Washington: A Life (156 page)

As proof of his unswerving commitment to the city, Washington purchased lots in various locations to avoid accusations of favoritism toward any section. After hearing criticism that the neighborhood near the Capitol would lack housing for congressmen, he bought adjoining parcels on North Capitol Street, between B and C streets, and constructed a pair of attached three-story brick houses designed by Dr. William Thornton. Boasting that they stood upon “a larger scale than any in the vicinity of the Capitol,” he said they would be capable of housing “between twenty and thirty boarders”—an excellent example of Washington’s take-charge spirit.

Much as its backers had intended, the new capital was a southern city that would be hospitable to slavery, and it continued to owe its existence to slave labor. Noting the arduous work involved in draining swampland, one commissioner admitted that the project “could not have [been] done without slaves.”
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Five slave carpenters now labored over the President’s House, and future presidents who lived there, starting with Jefferson, would enjoy the residence in undisturbed possession of their human property. When Julian Niemcewicz toured the Capitol in 1798, it pained him to see slaves hard at work: “I have seen them in large numbers, and I was very glad that these poor unfortunates earned eight to ten dollars per week. My joy was not long lived. I am told that they were not working for themselves; their masters hire them out and retain all the money for themselves. What humanity! What a country of liberty.”
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For many decades, Washington, D.C., would qualify as a work in progress. George Washington never lived to see John Adams occupy a still-unfinished, sparsely furnished President’s House. As he had feared, congressmen complained about the incomplete Capitol and inadequate lodgings, and the huge Capitol dome was completed only during the Civil War. For a long time the Capitol and President’s House stood out as splendid but incongruous fragments in a still barren landscape; only later would the city expand to fill the spacious contours of Washington’s buoyant dream.

 

 

DESPITE HIS CHILDLESS STATE, Washington had enjoyed a happy, abundant family life, having first stepchildren and then stepgrandchildren while also serving as guardian for numerous family orphans at Mount Vernon. After his sister, Betty, died, he had brought her son Lawrence, a childless widower, to Mount Vernon to aid with surplus visitors. Like most males, Lawrence fell instantly in love with Nelly Custis, only this time she reciprocated the attention, producing yet another union of the Washington and Custis clans. So that Nelly could marry at age twenty, Washington made official his position as her legal guardian, enabling him to sign the marriage license. In a tribute to Nelly’s love for her adoptive grandfather, the wedding was celebrated by candlelight at Mount Vernon on February 22, 1799, Washington’s sixty-seventh birthday. Deferring to the bride’s wishes, Washington appeared in his old blue and buff wartime uniform. Martha “let all the servants come in to see” the wedding, one slave recalled, and gave them “such good things to eat” as part of the celebration.
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The newlyweds stayed on as Mount Vernon residents after Washington gave them the vast Dogue Run farm.

Washington’s history with Nelly’s brother, Washy, remained problematic. Despite Washington’s constant exhortations and the boy’s eternal pledges to reform, the latter dropped out of Princeton, and in 1798 Washington enrolled him in the smaller St. John’s College in Annapolis. “Mr. Custis possesses competent talents to fit him for any studies,” Washington promised the school’s president, “but they are counteracted by an indolence of mind, which renders it difficult to draw them into action.”
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For Washington, who felt keen deprivation at having missed college, his grandson’s apathy must have been frustrating. The boy was never less than affectionate or respectful to him, but like his father before him, he was simply incorrigible.

When young Washington posed the question of whether he should not drop out of St. John’s as well, the former president threw up his hands in despair: “The question … really astonishes me! for it would seem as if
nothing
I could say to you made more than a
momentary
impression.”
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Bowing to the futility of pushing the boy any further, Washington had him tutored at Mount Vernon by Tobias Lear. When Washy then contemplated an inappropriate marriage, Washington tried to prevent it by getting him appointed to a cavalry troop. He ended up with a fatalistic attitude toward his trying adopted grandson as someone who meant well but suffered from a congenital inability to make good on his pledges.

A deeper source of discontent in Washington’s last year was the continuing financial worries that preyed on his mind, reaching their nadir in the spring of 1799. Even when he rode off to Philadelphia in November 1798, cheered by the adulatory multitudes, he gnashed his teeth over his finances, bewailing that “nothing will answer my purposes like the money, of which I am in extreme want, and
must
obtain on disadvantageous terms.”
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Never able to economize, he confessed that “I find it no easy matter to keep my expenditures within the limits of my receipts.”
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Another drought during the summer of 1799 ruined his oat crop, threatened his corn, and left his meadows barren, only aggravating his long-standing woes.

With mounting desperation, he badgered people for overdue money and dished out tough lectures to deadbeats, telling one, in the tone of a surly bill collector, that “however you may have succeeded in imposing upon and deceiving others, you shall not practice the like game with me with impunity.”
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While horrified at sending people to debtors’ prison, he believed that he had no choice but to summon sheriffs to collect the money. For the first time in his life, he took recourse to bank loans, renewed at sixty-day intervals and set at what he termed “ruinous” interest rates.
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His sales of western lands for emergency infusions of money scarcely kept pace with his insatiable demands for cash.

Two incidents underlined the gravity of his economic predicament. In October 1799 he decided to sell the houses he had built in the new capital—a terribly public blow to his pride as well as harmful to the project’s hard-won image. That fall he also declined two months’ salary as commander in chief. In thanking Secretary of War McHenry, Washington was frank about his embarrassing predicament: “I shall not suffer false modesty to assert that my finances stand in no need of it.”
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He complained of applicants for army appointments who came “with their servants and horses … to aid in the consumption of my forage and what to me is more valuable—my time.”
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While public life forced Washington into expenditures beyond his control, during his entire adult life he had exhibited an inability to live within his means.

Hard as it was for him to admit, he could no longer supervise alone his far-flung operations, whose inspection had always formed part of his daily routine. In March 1798 he hired a clerk, Albin Rawlins, whose duties went beyond keeping accounts and drafting letters. Even though Washington still strode around in blue overalls and mud-spattered boots and was every bit the master of Mount Vernon, for the first time he alluded to difficulty in riding his horse. As he told a relative, he had hired Rawlins, in part, because he now found it “impracticable to use the exercise (on horseback) which my health, business, and inclination requires.”
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Washington had never made Mount Vernon the thriving productive enterprise he wanted. In his last months, he kept saying that the “first wish” of his heart was to simplify and contract operations and live “exempt from cares.”
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To this end, he planned to rent out his mill, distillery, and fishery businesses and dispose of one of his farms. Three of the farms—River, Union, and Muddy Hole—he decided to manage himself, restoring their exhausted fields through the scientific crop rotation that had long tantalized his imagination. The simple truth was that he had spent too many years away from Mount Vernon ever to attain the modern, advanced plantation of his daydreams. Sadly, the date he set for the new dispensation that would free him from onerous managerial duties was New Year’s Day 1800—a date he would not live to see.

 

 

BY 1799 George Washington must have realized that the only respite he would ever get from politics resided in a peaceful afterlife. That June Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., reminding him of the pending presidential election, expressed the hope that if Washington’s name were brought forward, “you will not disappoint the hopes and desires of the wise and good … by refusing to come forward once more to the relief … of your injured country.”
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Trumbull spoke for many Federalists who worried that Adams was a weak candidate and were terrified that the Francophile Jefferson might emerge as the next president. In response, Washington talked like an unabashed Federalist, sarcastically deriding Republican sophistry: “Let that party set up a broomstick and call it a true son of liberty … and it will command their votes in toto!”
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His passionate words mocked the Jeffersonian myth that his mental powers were impaired, and he satirized the scuttlebutt that he had lapsed into “dotage and imbecility.”
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He declined Trumbull’s request on political grounds, claiming that he could not draw a single new vote from the opposition. His personal reasons were far more cogent. Citing declining health, he said it would be “criminal therefore in me, although it should be the wish of my countrymen … to accept an office under this conviction.”
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Dismayed that, since mid-March, President Adams had absented himself from the capital, staying at his home in Quincy, Washington said that Federalists were aggrieved at his behavior while Republicans “chuckle at and set it down as a favorable omen for themselves.”
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With his usual sense of courtesy, Washington thought it would be unbecoming for him to advise the president: “It has been suggested to me to make this communication, but I have declined it, conceiving that it would be better received from a private character—m[ore] in the habits of social intercourse and friendship.”
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At the end of August Washington tossed cold water on Trumbull’s entreaties a second time. He now sounded even more categorical that “no eye, no tongue, no thought may be turned towards me for the purpose alluded to therein.”
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If he ran, he would only be battered with charges of “inconsistency, concealed ambition, dotage.”
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Having experienced more than enough venom for one lifetime, he did not care to expose himself further: “A mind that has been constantly on the stretch since the year 1753, with but short intervals and little relaxation, requires rest and composure. And I believe that nothing short of a serious invasion of our country … will ever draw me from my present retirement.”
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Thanks to the astute, if mercurial, diplomacy of John Adams, such an invasion never happened. When the president sent two envoys to France that October, without consulting his cabinet first, Washington was beset by serious doubts. “I was surprised at the
measure,
how much more so at the manner of it?” he told Hamilton. “This business seems to have been commenced in an evil hour and under unfavorable auspices.”
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But Washington proved wrong, and because of the administration’s successful diplomacy in resolving differences with France, he never had to take the field with the new army.

On November 10, 1799, McHenry warned Washington of burgeoning Republican strength in the upcoming campaign. For many Federalists, it foreshadowed a threat to the Constitution and the still-fragile strength of the federal government. “I confess, I see more danger to the cause of order and good government at this moment than has at any time heretofore threatened the country,” McHenry concluded.
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If Republicans saw the Federalists as threatening republican government, the Federalists saw themselves as upright custodians of the constitutional order. Previously unaware of the opposition’s strength, Washington claimed to be “stricken dumb” by McHenry’s letter and replied that political trends seemed “to be moving by hasty strides to some awful crisis, but in what they will result that Being, who sees, foresees, and directs all things, alone can tell.”
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So only weeks before his death, Washington, for all his long-term faith in America’s future, viewed its short-term prospects as fairly dismal.

On December 9 Gouverneur Morris added his voice to the Federalist chorus and made a last plea to lure Washington from retirement. The next president, he pointed out, would hold office in Washington, D.C. “Will you not, when the seat of government is in your neighborhood, enjoy more retirement as President of the United States than as General of the Army?”
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Making a shrewd pitch, Morris reviewed the way that each time Washington had returned reluctantly to the public stage, he had been catapulted to higher levels of glory: “If General Washington had not become [a] member of the [constitutional] convention, he would have been considered only as the defender and not as the legislator of his country. And if the president of the convention had not become president of the United States, he would not have added the character of a statesman to those of a patriot and a hero.”
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This clever, eloquent appeal went unanswered.

IT MAY SAY SOMETHING about the American blind spot toward slavery that some of the most affecting vignettes of slaves at Mount Vernon emanated from foreign visitors, while American visitors selectively edited them from the scene. In April 1797 Louis-Philippe, a young French aristocrat who would become the so-called citizen king of France, toured Mount Vernon and showed commendable curiosity about the slaves’ condition. They were well aware, he learned, of abolitionist clubs in Alexandria and Georgetown and the violent slave uprising in St. Domingue, making them hopeful that “they would no longer be slaves in ten years.”
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No less fascinating was the Frenchman’s observation that many house servants were mulattoes and that some looked strikingly white. Because Washington was often away from Mount Vernon and seemingly could not have children of his own, suspicion has never settled on him as having sired biracial children, except for the questionable case of West Ford mentioned earlier.