Washington: A Life (92 page)

The figure hurrying back to his long-forgotten past had just accomplished something more extraordinary than any military feat during the war. At war’s end, he stood alone at the pinnacle of power, but he never became drunk with that influence, as had so many generals before him, and treated his commission as a public trust to be returned as soon as possible to the people’s representatives. Throughout history victorious generals had sought to parlay their fame into political power, whereas Washington had only a craving for privacy. Instead of glorying in his might, he feared its terrible weight and potential misuse. He had long lived in the shadow of the historical analogy to the Roman patriot Cincinnatus, and now, with his resignation at Annapolis, that analogy was complete. When John Trumbull later painted a series of portraits for the U.S. Capitol, he chose Washington’s resignation at Annapolis as one of the crowning moments of the founding era and the highest proof of Washington’s virtue. At the time of the resignation, Trumbull was in London and recorded European wonderment at the news, saying that it “excites the astonishment and admiration of this part of the world.”
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Washington had served as commander in chief for eight and a half years, the equivalent of two presidential terms. His military triumphs had been neither frequent nor epic in scale. He had lost more battles than he had won, had botched several through strategic blunders, and had won at Yorktown only with the indispensable aid of the French Army and fleet. But he was a different kind of general fighting a different kind of war, and his military prowess cannot be judged by the usual scorecard of battles won and lost. His fortitude in keeping the impoverished Continental Army intact was a major historic accomplishment. It always stood on the brink of dissolution, and Washington was the one figure who kept it together, the spiritual and managerial genius of the whole enterprise: he had been resilient in the face of every setback, courageous in the face of every danger. He was that rare general who was great between battles and not just during them. The constant turnover of his army meant that he continually had to start from scratch in training his men. He had to blend troops from different states into a functioning national force, despite deep ideological fears of a standing army. And before the French alliance, he had lacked the sea power that was all-important in defeating the British.

Seldom in history has a general been handicapped by such constantly crippling conditions. There was scarcely a time during the war when Washington didn’t grapple with a crisis that threatened to disband the army and abort the Revolution. The extraordinary, wearisome, nerve-racking frustration he put up with for nearly nine years is hard to express. He repeatedly had to exhort Congress and the thirteen states to remedy desperate shortages of men, shoes, shirts, blankets, and gunpowder. This meant dealing with selfish, apathetic states and bureaucratic incompetence in Congress. He labored under a terrible strain that would have destroyed a lesser man. Ennobled by adversity and leading by example, he had been dismayed and depressed but never defeated. The cheerless atmosphere at Valley Forge was much more the rule than the exception during the war. Few people with any choice in the matter would have persisted in this impossible, self-sacrificing situation for so long. Washington’s job as commander in chief was as much a political as a military task, and he performed it brilliantly, functioning as de facto president of the country. His stewardship of the army had been a masterly exercise in nation building. In defining the culture of the Continental Army, he had helped to mold the very character of the country, preventing the Revolution from taking a bloodthirsty or despotic turn. In the end, he had managed to foil the best professional generals that a chastened Great Britain could throw at him. As Benjamin Franklin told an English friend after the war, “An American planter was chosen by us to command our troops and continued during the whole war. This man sent home to you, one after another, five of your best generals, baffled, their heads bare of laurels, disgraced even in the opinion of their employers.”
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WITH PERFECT TIMING, George Washington made it home to the loving embrace of his family on Christmas Eve. His return to Mount Vernon made him acutely aware of the enormous distance he had traveled since he left for the Second Continental Congress in May 1775. In writing to Lafayette, he noted time’s steady passage, observing that he had “entered these doors an older man by nine years than when I left them.”
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He indeed cut a very different figure from the tentative, uncertain arriviste of the prewar years. Secure in himself and his place in history, he little resembled that edgily combative young man who never missed a chance for self-advancement. That bumptious, sharp-elbowed character would emerge again sporadically in business dealings but would now coexist uneasily with a far more mature self.

A heavy snowfall soon cast a hush over Mount Vernon—it was a winter of historic coldness—so that Washington discovered himself “fast locked up in frost and snow” and sequestered at home by icy gusts and impassable roads.
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Only his wartime trophies, including the banners of captured flags that decorated the downstairs walls, evoked his extraordinary exploits. This isolation must have been sweetly congenial to Washington after the toilsome years of battle and the attendant lack of privacy. Ever the dutiful if exasperated son, he planned to visit his mother, but bad weather intervened, forcing him to defer the trip and enabling him to savor an unaccustomed solitude.

As he gazed back over the hazardous odyssey he had survived, he wondered at his own unaccountable preservation, telling Henry Knox, “I feel now, however, as I conceive a wearied traveler must do who, after treading many a painful step, with a heavy burden on his shoulders, is eased of the latter, having reached the goal … and from his housetop is looking back and tracing with a grateful eye the meanders by which he escaped the quicksands and mires which lay in his way and into which none but the all-powerful guide and great disposer of human events could have prevented his falling.”
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This hardheaded, practical man increasingly struck a reflective tone, experience having forced him to ponder the world more deeply.

Long burdened by wartime correspondence, Washington took a vacation from letter writing for several blissful days. It took a while to break his military habit of waking early and revolving in his overcrowded mind the day’s manifold duties. He kept realizing, with a start, that he “was no longer a public man or had anything to do with public transactions.”
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On December 28 he composed his first letter from home, proclaiming to New York governor George Clinton, “I am now a private citizen on the banks of the Potomac … I feel myself eased of a load of public care. I hope to spend the remainder of my days in cultivating the affections of good men and in the practice of the domestic virtues.”
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These early postwar letters emit an elegiac whiff, as if Washington thought his best days now lay behind him, and he dwelt inordinately on his own mortality. Sounding more like a sage than an aging warrior, he portrayed himself, in Old Testament language, as sitting “under the shadow of my own vine and my own fig tree, free from the bustle of a camp,” as he told Lafayette. “Envious of none, I am determined to be pleased with all, and this, my dear friend, being the order for my march, I will move gently down the stream of life until I sleep with my fathers.”
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For more than a month Washington postponed the trip to his mother due to inclement weather. When he at last set out for Fredericksburg in February 1784, he allotted a full week to his sojourn, which soon became enlarged into a state visit. The
Virginia Gazette
hailed his arrival in town “on a visit to his ancient and amiable parent.”
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Washington could not avoid a public dinner and elegant ball in his honor, capped by a twenty-one-gun salute from local artillery. As best we can tell, Mary Washington skipped these festivities, but her son voiced the obligatory pieties to town dignitaries, touting Fredericksburg as “the place of my growing infancy” and expressing pleasure at “the honorable mention which is made of my revered mother, by whose maternal hand (early deprived of a father) I was led to manhood.”
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Try though he might, Washington couldn’t completely extricate his thoughts from politics and feared that the still immature country would blunder into errors before arriving at true wisdom. As he affirmed, “all things will come right at last. But, like a young heir come a little prematurely to a large inheritance, we shall wanton and run riot until we have brought our reputation to the brink of ruin.” Only when a crisis materialized would the country be “
compelled
perhaps to do what prudence and common policy pointed out as plain as any problem in Euclid in the first instance.”
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This statement tallied with Washington’s often expressed view that citizens had to feel before they saw—that is, they couldn’t react to abstract problems, only to tangible ones. The long fight against British tyranny, paradoxically, only strengthened his view that the foremost political danger came not from an overly powerful central government but from an enfeebled one—“a half-starved, limping government that appears to be always moving upon crutches and tottering at every step.”
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The snowbound house was enlivened by young people. The Washingtons ran something akin to a small orphanage, and the general must have fled sometimes from the rambunctious shouts of skylarking children to the silence of his study. As we recall, after Jacky’s death, George and Martha had taken in his two youngest children, Nelly, now four, and Washy, now two. Although the situation was never formalized, Washington referred to them as his “adopted” children. Martha seemed to transfer her affections intact from Patsy and Jacky to Nelly and Washy, including her propensity to spoil the boy and anguish over his health. “My pretty little dear boy complains of a pain in his stomach,” Martha wrote in one letter. “… I cannot say but it makes me miserable if ever he complains, let the cause be ever so trifling … I hope the almighty will spare him to me.”
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She couldn’t conceive of a happy home devoid of children. “My little family are all with me,” she exulted to a friend, declaring that, without them, “I almost despair of ever enjoying happiness.”
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This second set of children seemed far happier than the epileptic Patsy and the feckless Jacky, and family life at Mount Vernon was less troubled than before. When Robert Edge Pine painted the children, he captured their contrasting natures. A sprightly girl, clever and sociable, Nelly stares out boldly, even impudently, at the viewer. Washy has a soft mop of well-brushed hair that falls over his forehead, and he seems gentle, almost feminine, his thoughts trailing far away. When Washington hired tutors for them, he sounded far more tolerant and relaxed than he had been with Jacky and Patsy, saying their education would “be mere amusement, because it is not my wish that the children should be confined.”
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Though much loved, Washington was sometimes a grandly remote figure to these two stepchildren. “He was a silent thoughtful man,” Nelly said years later. “He spoke little generally, never of himself. I never heard him relate a single act of his life during the war.”
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The Washingtons agreed to provide guidance or financial support for an amazing assortment of nieces and nephews. As noted earlier, after her sister, Anna Maria Dandridge Bassett, died early in the war, Martha pledged to raise her charming daughter Frances, or “Fanny,” who was now a teenager and had moved permanently to Mount Vernon. In a Robert Edge Pine portrait, Fanny has pretty features, big deep-set eyes, a rosebud mouth, and long wavy hair that falls across her shoulder and slightly exposed bosom. Martha adored Fanny and let her function as an assistant plantation hostess. “She is a child to me,” she later wrote, “and I am very lonesome when she is absent.”
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Washington also delighted in Fanny’s “easy and quiet temper.”
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In fact, the girl with her cheerful, winning personality was universally popular. “There was something so pleasing in her appearance and manner that even a stranger could not see her without being interested in her welfare” was one visitor’s impression.
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The bulging household incorporated other young relatives. George Augustine Washington, the son of Washington’s hard-drinking brother Charles, had been an aide to Lafayette during the war and was already plagued by a lingering bout of tuberculosis that would only worsen with the years. Washington was also saddled temporarily with three children from his late brother Samuel, who had been married five times and died heavily in debt. “In God’s name,” Washington had wondered to brother Jack earlier in the year, “how did my broth[e]r Sam[ue]l contrive to get himself so enormously in debt?”
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Samuel’s three children by his fourth marriage—Harriot, Lawrence Augustine, and George Steptoe Washington—ranged in age from eight to eleven and had been left indigent. All three presented special challenges. Harriot, an awkward, slovenly young girl, found herself trapped in a household of manic perfectionists. Starting in 1784 and for the next eight years, Washington footed the bill to educate her two brothers at a Georgetown academy, but they were wild and uncontrollable and a constant trial to Washington, who was extremely generous with young relatives but quite exacting if they failed to measure up to his high standards.