human beings to stay in such places, instead of “clearing out for a new country, where every hide hangs by its own tail.”
As Davy walked back to the American Hotel, after leaving the Colonel, he was introduced to Albert Gallatin, the celebrated scholar, volunteer soldier, suppressor of the Whiskey Insurrection, and Jefferson’s Secretary of the Treasury. The old veteran of seventy-three, straw hat in hand, was also “moving,” Davy says. He pointed out to him the house he was leaving, which was about to be torn down, with others, to be replaced by a big tavern to be built by John Jacob Astor, and to cover a whole square. Before Davy left, a day or so later, he saw the roofs of the houses torn off by the workmen. The big tavern was the famous Astor House.
Some time during the same day, a new flag was hoisted at the Battery, then the favorite promenade of the fashionables of the city. Davy was invited, and witnessed a parade of the artillery, under command of General Morton, formerly of the Revolutionary army. An entertainment followed, in which eating and drinking played the usual prominent part. Davy seems to have been greatly pleased with the Battery and its views of the bay and islands about. “It is a beautiful meadow of a place,” he says, “all measured off, with nice walks of gravel between the grass plats, full of big shade trees, and filled with people and a great many children, that come there to get the fresh air that comes off the water of the bay.”
Early the next morning Davy visited Thorburn’s renowned seed-store, and from there went to a rifle match in Jersey City. There he hit a quarter at forty yards, off-hand, with a strange gun, and made other shots that sustained his reputation as a marksman. He was used up with sight-seeing, and was glad to go to Boston at the invitation of another new-made friend, Captain Comstock, in command of one of the Long Island steamboats. On the way to the dock they drove around through South and Front Streets. Here the queen clippers of the world lay moored, with their bowsprits high above the pavements, and their rigged-in jib-booms almost touching the buildings along the water-front.