Late in 1787 the sad tidings of George William’s death at the age of sixty-three reached Mount Vernon. If Washington and his wife sent their condolences to the widow, no record of their letter has survived. In fact, there is no evidence that Washington wrote Sally Fairfax until eleven years later. Some historians have made much of that letter because Washington invited her to consider returning to Virginia. But it was the first—indeed, the only—letter he had written her since she departed America more than a quarter-century before. Besides, Martha appended a note of her own to her husband’s missive, then the packet was taken to England by the Washingtons’ old friend and Sally’s in-law, Bryan Fairfax.38 In all likelihood, had Fairfax not been traveling to England, the Washingtons would not have written. Sally seems not to have bothered to have answered their letter. Despite the heroic attempts to the contrary by some scholars, it is difficult to attach much significance to this one rather stiff communication.
As occupied as was Washington with his many business pursuits, he found ample time to enjoy his leisure. He obviously delighted in entertaining, especially as those who came to Mount Vernon were “people of the first distinction,” as he put it, and they came to pay homage to him, fulfilling his need to be esteemed. For the most part, however, his tastes were not unlike those of most other planters. Periodically he attended the theater in nearby Alexandria, and on one of his two trips to Philadelphia he escorted Robert Morris’s wife, Mary, to concerts, where for the first time he heard works of Joseph Haydn and Johann Sebastian Bach performed. He frequented the race track at Annapolis, a pastime that he also permitted his slaves to enjoy. He also laid out a bowling green on his lawn at Mount Vernon, and on occasion he sought the solace of a nearby stream for an afternoon of fishing. His delight in breeding and raising his horses and hounds persisted, but, inexplicably, his ardor for hunting waned about a year after his return from the war. In 1784 he frequently was on the hunt, often in quest of the fox as many as three times each week. Garbed in the costume of the age—blue coat, scarlet waistcoat, buckskin pants, top boots, a velvet cap, and carrying a whip—Washington rode on with his guests, happy in this deadly pursuit. When Lafayette presented him with several ferocious dogs, breeds trained in hunting boar and deer and wolves, Washington plunged deeper back into the forests in search of larger game. But then he quit the pursuit, and for the next fifteen years he did not even allow hunting on his estate, a tradition he broke only in 1799 when he authorized a deer hunt, and then he carefully stipulated that only one stag could be taken. Although in good health, he did not accompany the hunters on that occasion.39
Whatever led him to abandon hunting, it was not due to reasons of health. He was home for three years before he experienced any illness whatever, and then he appears to have been afflicted with nothing more serious than a brief, though unpleasant, bout with some viral adversary. Later, however, rheumatic pains were his frequent companion. At times he ached so badly that he could turn his head only with difficulty, and he complained that a continuous night’s sleep was impossible, for he awakened in agony each time that he tossed and turned. During these years, too, Washington began to experience a gradual decline in his hearing, until by 1787 one overnight visitor at Mount Vernon was moved to exclaim that he believed the general was so deaf that he barely had heard the mealtime conversation. Washington’s physical ills and the unmistakable signs of decline left him painfully aware that he was “descending the hill” he “had been 52 years climbing.” So, too, did the occasional tidings of the demise of this or that Revolutionary comrade. The war had hardly ended, it seemed before he learned that General Greene was gone, taken at his retirement estate in Georgia, news that came in the wake of word that Joseph Reed, still in his early forties, also was dead. But more than anything, Washington knew that he “was of a short lived family.”40
That many Washingtons died young was a maxim repeatedly demonstrated. George’s father, Gus, had died while still in his forties. Lawrence had not reached even that age; while George’s other half-brother, Augustine, had lived only forty-two years. In the 1780s two of these three younger brothers also died. Samuel, who had inherited a six-hundred-acre tract near Chotank, and who ultimately moved from the Tidewater to “Harewood,” an estate he built on Evitts Run in present-day West Virginia, died of tuberculosis in 1781. Six years later John Augustine died at “Bushfield,” the family home of his wife, on Nomini Bay overlooking the Potomac. Both died at the age of forty-seven.41 Charles and Betty still were alive, however, and so was his mother.
Mary Ball Washington was seventy-eight years old when her son returned from the war. He had not seen her when he came to Virginia for the fight with Cornwallis in 1781, but he had been home only three weeks in 1784 before he rode to Fredericksburg for a visit, calling at the little one-story house he had acquired for her, in which she lived behind constantly shut and barred windows. It was a trip that he characterized as a “duty.” A more apt description Washington never offered, for while he always honored her, he also remembered that extended contact between the two of them—both independent, strong-willed people—inevitably produced friction. As an adolescent he had escaped her presence at the first opportunity, and as a young man he took pains to be in her company only occasionally, and then for the shortest possible period. He did not see her at all between 1775 and 1781, but he certainly heard of her activities. As the war dragged on she repeatedly—and eventually publicly—pleaded for money; on at least nine occasions she badgered Lund for financial relief, altogether obtaining over £260, and she must have leaned even more heavily on Betty and John Augustine, who lived nearby. There also is evidence that she received handouts from some outside the family. “I never lived so pore in my life,” she railed, her protestations finally becoming an acute embarrassment, especially when she additionally was moved to utter some remarks with Tory overtones. Some Virginia politician got the bright idea of shutting her up by providing her with a state pension, but when her son, the general, heard of it he immediately told the authorities to mind their own business. She “has an ample income of her own,” he wrote from headquarters in 1781, and if she ever wanted he would divide his “last sixpence to relieve her from any real distress.” But the commander shied away from confronting her; instead, he asked John Augustine “to represent to her in delicate terms the impropriety of her complaints.”42
John evidently had little success in quieting her. In his first three years back at Mount Vernon, George paid her £50 out of pocket, yet early in 1787 she once again was begging outside the immediate family. George sent her fifteen guineas in hush money, accompanied by a long letter in which he claimed—none too convincingly—that he was giving her the last bit of cash in his possession. “This is really and truely” all my money, he wrote, adding that he would suffer for giving it to her as he was so deeply in debt. “I know not where or when, I shall receive one shilling with which to pay it,” he added, but for good measure he told her that “whilst I have a shilling left, you shall have part, if it is wanted, whatever my own distress may be.”
The solution to her woes, he went on, would be for her to sell her house in Fredericksburg and move in with one of her three children. Charles and Betty would be the best candidates, he added, for Mount Vernon, chronically overrun with visitors, was noisy and lacking in privacy. The revenue from the sale of her property would “answer all your wants and make ample amends” to Charles or Betty; “if it did not, I would most cheerfully contribute more,” he concluded, not bothering to explain where, in his penurious state, he would find the funds. Within days of receiving his letter Mary Washington fell ill, stricken with cancer. She sank rapidly and in April 1787 her doctors believed her death was imminent. Washington hurried to see her, finding her already “reduced ... to a Skeleton.” But the disease evidently went into remission, and she lived for another thirty months, finally succumbing in September 1789. When her will was opened it revealed that she had left the lion’s share of her estate to her favorite
child, by then the President of the United States.43
When Washington cautioned his mother of the noise at Mount Vernon, he had not exaggerated. Although the Washingtons were childless, the mansion seemed to teem with young people. The grandchildren—three daughters and a son from Jackie’s marriage to Nelly—seemed always to be present, even though their mother continued to live at her own home above Alexandria. Some doubted that Nelly ever would remarry, but Washington expected it, and, in fact, after waiting a suitable interval following her husband’s death she began to attend balls, then to keep company with Dr. David Stuart, a Fairfax County physician. Early in 1784 the couple were married. Strangely, two of her children, five-year-old Eleanor Custis, or Nelly, and three-year-old George Washington Parke Custis, remained with their grandparents. They joined Harriet Washington, the daughter of George’s brother Sam, who had come to live at Mount Vernon three years before. Subsequently two other nieces joined the Washingtons. Patty Dandridge, the daughter of Martha’s brother, was taken in upon her father’s death in 1785; and Burwell Bassett’s daughter Frances—Fanny, everyone called her—moved in on Christmas Eve in 1784, sent there by her father who felt unable to care for her after his wife, Martha’s sister, died. Besides, she was a sickly young girl, and her father hoped that Mount Vernon’s proximity to the sea might rejuvenate her. Something did restore her health. Within four months of being transplanted to this clime she was engaged to George Augustine Washington, the general’s nephew and assistant farm manager. That autumn the two were married, an unusual match in that she was the daughter of Martha’s sister, he the son of George’s brother.44
Fanny barely had moved in amidst the three younger, romping, boisterous children before still another newcomer settled in. Still saddled with the demands of a heavy correspondence a full year after his retirement, Washington quietly began to advertise for a clerical assistant. He wanted more than just an amanuensis, however. He wanted someone who also could “keep accounts; examine, arrange and properly methodize my papers. . . ; ride, at my expence, to do such business as I may have in different parts of this, or the other States,” and tutor his two grandchildren who lived at Mount Vernon.45
That summer he hired a young Canadian, William Shaw, for the post, selecting him over Noah Webster, who had applied in person. Washington agreed to pay Shaw £50 per year, in addition to free room and board. The young man lasted the full year, a considerably longer period than his employer came to wish. He was not without talent, but, young and unsettled, he gave his work less than the full attention that Washington expected. The general groused and complained about his repeated absences due to jaunts to Alexandria, but, in fact, Shaw left Mount Vernon infrequently, only eight times in the last eight months of his tenure, and he remained away from the estate overnight on only one of these occasions. At any rate, when Washington noted without further comment that “Mr. Shaw quitted this family to day,” there was an air of relief in his diary inscription.46
Whether Shaw knew it or not, about halfway through his tenure at Mount Vernon, Washington arranged to hire his successor. Before Shaw was retained Washington had asked General Lincoln to be on the lookout for someone suitable for the position. It took Lincoln nearly a year, but in January 1786 he wrote that he had located a young man with the “character of a Gentleman and a schooler.” The man was Tobias Lear, twenty-four years old, a graduate of Harvard College, and recently returned from a year’s travels in Europe. Washington hired him sight unseen, agreeing to pay him an annual salary of two hundred dollars, but stipulating that the appointment be renewed from year to year. Lear arrived three months before Shaw departed, and if it was an awkward arrangement for the young men, Washington seems only to have been delighted by Lincoln’s judgment. An enterprising and indefatigable worker, Lear was just what Washington had been looking for, a responsible and trustworthy aide, one who—even more than Lund—could be counted on when the master of Mount Vernon was away.47
Not that Washington had any expectation of once again being away for an extended period—and certainly not for additional public service. Washington made no attempt to seek reelection to the House of Burgesses, and he was far too much the nationalist to find the governor’s chair in Richmond to be very alluring. Never one to function too well in a corporate setting, he could not have looked upon a seat in the United States Congress with any enthusiasm, nor could he imagine any sort of crisis that might induce him “to draw my sword again.”48
Still, Washington found the transition back to civilian pursuits to be difficult, inasmuch as he had spent many years listening to “the clangor of arms and the bustle of a camp.” During his first several weeks at home letter after letter to former general officers and high public officials left Mount Vernon, each tinged with that aura of authority that had become his habit. He was home for nearly ten weeks before he even claimed that he was adapting to his prewar life style, and more than a year passed before he endeavored to speak with any enthusiasm about the “tranquility and rural amusements” of the pastoral life. He was determined, he said, “to make the remainder of my life easy, [and to] let the world or the affairs of it go as they may.” His public life was over, he told Lafayette in 1784. “I have had my day.”49
But he was having a difficult time convincing himself. Indeed, Washington faced a dilemma that stemmed in part from his public image. An adoring populace had come to see Washington as a modern Cincinnatus, equating him with the ancient legend of Cincinnatus, the Roman who was summoned from his plow to save his country. Having served and then surrendered his power, Washington, like the first Cincinnatus, perhaps felt compelled to remain at his plow. Yet Washington was less happy at Mount Vernon than many historians have realized. He missed the bustle and excitement and, certainly, the flattery and acclaim that had accompanied his public service. For a time he sought to find some of those same rewards in the attempt to remake Mount Vernon into a showplace; he tried so hard, in fact, that one visitor remarked that the general had paid more attention to turning the estate into an exposition than he had to simply enjoying the place. Next, he sought to “spend the remainder of my Days in cultivating the affections of good Men.” There were drawbacks to that endeavor too. Still, Washington was reluctant to lay aside his plow. As Garry Wills discerned, he had a “heavy emotional investment in the symbol of his resignation.” His was the ultimate act of the Revolution, the great virtuous gesture to accommodate republican idealism; whatever acclaim he had received for his military feats, he had drawn even more praise for his breathtaking act of having resigned his power in 1783.50
Thus, he could not abandon his vine and fig tree. Not unless danger lurked and he again was summoned from Mount Vernon. And by 1786 he was convinced that a critical period once again had dawned.
14
An End to Retirement
“There exists not a power to check”
Having “assisted in bringing the Ship into Port, and having been fairly discharged,” Washington wrote about thirty months after returning to Mount Vernon, “it is not my business to embark again on a sea of troubles.” Perhaps not, but that metaphorically studded sentence immediately followed a line in which he remarked that he could not “feel myself an unconcerned spectator” to public affairs.1
As he watched from the sidelines, Washington was most concerned by the jealousy between the states, a covetousness and mistrust which resulted in their refusal “to yield competent powers to . . . the Federal Government.” Obviously, this was not a new concern. Through the war years he had repeatedly echoed these sentiments in private, while in his farewell remarks as commander in chief he had aired his views publicly. Yet once he returned home he really was a spectator. Removed from the day-to-day cares of office, the immediacy of the problem largely vanished for him, surfacing only infrequently in 1784 and 1785, principally when political decentralization threatened to adversely affect his interests. The simmering sectional rivalries, for instance, posed a constant menace to his Potomac navigation pla
ns, and because, as he observed, he was “not so disinterested in this matter,” he was moved to complain about the several states’ “short sighted politics.” The impotent central government’s inability to compel Spain “to open the avenues of trade” in the transmontane region was another side to the same coin, for it impeded the flow of population into the West. Still, diverted by his own pursuits, and deeply content now that the war had ended victoriously, Washington betrayed no sense of the presence of an urgent national crisis during his first two years back at Mount Vernon. On into 1786 he remained confident that everything would be worked out. In fact, he predicted that America’s lagging foreign trade eventually would compel the states—all Atlantic seaboard entities—to vest the central government with adequate powers in “all matters of common concern.”2
During his first two years back in Virginia the only public matter in which Washington displayed much activity occurred during the tempest over the Society of the Cincinnati. Founded in 1783, the organization evidently was meant to be a fraternal order for former Revolutionary officers who had served for three years or who were in the army when the war ended; their brethren in the French officer corps also were eligible for membership. But among a people with an abiding distrust of standing armies, it probably was inevitable that some citizens would be apprehensive over such a federation. When the society limited future membership to certain descendants of the original initiates, protest was certain, for the former officers appeared to have created a blue-blooded aristocratic order. Nor were the critics mere cranks. Thomas Jefferson wrote Washington expressing his fear that if left intact the society ultimately would “produce an hereditary aristocracy which will change the form of our governments from the best to the worst in the world.” Franklin voiced similar fears, and John Adams denounced the order as anti-egalitarian and as the perfect vehicle for saddling America someday with a military dictatorship.3 By the spring of 1784 the society’s existence had spawned a white-hot furor, the very sort of commotion that could besmirch the reputation of its president-general, George Washington.
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