Washington: A Life (95 page)

Starting in the summer of 1786, Humphreys came to Mount Vernon to compile research for his book. His admiring but incomplete narrative of Washington’s life proved less important than the four-thousand-word marginal commentary penned by Washington on portions dealing with the French and Indian War. At some point after returning to Mount Vernon, Washington had assistants transcribe his letters from that period, and in another instance of old insecurities rearing their head, he corrected his youthful spelling and grammar and polished awkward passages. Addicted as always to self-control, he opposed inadvertent revelations of self.

During his Mount Vernon stays, Humphreys was a charming, amiable companion of the family. With a deep passion for poetry, he was wont to burst into recitations on the spur of the moment. He became the roving poet of the plantation, spouting verses
en plein air
when he quit work for the day. As happened with Lafayette, Humphreys brought out a youthful idealism in Washington, even a buried utopian streak. The man who had headed an army for more than eight years told Humphreys, in biblical cadences, that he longed to see the curse of war ended: “My first wish is to see this plague to mankind banished from the earth and the sons and daughters of this world employed in more pleasing and innocent amusements.” He also wanted America to function as the promised land for the world’s downtrodden: “Rather than quarrel about territory, let the poor, the needy, and oppressed of the earth … resort to the fertile plains of our western country, to the second land of promise, and there dwell in peace, fulfilling the first and great commandment.”
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Slowly, Washington assembled a cadre of bright, capable young men—the peacetime equivalent of his military family—to assist him with the mounting stacks of paperwork. In January 1786 General Benjamin Lincoln recommended as a private secretary twenty-three-year-old Tobias Lear of New Hampshire, a Harvard graduate who read French and was a fluent letter writer. In reply, Washington explained that such an assistant would also tutor Washy and “will sit at my table—will live as I live—will mix with the company which resort to the Ho[use].”
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Despite his unstinting admiration for Washington, Lear expressed one reservation about working at Mount Vernon: he abhorred slavery. Only when Washington declared his ultimate intention to free his slaves and said they would meanwhile be better off under his tutelage than anywhere else did Lear relent. The personal and professional relationship with Lear lasted much longer than that with the self-absorbed David Humphreys. Lear became yet another of the surrogate sons who supplied the absence of biological children for George and Martha Washington. The feeling was reciprocated, as can be seen in Lear’s praise of Martha Washington as “everything that is benevolent and good. I honor her as a second mother and receive from her all those attentions which I should look for from her who bore me.”
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GEORGE WASHINGTON might resign his commission—might spurn an impertinent suggestion that he be anointed king—but he refused to renounce a princely style in his private life, as if his highest social ambition after the war were to return to Virginia and resurrect the privileged world he had left behind. He had, in many ways, been transformed by the war, but he had not yet realized how profoundly the democratic message of the American Revolution would filter down to the masses and even, in the fullness of time, threaten slavery itself. He clung to the tastes of a British country squire while making few concessions to a more egalitarian ethos. Strange as it may sound, Mount Vernon after the war did not evolve in notable ways that reflected American independence, except for greater efforts at agricultural modernity.

Many improvements that Washington had first projected in the early 1770s came to fruition only after the long hiatus of the war. Where visitors had once approached Mount Vernon by a straight path, they now rode along a symmetrical pair of serpentine drives that tantalized them with flickering glimpses of the distant mansion. At the end, right before they alighted, their carriages ran over rough gravel and curved around a bowling green and a small circular courtyard. Unable to tell a lie, Washington admitted in his diary that he had “cut down the two cherry trees in the courtyard.”
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The house was now attached to the outlying buildings by graceful covered walkways that, instead of shutting out nature, disclosed distant vistas of natural beauty. All in all, Mount Vernon contained fourteen or fifteen separate buildings, giving newcomers the impression that they had rolled into a small, bustling rural village.

The most imposing expansion of the house was the soaring chamber at the north end, dubbed the New Room or Banquet Hall. The splendid stage set for many social and political gatherings, it was the closest approximation Washington could obtain to a state dining room. Executed in a grander and more refined style than anything else in the house—it made the rest seem fairly humdrum by comparison—the room rose two stories high, its height emphasized by a tall Palladian window. At the time, green and blue were the most expensive imported pigments, prompting a status-conscious Washington to opt for bright green wallpaper, which gave the room a cheerful buoyancy by day but must have lent guests a lurid sheen at candlelit dinners. Washington ordered gilded borders that endowed the green walls with “a rich and handsome look.”
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When he mentioned to Samuel Vaughan of Philadelphia that the room lacked a chimneypiece, the English-born merchant spontaneously sent one of Italian marble, flanked by fluted columns and topped by pastoral imagery—farm animals, plows, contented peasants—evocative of Cincinnatus. This exquisite ornament, shipped in ten bulky cases, made Washington blush with embarrassment. Always dealing with an unresolved tension between his aristocratic tastes and republican ideology, he confessed to discomfort about the chimneypiece. “I greatly fear it is too elegant and costly for my room and republican style of living,” he told Vaughan’s son.
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In the end, Washington overcame his doubts and held on to the piece. Clearly preparing to entertain sumptuously, he ordered seventy yards of red and white livery lace to outfit slaves tending guests.

In these early postwar years, Mount Vernon acquired the architectural touches that became its trademark and marked its owner’s new self-assurance. Most striking was the two-story piazza fronting the Potomac, supported by eight square wooden pillars and with an English flagstone walkway. Porches were relatively new in America, and this one transcended anything Washington might have seen, underscoring his architectural daring. The stately piazza, with expansive views of the Potomac, lent itself to hospitality. The porch also signaled to river traffic coming around the bend—one visitor remembered an “amazing number of sloops … constantly sailing up and down the river”—the elevated standing of the plantation’s owner.
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“The view down the river is extensive and most charming,” said Samuel Powel of Philadelphia, who called Mount Vernon “the most charming seat I have seen in America.”
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Washington paid a penalty in indoor comfort for his magnificent piazza, since the projecting roof plunged the rooms on that side into perpetual shadow. On the other hand, he had Windsor chairs and light portable tables brought onto the piazza in warm weather, which allowed guests to enjoy alfresco dining, cooled by river breezes and serenaded by parrots.

Adding grandeur to the west side was an octagonal cupola, surmounted by a weathervane, figured as the Dove of Peace, with a green olive branch in its black beak. It was a powerful statement from the former commander in chief, a silent prayer for peace. The gracious quality of Mount Vernon in the 1780s surely owed something to Washington’s desire for a restful atmosphere after the backbreaking years of combat.

The man who won American independence nonetheless remained in thrall to British fashion. When he told Samuel Vaughan of his desire to redo the New Room in stucco, he added an anxious aside, as if seeking urgent confirmation—“which, if I understood you right, is the present taste in England.”
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On the slope between the piazza and the river, Washington laid out a deer park in the English style, with a mixed herd of English and American deer—an innovation that forced him to reduce hunting nearby, since foxhounds might have scared them away. He also tried to follow the English fashion of planting “live fences” or hedgerows instead of standard wooden fences. Along the sinuous drives, he laid out a formal English landscape, fragrant with groves, shrubs, and extensive pleasure gardens that invited strollers to enter and wander. His garrulous German gardener told anyone who cared to listen that he had served as gardener to the kings of Prussia and of England. Forming the ornamental centerpiece of the gardens was a handsome brick greenhouse with seven tall, narrow windows that spanned almost the entire wall. An uncommon structure in rural Virginia, this enclosure enabled Washington to grow palm trees and semitropical plants as well as lemons, limes, and oranges. In the surrounding meadows he selected trees with a discerning artistic eye, and in the springtime the estate was radiant with the bloom of peach, cherry, apple, apricot, lilac, and dogwood blossoms.

All this display impressed visitors, often wrongly, with the magnitude of the owner’s wealth. When one English merchant toured Mount Vernon in 1785, he stumbled into this understandable error: Washington’s “gardens and pleasure grounds … were very extensive … He is allowed to be one of the best informed as well as successful planters in America.”
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Washington was indeed well informed, but his success was more problematic. The merchant would have been shocked to hear Washington grumble that year that “to be plain, my coffers are not overflowing with money.”
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Unable to curtail his free-handed spending and with his crops faring poorly, he started out 1786 with a paltry eighty-six pounds in cash.

Although Washington delegated authority to managers and overseers, he never really developed a right-hand man or someone equivalent to him in power. Even after George Augustine Washington succeeded Lund, Washington kept a tightfisted grip on operations, monitoring them through weekly reports, a process so rigorous that some detected a military mentality at work. Senator William Maclay later wrote of Mount Vernon as regimented to the point of madness: “It is under different overseers. Who may be styled generals … The Friday of every week is appointed for the overseers, or we will say brigadier generals, to make up their returns. Not a day’s work but is noted what, by whom, and where done; not a cow calves or ewe drops her lamb but is registered … Thus the etiquette and arrangement of an army is preserved on his farm.”
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To repair his damaged finances, Washington set out for his western holdings in September 1784, hoping to retrieve lost rents. He was accompanied by Dr. Craik and his son, his nephew Bushrod Washington, and three slaves. He had never ceased to be a prophet of the pristine Ohio Country, declaring during the Revolution that there was “no finer country in the known world than is encircled by the Ohio, Mississippi, and Great Lakes.”
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On the basis of prewar patents, Washington claimed thirty thousand western acres, with survey rights to an additional ten thousand. On an abstract level, Washington portrayed the western lands as a new American Eden, telling the Reverend John Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey, that “it would give me pleasure to see these lands seated by particular societies or religious sectaries with their pastors.”
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When it came to his actual behavior as a landlord, however, Washington never ascended to these giddy rhetorical heights and could sound like a downright skinflint.

The early postwar years witnessed a mad and often lawless scramble for western lands, and many settlers had little regard for eastern landlords who claimed their property. Throughout the Revolution Washington received reports of squatters occupying his land while legitimate tenants fell behind on payments. At first, inclining toward leniency, he said that those squatters who improved the land should be allowed to stay at reasonable rents. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, he said they might have inadvertently settled the land without realizing it was his. By the summer of 1784, however, he had lost all patience. Western rents had become his main source of revenue, and he decided to take matters into his own hands by personally dunning recalcitrant tenants. Less than a year after laying down his commission at Annapolis, the American Cincinnatus, badly strapped for cash, was reduced to a bill collector.

For this rugged journey across the Appalachian Mountains, Washington loaded up the horses with a large tent, camp utensils, a boat, medicine, and hooks and lines for fishing. He retraced the footsteps of earlier journeys into the western country, a landscape rife with youthful memories, including the march with Braddock’s army. Still a fearless traveler, he didn’t shrink from roughing it—at one campsite he slept under nothing but his cloak in a torrential downpour—but his diaries contain more references to fatigue than in earlier years as well as to rain running in rivulets down the trails.

A man of strongly fixed enthusiasms, Washington was also bent on reviving his long-standing but stalled project of improving the Potomac River navigation. He was still bedazzled by the vision of a watery gateway to the Ohio Valley that ran right by his home. When he arrived at Berkeley Springs, he came under the sway of a gifted inventor endowed with glib patter, James Rumsey, who had devised a mechanical boat that could churn upstream against the current. Always open to innovation, Washington was beguiled by Rumsey’s craft. Spying a way to promote Potomac traffic, he did more than pay lip service to this device: he issued a written endorsement for Rumsey, vouching that he had actually seen his ungainly invention move upstream against the current.