by Ron Chernow
In 1785 Washington formed an institutional tie that led him ineluctably back into national politics. His western trip the previous autumn had rekindled his fervent faith in the Potomac River as the gateway to America’s interior. After the trip he lobbied Virginia governor Benjamin Harrison to form a company that would make the Potomac, with its stony obstructions, waterfalls, and rapids, navigable to the headwaters of the Ohio. Completing the linkage would require additional canals, locks, and portages. However partial he was to the Potomac, Washington also held out the possibility of extending the James River. He pressed Madison and others in the Virginia House of Delegates to champion the navigation project, then took up the same cause with Maryland legislators in Annapolis. Since Virginia and Maryland shared rights to the Potomac, any project required the joint approval of both states. “It is now near 12 at night,” an exhausted Washington wrote to Madison from Annapolis on December 28, “and I am writing with an aching head, having been constantly employed in this business since the 22nd without assistance from my colleagues.”16 Madison was agog at Washington’s stamina. “The earnestness with which he espouses the undertaking is hardly to be described,” he remarked to Jefferson, “and shows that a mind like his, capable of grand views . . . cannot bear a vacancy.”17
Washington’s advocacy of the Potomac project united a private motivation (to enhance the wealth of western landowners such as himself) with a political motivation (to bind western settlers to the United States and forge a national identity). He was disturbed by ongoing clashes between settlers and Indians but thought it fruitless to try to stem the restless droves of immigrants pushing ever farther westward. Although the government couldn’t halt this tide, it could guide it into constructive channels. “The spirit of emigration is great,” he told Richard Henry Lee. “People have got impatient and tho[ugh] you cannot stop the road, it is yet in your power to mark the way.”18
Washington became something of a monomaniac about the Potomac River project, and more than one Mount Vernon visitor was trapped in the talons of this obsession. When Elkanah Watson stayed there in January 1785, he described the inland navigation scheme as Washington’s “constant and favorite theme.”19 Waving away questions about the Revolutionary War and dwelling compulsively on the river project, Washington computed the distances from Tidewater Virginia to spots in the interior. “Hearing little else for two days from the persuasive tongue of the great man,” wrote Watson, “I confess completely infected me with the canal mania.”20
In early January 1785 Virginia and Maryland decided to survey the two potential waterways to the Ohio Country and incorporated a pair of private companies, the Potomac River Company and the James River Company, to extend those rivers into the interior. To finance this extensive work, the legislatures would allow entrepreneurs to charge tolls on the waterways. Imagining that the companies would be quite lucrative, Washington had no qualms about businessmen booking large profits as long as their work served the public weal and provided a model for future government action.
While Washington rejoiced over his legislative victories, the state of Virginia threw him into a profound dilemma by deeding him a gift of fifty shares of Potomac River Company stock and one hundred shares of James River Company stock to recognize his services to the state. Having sacrificed a salary throughout the war, Washington was not about to accept payment now; nor did he want to seem vain or offend his fellow Virginians by brusquely dismissing their kind gesture. He admitted to Governor Harrison that “no circumstance has happened to me since I left the walks of public life, which has so much embarrassed me.” If he spurned the gift, he feared, people would think “an ostentatious display of disinterestedness or public virtue was the source of the refusal.” On the other hand, he wanted to remain free to articulate his views without arousing suspicions that “sinister motives had the smallest influence in the suggestion.”21 He valued his reputation for integrity, calling it “the principal thing which is laudable in my conduct.”22 Noting that such “gratuitous gifts are made in other countries,” Washington wanted to establish a new benchmark for the behavior of public figures in America and eliminate petty or venal motives.23
Perplexed, Washington sent a flurry of letters to confidants, asking how to handle the unwanted gift. Beleaguered by money problems at Mount Vernon, he nevertheless tried to project the cavalier image of an affluent planter who had far more money than he needed. Throughout his life he cherished the pose of noblesse oblige in public service, even if he could scarcely afford it. Referring to his lack of children, he told Henry Knox airily, “I have nobody to provide for and I have enough to support me through life in the plain and easy style in which I mean to spend the remainder of my days.”24 In fact, Washington had insufficient money to support himself, his wards, and his slaves, and his style of life was scarcely plain and easy. He came up with an enlightened solution: he would hold the gift shares in trust for public education, possibly for the creation of “two charity schools, one on each river for the education and support of the children of the poor and indigent,” especially those who had lost fathers in the war.25 The final disposition of the money was deferred for many years.
To iron out differences between Virginia and Maryland over Potomac navigation, Washington presided over an interstate conference at Mount Vernon in 1785. He was also elected president of the Potomac River Company, for which he tirelessly proselytized. In early August he climbed into a canoe and undertook the first of his periodic inspection tours of the Potomac, investigating submerged obstacles at Seneca Falls and Shenandoah Falls by personally shooting the rapids. He was also involved in hiring a European superintendent and dozens of indentured servants to build the canals and locks. Soon teams of slaves went to work, their heads shaved to make it more difficult for them to escape without detection. Washington’s ambition was huge: the lock canal constructed around Great Falls alone would rank as the biggest civil engineering project in eighteenth-century America. To carve open the interior, the Virginia legislature authorized the building of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which would connect the Potomac and Ohio rivers, and the Kanawha Canal, linking the James with the Great Kanawha River in western Virginia. Both projects took decades to reach fruition.
A determined man, George Washington reveled in having overcome great skepticism to establish the Potomac River Company. When Robert Hunter visited Mount Vernon in November, he noticed that his host engaged in uncharacteristic gloating: “The general sent the bottle about pretty freely after dinner and gave ‘Success to the navigation of the Potomac’ for his toast, which he has very much [at] heart, and when finished will, I suppose, be the first river in the world . . . He is quite pleased at the idea of the Baltimore merchants laughing at him and saying it was a ridiculous plan and would never succeed.”26
The plan to extend navigation of the Potomac influenced American history in ways that far transcended the narrow matter of commercial navigation. It created a set of practical problems that could be solved only by cooperation between Virginia and Maryland, setting a pattern for a seminal interstate conference at Annapolis in September 1786 and indeed the Constitutional Convention itself in 1787. Coordinating the efforts of two states confirmed Washington’s continental perspective and sense of the irreparable harm that could be done by squabbling among states unconstrained by an effective national government. When Edward Savage painted The Washington Family, he shrewdly made the Potomac River, wending its way west in the background, a central element of the composition. Washington continued to tout the Potomac as “the great avenue into the western country . . . which promises to afford a capacious asylum for the poor and persecuted of the earth.”27 The Potomac River Company never lived up to these grandiose expectations: in the nineteenth century it went bankrupt, having penetrated no farther than Cumberland in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. But its real value in American politics had long since been realized.
FOR ALL THE HOPEFULNESS of his postwar life, Washington retai
ned wistful recollections about his prewar existence, especially his relationship with George William and Sally Fairfax. Wartime duties had precluded him from acting as care-taker of Belvoir, and he was alarmed to hear rumors as early as 1778 that the estate was “verging fast to destruction.”28 Before the war the Fairfaxes had returned to England to follow a suit in Chancery, which involved a sizable estate left to George William by a relative; the case degenerated into a ghastly, never-ending Dickensian donnybrook. George William told Washington in August 1778 that the case was “as far from a conclusion as ever, owing to the villainy of my solicitor.”29 Lacking the income expected from the suit’s resolution and deprived of any money from Virginia, the hitherto rich couple had to retrench drastically. They were both broken in health and had bought a small cottage near Bath so they could take the spa waters. There a chastened General John Burgoyne, after his Saratoga defeat, sought out the couple and hand-delivered a personal letter from General George Washington.
During the last year of the war, Belvoir had been severely damaged by fire, but for more than a year Washington could neither find the time nor muster the nerve to visit it. Then in late January 1785 he made a midwinter visit and grew awash in nostalgia. On February 27 he sent a heartfelt letter to George William in which he described the ravages visited upon their beloved Belvoir: I took a ride there the other day to visit the ruins—and ruins indeed they are. The dwelling house and the two brick buildings in front underwent the ravages of the fire; the walls of which are very much injured. The other houses are sinking under the depredation of time and inattention and I believe are now scarcely worth repairing. In a word, the whole are, or very soon will be, a heap of ruin. When I viewed them—when I considered that the happiest moments of my life had been spent there—when I could not trace a room in the house (now all rubbish) that did not bring to my mind the recollection of pleasing scenes, I was obliged to fly from them and came home with painful sensations and sorrowing for the contrast.30
Whenever he gazed longingly toward Belvoir, he admitted, he wished that George William and Sally Fairfax would return to America and rebuild their residence while staying at Mount Vernon. He added that Martha joined him in this fervent wish.
This letter is remarkable in two ways. Washington states that the happiest moments of his life were spent not with his wife but with George William and Sally Fairfax, although one suspects he really had Sally in mind. Does the letter suggest that George William knew of the romantic liaison between his wife and Washington? Or does it tell us that their relationship was more an affectionate friendship than an adulterous affair, enabling Washington to refer to it with complete safety? Perhaps it confirms that Washington’s fondness for Sally Fairfax had been a youthful dalliance that everyone now recognized as such. We will never know the full truth of this tantalizing but finally murky story. The letter is also notable in showing us how incurably sentimental Washington was beneath the surface—he could experience an eruption of memories so overpowering that he had to flee the scene.
In reply, George William Fairfax talked of the picturesque valley of dairy farms in which he and Sally lived and asserted they were too old to contemplate a return to America. Sally had pored over Washington’s letter with great care, and his description of the ride to Belvoir had provoked an equally strong response in her. “Your pathetic description of the ruin of Belvoir House produced many tears and sighs from the former mistress of it,” wrote George William—doubtless what Washington yearned to hear.31 Sally volunteered to send Washington seeds for trees and shrubs for Mount Vernon, and he reacted with typical gallantry, reassuring George William that “while my attentions are bestowed on the nurture of [the seeds], it would, if anything was necessary to do it, remind me of the happy moments I have spent in conversations on this and other subjects with that lady at Belvoir.”32 So Washington again openly alluded to his special relationship with Sally Fairfax without fearing repercussions. After years of precarious health, George William Fairfax died on April 3, 1787. By that point the Constitutional Convention was looming, and Washington, sidetracked by political business, declined to act as American executor of his friend’s estate.
The themes of love and marriage were often on Washington’s mind after the war. Before it ended, Lund Washington had sounded him out on the prospective marriage of Jacky Custis’s widow, Eleanor Calvert Custis, to Dr. David Stuart. Washington customarily refrained from giving advice in such situations because if he supported it, he might push a couple into an unwanted marriage, but if he opposed it, the young couple would blithely ignore him anyway. Nevertheless he went on to say that if Eleanor asked him, he would counsel her thus: “I wish you would make a prudent choice, to do which many considerations are necessary: such as the family and connections of the man, his fortune (which is not the most essential in my eye), the line of conduct he has observed, and disposition and frame of his mind. You should consider what prospect there is of his proving kind and affectionate to you; just, generous, and attentive to your children; and how far his connections will be agreeable to you.”33 Rather glaringly absent from this eminently reasonable list is romance—perhaps the sole ingredient lacking in Washington’s otherwise happy, satisfying match with Martha. At the same time, he knew that genuine friendship formed the foundation of a marriage, and this, at the very least, he had found in abundance with his wife.
Martha viewed marriage in a similarly pragmatic light. When her niece Fanny contemplated marriage to George Augustine Washington, Martha tried to coach her in sizing up marital prospects. She recommended that Fanny look at a man’s character and worldly prospects—whether he was honest, upright, hardworking, and likely to be a good provider. She didn’t mention looks or charm or compatibility or any of the other romantic prerequisites that might preoccupy a modern woman.
When Fanny and George Augustine decided to get married, the Washingtons were jubilant about the match of these two young favorites. Before the October 1785 wedding, Washington paid for his nephew to spend time in the West Indies in an attempt to repair his health. Although the Washingtons invited the young couple to share the Mount Vernon mansion with them, the suggestion came loaded with one big caveat. As Washington told Lund, the young couple had been urged to “make this house their home till the squalling and trouble of children might become disagreeable.”34 By this point, the Washingtons had probably had their fill of the responsibility of caring for children.
Just as Washington’s postwar years were touched with many intimations of mortality, so Martha had many somber occasions to reflect on life’s brevity. In April 1785 an express messenger arrived at Mount Vernon bearing a double dose of dreadful news for her: her mother, seventy-five-year-old Frances Dandridge, and her last surviving brother, forty-eight-year-old Judge Bartholomew Dandridge, had died within nine days of each other. These deaths lengthened the already-long list of family losses Martha had endured, starting with the demise of her first husband and all four of her children. The death of her younger brother meant that, among her seven siblings, only her youngest sister, Betsy, was still alive. Like the Washingtons, the Dandridge clan seemed doomed to suffer untimely deaths.
The following year George Washington suffered two tremendous blows. He had always delighted in the bright young men in his military family, often finding it easier to befriend these protégés than his peers, and he had felt special warmth for Lieutenant Colonel Tench Tilghman, who handled his business matters in Baltimore. “I have often repeated to you that there are few men in the world to whom I am more sincerely attached by inclination than I am to you,” Washington had assured him.35 Genial and unassuming, Tilghman had entered fully into Washington’s confidence, and the latter was grief-stricken when the younger man died at age forty-one in April 1786. In a mighty tribute, Washington told Jefferson that his former aide had “as fair a reputation as ever belonged to a human character,” and he speculated that he mourned the death more keenly than anyone outside of Tilghman’s own family.36
/> Perhaps more consequential for America’s future was the demise of General Nathanael Greene at forty-three. Just as Washington and Greene had seen eye to eye on war-related matters, so they had viewed the country’s postwar turmoil with similar apprehension. Like Washington, Greene had developed a federal perspective and feared that the total autonomy of the states would culminate in feuding and anarchy. As he warned Washington, “Many people secretly wish that every state should be completely independent and that, as soon as our public debts are liquidated, that Congress should be no more—a plan that would be as fatal to our interest at home as ruinous to it abroad.”37 Unfortunately, Greene’s personal finances were in no less disorderly a state than those of the country at large: he had accumulated such heavy debts guaranteeing contracts for the southern army that it gave him “much pain and preyed heavily upon my spirits.”38 He also revealed to Washington in August 1784 that for two months he had experienced a “dangerous and disagree[able] pain” in his chest, which sounds like heart disease.39 In June 1786, while at his estate near Savannah, Georgia, he was seized at the table with a “violent pain in his eye and head,” followed by his death a few days later.40
Washington mourned Greene’s death for many months. Beyond personal grief, he knew that the country had lost a man cut out for bigger things. He had counted on Greene as a political ally and kindred spirit and said he regretted “the death of this valuable character, especially at this crisis, when the political machine seems pregnant with the most awful events.”41 It seems likely that, had Greene lived, Washington would have chosen him as the first secretary of war in preference to Henry Knox. Greene died in such dire economic straits that Washington volunteered to pay for the education of his son, George Washington Greene. It was yet another example of Washington’s extraordinary generosity in caring for the offspring of friends and family, whatever his own financial stringency.