by Myron Magnet
Meanwhile, conflict of interest notwithstanding, Washington the burgess lobbied the authorities to keep their promise of land for ex-officers, himself included, and he scoured the Ohio country by horse and canoe in 1770 to scout out prime sites firsthand. When the government finally awarded the pledged land in 1772, Washington owned, by grant and purchase, over 30,000 rich acres, including forty miles along the Great Kanawha, much more than rules about riverfront property allowed.88 And with his surveyor’s mind able to visualize the continental terrain as if from a satellite, he began planning yet another entrepreneurial use for the Potomac. With dredging, locks, and portages, privately financed like an English turnpike company, it might become the profitable “Channel of conveyance of the extensive & valuable Trade of a rising Empire” in the West, where he was a major landholder.89
ONCE AGAIN, heartbreak had a silver lining for him. When his teenaged stepdaughter Patsy died in 1773, her inheritance—one-third of her father’s fortune—went to Martha, doubling her wealth. Washington paid off his debts and decided to double the size of Mount Vernon, too, creating a preeminent mansion for a preeminent landowner. He designed extensions at each end, and planned to embellish the west front with a pediment and the east front with a deliciously cozy, two-story-high, Tuscan-pillared piazza—his most influential innovation—framing the sparkling river view and catching the breeze in the afternoon shade. A cupola for light and ventilation would crown the red-painted roof, and curved, open arcades revealing glimpses of the river, another innovation, would connect the main house to the service wings, their roofs originally painted blue. Bucolic drives meandering through informal, Capability Brown–style plantings would replace the straight approach road and symmetrical gardens to the west, while toward the river Washington planned to sculpt the earth itself to improve the view and provide a grassy podium for the piazza.90
In 1774, he started to build, adding on to Mount Vernon’s south end a spacious study for himself with a master bedroom above. Anterooms buffering this addition from the rest of the house, plus a separate staircase and entrance from outside, created a private sanctum “that none entered without orders,” recalled Martha’s grandson.91 In 1776, work began on the north extension, a grand, two-story-high dining room lit by a magnificent Venetian triple window and, when finished, one of America’s most stately and beautiful rooms. But it was a long time finishing—for in the spring of 1775, its architect left to fight the Revolution. The work advanced glacially in his absence: the piazza rose in 1777 and the cupola in 1778, all constructed according to directions Washington sent from the battlefield.
Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association
When he next saw the house in 1781—briefly, after six years—he was a changed man. And a certain ambivalence in the design of the house foreshadows the change. Yes, it is ambitious. But compared to an English country mansion, it is surprisingly modest. While the lofty dining room wouldn’t be out of place in an English grandee’s manor, the rest of the house breathes cozy domesticity, especially since no two interior doors line up to reveal the expanded building’s full length. Nor does Mount Vernon’s main façade achieve the dignified classical symmetry of such splendid eighteenth-century Virginia houses as Stratford Hall down the Potomac or Shirley Plantation on the James—or even George Mason’s much smaller but perfect Gunston Hall just down the road (which visitors to Mount Vernon should also tour). For all its efforts at balance, Mount Vernon is lopsided: the pediment embraces two windows to the left of the front door but only one to the right; the cupola is ten inches off center. The ends too are asymmetrical, with a humble cellar door elbowing the grand Venetian window to the north, and the doorway to Washington’s study marring the symmetry of the south.
These defects lie at the heart of Mount Vernon’s meaning. The house embodies the temperament of a conservative revolutionary. Just as Edmund Burke described how improvement in government ought to proceed—gradually, organically, and with deep respect for time-tested institutions—so Mount Vernon evolved in stages over decades, as Washington embellished, modernized, and extended its asymmetrical core, rather than razing it in order to rebuild from scratch, according to some abstract, rational blueprint, as the French revolutionaries did. A 1773 pencil sketch he made shows that he thought about regularizing the windows during the new enlargement, as he easily could have done. But that would have changed the harmonious balance of the rooms within, and he didn’t want to meddle with what already worked so well, even while he was hugely altering the existing structure. Architect Allan Greenberg, a leading modern neoclassicist, suggests a related explanation for Mount Vernon’s irregularities: he guesses that Washington wanted both a manor house and a vernacular farmhouse and tried to combine the two. For all his ambition, he built the house of a citizen, not a seigneur, and the endearingly homey Mount Vernon turned out to be a large but undoubted example of what Greenberg calls America’s architecture of democracy.92
WASHINGTON ALREADY chafed under a sense of slighted merit when he left the king’s service for marriage just before Britain won the French and Indian War in 1763, and his resentment of the English, increasingly rubbed raw during these years as a planter, set him on the road to revolution. When Britain had forbidden settlement west of the Alleghenies to protect its Indian fur trade, Washington saw his land-speculation schemes blocked. Then London barred the colonies from printing paper money, whose rapid depreciation harmed British merchants trading with America, so his cash-strapped tenants and other debtors couldn’t pay him. With cash now scarce in the colonies, the stamp tax that Britain imposed on Americans in 1765 to make them defray the debt for a war they thought they’d fully paid for in blood and treasure sparked outrage that in Washington’s case was especially personal, since he thought Britain owed him for the war, not vice versa.
Washington’s sketch of an ideally symmetrical Mount Vernon
Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association
At first, he took out his ire on Cary & Co., the London agents through whom he sold his produce and bought much of the finery that bedecked himself, his family, and Mount Vernon. The firm had had the gall to send him a dunning letter in 1764. “Mischances rather than Misconduct,” he replied in the clear, round, powerful penmanship that made his written battlefield orders impossible to mistake, explain why “a corrispondant so steady, & constant as I have proovd” is late in paying his bill. Crops have been poor, he said; when they’ve been “tolerable,” Cary has sold them for “little or nothing.” And because of the London-made cash crunch, bills of exchange from his debtors that Washington sent in as payment bounced.93
A year later—just after the Stamp Act—he was flaming with anger over having to suffer passively the British merchant’s and the British government’s malign role in every part of his economic life. He sends “none but Sweetscented Tobacco,” carefully packed, he thundered to Cary, and Cary gets him lower prices for it than his neighbors’ poorer product commands—and lower than a Liverpool agent got for worse stuff. Plus Cary sends wrong or shoddy goods from London, overcharges for them, and blithely says to send them back next year and meanwhile do without clothes and household necessities. Since “the selling of our Tobacco’s well, & purchasing of Our Goods upon the best Terms, are matters of the utmost consequence to our well doing,” if Cary doesn’t perform better, they’re fired. As for the Stamp Act, which “the speculative part of the Colonists” consider “a direful attack upon their Liberties”: loading Americans with taxes will leave them less money to buy British goods, and they are learning “that many of the Luxuries which we have heretofore lavished our Substance to Great Britain for can well be dispensed with,” to Britain’s detriment. And since the act requires payment in hard money for the stamps required on legal documents and the like, and the colonies have so little of it, the law courts will have to shut—so good luck trying to sue to collect your debts.94
Britain repealed the Stamp Act in 1766. But when it imposed its new Townshend taxes in 1767 an
d sent two regiments in 1768 to scare Bostonians out of their boycott of British goods, Washington knew that war was likely. Since “our lordly Masters in Great Britain will be satisfied with nothing less than the deprivation of . . . the liberty which we have derived from our Ancestors,” he wrote his neighbor George Mason in April 1769, “no man shou’d scruple, or hesitate a moment to use a—ms in defence of so valuable a blessing, on which all the good and evil of life depends.” Of course the colonists should try everything else first. But they had already “proved the inefficacy” of petitions to king and Parliament, so now only “starving their Trade & manufactures, remains to be tried.”
Naturally, “selfish designing men” will try to evade a boycott, and they “ought to be stigmatized, and made the objects of publick reproach,” since (as he well knew) the opinion of one’s fellows powerfully shapes behavior. But a boycott might also have unforeseen advantages for the compliant, he mused, drifting off into the personal. “The extravagant & expensive man . . . is thereby furnished with a pretext to live within bounds.” Surely “prudence dictated œconomy to him before, but his resolution was too weak,” he wrote; “for how can I, says he, who have lived in such & such a manner change my method? . . . [S]uch an alteration in the System of my living, will create suspicions of a decay in my fortune, & such a thought the world must not harbour.”95 That’s the emulative Washington speaking, spending beyond his ample means to win admiration—except he’s beginning to imagine a larger and loftier ideal.
HITHERTO a lightweight in the House of Burgesses, he threw himself into its work and emerged a leader. He approved the May 1769 Virginia Resolves declaring that only Virginians could tax themselves. When the new governor, Lord Botetourt, punished such effrontery by dissolving the House, Washington successfully presented George Mason’s nonimportation plan to his colleagues, gathered extra-legally—as so often during this tumultuous period—at Williamsburg’s Raleigh Tavern.96 In March 1773 he voted to start a Virginia Committee of Correspondence, part of a colonies-wide network created to harmonize the colonies’ response to British encroachment and to convene a meeting of colonial representatives.97
When Britain savagely retaliated for the December 1773 Boston Tea Party with the 1774 Intolerable Acts, closing the town’s port and suspending the colony’s charter, Washington understood, he wrote in June 1774, that “the cause of Boston . . . ever will be considered as the cause of America,” for the English were “endeavouring by every piece of Art and despotism to fix the Shakles of Slavry upon us.”98 After all, he wrote a friend on July 4, “Does it not appear, as clear as the sun in its meridian brightness, that there is a regular, systematic plan formed to fix the right and practice of taxation upon us,” and “that the administration is determined to stick at nothing to carry its point?”99
On July 17, George Mason came to Mount Vernon with a draft of his Fairfax Resolves, and, as the two friends wrote a final version together, Washington got a crash course in political theory, from natural rights to legitimacy to constitutions. The next day, with Washington in the chair, the Fairfax County constituents whom he represented in the House of Burgesses approved the radical Lockean Resolves, which declared that the Americans’ ancestors had established the colonies at their own expense, not the Crown’s, and that they had formed a compact with Britain, confirmed by charters, promising them all the rights guaranteed by the British constitution, particularly the right of “being governed by no Laws, to which they have not given their Consent, by Representatives freely chosen by themselves”—meaning our “own Provincial Assemblys or Parliaments.” Since “Taxation and Representation are in their Nature inseperable,” it follows that “the Powers over the People of America now claimed by the British House of Commons, in whose Election we have no Share,” are “totally incompatible with the Privileges of a free People, and the natural Rights of Mankind,” and “must if continued, establish the most grievous and intollerable Species of Tyranny and Oppression, that ever was inflicted upon Mankind.”100
Two days later, Washington put it in simpler terms in a letter to a friend: “I think the Parliament of Great Britain hath no more Right to put their hands into my Pocket, without my consent, than I have to put my hands into your’s, for money.” Indeed, my “Nature . . . recoil[s] at the thought of Submitting to Measures which I think Subversive of every thing that I ought to hold dear and valuable”—and “the voice of Mankind is with me.”101
In August, the Virginia burgesses, locked out of their chamber again, renamed themselves the Virginia Convention and adopted many of the Fairfax Resolves, including Washington and Mason’s plan for an ever-harsher trade boycott. They chose Washington and six others as delegates to the First Continental Congress. The veteran soldier saw war looming. “I could wish, I own, that the dispute had been left to Posterity to determine,” he wrote later that month, “but the Crisis is arrivd where we must assert our Rights, or Submit to every imposition that can be heap’d upon us.”102
Mrs. Washington, too, sensed what was in store: when her husband set off from Mount Vernon for the Congress in Philadelphia with fellow delegates Patrick Henry and Edmund Pendleton on August 31, 1774, she “talked like a Spartan mother to her son on going to battle,” Pendleton recalled. “ ‘I hope you will stand firm—I know George will,’ she said.”103
WHILE WASHINGTON POLITICKED with notables of the other colonies, George Mason, also filled with foreboding, set up a Fairfax County militia that, along with four nearby county militias, elected Washington its commander and started “arming, equipping, and training for the worst event,” Washington noted approvingly. On October 9, shortly before the Congress adjourned, Washington wrote that without doubt “more blood will be spilt on this occasion (if the Ministry are determind to push matters to extremity) than history has ever yet furnished instances of in the annals of North America; and such a vital wound given to the peace of this great Country, as time itself cannot cure or eradicate the remembrance of.”104 In preparation, before he left Philadelphia, he outfitted himself with a new silk sash, a gorget, and epaulettes.105
The March 1775 meeting of the Virginia Convention—where Patrick Henry cried, “Give me liberty or give me death!”—elected Washington as one of Virginia’s seven delegates to the Second Continental Congress. The next month, when the shots rang out at Lexington and Concord, Washington knew that the war had begun. “Unhappy it is,” he wrote, “that a Brother’s Sword has been sheathed in a Brother’s breast, and that, the once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with Blood, or Inhabited by Slaves. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous Man hesitate in his choice?”106 Not he: he arrived at the Congress in May in his uniform. On June 15, his fellow delegates unanimously elected him commander in chief of the American armies and toasted him at a midnight supper. Moved by the honor, he rose to thank them; and they, moved by the enormity of what they were doing, rose with him, and drank standing in solemn silence.107
As the vastness of his task sank in over the next few days, Washington had two conflicting feelings that recurred at his life’s turning points. Of course he worried he might fail—he was going up against the world’s greatest military. “I am now embarked on a tempestuous Ocean from whence, perhaps, no friendly harbour is to be found,” he wrote. “It is an honour I wished to avoid . . . from a thorough conviction of my own Incapacity & want of experience in the conduct of so momentous a concern.” He hoped, however, to come through it “with some good to the common cause & without Injury (from want of knowledge) to my own reputation.” But “as reputation derives its principal support from success, . . . it will be remembered I hope that no desire, or insinuation, of mine placed me in this situation.”108 To his familiar love of fame, he now adds a new concern: Will people recognize that his inner motives are pure, that he values the public good more than his own repute—and certainly more than his own fortune, for he had refused a salary for his service? There are times when you can see a culture’s moral life revising
itself, Lionel Trilling once said: here, the arbiter of honor is migrating from the outer world to the inner conscience.109 George Washington now began to live as examined a life as Hamlet—except that he could act, with a vengeance.
But along with his fear of inadequacy went a remarkable self-assurance, tied to his public spirit, that shines out from the moving letter he wrote his wife from Philadelphia, telling her he was off to war. Despite “my unwillingness to part with you and the Family,” he writes, “it was utterly out of my power to refuse this appointment without exposing my Character to such censures as would have reflected dishonour upon myself, and . . . could not, and ought not to be pleasing to you, & must have lessend me considerably in my own esteem.” But clearly he had been pondering why such amazing strokes of good fortune had befallen him, preserving his life in lethal firefights and, through the unlikeliest chain of circumstance, making him rich, and he had reached the same conclusion as the Indian chief who had tried so unsuccessfully to kill him: some great fate must await him. “[A]s it has been a kind of destiny that has thrown me upon this Service, I shall hope that my undertaking of it, is designd to answer some good purpose,” he writes. “I shall rely therefore, confidently, on that Providence which has heretofore preservd, & been bountiful to me, not doubting but I shall return safe to you in the fall.” Like any good soldier, however, he made his will and sent it with the letter.110
4
General Washington
WASHINGTON LOVED THEATER—Shakespeare, Sheridan, and above all Addison’s patriotic Roman tragedy Cato—and a good thing, too: for running the war, and all his later career, required adroit stagecraft. He became a virtuoso of appearance, a paragon of role playing, who could move an audience to passion, to tears, and to action. And of course he loved dressing for a role.