Washington: A Life (93 page)

By war’s end, Martha Washington was round and matronly in face and form, a fact recorded by one visitor: “Mrs. Washington is an elegant figure for a person of her years … She is rather fleshy, of good complexion, has a large, portly double chin, and an open and engaging countenance.”
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Although her hair was now gray, she still had smooth, unlined skin, and her eyes were warm and bright. She was fond of wearing sheer fabrics in light pastel colors that comfortably fit her full figure. By her own description, Martha was never either sick or well but hovered somewhere in between. Perhaps because she was short, she believed in a proud, erect posture and bought stiff collars for Nelly to encourage her upright carriage. The travel-weary Martha was slow to admit that her marital life had now changed forever: her husband could surrender his commission but not his fame. Later on, in a wistful mood, she would recollect to Mercy Warren that when her husband returned from the war that Christmas, she had little thought “that any circumstance could possibly happen to call the general into public life again” and that she “anticipated that from that moment they should have grown old together in solitude and tranquillity. This, my dear madam, was the first and fondest wish of my heart.”
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Whatever ambitions she might have harbored for her husband’s career had long since been gratified, and she never dreamed that the curtain would soon rise again on a vast and thrilling new pageant in their lives.

Whatever the strains of returning to private life, the period between the war and his presidency was a halcyon time for Washington, who laid aside the gigantic labors of nation building. Those who had seen him amid the tumult of war were struck by his happy metamorphosis back into a private citizen. Although he fondly invoked the “rural amusements” of his country cottage, such pastoral imagery didn’t quite square with the desperate economic plight he faced upon his homecoming.
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As he devoted every morning to business matters, the scenes of bucolic harmony he had envisioned while in uniform faded from the hard collision with reality. For nine years Mount Vernon had suffered terrible neglect, thinning his fortune. “I made no money from my estate during the nine years I was absent from it and brought none home with me,” he told his nephew Fielding Lewis, Jr.
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Great Britain exacted a high price from American farmers after the war by shutting West Indian markets that had once been open to the colonists. To further his economic woes, Washington’s debtors paid him in depreciated wartime currency, making it difficult for him to satisfy his own creditors. While France yearned to welcome the American hero, Washington told Lafayette that his straitened circumstances precluded an Atlantic crossing and might “put it forever out of my power to gratify this wish.”
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If Washington thought he could repair his affairs quickly, he was soon disabused, and more than a year after returning to Mount Vernon, he told Henry Knox despondently that his business affairs “can no longer be neglected without involving my ruin.”
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He had frequently reassured his estate steward, Lund Washington, of his confidence in leaving his wartime business in his hands. Nevertheless, as the war drew to a close, he berated Lund for failing to provide adequate financial statements and accused him of keeping him ignorant since Valley Forge. From brother Jack, Washington learned that his frontier tenants had fallen years behind in their rent, and he pleaded with Lund to travel west and collect the overdue money, accusing him of “an unconquerable aversion to going from home.”
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Unknown to Washington as he issued these intemperate charges, Lund had forgone his steward’s salary since the Valley Forge period. When he discovered it, Washington was mortified but had no immediate way of making up the shortfall.

In 1785, beset by growing financial troubles, Washington began to edge Lund aside and took over daily supervision of the five farms—Muddy Hole, Dogue Run, River, Union, and Mansion House—that constituted Mount Vernon, which had burgeoned to seven thousand acres. Now in his early fifties, Washington no longer had time to stay on top of his far-flung operations. When Lund stepped down as manager after twenty-one years, he was replaced by Washington’s nephew-in-residence, the sickly George Augustine Washington. Although Washington lacked the time to make the daily rounds, he didn’t wish to relinquish all control of plantation life and instituted a detailed system of weekly reports from each farm. As he told the departing Lund, “I am resolved that an account of the stock and every occurrence that happens in the course of the week shall be minutely detailed to me every Saturday.”
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There never seemed to be enough detail to satisfy his insatiable appetite for information.

Even as his finances suffered from his long enforced absence, Washington needed to keep up a show of prosperity and entertain the stream of visitors, friends and strangers alike, who descended upon the shrine of Mount Vernon. He was never able to enjoy fully the respite from national duty that he had so richly earned. He didn’t cultivate adulation so much as endure it and played the fifty-two-year-old smiling public man. Toward the war’s end he had begun bracing for the rigors of receiving visitors on a lavish scale. After the British evacuation of New York, he tried to hire a cook who could whip up a proper dinner for thirty guests at a time. Reverting to the man of fashion, he asked Lafayette to send him French silver salvers that could hold up to twelve glasses; where possible, he still attempted to boycott British goods. He retained his old aristocratic habits, having his arms engraved on new silverware, and he didn’t see any contradiction between such behavior and the war he had just waged against British nobility.

In eighteenth-century Virginia, where roadside taverns were sparse and travelers could easily be stranded in transit, feeding and lodging travelers who showed up unannounced at one’s doorstep were considered necessary marks of hospitality. The polite Washington was victimized by this tradition as veterans and curiosity seekers descended on his home in massive numbers. Much of the mystique later attached to the White House first crystallized around Mount Vernon, which became a sort of proto-presidential mansion. Except for Ben Franklin in Paris, Washington was the first American celebrity, and he only partially succeeded at shielding himself from supplicants. Strangers arrived intent upon seeing Washington, who had to figure out ways to bar their prying eyes. He often greeted people at the door, only to hand them off to slaves, then disappeared into his study or rode off to his farms. “Even friends who make a point of visiting him are left much to themselves, indeed scarcely see him from breakfast to dinner, unless he engages them in a ride, which is very agreeable to him,” said a visitor named Elizabeth Ambler Carrington.
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Sometimes, like a dutiful innkeeper, Washington showed up in the room of a sick guest, proffering a hot cup of tea and showing his basic decency.

He never resolved the problem of the tremendous expenses he incurred in taking care of visitors. Not only did guests devour his food, but their horses freely ate his forage. “My situation is very little understood by most people,” he explained in later life. “Whatever may be my property, the income of it is inadequate to my expenses. Not from any wish or desire I have to live extravagantly, but from
unavoidable
necessity proceeding from the public walks of life in which I have been and the acquaintances made thereby, which fill my house continually with company.”
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At a typical dinner, half the people might be guests. “There is not one single officer on the whole continent who will forsake the pleasure of spending a few days with his General,” said Philip Mazzei, Jefferson’s Florentine-born friend. “… The result is that his house is continuously filled with strangers who bring with them an even larger number of servants and horses. As there is no village in the vicinity and no inn within reach, the General has to take charge of everything.”
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As legions of hopeful tourists made a pilgrimage to this mecca, George and Martha Washington struggled to retain some modicum of privacy. Sometimes they behaved like inmates held hostage by an overflowing wave of visitors, condemned to make small talk with complete strangers. One of the sadder lines in Washington’s copious papers occurs in his diary entry for June 30, 1785, where he notes that he “dined with only Mrs. Washington, which I believe is the first instance of it since my retirement from public life.”
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One can almost hear the sigh of relief. Washington admitted to Franklin that “retirement from the public walks of life has not been so productive of the leisure and ease as might have been expected.”
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Benjamin Franklin scarcely needed a lesson. “Celebrity may for a while flatter one’s vanity,” he wrote, “but its effects are troublesome.”
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The nation wouldn’t let Washington enjoy the ease of a private citizen, and he had to learn to manage his celebrity. One unspoken trick he used to deter unwanted visitors was to post inadequate signs indicating the way to his house, erecting a natural barrier against intruders. The nine-mile ride between Alexandria and Mount Vernon confounded travelers, forcing them to traverse bogs, thick woods, and winding trails; the visitor files at Mount Vernon abound with comic tales of travelers getting hopelessly lost in this trackless maze. Although Washington weeded out guests by asking for letters of introduction, he was too civil to turn people away even if they lacked referrals. When a French officer showed up for dinner without papers, Washington confessed in his diary that “I was at a loss how to receive or treat him.” Then he added: “He stayed [for] dinner and the evening.”
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One stranger who arrived in Washington’s absence was astounded by his courteous treatment: “Immediately on our arrival, every care was taken of our horses, beds were prepared, and an excellent supper provided for us.”
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The visitors’ accounts during these years give many candid glimpses of Washington. Their impressions vary dramatically, suggesting that he reacted quite differently to people—so much so that, at times, he scarcely seemed the same person. He could be merry and convivial or, if he didn’t care for the guests, silent and morose. This mutable personality, reflecting his shifting levels of trust in his listeners, has made it hard for historians to form a coherent sense of his personality. Seldom quotable in person, Washington could never be surprised into confessional statements. But if few visitors came away with treasured table talk, he made his presence powerfully felt.

A young Scottish visitor, Robert Hunter, left this portrait of Washington’s venerable appearance: “The General is about six foot high, perfectly straight and well made, rather inclined to be lusty. His eyes are full and blue and seem to express an air of gravity.”
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He picked up Washington’s fastidious regard for appearance. When they first met, the general “was neatly dressed in a plain blue coat, white cashmere waistcoat, and black breeches and boots, as he came from his farm.”
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Washington left him briefly with Martha and Fanny, shed his work clothes, then reappeared in more fashionable garb, “with his hair neatly powdered, a clean shirt on, a new plain drab coat, white waistcoat, and white silk stockings.”
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Hunter conjured up a Washington who seemed relaxed after the great labors of war, a man still healthy and vital who could be elegant in the drawing room and energetic in the field. He noted that Washington was talkative with intimates, but that, cherishing his privacy, he was far more guarded and laconic with people he distrusted.

Hunter recorded the clockwork regularity of Washington’s days as the latter followed a farmer’s routine of going to bed at nine, then rising with the sun. Mornings he devoted to the masses of mail that swamped him. “It’s astonishing the packets of letters that daily come for him from all parts of the world,”noted Hunter.
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With evident pride, Washington showed him the vast archive of wartime letters he had transcribed for posterity: “There are thirty large folio volumes of them upstairs, as big as common ledgers, all neatly copied.”
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Hunter discovered that his study, with a thousand books shelved behind glass, was the inner sanctum to which he denied admittance to strangers. As Washington gave him a tour of his extensive fields and gardens, Hunter reported that his “greatest pride is now to be thought the first farmer in America.”
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Far from being an aloof boss, Washington often dismounted from his horse to work alongside slaves and indentured servants, especially to ensure that construction matched his specifications: “It’s astonishing with what niceness he directs everything in the building way, condescending even to measure the things himself, that all may be perfectly uniform.”
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While Washington opened up in Hunter’s company, he clammed up with others. If he didn’t like someone, he would be correct but never warm. As one European visitor observed, “There seemed to me to skulk somewhat of a repulsive coldness, not congenial with my mind, under a courteous demeanor.”
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One Dutchman also came away disgusted: “I could never be on familiar terms with the General—a man so cold, so cautious, so obsequious.”
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It did not occur to these tourists that Washington felt burdened by uninvited visitors gaping at him, particularly since he wasn’t a backslapping soul who feigned friendship with total strangers. His modesty disappointed those who expected him to narrate the wartime drama especially for them. “He announces a profound discretion and a great diffidence in himself,” said the French journalist Brissot de Warville. “… His modesty is astonishing to a Frenchman; he speaks of the American war and of his victories as of things in which he had no direction.”
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Of course, the many volumes of letters upstairs underscored Washington’s sense of his own overwhelming importance in the war, but he preferred to let his deeds speak for themselves.