“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.
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 travelers 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.