The Washingtons

by Flora Fraser

  Washington’s authority and Hamilton’s influence secured the required two-thirds majority needed in the Senate for the treaty. The president, however, did not forget the attacks he had endured. On leaving office two years later, he was to meditate including in his farewell address to the Senate a protest against newspaper paragraphs teeming with “all the Invective that disappointment, ignorance of facts, and malicious falsehoods could invent, to misrepresent my politics and affections; to wound my reputation and feelings; and to weaken, if not entirely destroy the confidence you had been pleased to repose in me.” Jefferson’s private encouragement of the anti-Federalist press was known to both Washingtons. Years later Martha had not forgiven him and named him, to a Federalist reverend, “one of the most detestable of mankind.”

  Slowly, as the benefits of the commercial treaty accrued, some of Washington’s popularity returned. But in Philadelphia the anti-Federalist newspapers remained on the attack. In March 1796 Vice President John Adams wrote: “the Turpitude of the [American] Jacobins touches him more nearly than he owns in Words. All the studied Efforts of the Feds, to counterbalance Abuses by Compliments don’t answer the End.” Days earlier a thousand people had gathered to celebrate Washington’s birthday at a ball “in a vast Room a Circle of 80 feet Diameter.” A few months later Jefferson, referring to “the colossus of the President’s merits with the people,” predicted that his successor, “if a monocrat,” would be “overborne by the republican sense of his constituents.” The kingly trappings that had accreted to the office, while the “colossus” occupied it, would prove hard to dislodge. But it would be for others to participate in that struggle. In the last year of office, the Washingtons were already preparing for retirement.

  John Adams, dining with the Washingtons in February 1796, heard that Betsy Custis was to marry an “English East India Nabob” and settle in the Federal City. The bride’s grandmother, Martha, was “as gay as a Girl,” the vice president wrote to his wife, “and tells the story in a very humerous stile. Mr. Law says he is only 35 Years of Age and altho the Climate of India has given him an older look Yet his Constitution is not impaired beyond his Years. He has asked Leave and a Blessing of The President and Mrs. W. He is to finish a House in the Federal City and live there. He has two”—actually three—“Children born in India: but of whom is not explained.” Adams added: “Nelly is with her sister Patcy at Georgetown—married to Mr. Peters [Peter], son of a Maryland Nabob. Thus you see that Fortune is the Object in our Country not Family. No, that would be Aristocratical.”

  To Law, a bishop’s son and an East India Company man for the last twenty years, an alliance with the president’s granddaughter and purchase of land in the Federal City no doubt seemed promising investments. But Washington had originally discouraged the match, when Betsy—now, by Thomas’s wish, called Eliza—and her husband-to-be wrote with news of their forthcoming nuptials. “No intimation of this event,” Washington responded to Law on February 10, “from any quarter, having been communicated to us before, it may well be supposed that it was a matter of Surprize.” He hoped, “as the young lady is in her non-age [a minor], that preliminary measures”—a settlement on Eliza—“has been, or will be arranged with her Mother and Guardian, before the Nuptials are Solemnized.”

  Outwardly the principal occupants of the house on Market Street appeared little changed in the last year of his office from when they had first appeared in public as president and his lady—he tall, dignified, and courtly, she small, robust, and lively. Age had not diminished their spirit. Martha, however, suffered more than ever from stomach and bilious complaints, and her small white teeth were no longer her own. Gilbert Stuart, who painted the couple in Washington’s last year of office, defended himself against criticism of the president’s grim mien: “he had just had a set of false teeth inserted, which accounts for the constrained expression so noticeable about the mouth and lower part of the face.” He had consented to be painted on this occasion only to oblige his wife, who had seen him painted for others so often and now wanted a souvenir for herself. Martha was not to have her prize. Stuart never finished the portraits and kept them in his studio, using that of the president as a model for many copies that he worked up and sold.

  Though Washington’s habitual reserve was both lauded and castigated, Stuart affected to observe “a man of terrible passions.” He told his friend John Neal: “the sockets of his eyes; the breadth of his nose and nostrils; the deep broad expression of strength and solemnity upon his forehead, were all a proof of this.” Washington’s anger did erupt at moments of frustration during the war and, according to Jefferson, at least once during cabinet. His friendship for Mrs. Powel, even during her widowhood, suggests that passion of another kind stirred him. In a teasing and tantalizing letter of June 1796, she wrote: “Feeling myself incapable of nourishing an implacable Resentment, and in conformity with your better and dispassionate Judgment I have, after maturely considering all that passed Yesterday, determined to dine with you Tomorrow, when I will endeavour to meet your Ideas with Fortitude.” Washington’s other correspondence sheds no light on “all that passed Yesterday,” but it may have been a clash of political views.

  While at Mount Vernon this summer, the Washingtons were busy preparing to make it their permanent residence the following year. They were missing one member of the household whom Martha deemed crucial to her happiness. Just before they left Philadelphia, Oney Judge, the house slave who served as one of Martha’s maids, had run away. Forty years later Oney was to give this account of the day she sought her freedom: “Whilst they were packing up to go to Virginia, I was packing to go, I didn’t know where; for I knew that if I went back to Virginia, I should never get my liberty. I had friends among the colored people of Philadelphia, had my things carried there beforehand, and left Washington’s house while they were eating dinner.” Oney seems to have feared, too, that she would be given as a “wedding present” to Eliza Law. Her sister, Delphy, passed into Mrs. Law’s keeping.

  There were sightings of Oney in New York before she was firmly located in the autumn in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Conversations, on November 28, were held with her there, as she seemed wishful to return to her native Virginia. Washington himself gave this account: “there is no doubt in this family, of her having been seduced and enticed off by a Frenchman, who was either really, or pretendedly deranged; and under that guize, used frequently to introduce himself into the family.” The president heard that the Frenchman had subsequently tired of her, and that she had “betaken herself to the Needle—the use of which she well understood—for a livelihood.”

  Just before yellow fever afflicted Philadelphia in 1793, Washington had signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act, which empowered a slave owner or his agent to arrest any slave who had fled into another state. It was the duty of a local judge or magistrate, upon production of satisfactory proof of ownership, to give a warrant for the slave’s removal from the state. Children born of slave mothers were classed as slaves themselves. Accordingly, this act and the fear of arrest extended unto succeeding generations. In this case Washington wished Joseph Whipple, the collector of customs in Portsmouth, to proceed cautiously. If possible, he should make no arrest. A Gradual Abolition Law had been passed in New Hampshire. The citizenry, as well as the free black community among whom the girl was living, would undoubtedly react badly if she were taken by force.

  A curious standoff developed between master and fugitive slave. The president struggled to gratify his wife’s wishes and square his own conscience. Oney, bartering for her freedom, offered the Portsmouth officials a compromise. She would return to Martha’s side if her manumission, following Washington’s death and that of her mistress, was guaranteed. This Washington refused as a matter of principle. “However well-disposed I might be to a gradual abolition, or even to an entire emancipation of that description of People (if the latter was in itself practicable at this Moment),” he wrote, “it would neither be politic or just, to
reward unfaithfulness with a premature preference.” It would breed discontent in her fellow servants’ minds. If she returned voluntarily, he suggested, “her late conduct will be forgiven by her Mistress.”

  At first Oney said she would return. Then, no doubt advised by her friends, she changed her mind. Fear of obloquy deterred Whipple from dispatching her, unwilling, to Virginia. Still at large in January 1797, she married seaman Black Jack Staines and was soon with child. That child, of course, like Oney herself, was liable to arrest and dispatch to Mount Vernon, should Washington decide at any time to employ what he termed, in November 1796, “violent measures.” Martha must take another maid.

  There were other losses threatening a peaceful retirement. Martha’s niece, Fanny, had died that spring of the same tuberculosis that had afflicted her first husband, George Augustine. The mistress of Mount Vernon must look to Nelly to aid her in household management. Pearce, moreover, an effective farm manager, was too ill from a rheumatic complaint to continue long in his post. James Anderson, who would succeed him in January 1797, was to prove to have little experience of managing a slave workforce.

  Martha’s granddaughter Eliza was delighted with her new position in the Federal City as Mrs. Thomas Law and was soon expecting a child. With Nelly at home and the Laws and Peters in the Federal City, only Wash Custis would be far off when George and Martha retired to Mount Vernon in March 1797. In the autumn of 1796 he was to be installed in Nassau Hall, the university in Princeton. The president had been alarmed by some of the company his ward was keeping while at school in Philadelphia. Under no illusions about the young man’s habits, he opined that Custis would least like having to rise an hour before daybreak to begin his studies.

  In November, John Adams, Federalist, was elected president, and Jefferson, anti-Federalist, vice president. On February 22, 1797, for the last time during the Washingtons’ residence in Philadelphia, society thronged the rooms of the Market Street house for “birthday” celebrations. Martha received the ladies above. Washington, the order of the Cincinnati on his chest, welcomed those—Knox, Hamilton, and others—similarly bedecked and, among the members of his cabinet, foreign ministers, senators, congressmen, and businessmen, the friends with whom he and Martha had dined and visited these years he was in office.

  Arrangements and preparations and farewells now filled the Washingtons’ days. Lear was overseeing the packing up of the house as he had seen to the installation there of the Washingtons’ belongings. Mrs. Powel offered to buy from the the president his carriage horses on her nephew’s account: “If my dear Sir it will be any accommodation to you to anticipate the payment for the Horses, intimate it to me, it will at any Moment be perfectly convenient to me to draw a Check on the Bank for the Amount.” As she did not speculate, she wrote, she was “always in Cash.”After his departure for Virginia, Washington instructed Lear to send Mrs. Powel, as a gift, two mirrors, lamps, and brackets. She was warm in her thanks: “From you they are acceptable tho from no other Being out of my own Family would I receive a pecuniary Favor, nor did I want any inanimate Memento to bring you to my Recollection.” She begged only her “best wishes to Mrs Washington and Miss Custis.”

  Days before he and Martha departed for Virginia, the president was to tell Mrs. Liston, wife of the British minister, he was “like a Child within view of the Holydays, I have counted the months, then the weeks, & I now reckon the days previous to my release.” On the eve of John Adams’s inauguration, a large company, including the president-elect and his wife, dined at Market Street. Conversation stopped when Washington rose and filled his glass: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the last time I shall drink your health as a public man. I do it with sincerity, and wishing you all possible happiness.”

  Now it was for the Adamses to rent and inhabit the Market Street house. Mrs. Adams wrote to a government wife in February in preparation: “I will thank you if you can inform me what Number of domesticks the President’s Household consisted of, how many female Servants? I can carry four from hence.” She added: “To be the Successor of Mrs Washington and to make good her place will be an arduous task.” On the ninth of the month she wrote to Martha herself, asking for guidance: “the Tongue of Slander, the pen of Calumny, nor the bitterness of envy have never once to my knowledge assailed any part of your conduct.…I will endeavour to follow your steps and by that means hope I shall not essentially fall short of my amiable exemplar.” Abigail was anxious to learn the “Rules” which Mrs. Washington had instituted and followed: “as it respected receiving & returning visits, both to Strangers and citizens as it respected invitations of a publick or private nature.” She paid due tribute to her correspondent’s “experience and knowledge of persons and Characters.”

  Martha responded on the twentieth: “I never dined or supped out, except once with thence President, once with each of the Governors of the state where we have resided and (very rarely) at dancing assemblies.” She was content to withdraw from the public gaze. “The curtain is falling,” wrote that most undramatic of women to Caty Greene—now Mrs. Phineas Miller—in Georgia, and she looked forward to a “more tranquil theater.”

  28

  Retirement, 1797–1798

  “Rooms to Paint—Paper—Whitewash &ca &ca”

  WASHINGTON CELEBRATED the resumption of private life in Virginia to which he had so long looked forward with an economical diary entry for March 16, 1797: “At home all day alone. Wind at East & very cloudy all day.” On their way from Philadelphia to Mount Vernon, he and Martha and Nelly had dined with the Laws in their house near the Capitol and lodged with the Peters in Georgetown on their way home. Martha was not often again to visit the Federal City, now known also as the “city of Washington.” Her husband was to lodge alternately with the Laws and Peters when inspecting lots at either end of the city that he had bought four years earlier. The progress of the public buildings, too, was to attract his attention.

  At first, both Washingtons stayed close to home. A change in the weather a few days after their arrival at Mount Vernon caused Nelly to write to her friend Elizabeth Bordley in Philadelphia: “this has been a charming morning—and everything appears to be revived. The grass begins to look green. Some trees are in blossom, others budding. The flowers are coming out—and the numerous different birds keep up a constant serenading.” The inhabitants of the house included the Marquis de Lafayette’s son and his tutor. The arrival of this young namesake, George Washington Motier Lafayette, in America two years earlier had not been without embarrassment for the president. The boy’s father had been denounced in France as a traitor to the revolution and by the allied powers as a traitor to the defunct king whom he had once served. After he fled France in 1792, Lafayette was captured by Austrian forces and imprisoned in a series of jails. Washington had won the approval of Congress, before he issued an invitation to George and his tutor to reside at the presidential mansion. They continued as the Washingtons’ guests at Mount Vernon.

  George and Martha had at first little opportunity to appreciate the natural beauty of their home, and the general, little time to attend to his farms. There were still matters arising from their leave-taking of the house on Market Street. Washington’s ardent admirer, Mrs. Powel, had bought the writing desk he had used as president. She wrote in mid-March: “Suppose I should prove incontestably that you have without Design put into my Possession the love Letters of a Lady addressed to you under the most solemn Sanction; & a large Packet too.” After some raillery, she had pity on him: “to keep you no longer in Suspense, tho’ I know that your Nerves are not as irritable as a fine Ladies, yet I will with the Generosity of my Sex relieve you, by telling you—that upon opening one of the Drawers of your writing Desk I found a large Bundle of Letters from Mrs Washington bound up and labled with your usual Accuracy.” Washington denied in answer that he had any “love letters” to lose. He was, however, discomfited by his error in not having emptied the drawers and thanked Mrs. Powel for her “delicacy” in ensurin
g he received the letters safely and unread by others. Had they fallen into “more inquisitive hands,” he asserted, the correspondence would have been found to be “more fraught with expressions of friendship, than of enamoured love.” So as to confer “warmth, which was not inherent,” on the correspondence, an illicit reader with ideas “of the Romantic order,” he wrote with ponderous humor, might have committed the letters to the flames.

  The Washingtons had left behind the “furniture of the Green Drawing Room”—scene of so many successful receptions—as well as their splendid town coach, in hopes that Adams would decide to acquire them. Mrs. Powel had written to Washington in February: “if Mr Adams lays the same stress on the association of Ideas that I do, both with respect to our Pleasures, and our Consequence, I think he will gladly become the Purchaser of not only your Coach, but of every Article that the World have been accustomed to see you make use of; and that you are disposed to part with.” John and Abigail Adams had other ideas. Furniture and vehicle were, in consequence, put up for sale, with the pictures that had adorned the public rooms—“fancy pieces of my own chusing,” Washington told Mary White Morris in May, and no longer required. To the disappointment of auctiongoers, Washington reserved for their home in Virginia what Lear termed in March “the Paintings, Prints &c”—images of the president.