The Washingtons

by Flora Fraser

  The Washingtons took advantage of Rocky Hill’s propinquity to Philadelphia to deluge Clement Biddle, now a civilian once more, with orders—linen, nails, paint, blankets for the slaves—for Mount Vernon. George’s nephew Bushrod Washington, who was a law student in the city, also received numerous commissions. The general was not flattering in his estimation of Bushrod’s capabilities: “As you are young in this business, take some Mentor as a guide to your enquiries.” The young man was to inquire of leading cabinetmakers after “two dozen strong, neat and plain, but fashionable” dining room chairs “with strong canvas bottoms to receive a loose covering of check, or worsted.” Additionally he was to ask the price and availability of French wines, olives, nuts, oils, and “blue and white china.” When the Washingtons first married, they had sent to London for what they required. When they wished to protest British taxation, they had turned to the domestic market. Now, aware of the need to renovate and refurbish after long years dedicated to public affairs, the couple looked once more to New York and Philadelphia. They also—at first timorously—investigated the luxury market in Paris. Washington wished to know “whether French plate is fashionable and much used in genteel houses in France and England.” He and Martha had heard that “the quantity in Philadelphia is large.”

  The Washingtons might stock Mount Vernon with French plate and wines, but word of a “general peace” in Paris was still lacking. In early October, Martha left Rocky Hill for the Potomac, before the roads and weather could deteriorate. Washington would follow, as he told Tilghman on the second, “as soon as the Definitive Treaty arrives, or New York is Evacuated by our Newly acquired friends [the British]. On the first there is little said. Of the latter a great deal, but scarcely the same thing by any two who come from there.” The general opinion, he noted, was that the British would be gone by the end of the month.

  Martha broke her journey at Philadelphia, where she stayed with the Robert Morrises and dined out with de La Luzerne and others. Her principal aim was to further equip Mount Vernon. She had brought £1,500 with her from New Jersey. She reimbursed Samuel Powel, who had paid for the two dozen chairs for the New Room, £136. Remaining at the Morrises’ for most of October, she purchased linens, china, and carpets as well as household stores (medicines, nuts, pickles) and personal items (stays, caps, shoes). Her total expenditure was £650. Washington had told Biddle to defer choosing linens: Martha, on her arrival, would “please herself in the quality” of different materials. Washington wrote in October to Wakelin Welch, sole surviving partner of those at Robert Cary and Co. in London with whom he had dealt before the war. He wanted to know how his account, and that of his deceased ward, Jacky, stood with them. Other Americans might now default on debts to London merchants that had been outstanding on the outbreak of hostilities. He would not be among them.

  News—not unwelcome but unexpected—had come while Martha was still at Rocky Hill. Her daughter-in-law, Nelly, meant to remarry, and Alexandria physician David Stuart, who had formerly escorted Martha to Newburgh, was her intended. Stuart was an intelligent and educated man who lacked only fortune—which Nelly would supply—to play a part in the new America. Winsome Nelly would have a sober husband to manage the Parke Custis estate and act as guardian to Jacky’s children. It was a match that promised well, though Nelly had made no mention of romance previously in letters to Martha. Washington told Lund that they had never expected that Nelly would spend the rest of her days a widow; Nelly now sought counsel through intermediary Lund. Washington declined to give any: “A woman very rarely asks an opinion or requires advice on such an occasion, ’till her resolution is formed; and then it is with the hope and expectation of obtaining a sanction, not that she means to be governed by your disapprobation, that she applies.” He suggested she consider whether her suitor would likely prove kind and affectionate and “just, generous and attentive” to her children.

  Martha, at Mount Vernon, saw much of the new couple at Abingdon, after Nelly became Mrs. David Stuart in late November 1783. If it was bittersweet for Jacky’s mother to see his bride with a new husband, his children responding to a stepfather, she gave no sign of it. The Stuarts were assiduous visitors to the Washington home, not least because four-year-old Nelly Parke Custis and her younger brother still lived there. “Wash”—sometimes “Tub”—was now two and a half and bore a strong physical resemblance to his father as a child. His grandmother and mother thought him exceptional, and visitors found him promising.

  At last, on October 31, intelligence came to Rocky Hill that the peace treaty had been signed in September at Paris. Congress had decreed that the wartime army might, upon receipt of this news, disband. Two days later Washington issued a farewell address to the army. If his words lacked the pen of an Alexander Hamilton to shape them, they were at least sincere. He asked, with good reason, “who has before seen a disciplined Army form’d at once from such raw materials?” Recommending the soldiers whom he discharged to a “grateful country,” he wished for those who had fallen for the cause “the choicest of heaven’s favours.”

  Before he himself could “take his ultimate leave…of the military character,” Washington must participate in the transfer of New York to civil—and American—government. Once the British commander, Sir Guy Carleton, and the British completed their evacuation in late November, Washington entered and took possession of the city that he had so ignominiously and hastily left seven years before. He then turned the city over to patriot governor George Clinton.

  Addresses, conferences, and formal dinners occupied Washington during ensuing days. “The principal officers of the army in town” gathered on December 4 at the tavern kept by patriot Samuel “Black Sam” Fraunces. They wished to bid the commander-in-chief farewell before he made for Annapolis, where Congress was in session and where he would resign his commission. The room in the tavern was too crowded to allow Washington passage among the officers. After having drunk with them, he asked each of them to come to him, where he was, and take him “by the hand.”

  The officer nearest him was Henry Knox, Boston bookseller turned artilleryman and Washington’s closest associate throughout the war. When Knox came up and extended his hand, his commanding officer spontaneously embraced him. Having apparently been surprised by emotion into this act, Washington embraced all the other officers, though many of them were unknown to him. Of all the numerous officers who had composed his “family” at different times, only John Laurens had died in battle—in a skirmish close to his home in South Carolina, shortly before the British withdrew from Charleston.

  Punctilious servant of Congress to the last, on his arrival in Annapolis, Washington inquired if they wished his resignation to be effected by letter or in person at the State House. They chose the latter alternative and named the twenty-third. At a ball on the eve, the general “danced every set,” wrote one present, “that all the ladies might have the pleasure of dancing with him, or as it has since been handsomely expressed, get a touch of him.” In a crowded State House the following day, Washington recommended his “family” to Congress as deserving of reward. He relented in his opinion of that “august body,” under whose orders he had so long acted, so far as to bid it an “Affectionate farewell.” But he expressed his main purpose pithily: “I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.”

  Washington made one request of Congress, a month after he had reached home in time for Christmas with Martha. He wrote to the body’s secretary, Charles Thomson, on January 22, 1783, begging for his commission, were it not to be needed by Congress: “I should be glad to have it deposited among my own papers. It may serve my Grand Children, some fifty or a hundred years hence, for a theme to ruminate upon, if they should be contemplatively disposed.” Thomson replied, the following month, that it had “been in agitation” among members of Congress, even before receipt of this letter, to bestow the order “in a gold box” upon the former commander-in-chief. But no commission, in plain or orn
ate box, came to Mount Vernon. Washington’s “grandchildren”—he was thinking of Martha’s as his own—would have to look elsewhere for “a theme to ruminate upon.” Washington, a Virginia farmer once more, did not pursue the matter.

  Martha was resolved not to stir again from home. She wrote in January to congratulate Mrs. Boudinot, a friend from wartime New Jersey, on her return home to Elizabethtown after an “exile” of seven years. They would not meet again, unless her correspondent should come to Mount Vernon: “my frequent long journeys have not only left me without inclination to undertake another, but almost disqualified me from doing it, as I find the fatigue is too much to bear.” She had this advice for her friend: “The difficulties and distresses to which we have been exposed during the war must now be forgotten.”

  Making reference to Proverbs 3, she added: “we must endeavour to let our ways be the ways of pleasantness and all our paths, peace.” The Washingtons, however, so strongly united in the recent conflict, would find the way ahead in private life neither wholly pleasant nor peaceful.

  BOOK THREE

  After the War, 1784–1802

  23

  Mount Vernon, 1784–1786

  “You will see the plain manner in which we live…”

  IT TOOK WASHINGTON some time to adjust to civilian life. In February 1784, two months after returning home, he confided to Henry Knox: “strange as it may tell, it is nevertheless true, that it was not ’till lately I could get the better of my usual custom of ruminating as soon as I waked in the Morning, on the business of the ensuing day; and [the better] of my surprize, after having revolved many things in my mind, to find that I was no longer a public Man, or had anything to do with public transactions.”

  Earlier that month the general had written to Lafayette in Paris: “I am not only retired from all public employments, but I am retiring within myself.” Determined to play no part in public life, however innocuous, he resigned from the Truro parish vestry. Wearing the gray coat of a “Virginia farmer,” he resumed his former long daily rides around the different quarters of Mount Vernon. He directed overseers, slaves, and hirelings, for all the world as though he had never been away.

  He was, however, far from content. Everywhere he saw neglect to remedy. An examination of the accounts that Lund had kept while he was away brought him no satisfaction. He declined an invitation to be Lafayette’s guest in France, citing “the deranged situation of my private concerns, occasioned by an absence of almost nine years, and an entire disregard of all private business during that period.” During the war he had several times expressed a desire to visit Paris and Versailles. He feared that attention to his affairs now would “put it forever out of my power to gratify this wish.”

  Martha had different obligations. In April her husband addressed Lafayette’s wife, the marquise: “Mrs. Washington…feels very sensibly the force of your polite invitation to Paris; but she is too far advanced in life, & is too much immersed in the care of her little progeny to cross the Atlantic.” The general urged the young Parisian woman to come and see America, “young, rude & uncultivated as it is.” In high Augustan style he wrote: “You will see the plain manner in which we live; & meet the rustic civility, & you shall taste the simplicity of rural life.”

  A division of the Parke Custis children long in place, though provisional, had by now hardened into permanence. Nelly Parke Custis and her younger brother, Wash, Martha’s “little progeny,” were Martha’s responsibility at Mount Vernon. She established a routine for them and their nurse, as she had once directed the upbringing of her own children. The elder girls, Bet and Pat, now nearing eight and seven, lived with their mother at Abingdon but were often to be found at Mount Vernon. Martha told a New Jersey correspondent that January: “My little family are all with me and have been very well till within these few days, that they have been taken with the measles.” The worst, she opined, was over: “I shall soon have them prattling about me again.”

  Though never in robust health, the children’s mother, Nelly Stuart, was to succeed in giving her new husband, David, more than a dozen children. If their mother had little time to offer Bet and Pat, their stepfather could advise on their suitable education. Stuart had studied languages as well as medicine in Europe before emigrating to Virginia. He was often of service to Washington, acting as an interpreter when foreign visitors came calling and assisting with French correspondence.

  The French ambassador, de La Luzerne, when visiting Washington at Mount Vernon in April 1784, noted “the great number of foreigners who come to see him.” Strangers from all over America came calling too. The Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania had earlier suggested to Congress that an allowance be made to the general. Visitors “desirous of seeing the great & Good Man who has so eminently Contributed to the happiness of a Nation” would otherwise prove a great expense to him. Washington, characteristically high-minded, scorned to accept any such subsidy. Equally characteristically he complained of the huge drain on his personal finances.

  In June 1784 Martha wrote to her sister-in-law Hannah Bushrod Washington that she hoped to pay her a visit, whenever it was convenient for “the general” to leave home. For the moment there could be no thought of it: “he has so much business of his own, and the public’s, together that I fear he will never find leisure to go see his friends.” The “business of…the public’s” to which she referred was something of a poisoned chalice.

  Washington had presided the previous month in Philadelphia over the first general meeting of a chivalric association, the Society of the Cincinnati. Cincinnatus, a general in republican Rome, was twice called from his plow in Latium to lead the army at a time of crisis. Each time victorious, Cincinnatus afterward slipped away to resume life as a farmer. The chivalric order given his name in 1783 by Knox and von Steuben aimed to render permanent “the cordial affection” then subsisting among the officers serving in the war. Membership was limited to those who had fought three years or more during the war, and was hereditary, so that the ideals of the revolution might ever be kept alive. French officers who had served in the war received honorary membership.

  The proceedings of the first general meeting in Philadelphia proved turbulent. The hereditary principle underlying the society was controversial, causing offense to many citizens proud of having espoused a republican cause. Others viewed this club of veteran officers as a potential threat to civil government. In May, Washington managed with some skill to eliminate both the hereditary element and “political tendency” from the rubric. They were subsequently reintroduced by branches in the different states.

  Martha might regret that Washington had little leisure to accompany her on family visits, but she was a hardened planter’s wife. She was later brisk with a niece who complained of her husband’s preoccupation with business: “if he does not attend to his affairs he will get nothing done, and if his people do not make bread, how will he be able to pay the taxes if nothing else is wanting?”

  Plenty of family visited Mount Vernon, by way of recompense. Samuel Washington’s two sons were being educated, following their father’s death, at their uncle George’s expense in Alexandria. Another of the general’s nephews, George Augustine Washington, formerly Lafayette’s aide, was a firm favorite—not least with Fanny Bassett—but his health was poor. In the autumn he was dispatched to the West Indies, in the hope that a warmer climate would do him good.

  Martha prized the company of some of their guests more highly than that of others, writing to her niece Fanny Bassett in August 1784: “Tho I have never been alone since you left this [house], yet I cannot but say that I have missed your company very much.” She added, as if preparing for an ordeal, “The General is still determined to set out the first of next month over the mountains.” Before the war and until his death in 1781, her son’s careless affection and high spirits had sustained Martha during Washington’s absences. The home in which he had grown to manhood was full of memories. The loss of her son was not one
from which Martha recovered easily, but the small adventures of his children amused her. Referring to her grandson “Wash” by an affectionate derivative, she wrote to Fanny: “Tub is the same clever boy you left him. He sometimes says, why don’t you send for Cousin?” Her niece should consider this a compliment. “You know he never makes himself unhappy about absent friends.”

  Lafayette, still Washington’s fervent admirer, crossed the Atlantic this summer. Crowds at New York, in New Jersey, and at Philadelphia mobbed the marquis. His goal, however, was Mount Vernon. On his arrival in August, he found Washington, he wrote to the marquise in France, absorbed “in the routine of his estate.” Their meeting, he reported, was truly tender, adding: “in retirement General Washington is even greater than he was during the Revolution. His simplicity is truly sublime, and he is as completely involved with all the details of his lands and house as if he had always lived here.”

  The Custis children had been anxious to see if Lafayette resembled his portrait that hung in the house. “The general has adopted them and loves them with great tenderness,” the marquis wrote. Conversation at table centered on “the events of the war.” In addition, Lafayette wrote home, he and Washington, after breakfast each morning, reviewed “the past, the present and the future.” Martha urged him to come again and bring with him his wife and “whole little family.” Since she and her husband were “both old,” she said, the Lafayettes must not defer the pleasure such a visit would give.