The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  Sensing he hadn’t carried his point, he reached into his pocket to read a congressman’s letter reaffirming the official promises. But he couldn’t see the script and drew out a pair of spectacles that none but his closest aides had ever known him to wear. “Gentlemen, you must pardon me,” the fifty-one-year-old, visibly aged commander said, putting them on. “I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind.” That homely gesture brought the human reality straight to the officers’ hearts, and tears stung many eyes. He read them the letter and left the Temple, and they unanimously voted to tell him that they “reciprocated his affectionate expressions with the greatest sincerity of which the human heart is capable.” The danger passed—and Congress did make good on its promise, to the extent of five years’ full pay in lieu of half pay for life.144 But even so, Washington the realist also knew that many officers—who “have been obliged to dress, and appear in character” and therefore “to anticipate their pay”—would consequently have debts that “will compell them to part with” the government bonds they will receive as their pensions for whatever they might fetch from “unfeeling, avaricious speculators,” such as he had been when he bought up officers’ land claims after the French and Indian War.145

  ON THE EIGHTEENTH of April in ’83, eight years to the day after Paul Revere’s midnight ride, Washington announced to his troops the official end of hostilities. The war—in which one American soldier in four had died, compared with one in five in the Civil War and one in forty in World War II—was really over, and all soldiers should be proud of “the dignifyed part they have been called to act . . . on the stage of human affairs” in “erecting this stupendous fabrick of Freedom and Empire . . . and establishing an Asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and religions,” he told them in his favorite imagery. “Nothing now remains but for the actors of this mighty Scene . . . to close the Drama with applause; and retire from the Military Theatre.”146

  When the signed peace treaty reached America in November, the General wrote a Farewell Address to his army, taking “leave of those he holds most dear” and thanking them for their “unparalleled perseverence . . . through almost every possible suffering and discouragement for . . . eight long years”—a feat “little short of a standing miracle.” In his first General Orders as commander in July 1776, hoping to make the army America’s first truly national institution, he had urged his men to lay aside “all Distinctions of Colonies” to serve “the great and common cause in which we are all engaged.” Now he marveled at how well they succeeded. “Who, that was not a witness, could imagine that the most violent local prejudices would cease so soon, and that Men who came from the different parts of the Continent . . . would instantly become but one patriotic band of Brothers,” he told them, echoing Henry V. As so often, he closed with a benediction: “May the choicest of heaven’s favours, both here and hereafter, attend those who, under the devine auspices, have secured innumerable blessings for others.”147

  On December 4 he said good-bye to some thirty of his officers at a buffet at Black Sam Fraunces’s Tavern, still standing (much altered) on Pearl Street at Manhattan’s southern tip. He toasted them with a trembling hand and “a heart filled with love and gratitude,” he said, and his face streamed with tears as each of them, beginning with Knox and Steuben—also “suffused in tears,” a colonel wrote—came up to be hugged and kissed. And then he walked across the room, waved his hand, and was gone.148

  On his way home to Virginia, he fulfilled another promise he had made when he took command. “When we assumed the Soldier,” he said just after Bunker Hill, “we did not lay aside the Citizen.”149 On December 23, he appeared before Congress and, his hand trembling again, surrendered the parchment commission he had received eight and a half years earlier to the civil authorities who had granted it, dramatizing the subordination of the military to the civil power. “Having now finished the work assigned me,” he said in a voice thick with emotion, “I retire from the great theatre of Action.” When George III heard that he intended to return like Cincinnatus to his farm, he exclaimed with amazement, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world!” On Christmas Eve 1783, private citizen Washington dismounted his horse at his beloved Mount Vernon’s welcoming door.150

  5

  President Washington

  A MONTH AFTER WASHINGTON RETURNED home to Mount Vernon, he wrote Lafayette how happy he was to be “under the shadow of my own Vine & my own Fig tree, free from the bustle of a camp & the busy scenes of public life.” Unlike “the Soldier who is ever in pursuit of Fame,” he wrote, “I am retireing within myself,” content to “move gently down the stream of life, until I sleep with my Fathers.”1 To Lafayette’s wife, he wrote to invite the whole family to visit him in his “small Villa, with the implements of Husbandry and Lambkins around me,” where she will “see the plain manner in which we live, & meet the rustic civility, & . . . taste the simplicity of rural life.”2

  Balderdash, of course. There was nothing sentimentally pastoral about his busy Virginia life, and even on the banks of the Potomac he remained a public figure: Mount Vernon thronged with dignitaries and curiosity seekers, up to thirty a day, whom the rules of hospitality required him to entertain handsomely, as well as provide for their servants and horses. On June 30, 1785, a year and a half after his return home, he noted in his diary that he “dined with only Mrs. Washington, which I believe is the first instance of it since my retirement from public life.”3

  Plus he had an ambitious house to finish, and it took two frustrating years just to find the needed workmen. He was willing to take them from anywhere, he wrote Tench Tilghman. “If they are good workmen, they may be of Assia, Africa, or Europe. They may be Mahometans, Jews, or Christians of any Sect—or they may be Atheists—I would however prefer middle aged, to young men.”4 As he searched, his merchant friend Samuel Vaughan sent him an Italian mantelpiece he claimed he had no place for. Washington hesitated to accept it, judging from its ten huge crates that it was sure to be “too elegant & costly by far . . . for my own room, and republican stile of living.” But he couldn’t resist installing it, in what he always called the “New Room,” and it did indeed have swains, shepherdesses, milkmaids, plowboys, oxen, and—yes—lambs, beautifully carved upon its sumptuous creamy marble surface, between two Ionic columns of even more gorgeous golden stone.

  When he finally found skilled craftsmen early in 1786, he had them follow the mantel’s lead and incorporate in the new dining room’s exquisitely delicate and restrained plasterwork such instruments of husbandry as scythes, sickles, and rakes, and he finished the room, with its rich but plain verdigris wallpaper, with the same chaste refinement.5 The pastoral imagery adorning a lofty, formal, neoclassical room, in the style that Robert Adam had made all the rage in English aristocratic mansions, nicely embodied the tensions in Washington’s life at this time. Unlike the cozy domesticity of the rest of Mount Vernon, the imposing New Room was a stage set for public functions—even down to the damask-draped boards on trestles in lieu of a dining table, easy to remove, stretch, or shrink, depending on the scene being played.

  He also needed, from two continents, such basic materials as flagstones to floor his ninety-two-foot-long piazza, he wrote in 1784, and he hoped he could get some “with a rich polished face” in “common Irish Marble (black and white)” or even in “the very cheap kind of Marble, good in quality,” that he had heard was for sale in Flanders.6 He needed glass for the grand Venetian window in the dining room, boarded up until now. The piazza floor and the New Room weren’t finished until Washington was away at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and at that crowning moment of the Founding, fittingly, the weathervane, which Washington had a Philadelphia carpenter fashion as a dove of peace with an olive branch in her mouth, went up on top of the cupola of the victorious warrior’s house, where the swords and spears seemed to have been stuccoed into plowshares and pruning hooks.7

  WHEN HE HAD WRITTEN to
the Marquise de Lafayette, not only did his “Cottage,” as he coyly called it, stand unfinished, but even the lambkins were a work in progress: two years later he was trying to buy a couple of hundred, his stock of sheep having dwindled during his absence.8 Wishing to improve his five farms at Mount Vernon, he leapt at British agronomist Arthur Young’s 1786 offer to send him his farming journal as well as seeds and tools from England. “Agriculture has ever been amongst the most favourite amusements of my life, though I never possessed much skill in the art,” Washington confided to his new correspondent, and what skill he had had withered after “nine years total inattention.” But he did know that Virginia’s farming methods were “unproductive” and “ruinous,” so he was thrilled to have Young’s scientific guidance, and he asked for bushels and pounds of top-quality seeds, two of “the simplest, & best constructed Plows,” and perhaps even a “good Plowman at low wages.”9

  His “greatest pride is now to be thought the first farmer in America,” a visitor reported, and Washington worked hard at it, riding round on daily inspections, always ready to get off his horse and work beside his slaves and hired hands when needed—though, when he had his hounds with him, he would just as quickly jump back in the saddle and gallop after them if they scented a fox. “It’s astonishing with what niceness he directs everything in the building way,” his visitor noted, “condescending even to measure the things himself, that all may be perfectly uniform.”10 As Washington wrote when he was president, “I shall begrudge no reasonable expense that will contribute to the improvement and neatness of my Farms; for nothing pleases me better than to see them in good order, and every thing trim, handsome, and thriving about them.”11

  His chief claim to agricultural fame is, oddly . . . the mule. The king of Spain had promised (without irony) to send him two prize jackasses “as a mark of his esteem,” only one of which made it safely to Mount Vernon in 1786. Washington set out to breed the creature, whom he named Royal Gift, with American mares, to produce a hybrid, hardier and stronger than a horse, and cheaper to feed. Royal Gift, disappointingly, could scarcely perform “his labours—for labour it appears to be”—“seldomer, or with more majestic solemnity,” Washington reported. “However, I am not without hope that when he becomes a little better acquainted with republican enjoyments, he will amend his manners, and fall into a better & more expeditious mode of doing business.”12 He fortunately did, and the fifty-seven mules that Mount Vernon produced proved the worth of these animals to American farmers and earned Washington—not Royal Gift—the title of “Father of the American Mule.”13

  EVEN AS “a private citizen on the banks of the Potomac,” as he liked to call himself, Washington kept trying to shape public affairs, and his words and actions disprove the myth that in politics he became but a stately figurehead for the views of Madison and Hamilton. Not at all. Well before he left the army, the idea of a constitutional convention took root in his mind. On March 4, 1783, he wrote Hamilton from his Newburgh camp that congressmen must fire up their constituents to fix “the great defects of their Constitution” by giving Congress adequate power. Otherwise, “the blood we have spilt in the course of an Eight years war, will avail us nothing.”14 In June, he stressed the need for an “indissoluble Union of the States under one Federal Head.”15 By July, he was calling for “a Convention of the People” to make the states as subordinate to the federal government as the counties are to the state governments. How can anyone fear this step? he exclaimed. “For Heavens sake who are Congress? are they not the Creatures of the People, amenable to them for their Conduct, and dependant from day to day on their breath? Where then can be the danger of giving them such Powers as are adequate to the great ends of Government?”16 The need for an energetic central government is “as plain as any problem in Euclid,” he wrote from Mount Vernon in 1784.17 Too bad the people weren’t as quick to understand their rational self-interest and pursue it, he sighed in May 1786. “It is one of the evils of democratical governments that the people, not always seeing and frequently mislead, must often feel before they can act right.”18

  From early on, too, he mocked the Jeffersonian fear of commerce. Why waste time speculating “whether the luxury, effeminacy, & corruption which are introduced by it, are counterballanced by the conveniencies and wealth of which it is productive,” he wrote acidly in October 1785, since by now “the spirit of Trade which pervades these States is not to be restrained”? The only worthwhile question is how to regulate trade justly among the states—and, in indolent Virginia, to “force this spirit” before the state falls behind its neighbors. He did his part by hosting a conference at Mount Vernon of Virginia and Maryland dignitaries in March 1785, trying to make a reality of his cherished Potomac canal idea to encourage the industry of the West and knit the country into a commercial unity, with Virginia a key entrepôt.19

  The gravest danger of the existing ineffectual government of thirteen sovereign states pulling in different directions and canceling each other out, he warned, was anarchy. “Liberty, when it degenerates into licentiousness, begets confusion, and frequently ends in Tyranny,” he wrote in 1783. Three years later, in August 1786, he saw (or thought he saw) that prediction come horrifyingly true in Shays’s Rebellion, a violent aftershock of Britain’s postwar closure of its West Indian ports to American ships, as being no longer British. That move nearly halved U.S. exports and sparked a depression, nowhere harsher than in mercantile New England. Thousands of desperate, pitchfork-wielding young farmers in western Massachusetts tried to wrest weapons from the Springfield armory to close the courts before judges could seize their farms for tax delinquency or allow creditors to foreclose. Henry Knox, sent to quell the revolt, reported that the rebels’ “creed is, that the property of the United States has been protected from confiscation of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all,” Washington wrote Madison in November, adding his own incredulous italics. Further, Knox reported, “They are determined to anihilate all debts public & private.” Washington—who had spent two months on his western lands in the fall of 1784 trying to evict squatters and collect rents from his deadbeat legitimate tenants, and two more years in lawsuits to vindicate his property claims—drew his own conclusions about the breakdown of the Lockean social compact: “What stronger evidence can be given of the want of energy in our governments than these disorders? If there exists not a power to check them, what security has a man of life, liberty, or property?”20

  THE CONFERENCE he called at Mount Vernon to discuss chartering a Potomac canal company proved as fateful as the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings that proverbially changes the climate on the other side of the world. It led to a further meeting of five states on national issues in Annapolis in September 1786, that, pushed by delegates Hamilton and Madison, scheduled a constitutional convention for May 1787 in Philadelphia. Just after Christmas 1786, Madison and other Virginia notables asked Washington to head the state’s delegation, “as a mark of the earnestness of Virginia,” wrote Madison, and an enticement “to the most select characters of every part of the Confederacy” to come.21 General Knox weighed in, with shrewd insight into what made his old chief tick, telling him that, as he was sure to be named the convention’s president, its success would be “highly honorable to your fame . . . and doubly entitle you to the glorious republican epithet ‘The Father of Your Country.’”22 Given Washington’s longtime support for such a step—“to avoid, if possible, civil discord, or other impending evils,” as he put it—he knew he had to go.23 He performed what became his characteristic hard-to-get dance, but he went, aiming to achieve “no temporizing expedient” but “radical cures,” he wrote Madison, that “will stamp wisdom and dignity on the proceedings.”24

  But just as with a problem in Euclid, Washington could calculate the angles: accepting this appointment, he ruefully told Virginia governor Edmund Randolph, “will, I fear, have a tendency to sweep me back into the tide of public affairs.”25
The fame he had already won conferred the aura of his prestige on the Convention, and that prestige would be essential to legitimate whatever the Convention brought forth. Deeply aware of his symbolic role, he wore his military uniform when he accepted the meeting’s presidency on May 25, 1787, and he presided with the firm and quiet dignity of a judge, speaking rarely and keeping delegates in line.26 That Olympian reserve, heightening the mystique of his prestige, influenced the delegates in their shaping of the executive branch: Pierce Butler of South Carolina opined that they would not have made it so strong “had not many members cast their eyes toward General Washington as president and shaped their ideas of the powers to a president by their opinion of his virtue.”27