First of Men

by Ferling, John;

  From this moment everything must have seemed anticlimactic to Washington. New York, the scene of his worst defeats in this war, a recurrent subject in his thoughts for seven long years, had been restored to American control. At last the war really was over.

  He remained in town until the weather permitted Carleton to sail. At times it must have seemed that the town would not let him leave even then, for dinners and congratulatory affairs crowded in on him. But finally, on December 4, all was clear. He summoned his officers for the final time, now for a luncheon of cold meats, wine, and brandy at Fraunces’s Tavern. The men gathered at noon. Four general officers, perhaps a score from the lower grades, were present; among these men only Knox had been with the commander since that first day at Cambridge. The meeting was fraught with emotion, and with an intense consciousness of the past and the future, for these men knew that they were witnesses to the end of an epoch, and that their lives would never again be the same. Washington made no speech. What was left to say? At the end of the meal he simply asked each man to come up and say goodbye individually. Many recalled later that the commander wept.84

  Then he was gone. Accompanied now by just one aide, David Humphreys, he was conveyed by barge to New Jersey, then he began the long, familiar ride home, alternately traveling on horseback and in a carriage. Another wagon brought along his wartime possessions, his uniforms, his bed, his eating utensils, and packed with those items were gifts, some that he had received, some that he had purchased during a brief trip to Philadelphia in October or while in New York. For Martha he brought lockets and sashes, hats and hose and an umbrella; there were books and a fiddle and a whirligig for the grandchildren. And for himself there was’a new pair of reading glasses, some books to use the spectacles on, a hunting rifle, a few bottles of good wine, and the delicacies that he loved—walnuts and brazil nuts, capers and olives, anchovies and raisins.85

  Four days out of New York the general reached Philadelphia, where, for him anyway, the war had begun. Business detained him for a week, then he was off again. He paused briefly in Baltimore before riding on toward his next-to-last stop, Annapolis, where Congress had moved in November.

  Washington had one last piece of public business to transact. Quietly he submitted his expense account (which Congress scrutinized into 1784 before it reported that the general had made an error; he had shortchanged himself by one dollar, they declared, and they awarded him $64, 355.30 in paper securities), then at noon on the 23rd the legislators formally received him. The session was gaveled to order by the president, Thomas Mifflin, once his aide, then his quartermaster general. When the unusually large gathering of lawmakers and onlookers fell quiet, he called General Washington forward. Slowly, almost faintly, the general read his final address as commander in chief, this one his resignation, an act that was in order, he said, because the United States, now independent and sovereign, had become “a respectable Nation.” In closing, he said, he “resign[ed] with satisfaction the Appointment I accepted with diffidence.”86

  It was a brief ceremony, mercifully. He had promised his wife that he would enjoy Christmas dinner with her at home. He kept his promise. In the last lingering rays of light on Christmas Eve he spotted Mount Vernon. Perhaps he reined his huge gray mount to a slower pace so he could fully enjoy the sight. Certainly there no longer was any hurry. It had been ten years and five days since the Boston Tea Party set in motion the tumultuous events over which he had presided. But now they were over. At last he was home—to stay. As he had told Congress the previous day: “I retire from the great theater of Action.”

  PART THREE

  13

  A Brief Retirement

  “I have had my day”

  Mount Vernon. At last. A place where the retired general could be “under the shadow of my own Vine and my own Fig-tree, free from the bustle of a camp and the busy scenes of public life.”1

  The Mount Vernon to which Washington returned differed in many ways from the estate he had left behind that humid morning in 1775 when he had set out with Richard Henry Lee for Philadelphia and the Continental Congress. Almost a year before his departure he had initiated a program of extensive alterations on the estate, hiring a master builder, ordering the necessary materials, and then in the spring of 1774 seeing work commence. The plan was to transform his handsome country farmhouse into a larger, more opulent estate befitting the status of a Virginia planter, adding to one side a section that included a study or library on the ground floor and a bedchamber above, and to the other side a high-ceilinged banquet room; alterations to the ceiling and the fireplace in the old dining room also went forward, while outside a piazza was planned for the back of the house and a cupola was proposed for the roof. The grounds continued to be improved too, work that had begun shortly after Patsy’s death. This landscaping project soon grew quite ambitious, as Washington came to envision not only gardens but the addition of a palisade, either a formal fence or an arcaded wall that connected the main house to the two front buildings.2 Construction had not proceeded very far before the war lured Washington away, but the workmen’s toil continued in his absence, overseen, of course, by Lund Washington and orchestrated through occasional letters from the owner to his manager.

  For years after 1774 scaffolding obscured portions of the exterior of Mount Vernon, and sections of the rich, green lawn that had rolled out from the house were transformed into trampled, dusty marl in the summer, to an unsightly bog in other months. Progress was slow. At the start of the project it had taken the sharp-eyed owner only a few days to learn that the work “goes on better whilst I am present, than in my absence from the workmen,” and his eight years away from the estate had done nothing to hasten the job’s completion.3 But undertakings of this sort always proceeded at a crawl, regardless of the workers. Wood had to be cut and hauled to the building site. Before nailing it into place, it was wise to give the lumber, especially the heavy beams, a prolonged exposure to the sun; otherwise, warping was certain to result. Artisans worked by hand, moreover, using a vast array of tools whose very names today sound quaint: the ripping chisel, whip saw, frame saw, pit saw, gouge, piercer, gimlet, and the jack.

  Before Washington departed for the war, the south wing—the library addition—had been raised. By late 1776, thirty months after work began, the exterior of the north addition also was completed, and the following year the piazza was erected. But in the next two years little was accomplished. In 1778 the chief builder, together with one assistant, were the sole workers, and in 1779 all labor was left to an assistant, a sad development that arose because—in Lund’s view—the head of the endeavor was a “worthless” sort. The last really major undertaking carried out before the general’s return had been the erection of the rear portico, and that had been in 1777. Nearly a hundred feet in length and almost thirty feet high—this airy back porch was supported by eight massive wooden pillars. But the most striking feature of this addition was that it was without precedent in the Virginia of that day, an innovation by a man who, though he seldom sought to be different, evidently took to heart his plan to sit “under the shadow” of his mythical fig.4

  The completion of these alterations occupied much of Washington’s attention upon his return, that and the replacement of Mount Vernon’s roof, the gradual impairment of which Lund earlier had warned, as well as the mending of chronic leaks about his new cupola. He also had to oversee what had not been finished in his absence. The doors, windows, and floors were in place in his banquet room, but work had not begun on the interior walls; he wished to have the walls stuccoed, as that was the “present taste in England,” but he had not decided on the best color (“plain blew or green” were his preferences), and he had no idea whether stucco should be painted or whether it was fashionable to install this cement-based material below the chair rail. Likewise, while the roof was up on his rear piazza, nothing had been done about the floor of this porch, and that set the general to investigating tile, black and white flagstone, and s
imilarly colored marble. (He finally settled on imported white flagstone cut to uniform size, each no less than twelve inches square.5

  Even before the arrival of the first hot days in the summer of 1784, Washington discovered that a new ice house built following his return was next to worthless, although he was uncertain whether it was due to shoddy workmanship or because he had packed it with snow, not ice. On the other hand, although he had intended to have several chimneys rebuilt and to replace some existing mantels, close inspection convinced him that they were unlikely to be improved. If he saved his money in that instance, he had been home for only a few months before he hit upon the need for a greenhouse, and he set his skilled servants to building one, only to discover that it would be too small. He wrote Tench Tilghman, his former aide, to request that he learn the dimensions of a hothouse he remembered seeing on a plantation in Maryland. By 1786 most of the remodeling was complete, though Washington soon learned what homeowners with a passion for puttering eventually discover—that work on a house never ends; in that year he was searching for copper gutters and downspouts, as well as for a more solid pavement for his serpentine stone driveways.6

  As concerned as was Washington with the buildings at Mount Vernon, he devoted almost as much attention to the grounds of his estate. He procured flowers and shrubs from many parts of America and looked for grass seed that would enable him to have the “best turf” possible. The variety of trees that he sought was almost limitless: he wanted balsams and white pines, spruces, hemlocks, magnolias, live oaks, aspens, locusts, redbuds, and even palmettoes, and he succeeded in acquiring some of each species, planting them adjacent to his existing peach orchard and amongst this or that coppice of cherry and plum, pear and apple. He returned from one of his journeys with pecan seedlings, and by the 1790s he had a small grove that annually bore several bushels for its delighted owner. Many of his trees came as gifts from friends. Governor Clinton sent lindens and limes (as well as sprigs of ivy), other acquaintances dispatched lilacs and mock orange and paw paw trees, and “Light Horse Harry” Lee had buckeye nuts delivered to Mount Vernon.7

  Washington also sought to grace his estate with exotic animals. He imported pheasants and partridges, but the birds soon died. (He sent the carcasses of two of the ill-fated fowls to Charles Willson Peale, who stuffed and exhibited them in his museum in Philadelphia.) He had better luck in his endeavors to create a deer park, all the rage in fashionable English circles. He acquired a buck doe, and six fawns of the “best English deer,” which he confined until they were tame, and he additionally procured six American deer. By 1787 he gleefully reported that his little drove at last had begun to multiply. However, what would really set Mount Vernon apart, he thought, was a buffalo herd, and Washington set out to acquire some of this species, but in this quest he came up empty-handed.8

  Each of Washington’s endeavors—interior and exterior—proceeded at a snail’s pace, slowed by the unavailability of skilled workmen, especially joiners and bricklayers. Although many styled themselves tradesmen, he discovered that few really were journeymen artisans. In one instance he evidently hired a “bricklayer,” only to discover that the man really was experienced only in mixing mortar. Find some workers, he beseeched Tench Tilghman; if they were good, it mattered not whether they were Africans or Asians, “Mahometans, Jews or Christians of any Sect, or . . . Atheists.” In fact, despite his antipathy toward acquiring additional slaves, he even purchased one bondsman presumed to be an artisan with a skill that his building project required. Mostly, however, he sought to find his workers among the pool of German redemptioners who entered Virginia, or among free laborers. But he was not always successful. He had been home for eighteen months before he located a joiner, and more than two years after returning to Mount Vernon he still was looking for a bricklayer.9

  Mount Vemon, East Front, overlooking the Potomac River, by an unknown artist (ca. 1792). Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union.

  Mount Vemon, West Front, by an unknown artist (ca. 1792). Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union.

  Those workers whom Washington owned or hired could have attested that time had not mellowed the master of Mount Vernon. He remained the exacting taskmaster he had been before the war, expecting his labor force to be at work from daylight to dark. He carefully planned the myriad operations of his estate a year in advance, this to assure that his workers would not be left with “nothing to do.” Moreover, he expected the managers of his properties to be virtual efficiency engineers, but in case they lacked that talent he prepared meticulous instructions, directions—he called them “head work”—designed to “guard against the misapplication of labour. . . .” His free workers were lectured “to avoid bad Company” and to shun the bottle, the “ruin of half the workers in this Country,” for the “aching head and trembling limbs which are inevitable effects of drinking disincline the hands from work,” leading first to laziness, then to indifference, and finally to total inactivity. But the dearth of skilled artisans left Washington with little clout over these employees, and he was compelled to forego some of his principles to retain their labor. For years he tolerated a chronically besotted miller, and in a contract with a gardner he not only consented to permit the man to be drunk four days and four nights both at Christmas and Easter, and for two days and two nights at Whitsuntide, but he sanctioned his daily intake of a dram (one-half ounce) of rum each morning and a grog of spirits with dinner.10

  One of the workmen with whom Washington first had to deal was his cousin Lund. Late in the war the general had discovered he was deeply in debt to his estate manager, as Lund had taken no pay since 1778, a course he quietly and voluntarily had pursued because of Mount Vernon’s economic woes. Not only did he have to be paid but, immediately upon his boss’s return, Lund had expressed a desire to leave the estate; he had married in 1779, and he now hoped to realize his long-standing dream of acquiring his own farm. The two evidently struck a deal during the owner’s first year back in Virginia. Beginning the next year, Washington undertook to remunerate Lund for his back wages, a process that required five years of annual payments. Moreover, in 1783 or 1784 Washington permitted Lund and his wife to set up residence on a 450-acre tract that he owned about five miles south of Alexandria, real estate that the young planter had acquired a few years before. In 1785 the tract was deeded formally to Lund, who by then had christened the place “Hayfield,” undoubtedly after the role the area had played while part of Washington’s property. Late that same year Lund ended his tenure as Mount Vernon’s manager, and the general proclaimed himself to be his own director. Lund’s last official act at Mount Vernon was to train George Augustine Washington, the general’s nephew, to become the assistant manager of the place, although during the remainder of the decade he occasionally acted as an agent in the marketing of Washington’s livestock, flour, and fish.11

  If Washington’s attention was absorbed by the problems of his workers and the alterations on his estate, he did not lose sight of his principal pursuit. When he came home from Newburgh he once again became a farmer. But try as he might, Washington never excelled—at least not to his own exacting standards—in this capacity. Soon after Lund’s departure, in fact, he felt compelled to find “a thorough bred practical english Farmer” to run his enterprises. A year-long search was required before he retained James Bloxham of Gloucestershire, a specialist recommended by George William Fairfax, who still lived abroad in Bath. Washington paid Bloxham sixty guineas a year, gave him free and “comfortable” room and board, a horse, and a stipend with which he could bring his family to America. The general promptly liked his English yeoman, finding him to be polite and industrious, as well as a pleasant conversationalist. But there also were immediate problems. Bloxham was chagrined to find that the war had taken a heavy toll on the estate, and that the farm implements that one took for granted in England were nonexistent in Virginia; for his part, Washington soon discovered that his emp
loyee had never run such a huge operation, nor was he at all certain that Bloxham was up to it. Things worked out, nevertheless. The two renewed their contract the following year, and in 1788 Washington pronounced that Bloxham and his family “appear to be contented with the country.” Apparently he was correct, for the Englishmen managed Mount Vernon for five years.12

  Bloxham faced a difficult assignment. If not useless, Mount Vernon’s soil was at best indifferent, its nutrients depleted through too many years of wasteful cultivation. This tract of land had never been superlative, as Washington had discovered two decades before when the estate’s tobacco crops had been incapable of matching that of its neighbors either in quality or in quantity. The owner’s recent protracted absence and the indifferent, perfunctory forced labor performed by the farm’s hands must have increased the odds against the estate’s agricultural success. Nor did the weather cooperate. Too much rain was followed by too little, and that in turn was succeeded by another round of torrential downpours. Conditions were so bad, in fact, that in 1786 Washington had to purchase corn, supposedly one of his two principal crops, in order to feed his laborers and livestock.13

  Strangely, despite his dismal record in husbandry, Washington was an energetic farmer, one who, by American standards, was ahead of his time in his enthusiasm both for scientific agriculture and for experimentation. He bought and read the treatises of Arthur Young, the great English agrarian, and he even took up a correspondence with him in these years. As a result he shifted his methods to those advocated by Young, chiefly a procedure by which he sowed his fields in grasses rather than permitting them to lie fallow between the harvest and the next planting. Washington was one of the first farmers in his region to use a mechanical seed spreader, having one built at Mount Vernon from plans that he had seen in an agricultural manual. In fact, he was nothing if not innovative. He tried numerous varieties of wheat, planted potatoes with and without manure, sowed and harvested at varying times to gauge the seasonal impact, experimented with plaster of paris as a fertilizer, and would have used mud from the bottom of the Potomac as dressing had he solved the problem of how to extract it. One of his more ingenious ideas was to turn Mount Vernon’s undulating lands into a vineyard, making the estate into the wine-producing center of America. He knew that the familiar European grapes would not do, for experiments by others had demonstrated that when grown in Virginia these fruits resulted in an acidic taste. Hence, he raised native vines and also imported exotic varieties. But, typically, that experiment failed too, and following his fourth summer back in Virginia he remorsefully acknowledged the continued failure of Mount Vernon to produce bountiful outputs of any plant.14