The Washingtons

by Flora Fraser

  The following month Washington made a round trip of 680 miles, visiting his lands west of the Appalachians. It might have tired a younger man. He admitted to disappointment, but not to especial fatigue, when he regained his home. He had hoped to extract rent due from tenants there. Some had pleaded an inability to pay rent. Squatters occupied a portion of of his lands. “Land Jobbers & Speculators” were offering other properties, to which he had title, for sale at Philadelphia and even in Europe.

  In early December, following some last days together, Washington said his farewells to Lafayette, who was taking ship for France. As the marquis’s carriage was lost to view, the general questioned if that was the last sight he would ever have of his protégé. “And tho’ I wished to say no, my fears answered yes,” he wrote to Lafayette from Mount Vernon. Washington was, he wrote, “now descending the hill” that he had been “fifty-two years climbing.” On a marginally more cheerful note, he ended: “but I will not repine, I have had my day.”

  Martha at Mount Vernon might have taken leave to doubt that last sentiment. Following an inspection of the western Potomac that he made on his tour, Washington was promoting a scheme to make the upper reaches of the river navigable by bateaux, flat-bottomed transports. He argued that a Potomac Company should be incorporated for political as well as commercial reasons. Swift transport of soldiers to the western borders of Virginia and Maryland, and efficient portage of furs from the northwest to the Middle States, were both desirable.

  Martha celebrated Christmas at Mount Vernon without her husband this year. Less than a year after he had resigned his commission at Annapolis, he was in the Maryland town again, once more a public servant. With two other Virginia commissioners, his task, in which he was successful, was to agree terms with three commissioners for Maryland. The Potomac Company slowly took shape.

  Washington was less sanguine about his finances. He told George William Fairfax in February 1785, “My accounts stand as I left them near ten years ago; those who owed me money, a very few instances excepted, availed themselves of what are called the tender Laws, & paid me off with a shilling & sixpence in the pound. Those to whom I owed, I have now to pay under heavy taxes with specie, or its equivalent value.”1

  He had hoped, that winter, to “overhaul & adjust” all his military papers. They were, he wrote, “in sad disorder, from the frequent hasty removals of them, from the reach of our transatlantic foes, when their Ships appeared.” He was beset, however, by what he termed “old military matters, with which I ought to have no concerns.” His opinion was none the less sought constantly. He was looking for an aide or secretary to whom he might delegate work: “at no period of the War have I been obliged myself to go thro’ more drudgery in writing, or have suffered so much confinement to effect it, as since what is called my retirement to domestic ease & tranquillity.”

  Washington complained to Fairfax of having been additionally distracted by “company” at the house that winter. The visitors continued to come. He was to make an entry in his diary on June 30: “Dined with only Mrs Washington, which I believe is the first instance of it since my retirement from public life.” Not only was this a call on his purse; he must expend on his guests’ entertainment that commodity most precious to him, time. Both George and Martha were assiduous hosts. A Massachusetts entrepreneur, Elkanah Watson, suffered a severe cold while staying in January. Washington, a towering and awesome nighttime visitor, appeared by his bed with a “bowl of hot tea.”

  Martha oversaw the management of the household. The “drudgery of ordering & seeing the Table properly covered—& things economically used,” to employ Washington’s words, was the business of the household steward. A competent individual, Richard Burnet, was let go when he was to become a married man and thereby judged by his employers no longer suitable for the position. He was subsequently rehired, married man though he was, when substitutes were found wanting. A butler, Frank Lee, waited at table, and house slaves saw to the comforts both of the family and of visitors who stayed overnight.

  Guests continued to arrive, with letters of introduction in hand. Benjamin Lincoln recommended British author Catherine Macaulay, once celebrated across the Atlantic for her History of England and now notorious for a recent marriage to William Graham, a young man twenty-six years her junior. The Grahams were resident at Mount Vernon ten days. Washington wrote subsequently to Richard Henry Lee: “her sentiments respecting the inadequacy of the powers of Congress…coincide with my own.” Martha, possibly less the focus of Mrs. Graham’s attentions, wrote of their guest to Mercy Otis Warren in Massachusetts: “she now returns to make happy those whom she left.” The “kind terms” of Mrs. Warren’s recent letter, “added to the recollection of those days in which you honoured me with your friendship,” filled Martha with “agreeable sensations.” Her husband, she added, would never forget his friendship with “General Warren” in Cambridge: “It was among the first formed, and most lasting.” The war was history now, “the General” a veteran. The complex friendships, alliances, and even quarrels with officers, state officials, and members of Congress that had obtained were now dissolved.

  The previous December Martha’s wish, expressed seven years earlier, to be “a parent and mother” to her niece, Fanny, was fulfilled when Burwell Bassett consented to his daughter joining the household at Mount Vernon. Fanny’s portrait, taken by an English artist this summer, is beguiling. It was said of Fanny that to know her was to love her. Washington might have loved her more had she remained at home with her father, but he accepted her presence, as he accepted all that gave his wife pleasure.

  Fanny’s presence was more than acceptable to Washington’s nephew, George Augustine, who had returned from the West Indies in the spring. In May the young man, aged twenty-two, obtained her father’s consent to their marriage, though she was not yet eighteen. Washington wrote to Burwell Bassett, father of the bride, that it had ever been his maxim “neither to promote, nor to prevent a matrimonial connection, unless there should be something, indispensably requiring interference in the latter.” Washington had earlier declined to give advice that Nelly Calvert Custis sought when intending to marry Stuart. “Neither directly, nor indirectly,” he continued, “have I ever said a syllable to Fanny, or George, upon the Subject of their intended connection.” However, he believed that their attachment to each other was “warm, & lasting.” In consequence, he had “just now” informed George Augustine—Martha broke the happy news to Fanny—that it was his wish that they should live at Mount Vernon. Washington’s nephew was happy to accept, and to accept the offer that he take the place of Cousin Lund as factor. Lund, moving nearby with his wife of some years, was at last his own master.

  While George Augustine learned the trade of agent, Washington hired as secretary William Shaw, a young man lately in business in Canada. His principal duties were to “methodize” the general’s papers, still in disarray, and to undertake business on his patron’s behalf abroad. He was to devote a portion of his time to teaching the “first rudiments of education” to four-year-old Wash and his sister, Nelly, now six.

  Though Shaw could attend to some business on his behalf, Washington himself was often absent from home on Potomac Company business. In October 1785 Martha wrote to excuse them both from attending the wedding of John Augustine’s son Bushrod to a bride in Dumfries. She herself pleaded ill health. Washington’s “particular engagements” in coming weeks included attendance at the “Board of Directors at Georgetown, the Great Falls, etc.”

  Another engagement detained him at home this month, though she did not mention it. The renowned French sculptor Houdon had been lured from Paris by Jefferson. He was to undertake a commission for the Virginia legislature—a portrait statue of Washington, to be erected in the future Richmond capitol. The cornerstone of this building had just been laid by Governor Patrick Henry.

  The arrival of Houdon with a bevy of assistants one October night was unexpected. No one at Mount Vernon and none of the tra
velers knew a word of each other’s language. The commotion was little less when the Parisian followed Washington on his rounds of the estate. Houdon, if irritating, was a shrewd observer of Washington’s relaxed stance in the fields. Before the sculptor returned to Paris to start work on the commission in earnest, he had the general lie on his back on a large table in “the white servants’ hall.” Laying a sheet over Washington’s body, Houdon applied plaster of Paris to his face, so as to make a life mask. Six-year-old Nelly Parke Custis, passing, thought her “Grandpapa” a corpse. Though reassured that he lived, she retained a vivid memory of the scene into later life. “Quills were in his nostrils,” she recalled.

  A more conventional event took place the same month at Mount Vernon. Washington recorded in his diary for the fifteenth: “After the Candles were lighted George Augustine Washington and Frances Bassett were married by Mr. Grayson.” George and Martha, the bride’s brother Burwell Bassett, Jr., and the Lund Washingtons looked on.

  William Shaw shirked his duties and proved an unsatisfactory secretary and tutor. In November 1785, searching for a replacement, Washington told George William Fairfax that he meant, in due course, to provide Martha’s grandson—“a remarkable fine one,” he wrote—with a “liberal education.” He sought “a classical scholar, & capable of teaching the French language grammatically; the more universal his knowledge, the better.” Wash was, he admitted, still young. He himself, however, had need of “a man of Letters & an accomptant.” Such employment could usefully occupy the successful candidate, “until attention should be more immediately required for his pupil.”

  Later that winter Benjamin Lincoln in Boston recommended a protégé, Tobias Lear, a sober New Englander and Harvard scholar, in his early twenties. In February 1786 Washington set out the terms on which the young man would live with the family at Mount Vernon. Lear would, he wrote, “sit at my Table—live as I live—mix with the Company which resort to the Ho[use].—and…be treated in every respect with civility, and proper attention.” The appointment proved a great success. Lear was soon on good terms with all and told a well-wisher in late July: “I have every attention paid me by His Excellency and all the family that I can wish; the duty required of me is small, and agreeable.” He added, “more than one half of my time is at my own disposal, which I employ in reading the Law.” Wash was as yet young, and the general did not as yet rely on Lear as he later would.

  Washington bought this summer, for 150 dollars, some “Cincinnati china” that had been brought to the United States by the first American ship to enter the China trade. “Light Horse Harry” Lee, who acted as Washington’s agent, wrote, “what renders this china doubly valuable & handsome is the order of the eagle engraved on it in honour of the Cincinnati—it has upward of 306 pieces.” In Canton an enterprising member of the society had had Chinese painters overlay the glaze with elements of the insignia of the order.

  Washington relished this “Cincinnati” dinner service as an appropriate, if expensive, souvenir of his command. Those years when he was the servant of Congress were growing distant now. He and Martha were apparently firmly established at home, though that home was a destination for all too many pilgrims and roost for passing travelers. Washington was to refer a year hence to Mount Vernon as “a well resorted tavern.”

  * * *

  1 The “tender laws,” as the Currency Act of 1773 was commonly known, had made “Virginia currency,” paper bills, as well as gold and silver, legal tender for the repayment of debts. While he had been away at war, his debtors had paid Washington in these paper bills, also known as “current money.” As mentioned, they depreciated to the point of being worth 1s 6d in the pound, their value rising only after the war, when three-quarters of the bills were withdrawn. Now, once more, only specie—gold or silver—was legal tender for repayment of debts. Washington reckoned he was the loser by £10,000.

  24

  Conventions and Elections, 1787–1789

  “a tendency to sweep me back into the tide of public affairs”

  WASHINGTON DECLINED TO ATTEND a meeting of the Society of Cincinnati, due to take place in May 1787 in Philadelphia, on the ground that he was now committed to a life of retirement. In March of that year, however, he wrote, with good reason, of “a tendency to sweep me back into the tide of public affairs.”

  Washington’s former protégé Alexander Hamilton, of New York, and James Madison, of Virginia, had earlier been foremost in calling for a grand convention of all the states to address the weaknesses in the Articles of Confederation. It was to be held that May in Philadelphia. The articles provided Congress with no power to raise taxes: it could only request monies from individual states, and its requests were often ignored. The control that the states wielded over trade and commerce was often as punitive as that emanating from London, against which patriot Americans had rebelled. Madison and Hamilton were intent on establishing a federal government with a bicameral house, executive, and judiciary. Both of them pleaded with Washington to attend the convention as a Virginia delegate who favored their cause. In January 1784 he had written to Benjamin Harrison of the “disinclination of the individual States to yield competent powers to Congress for a federal Government.” He deplored the states’ “unreasonable jealousy of that body & of one another.”

  At a preliminary convention in Richmond, Washington was named a delegate to the Grand Convention with Governor Edmund Randolph, Madison, Mason, Henry, and two others. However, it looked for some time as though he would refuse to serve in May. He had always guarded his reputation like a dog its bone. It would cause grave offense to his former comrades, members of the Society of Cincinnati, he argued, if, having declined to attend their meeting, he attended instead the Grand Convention. At the end of March he yielded to Madison and Hamilton. However, he still had misgivings, as the letter he wrote on the twenty-eighth to Governor Randolph shows: “there will be, I apprehend, too much cause to charge my conduct with inconsistency, in again appearing on a public theatre after a public declaration to the contrary.”

  Confident that Martha would be at her husband’s side, the Robert Morrises begged the Washingtons to make their Market Street house their home while they were in the city. “We will give You as little trouble as possible,” Morris wrote on April 23, “and endeavour to make it agreeable, it will be a charming season for Travelling, and Mrs Washington as well as yourself will find benefit from the Journey, Change of Air, etc.”

  Early in May the reluctant delegate replied: “Mrs. Washington is become too Domestick and too attentive to two little Grand Children to leave home.” When Jacky had been young, Martha had been too nervous about his health to leave him much, and she fancied him at death’s door when she went visiting. She expressed similar agitation about Wash, later writing to Fanny Bassett Washington: “I cannot say but it makes me miserable if ever he complains, let the cause be ever so trifling. I hope the Almighty will spare him to me.” There were others genuinely in need of her attention. That April Fanny Bassett Washington gave birth at Mount Vernon to her first child, a boy, whom they named George Fayette. Within two weeks, however, the child sickened. The Reverend Lee Massey, sent for to administer the rite of baptism, very soon officiated at the child’s burial. Martha mourned with Fanny and consoled her.

  In early May Washington prepared George Augustine for new responsibilities: “Rid [rode] to the Fishing landing—and thence to the Ferry, French’s, Dogue run, and Muddy Hole Plantations with my Nephew G.W. to explain to him the Nature, and the order of the business at each, as I would have it carried on, during my absence at the Convention in Philadelphia.” But he still harped on his reluctance to serve at the Grand Convention, writing on the fifth to Robert Morris: “I can assure you, Sir, that it was not until after a long struggle I could obtain my own consent to appear again in a public theatre.” As often before, he wrote of his wish to “glide gently down the stream of life in tranquil retirement” toward what he now described as “the world of Spirits.”r />
  He and Martha were both aware that his return to public life would not likely end with the closure of that assembly.

  When elected commander-in-chief, Washington had told Congress: “I do not think myself equal to the Command I am honored with.” He was again humble when he was—unanimously—elected, on May 25, to preside over the Grand Convention. From the chair, he reminded delegates of “the novelty of the scene of business in which he was to act, lamented his want of [better qualifications], and claimed the indulgence of the House towards the involuntary errors which his inexperience might occasion.” Such declarations only caused the convention president’s stock to rise. Washington had, of course, extensive experience as a burgess and as a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses. He had, besides, dealt constantly with Congress and state assemblies during the war.

  The battles in the chamber over which Washington presided were fierce. There was a powerful anti-Federalist lobby that included the Washingtons’ neighbor George Mason as well as Governor George Clinton of New York. They held that only amendments to the Articles of Confederation currently in force were required. The Federalists as staunchly favored Madison’s and Hamilton’s plans for a central government. By the end of July the latter had won the day, and the framework of a constitution for the United States was agreed. But there was still an array of detail to debate.