by Ron Chernow
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.”26 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.27 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.”28 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.”29
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.”30 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.”31 Benjamin Franklin scarcely needed a lesson. “Celebrity may for a while flatter one’s vanity,” he wrote, “but its effects are troublesome.”32
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.”33 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.”34
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.”35 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.”36 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.”37 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.38 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.”39 Hunter discovered that his study, with a thousand books shelved behind glass, was the inner sanctum to w
hich 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.”40 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.”41
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.”42 One Dutchman also came away disgusted: “I could never be on familiar terms with the General—a man so cold, so cautious, so obsequious.”43 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.”44 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.
Sharp-eyed visitors noted how Martha Washington, in her cheerful, self-effacing way, facilitated social interactions, making her husband’s life easier. “As to his lady, she appears to me to be a plain, good woman, very much resembling the character of Lady Bountiful,” wrote Captain John Enys. She “is very cheerful and seems most happy when contributing towards the happiness of others.”45 Neither plain nor showy, she occupied a congenial middle ground. As a Rhode Island merchant noted, “Mrs. Washington is an elegant figure for a person of her years . . . She was dressed in a plain black satin gown with long sleeves” and a gauzy black cap with black bows. “All very neat, but not gaudy.”46 One snobbish female visitor professed shock at the doyenne’s unpretentious appearance. She and a friend had “dressed ourselves in our most elegant ruffles and silks and were introduced to her ladyship. And don’t you think, we found her knitting and with a specked [checked] apron on!”47
Among the major tourist attractions at Mount Vernon was Washington’s stable of Thoroughbred horses, especially those he rode during the war, who had earned a rest. Early in the war his steed of choice had been Blueskin, so named for its bluish-gray skin. In 1785 Washington gave the horse to a lady friend, Elizabeth French Dulany, adding an affectionate note of apology: “Marks of antiquity have supplied the place of those beauties with which this horse abounded—in his better days.”48 Even more renowned was his chestnut Nelson, who had served at Yorktown and withstood gunfire better than any other horse. After the war, Old Nelson was exempt from all work and able to graze to his heart’s content. “They have heard the roaring of many a cannon in their time,” one appreciative visitor said of these two horses. “. . . The General makes no manner of use of them now; he keeps them in a nice stable, where they feed away at their ease for their past services.”49
For the most part, Washington stuck close to home after his years of military exile and resigned from the vestry of Truro Parish, a position he’d held for twenty-two years. Some scholars have attributed this to political motives. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Anglican vestrymen still had to vow obedience to the “doctrine and discipline of the Church of England,” which had George III at its head.50 Obviously George Washington couldn’t submit to such a public pledge without provoking a brouhaha. During the next few years, as the Anglican Church distanced itself from its British roots and evolved into the Protestant Episcopal Church, Washington’s church attendance still remained intermittent. One explanation has been that a minister once chided Washington for failing to take communion, preaching that great men needed to set an example for the community. Perhaps taking umbrage, Washington continued to attend the church but avoided Sundays when communion was offered. One also wonders whether Washington didn’t feel an unseemly sense of being on public display at church, his presence attracting large crowds and adding to the already weighty burden of his celebrity.
After the war Washington was a far more voracious reader than generally recognized. Though hardly a Renaissance man on a par with Jefferson and Franklin, he pursued a broad range of interests throughout his life. Long an attentive reader of agricultural treatises and other books of practical knowledge, he also read the important literature of his time, and his library included volumes of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Milton, and Oliver Goldsmith, as well as Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary. In the spring of 1783, from his Newburgh headquarters, he had ordered books advertised for sale in a gazette, and one is impressed by the substantial works on the purchase list. For his eclectic postwar reading he had lined up Voltaire’s Letters to Several of His Friends, John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Showing a decided biographical bent, he ordered lives of Charles XII of Sweden, Louis XV of France, and Peter the Great of Russia. Apparently still hoping to make a trip to France, he ordered a French dictionary and grammar, although he showed little aptitude for foreign languages and made no discernible headway.
Though not notable for scintillating repartee, Washington enjoyed the society of writers and never felt intellectually threatened by their company. In May 1785 the lexicographer Noah Webster spent a day at Mount Vernon, angling to get Washington to support a copyright law in Virginia. In all likelihood, he furnished Washington with a copy of his Sketches of American Policy, which made the case for a strong central government. A surprising wheeler-dealer, Webster attempted to cut a deal with Washington: he would tutor Nelly and Washy gratis in exchange for unrestricted access to Washington’s papers. Scenting a bad bargain, Washington spurned the offer.
For ten days in June he entertained a well-known British historian, Catharine Macaulay Graham, and her younger husband. Taken with his visitor, he told Henry Knox that a “visit from a lady so celebrated in the literary world could not but be very flattering to me.”51 A woman with a very long, pale face, sharply accentuated by a very long, pale nose, she was an expert in English and Roman history. A radical Whig and a distinguished friend to American liberty, she entered into serious political talks with Washington. “It gave me pleasure to find that her sentim[en] ts respecting the inadequacy of the powers of Congress . . . coincided with my own,” Washington told Richard Henry Lee.52 Perhaps Washington was also subtly screening a potential biographer for himself, for he confessed to his diary: “Placed my military records into the hands of Mrs. Macaulay Graham for her perusal and amusem[en]t.”53 Dr. Samuel Johnson memorably satirized the female historian as a high-minded hypocrite, once asking her to show her faith in her egalitarian beliefs by inviting her footman to dine at her table. She never forgave Johnson for the taunt.
Washington’s desire to socialize with literary personalities likely arose from his belief that writers crowned those who won fame and ended up in history’s pantheon. In 1788, when he steered Lafayette to the American poet Joel Barlow, then resident in France, Washington described Barlow as “one of those bards who hold the keys of the gate by which patriots, sages, and heroes are admitted to immortality. Such are your ancient bards who are both the priest and doorkeepers to the temple of fame. And these, my dear Marquis, are no vulgar functions.”54 Washington went on to say that military heroes, far from being passive, could groom their own advocates: “In some instances . . . heroes have made poets, and poets heroes. Alexander the Great is said to have been enraptured with the poems of Homer and to have lamented that he had not
a rival muse to celebrate his actions.”55 The passage shows Washington’s underlying hunger for posthumous glory and how calculating he could be in gaining it. He ended the letter by lauding the golden ages of arms and arts under Louis XIV and Queen Anne and by expressing the hope that America would not be found “inferior to the rest of the world in the performance of our poets and painters.”56
For all of Washington’s professions of modesty, the thought of his high destined niche in history was never far from his mind. Few historical figures have so lovingly tended their image. As we have seen, he had issued detailed instructions for preserving his wartime papers. When the wagon train loaded with these bulky papers set out for Mount Vernon in November 1783, he fussed over their transport, telling the lieutenant entrusted with the mission that he shouldn’t cross the Susquehanna or the Potomac by ferry if the winds were too high or any other dangers arose. As if the wagons were encrusted with precious jewels, he delivered this warning: “The wagons should never be without a sentinel over them; always locked and the keys in your possession.”57 He experienced vast relief when the papers showed up safely at his home.
No sooner had these documents arrived than a would-be biographer, John Bowie, and a would-be historian of the Revolution, Dr. William Gordon, emerged from the woodwork. In an extraordinary tribute, Congress had given Washington access to its secret papers on the same terms as its members, enhancing the value of his cooperation to future historians. To maintain the tradition of military submission to civilian authority, Washington decided not to open his papers until Congress did likewise with its archives. Washington wasn’t reluctant to disclose the historical record; he just thought it might seem conceited and presumptuous to do so first and that a congressional decision would make it seem less self-aggrandizing. Of the two projects, Washington was more troubled by the biography, fearing his cooperation might smack of vanity. “I will frankly declare to you . . . that any memoirs of my life, distinct and unconnected with the general history of the war, would rather hurt my feelings than tickle my pride whilst I lived,” he told Dr. James Craik. “I had rather glide gently down the stream of life, leaving it to posterity to think and say what they please of me, than by an act of mine to have vanity or ostentation imputed to me.”58