Washington: A Life (147 page)

Already in the 1780s Washington had tired of artistic conventions that cast politicians in Roman togas. Averse to idealizing his subjects, Gilbert Stuart dressed them in modern clothing and took a hard, cold look at them. So Stuart, for all the antics and fast talk that may have irritated Washington, was very much to his taste as a portrait painter. Only in the so-called Lansdowne portrait, where a visionary Washington stands with a fixed gaze and stiffly outstretched arm, does Stuart resort to the props of republican power, showing copies of
The Federalist
and the Constitution in bound form at his feet. Perhaps the memories of a healthier and happier husband predisposed Martha Washington to criticize Stuart’s work. “There are several prints, medallions, and miniatures of the president in the house, none of which please Mrs. Washington,” John Pintard wrote when he visited Mount Vernon in 1801. “She does not think Stuart’s celebrated painting a true resemblance.”
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Stuart converted the Washington portraits into a thriving industry, stamping out copies for so many years that he laughingly referred to them as his hundred-dollar bills—that being the price he charged for each. His daughter Jane contended that he could crank out a copy in a couple of hours and sometimes finished two portraits in a single session.

 

AS PATERFAMILIAS OF THE CLAN, the president loved to shower his young wards with sage advice, especially in affairs of the heart. Despite pressing political concerns, he enjoyed playing the didactic role of the grizzled adviser. George and Martha Washington were thrilled in 1795, when Fanny Washington, widowed by George Augustine’s death, wed Tobias Lear, who had lost his wife, Polly, to yellow fever. To bind them more closely, the Washingtons bestowed upon the young couple a rent-free house and 360 acres at Mount Vernon. Since Fanny had three children from her previous marriage and Tobias Lear a little boy from his, the wedding seemed a fairy-tale solution for the grieving young couple. Then in March 1796 Lear informed the Washingtons that Fanny had fallen gravely ill, and they were stunned when she breathed her last. “Your former letters prepared us for the stroke,” the Washingtons commiserated with Lear, “but it has fallen heavily notwithstanding.”
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For Martha Washington, who had been overjoyed by the marriage, touting Lear as “a worthy man … esteemed by everyone,” it extended the dreadful pattern in her life of the untimely death of children, both real and substitute.
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Another young woman who preoccupied Washington’s thoughts was Elizabeth Parke Custis, Nelly’s oldest sister, an attractive brunette raised by her mother and David Stuart. The girl so adored her stepgrandfather that she was once paralyzed by nerves when he descended for a visit. “The General said that, although he thought a young girl looked best when blushing,” she recalled, “yet he was concerned to see me suffer so much.”
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When requesting a portrait from Washington, she professed herself indifferent to love: “It is my first wish to have it in my power to contemplate at all times the features of one who I so highly respect as the Father of his Country and look up to with grateful affection as a parent to myself and family.”
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While Washington obliged her with a miniature by Irish artist Walter Robertson, he teased her gently and inquired whether “emotions of a softer kind” did not move her heart.
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Elizabeth’s desire to join the Washington household in Philadelphia in 1795 must have filled the older couple with misgivings. However devoted she was to them, she had a fiery temper and was cursed with what one aunt called “a violent and romantic disposition.”
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That same aunt regretted that in “her tastes and pastimes, she is more man than woman and regrets that she can’t wear pants.”
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When she first came to Philadelphia, she was sulky and querulous and boycotted church and dances. Martha Washington, a confirmed believer in social duties, could not sympathize with such morbid brooding. Washington, however, enjoyed Elizabeth’s company, and she accompanied him for sittings with Gilbert Stuart. One day, as Stuart painted, Elizabeth abruptly barged into the room and, folding her arms across her chest, cast an appraising look at his work. He was so struck by this self-assured pose that he painted her in exactly this manner, holding a straw hat embellished with a red ribbon. Her sidelong glance in the portrait is proud, spirited, and obstinate, as if she refused to budge from the viewer’s glance. Elizabeth appeared indifferent to her own beauty, as if it were something too trivial to occupy her attention.

In 1796 an Englishman twice her age, Thomas Law, revealed his plans to marry her, a move that took the Washingtons by surprise, Elizabeth having concealed the courtship. After running up a fortune in India, Law had come to America to dabble in real estate and promptly bought five hundred lots in the new federal district. Even before Washington knew he would someday have a familial connection with Law, he had recoiled at the scale of these purchases. “Will it not be asked,” he inquired, “why are speculators to pocket so much money?”
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When Law apprised him of his intention to marry Elizabeth, Washington was quietly livid and must have known that he could not talk the stubborn Elizabeth out of the marriage. In replying to Law, he faulted him for the deceptive manner in which he had proceeded but did not protest the marriage outright: “No intimation of this event, from any quarter, having been communicated to us before, it may well be supposed that it was a matter of surprise. This being premised, I have only to add … my approbation, in which Mrs. Washington unites.”
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It was a typically shrewd response from Washington, who offered qualified support to Law while privately gathering more information about him. He confronted Elizabeth gingerly, saying that she had “more honesty than disguise” in her nature and should disclose more details of her engagement: “This I have a right to expect in return for my blessing so promptly bestowed, after you had concealed the matter from me so long.”
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Wary of Law’s motives, Washington wrote on the sly to Elizabeth’s stepfather, David Stuart, suggesting a strong prenuptial agreement that would have Law “make a settlement upon her previous to marriage, of her own fortune, if no more.”
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When the couple married in Virginia the next month, the wedding was conducted in a studiously low-key style, devoid of dancing or festivities, as if the family had no wish to invest in premature celebration. The marriage proved a misalliance, and the couple separated in 1803.

Elizabeth’s petulant nature threw into shining relief the sterling qualities of her vivacious sister Nelly, who was so varied in her interests, including horseback riding, singing, playing the harpsichord, studying French, and drawing. One smitten male visitor marveled that she “has more perfection of form of expression, of color, of softness, and of firmness of mind than I have ever seen before.”
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With keen wit she skewered her enraptured male admirers. When she heard false rumors that she was romantically involved with one young man, she admitted that he had pleasing manners but had “been told too often of his merit and accomplishments, and it has given him more affectation than is by any means agreeable.”
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She mocked another young man for his pseudoromantic babble about “
hearts, darts, hopes, fears, heart-aches
” and other terms related to the “
tender passion
.”
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With such merciless comments, Nelly murdered the hopes of many young suitors, and it seemed unlikely she would marry anytime soon.

Martha sometimes found Nelly a little unconventional for her tastes, but the president adored her. Far more trying was his relationship with George Washington Parke Custis, who recapitulated his father’s history of academic apathy. He had grown into a handsome teenager, crowned with curly hair, a broad face, and large, attractive eyes. When Washy entered Princeton in the autumn of 1796—the president thought the school had “turned out better scholars” and “more estimable characters” than any other—the president didn’t know whether he would adjust to the academic rigors or loaf his way through.
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As with Jacky, Washington smothered the young man with advice, warning him against idle amusements, dissipated company, and hasty friendships. Trying to instill his own prudent habits, he told him to “select the most deserving only for your friendships, and, before this becomes intimate, weigh their dispositions and character
well
.”
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Washington’s vague bromides about Washy becoming a scholar and a useful member of society seemed like so much wishful thinking.

Within six months of Washy’s arrival at Princeton, Washington was confronted by disturbing reports from the boy’s tutor. “From his infancy, I have discovered an almost unconquerable disposition to indolence,” Washington informed the professor in words that echoed his chronic dismay with Jacky Custis.
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Like Jacky, Washy apologized profusely for his misdemeanors and promised to reform. He assured Washington that “like the
prodigal son,
” he would be “a sincere penitent,” but such noble intentions lasted only as long as it took the ink to dry.
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However good-natured and ingratiating in his letters, Washy was, at bottom, feckless and incorrigible. He would say all the right things, then do all the wrong things, and he lasted only a year at Princeton.

 

 

THE TWO-TERM PRESIDENCY had taxed Washington in many ways, not least in his personal finances. In March 1795, when his friend Charles Carter, Jr., approached him for a thousand-dollar loan, Washington, always touchy about borrowing, burst into a recitation of his financial stringency: “My friends entertain a very erroneous idea of my pecuniary resources … Such has been the management of my estate for many years past, especially since my absence from home, now six years, as barely to support itself.”
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He protested that his government allowance barely covered the extravagant costs of entertaining and that he had resorted to selling western lands to escape debt.

As he meditated on the end of his presidency, he mused about the prospect of “tranquillity with a
certain
income” and decided to pursue his earlier scheme of selling his western lands and leasing out the four Mount Vernon farms, while retreating to the fifth, the Mansion House, with Martha.
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On February 1, 1796, he posted advertisements for the sale of thirteen tracts along three western rivers—the Ohio, Great Kanawha, and Little Miami—amounting to a whopping 36,000 acres. These ads were posted in Philadelphia papers and well-frequented taverns in western Pennsylvania. The properties dated from the distant period when the young Anglophile officer had received bounty lands for service in the French and Indian War and had cornered aggressively the rights of fellow soldiers. In undertaking these sales, Washington harbored a secret agenda, hoping to use the proceeds to help emancipate his slaves.

In recruiting able farmers to rent the four outlying farms, the Father of His Country had so little faith in American farmers that he placed anonymous ads not only in eastern newspapers but as far afield as England, Scotland, and Ireland. “My wish is to get associations of farmers from the old countries, who know how … to keep the land in an improving state rather than the slovenly ones of this [country], who think (generally) of nothing else but to work a field as long as it will bear anything,” he told William Pearce, Mount Vernon’s estate manager.
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He now resolved to introduce the crop-rotation scheme that he had worked out on paper but that his hapless overseers had never been able to put into practice. Having long known that tobacco depleted the soil, he wanted to plant corn, wheat, clover, potatoes, and grass in a scientific sequence.

Conscious that he would someday free his slaves, Washington wanted to avoid doing anything that might interfere with that plan. His letters betray growing disgust with slavery, as when he told Pearce that “opulent” Virginians were made “imperious and dissipated from the habit of commanding slaves and living in a measure without control.”
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However benevolent his intentions were, he remained a largely absentee owner, able to exercise scant control over his overseers’ harsh practices, as shown in one 1795 letter to Pearce: “I am sorry to find by your last reports that there has been two deaths in the [slave] family since I left Mount Vernon, and one of them a young fellow. I hope every necessary care and attention was afforded him. I expect little of this from McCoy, or indeed from most of his class, for they seem to consider a Negro much in the same light as they do the brute beasts on the farms, and often treat them as inhumanly.”
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Washington mentally divided his slaves into productive ones who warranted favor and those unable or unwilling to work. When Pearce distributed linen to slaves, Washington instructed him to provide the good stuff “to the grown people and the most deserving, whilst the more indifferent sort is served to the younger ones and worthless.”
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Whatever his shortcomings as a master, Washington continued to refine his plan to free his slaves someday. So long as he was president, the subject was taboo; Washington told David Stuart that “reasons of a political, indeed of [an] imperious nature” forbade any such action.
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He wrote these words during the brouhaha over the Jay Treaty, when southern planters were especially upset over his policies and he could not afford to antagonize them further. Starting in 1795, Washington’s letters reflect a growing preoccupation with knowing who were his dower slaves, over whom he had no control, and those he owned outright and could free.

Washington’s plans to lease the four farms and simplify his future life came to naught. Adding to his nagging economic uncertainty was the regretted departure of William Pearce due to an “increasing rheumatic affection.”
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For the demanding Washington, the seasoned Pearce had been a godsend, a man of reliable industry and integrity. In October 1796 Washington replaced him with James Anderson, a native of Scotland well trained in agriculture, who would take the operations at Mount Vernon in some unexpected directions. The switch, which came as the president contemplated retirement, could only have exacerbated his worries about the situation that awaited him at home.