Despite that successful venture, Washington’s ardor for Anderson began to cool after he had been at home for about a year. By then it was apparent that Mount Vernon’s fields had yielded no greater produce than before, a failing that the owner laid at Anderson’s doorstep. It was an unfair charge. Not only was the Scotsman about as successful as his predecessors, but Richard Parkinson, the eminent English agriculturalist, visited Mount Vernon and privately advised Washington that indifferent soil was the source of the estate’s poor showing. The owner would have none of that, however. While he conceded that Anderson was “a very industrious man; a very honest, zealous, and well intentioned man; and ... a very sober man” who was not without skills as a farm manager, he felt his manager was doomed to be an underachiever because of his “Want of System,” his “Want of foresight” in planning. His great failing, Washington went on, was that he constantly was “shifting from thing to thing, without finishing any thing. . . .”9
There was another source of friction. Anderson did not appreciate criticism, and he had the misfortune to work for a man who displayed little restraint in meting out disapproving judgments. Early in 1798, for instance, when Washington questioned matters in Anderson’s account books, the irascible manager thought he was being accused of embezzlement and threatened to quit. Washington hurriedly assured him that he was “perfectly well suited with your conduct,” and while he acknowledged that he sometimes had questioned Anderson’s decisions, he protested that it always had been in “a friendly manner.” One reason that Washington was so loath to lose his manager was that he had no earthly idea how to operate the distillery, an expensive and profitable contraption that would be useless if Anderson departed. Thus, while their relationship often was troubled, Washington did what he had to do to keep Anderson aboard through 1798 and 1799. Near the end of the latter year Anderson once again announced his intention of quitting. This time he seemed intransigent, but the two men worked out a deal. The Andersons, father and son, agreed to remain, although only as managers of the distillery and the mill. The elder Anderson must have seen this as a good bargain, a way to remain in familiar surroundings while getting Washington off his back. But there was no immediate deliverance, and, indeed, on the day before he died, Washington wrote Anderson to complain about his allegedly careless maintenance of the cattle pens.10
Washington’s frequently strained relationship with Anderson did nothing to diminish his zeal for disposing of portions of Mount Vernon. However, in the five years that remained to him after he first advertised his intention of renting the estate, no takers stepped forth. Richard Parkinson was sufficiently interested to drop by for a look, but after a close inspection he told the owner with acerbity that he would not take twelve hundred acres of the place if it was offered free of charge. Just seventy-two hours before he was struck down by his final illness, Washington drafted a three-year plan for agricultural operations at Mount Vernon, suggesting he had abandoned hope of disposing of these mediocre fields. Indeed, his only success in his quest had come in the autumn of 1799 when he rented the mill and distillery to Lawrence Lewis, his nephew.11
Washington enjoyed better luck in disposing of his vast western land holdings, tracts in present-day West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky that totaled approximately 45,000 acres. Most of this realty had been on the market since well before his presidency, but it was not until 1795 that he found a buyer for a small portion of the domain. As usual, Washington proved to be a tough, intractable businessman, one who served notice that he would neither “dispose of the land for a song, nor . . . higgle” over the price. For years he settled for renting a part of his lands, generally receiving wheat in lieu of cash from his tenants. As that grain sold for record prices in the early 1790s, it should have been a good deal for the owner. It was not, however. Little wheat was forthcoming, the fault, Washington charged, as he had a decade before, of a negligent manager. He got a new agent in 1794, while, back in the capital, he worked to swap some of his western lands for a cleared homestead near Philadelphia, a working farm to which he could retreat periodically.12
Nothing turned up on his end, but the next year he sold most of his Pennsylvania dominion to two buyers, his Fayette County lands near the remains of Fort Necessity fetching $7.20 per acre, considerably above what he had dreamed of attaining. Nevertheless, as often was the case with Washington’s business transactions, the bonanza proved to be less bountiful than it had seemed at first glance. Although the purchaser of the Miller’s Run lands made a $3000 down payment and was generally trustworthy about meeting his subsequent obligations, he died in 1798, and his heirs were considerably less faithful. The new owner of the Fayette County tract was a headache from the outset. He made a down payment of $2693, then proceded to drag his feet. Washington directed his agent to tell the vendees “in decisive terms” to pay up, threatened legal action, and at the time of his death was planning still another trip to the West, a journey inspired in part by his wish for a face-to-face meeting with the new owners. Washington had expected to receive about $22,000 from these two tracts. At the time of his death he had received only slightly more than half that amount.13
In the years following his presidency Washington concluded transactions on much that remained of his other western holdings. In 1798 he swapped his Round Bottom tract on the Ohio—near present-day Moundsville, West Virginia—for cash and property in Alexandria. A bit later he concluded a complicated bargain for his additional Ohio lands between modern Marietta, Ohio, and Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and his Kanawha tracts. According to this deal the purchaser signed a thirty-year lease, paid $5000 down, and pledged to pay off the balance in three annual payments of $50,000 each, beginning in 1806. Shortly before his death Washington acknowledged that through the sale of his frontier lands, as well as with the jobbing of some of his Virginia investments, he had realized approximately $50,000 between 1795 and 1799.14
On the other hand his continued interest in the Potomac River Canal Company amounted to a far less profitable business endeavor. After his return to Mount Vernon in 1797 he continued to beat the drums for the venture, and he persisted in his dream that the Potomac one day would serve as the link between the Atlantic and the trans-Appalachian West. In fact, he seemed a victim of his own boosterism and wishful thinking. By the end of his presidency the company had overcome only one major obstacle. In 1794, acting largely at the behest of Washington, the board of directors had hired a new engineer, and after several months of labor under his guidance work was completed on the Little Falls. Yet the optimism which that generated proved to be misplaced, for the company was unable to surmount the more formidable Great Falls. By 1797 about thirty boats a day made the run between Cumberland and Williamsport, a one-and-a-half-day journey down river, a five-day trip upriver. At the Great Falls, however, each craft had to be unloaded, its cargo transferred to wagons and conveyed by land around the impediment, whereupon the freight was returned to another bottom for the final leg of the voyage. During the next three years not only was no progress made in overcoming the engineering obstructions that frustrated the enterprise, but the company’s financial plight grew more precarious.15
A year into his retirement Washington sought to sell $3494 in government securities in order to make a loan to the beleaguered firm. In addition, he bought additional stock in the ailing company and he served as something of a lobbyist to pry assistance from Virginia and Maryland. His argument was simple. The two states ultimately would derive enormous economic benefits from the endeavor, he counseled, but if they dragged their feet New York or Pennsylvania would be the winner, for one or the other would engineer the “great high way” into the interior.
Of course, Washington’s efforts were not born of altruism. He envisioned an annual return of 50 percent on his investments in this company. Moreover, he knew that if the undertaking succeeded the Shenandoah Valley, a region where he owned considerable acreage, could be expected to experience an economic boom. The ex-pres
ident lived to see Maryland purchase an additional 130 shares, each priced at nearly $600, but he witnessed no further accomplishments in the company’s epic battle to subdue nature. As was his custom, he attributed the Potomac Company’s failures to human shortcomings, ranting at the “sloth” and the mismanagement that had characterized the conduct of the firm’s directors. Such a view of things kept him naively optimistic to the very end. One or two personnel changes, coupled with Maryland’s handsome grant, buoyed his zeal, and in the last week of his life he “rejoice[d], sincerely, that the means are likely to be obtained, to effect so desirable an objective.”16
After General Washington had been back in Virginia for almost a year, his friend Eliza Powel inquired about the health of “the withered Proprietor” of Mount Vernon, as she jokingly referred to him. He was in good health, much as in the previous year when his spirits “never [had been] in better flow.” Washington and Robert Morris had made a compact a few years earlier, each man pledging to live into the next century. If appearances counted for anything, Washington seemed intent on keeping up his end of the bargain. A European traveler who met the general in 1798 thought him “a majestic figure,” a “square set, and very strongly built” man. He looked elderly, the visitor related, but he described Washington by quoting Virgil: “Now aged, but a god’s old age is hardy and green.” Washington, in fact, had maintained a good trim, still weighing 210 pounds, as he had fifteen years before. And he remained active. He rode and walked about his fields daily, moving about so jauntily that one young visitor, twenty-five years his junior, found the older man difficult to keep up with.17
Other than the chronic discomfort he experienced from ill-fitting dentures, Washington suffered no complaints until August 1798, when suddenly he was attacked by a fever. For two days he felt poorly, yet he paid little heed; the next day, however, nausea and other baleful symptoms of the ailment descended on him. A physician was fetched, and Washington, who steadfastly refused to take medicine, consented to swallow what was prescribed. For three days he was bedfast and quite ill, then the fever broke and he slowly began to recover. He lost twenty pounds during the ordeal, and for three weeks thereafter he complained of a lingering weakness. In the aftermath of his major illness in 1790 Washington had speculated that he never would survive another ailment. He was wrong. This was his second serious and debilitating bout of sickness since then. Clearly, however, he was all too aware that his time was running out. The best that could be hoped for, a mending Washington told Landon Carter that autumn, was “a gradual decline.”18
He suspected, though, that his life was “hastening to an end.” Yet whether he was tormented by premonitions of imminent death, as historian James Thomas Flexner surmised, is doubtful. While the subject certainly crossed his mind, there is no evidence that he was obsessed with the prospect of his demise. Earlier he had spoken frequently of hailing from a family cursed by a short life expectancy, but that no longer seemed accurate. His mother had lived past her eightieth birthday. He had been sixty-five when he retired, and he had barely arrived back at Mount Vernon when he learned that his sister Betty had died, at age sixty-five. Curiously, the news did not seem to weigh on him. He immediately wrote to George Lewis, Betty’s son, but it was a strange letter, one that mixed (in the same paragraph) the obligatory expressions of sorrow with news about his renovation of Mount Vernon; he even queried as to whether the bereaved knew of a joiner that he might hire. Nor did his sister’s death cause him to reflect on his own mortality in any of the scores of letters or diary entries that he wrote over the next several months. Indeed, the work on Mount Vernon which he carefully supervised in this period suggests just the opposite tendency: Washington planned to be around for awhile.19
Most recent biographers have suggested that Martha was in poor health, even that she had “gone downhill rapidly” by the time the family returned to Virginia. However, there is no evidence to sustain such a belief. She was troubled by occasional lingering colds, and once Washington noted that she was “indisposed by swelling on one side of her face.” But during all of 1798 Washington mentioned only one cold that afflicted her, apparently only a brief bout of the wintertime sniffles. A foreign traveler who spent nearly two weeks with the Washingtons that year apparently found her quite healthy, and he went on to characterize her as “extremely agreeable and attractive,” a woman “with lively eyes, a gay air,” “one of the most estimable persons that one could know, good, sweet, and extremely polite.”20
When Washington returned to Mount Vernon he took a step that he thought might prolong the good health that he and Martha enjoyed. He asked Lawrence Lewis, one of Betty’s five sons, to move to Mount Vernon and “ease me of the trouble of entertaining company” in the evenings. He could not pay him for the work, Washington wrote, but he would cover the expense of housing and feeding his body slave and his horse. “Besides,” he went on, “your time, or attention ... if you have an inclination for it, might be devoted to Reading, as I have a great many instructive Books, on many subjects, as well as amusing ones.” Lewis quickly accepted the offer and assumed his duties as surrogate host, but his time and attention soon were devoted less to study than to Nellie Custis. It is not difficult to see why.21
Now eighteen, Nelly was a beautiful young woman. Three years earlier an English visitor at the President’s House had discovered her to be “a very pleasing young lady.” A guest at Mount Vernon in 1798 thought her “a young woman of the greatest beauty,” a “celestial” figure, while Benjamin Latrobe, who also met her in Virginia, found her the embodiment of “perfection.” Fair-skinned, with raven hair and large, dark, lustrous eyes, she mingled an air of gentle sweetness and resolute confidence. Raised by the Washingtons, she had enjoyed a life of cosmopolitanism unavailable to most other children; tutored, indulged, fêted, she had seen much, met many people, and experienced the best of both the urban and rural worlds. But for all that, John Adams found her to be limited, the product of an environment in which her step-grandparents had been forced to shelter her unduly. Perhaps he was correct, although given the dearth of evidence it is as likely that what he deemed to be over-protection was, in fact, the conscious grooming of a young lady for the position she would, in all likelihood, hold someday as mistress of an isolated southern plantation.22
If there can be little doubt that Washington never tired of the company of Nelly, the same cannot be said of his relationship with her brother, Wash. Sixteen years old when Washington entered retirement, George Washington Parke Custis either was a late bloomer or he was acting out an adolescent rebellion against his step-grandfather. In any case his behavior was decidedly similar to that of his father, Jackie Custis, whose blasé indifference to work had caused the general and Martha so much vexation. Washington found this young man to be lazy and rebellious and utterly without ambition. The fact that he had done poorly at the College of Philadelphia—later the University of Pennsylvania—and at Princeton added weight to Washington’s judgment. But if the boy easily conceded defeat in these undertakings, his guardian did not. Washington contemplated sending him to William and Mary College, decided instead on Harvard (from which he had an honorary degree, but which he persisted in calling the “University in Massachusetts” or “the University at Cambridge”), and ultimately consented to Martha’s wish that he be enrolled closer to home. Thus St. John’s College at Annapolis got Wash next. No college-bound student ever left home with better advice ringing in his ears. Study with “zeal and alacrity,” Washington counseled the lad, and “your respectability in maturer age, you usefulness to your country, and, indeed, your own private gratification” will be ensured. After only two months, however, the young man was writing home for money, and a month later the Washingtons discovered that he was in love and hoped to marry, though that desire was thwarted by the young lady’s parents. Before two more months elapsed Wash was back at Mount Vernon, his college days a thing of the past. Yet, the general refused to surrender, and that autumn he placed the boy un
der the tutelege of Tobias Lear, the loyal secretary who had returned to Washington’s employ earlier in 1798.23
Lear did not live at Mount Vernon, as he had during his first stint with Washington. He and his four children resided at nearby Walnut Tree Farm on Clifton Neck, the homestead that Washington had given him for a modest rent as a wedding present in 1795. No doubt the size of his family dictated such a course, but the ceaseless flow of overnight visitors and the abundance of live-ins at Mount Vernon might have contributed to his decision. Lafayette’s son had accompanied the Washingtons to Virginia in 1797, and he and his tutor dwelled at Mount Vernon for six months, departing the moment they learned that the senior Lafayette had been liberated from his Austrian confinement. Lawrence Lewis arrived about the same time the sober young Frenchman departed, and so did Eleanor Forbes, a fifty-year-old English widow whom the general hired as a housekeeper. Her function, of course, was to help with Martha’s work load, made the more onerous by the sudden flight of Hercules, the Washington’s enslaved cook. About the same time that Mrs. Forbes came, Washington hired Albin Rawlins as a clerk, a move he apparently thought necessary inasmuch as Lear was not a resident. The general offered him $100 a year, or $150 if the applicant could “bring sufficient testimony ... of [his] Sobriety, integrity and good dispositions”; at either price, Washington got him cheap, for he was ready to pay an in-law 30 percent more to accept the same post.24
To this house which groaned with inhabitants came a steady stream of visitors. Curiosity brought numerous foreign travelers, including at least two diplomats, the Spanish and British ministers to the United States. Endless numbers of relatives also called on Washington, especially the ubiquitous clan of Dandridge and Washington nephews and nieces from all about Virginia. Planters from throughout the Chesapeake states likewise dropped in, and, seemingly, every son of every aristocrat in the region visited the estate, as if meeting the proprietor of Mount Vernon was a requisite to the completion of one’s education. Washington’s vanity led him to appreciate the attention, but what especially delighted him was the opportunity to spend an evening with an old acquaintance such as Dr. Craik or Dr. Stuart, the husband of Nelly and Wash’s mother. And he welcomed visits from old comrades in arms, such as Henry Lee and General Alexander Spotswood, as well as social calls by former political allies, men like Attorney General Lee and the Pinckney brothers from South Carolina. So rarely was Mount Vernon without a guest that on one such occasion a somewhat startled Washington wrote to Lear: “I am alone at present.. . . Unless someone pops in, unexpectedly—Mrs. Washington and myself will do what I believe has not been done within the last twenty years by us—that is to set down to dinner by ourselves.” He then asked Lear to come over that evening.25
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