Washington: A Life (152 page)

By the time Washington left office, the Union had expanded to include three new states—Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee—creating powerful new constituencies with outspoken needs. In this nascent democratic culture, the political tone was becoming brash and rude, sounding the death knell for the more sedate style of politics practiced by the formal Washington. Although he had securely laid the foundations of the federal government, he was still the product of his genteel Virginia past and accustomed to the rule of well-bred gentlemen such as himself. He would never have been fully at home with the brawling, roaring brand of democracy that came to dominate American politics in the era of Andrew Jackson. Nonetheless he had proved the ideal figure to lead the new nation from its colonial past into a more democratic future.

Apotheosis of Washington
, by David Edwin,
after Rembrandt Peale, engraved circa 1800.

FOR AT LEAST A SHORT INTERVAL, the return to Mount Vernon was a heavenly sensation for the wandering Washington family, who experienced again some modicum of normality after their long exile in the nation’s capital. “Since I left Philadelphia, everything has appeared to be a dream,” Nelly Custis told a friend. “I can hardly realize my being
here
and that grandpapa is no longer in office.”
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As far as Nelly was concerned, the ex-president had been restored to his natural habitat: “Grandpapa is very well and has already turned farmer again.”
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Martha basked in newfound domestic joy. “I cannot tell you, my dear friend,” she wrote to Lucy Knox, “how much I enjoy home after having been deprived of one so long, for our dwelling in New York and Philadelphia was not home, only a sojourning. The General and I feel like children just released from school.”
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Washington invoked his preferred pastoral image of domestic bliss: “I am once more seated under my own vine and fig tree and hope to spend the remainder of my days—which, in the ordinary course of things … cannot be many—in peaceful retirement.”
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Relieved to be at home, he spurned a wedding invitation from his nephew Lawrence Augustine Washington, explaining that “I think it not likely that either of us will ever be more than 25 miles from Mount Vernon again.”
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If George Washington expected a belated season of repose, he was bound to be disappointed. Soon after he got home, he had to deal with the death of his sister, Betty Lewis, which filled him with “inexpressible concern.”
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Her death left George and his younger brother Charles as the last survivors of their generation of the Washington clan. Washington generously invited Betty’s son Lawrence to live at Mount Vernon, but he also had an ulterior agenda, thinking his nephew might lift a social burden from his shoulders. “As both your aunt and I are in the decline of life and regular in our habits, especially in our hours of rising and going to bed,” Washington told him, “I require some person … to ease me of the trouble of entertaining company, particularly of nights, as it is my inclination to retire … either to bed or to my study soon after candlelight.”
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When Lewis delayed joining his uncle, having to deal first with a runaway slave, Washington commiserated: “I wish from my soul that the legislature of this state could see the policy of a gradual abolition of slavery. It would prev[en]t much future mischief.”
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As had happened in December 1783, Washington again encountered a decaying Mount Vernon that had never regained its antebellum efficiency. The buildings looked dilapidated, the furnishings shabby, the soil depleted. With his plantation, Washington seemed to suffer the curse of Sisyphus—he was forever away, forever falling behind, forever forced to rely on undependable help. “We are like the beginners of a new establishment, having everything in a manner to do,” Washington told Elizabeth Powel after surveying the place. “Houses and everything to repair. Rooms to paint, paper, whitewash, etc. etc.”
⁹
A constant parade of carpenters, masons, and painters trooped through the house, kicking up clouds of dust everywhere. So enormous were the repairs that Washington estimated they would cost almost “as much as if I had commenced an entire new establishment.”
¹⁰

Once again, with Roman fortitude, Washington endured an invasion of unwanted visitors. Far from being a rustic retreat, Mount Vernon became a way station for travelers eager to glimpse the retired national leader. On July 31, 1797, when he invited Tobias Lear to dinner, Washington made this startling comment: “Unless someone pops in unexpectedly, Mrs. Washington and myself will do what I believe has not been done within the last twenty years by us—that is, to set down to dinner by ourselves.”
¹¹
Although visitors said they had made the pilgrimage as a mark of respect, the ex-president expressed skepticism about their true motives: “Pray, would not the word curiosity answer as well? And how different this, from having a few social friends at a cheerful board?”
¹²

Many visitors viewed Washington through the golden haze of fame, with no real awareness of his underlying strain, and gushed about his stately serenity. When Amariah Frost of Massachusetts stopped by, he was struck by the exemplary courtesies extended to visitors. After slaves brought rum to him and his companions, they sat down with the Washingtons for a succulent meal consisting of “a small roasted pig, boiled leg of lamb, beef, peas, lettuce, cucumbers, artichokes … puddings, tarts, etc.”
¹³
Although Washington led discussions on current affairs, Martha was now also a repository of anecdotes about the historic events of the past quarter century. “The extensive knowledge she has gained in this general intercourse with persons from all parts of the world has made her a most interesting companion, and having a vastly retentive memory, she presents an entire history of half a century,” said a female visitor.
¹⁴

Fond of routine, Washington returned to his old daily schedule of rising at dawn, eating breakfast, then touring his five farms on horseback in a wide-brimmed hat with a hickory switch in hand. If slaves and overseers weren’t hard at work when he arrived, Washington said only half humorously, he sent them “messages expressive of my sorrow for their indisposition.”
¹⁵
The considerable demands of refurbishing Mount Vernon caused him to fall behind on correspondence and made sustained reading difficult. As he told Secretary of War McHenry, “I have not looked into a book since I came home, nor shall I be able to do it until I have discharged my workmen; probably not before the nights grow longer, when possibly I may be looking in [the] doomsday book.”
¹⁶
For all that, Washington remained well informed and enjoyed reading newspapers aloud to company. Since he still complained about their bias, he asked Treasury Secretary Wolcott to send him the unvarnished truth about various issues.

One of Washington’s cherished activities was arranging the huge trove of papers he had lugged back from Philadelphia. Before leaving office, he had instructed his secretaries to skim off documents needed by President Adams and ship the rest to Mount Vernon. He also had them forward a letterpress device so he could make copies of letters. One visitor was staggered by the sheer size of his Revolutionary War archives: “They consist of between 30 and 40 cases of papers, containing all the military expeditions, reports, journals, correspondence with Congress, with the generals, etc. What a wealth of material!”
¹⁷
As if envisaging the first presidential library, Washington planned to build a house at Mount Vernon dedicated to his records, a project that never came to fruition even though he ordered bookcases for it before his death.

Another labor of love was adding the finishing touches to the renovation of the main house. At the north end Washington completed the New Room, the stately dining room featuring a long table that seated ten people. From Philadelphia he carted home twenty-four mahogany dining chairs, enabling him to expand the number of people he entertained. Unfortunately, delays in completing the room had so weakened the underlying girders that “a company only moderately large would have sunk altogether into the cellar,” Washington complained before undertaking expensive corrective work.
¹⁸
Outside the house, the kitchen garden, greenhouse, and serpentine walks along the lawn created a beautiful geometric area where elegant, well-dressed people could stroll through fragrant, refreshing spaces. After negotiating the bad roads and thick woods nearby, visitors found the mansion house a sudden oasis of order. “Good fences, clear grounds, and extensive cultivation strike the eye as something uncommon in this part of the world,”noted architect Benjamin Latrobe.
¹⁹

Spared the onus of public office, Washington permitted his mind to roam into the pathways of the past. In the spring of 1798, when he learned that Belvoir, the old Fairfax estate, was up for sale, he was flooded with memories about his youthful dalliance with Sally Fairfax. On some subterranean level, the entrancing memory of Sally, now a widow of nearly seventy, had stayed evergreen in his mind. In May 1798 he learned that Bryan Fairfax, Sally’s brother-in-law, was traveling to England, and he handed him an elegiac letter to Sally, which mixed frank references to their amorous past with staple Washingtonian rhetoric about America’s glorious future. Very often, he admitted to Sally, he cast a nostalgic glance toward Belvoir and wondered whether she would spend her final days near her Virginia relatives “rather than close the sublunary scene in a foreign country.”
²⁰
He acknowledged the many extraordinary events he had lived through, then abruptly declared that none of these events, “not all of them together, have been able to eradicate from my mind the recollection of those happy moments—the happiest of my life—which I have enjoyed in your company.”
²¹
This unexpected line offered the ultimate romantic compliment: Washington had won a long war, founded a country, and created a new government, but such accomplishments paled beside the faded recollections of a youthful love affair. In its autumnal tone, the letter represented a farewell address of sorts. Having written it, he wanted to ensure that Sally did not misinterpret it as an invitation to revive their relationship. So the next day, using the same self-protective device he had employed with Elizabeth Powel, he drafted a letter to Sally under Martha’s signature in which the latter said it was among her great regrets that she no longer had Sally as her “neighbor and companion.”
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Washington’s life was more weighted with care than he admitted to Sally. For all the beauty and scenic vistas of his estate, the financial pressure remained unrelenting. His elaborate plan for renting four of the Mount Vernon farms had faltered because he wanted to rent them all at once, which was impossible. In the spring of 1797 he compromised and offered them for rent individually. In hiring his new estate manager, James Anderson, Washington had hoped that this “honest, industrious, and judicious Scotchman” would alleviate his chronic financial woes, but Anderson struggled in vain to make Mount Vernon more productive.
²³
He turned out to be too impulsive and improvident for Washington’s fastidious taste, though he did introduce signal innovations. The enterprising Anderson devised the concept of taking grain grown at Mount Vernon and converting it into corn and rye whiskey at a commercial distillery on the estate. For Washington, always rabid on the subject of alcoholism, it was an ironic turn of events, to put it mildly. Although the distillery started modestly, by 1799 it had five gleaming copper stills and produced eleven thousand gallons yearly, so that it may have ranked as the largest whiskey producer in America. Nevertheless, when Anderson talked of quitting in 1798, Washington chided him for having coaxed him into assuming “a very serious expense in erecting a distillery of which I had no knowledge … But do as you please in this matter. I never did, nor ever shall, wish to retain any person in my employ contrary to their inclination.”
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Washington again found himself sliding into a slow-motion financial crisis. Just as he had been forced to borrow to attend his own inauguration in 1789, he had had to sell “two valuable tracts of land” in western Pennsylvania and land in Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp to make the journey home in 1797 and “lay in a few necessaries for my family.”
²⁵
In his presidency’s waning days, he had been reduced to the indignity of personally dunning tenants in arrears on rent, threatening one with a lawsuit. Degraded to a bill collector, he had warned, “I w[oul]d fain avoid this appeal, but if I am obliged to resort to it, remember that it is brought upon you by your own default.”
²⁶
Upon returning to Mount Vernon, he scratched out testy notes to people, trying to settle their land disputes. When nephew Samuel Washington approached him for an emergency $1,000 loan, Washington grudgingly agreed, while lecturing him on the perils of borrowing and warning that “you are under the same mistake that many others are in supposing that I have money always at command.”
²⁷
To improve his financial situation, Washington started an economy campaign and froze the wages of overseers. He also began a gradual shift from agriculture to grazing, which curbed expenses and averted the need for more slave labor.