The First President once wrote a letter to a Charleston gentleman named Thomas Pinckney, who was then American ambassador at the British court. His words were for Thomas Pinckney, not for posterity, so posterity finds it refreshing to see a president writing a specific letter to his envoy under the pitiless light of publicity. Its chief interest here is not his report of the Senate’s action on a proposed treaty with Great Britain, nor his anxiety over Lafayette’s imprisonment in Olmutz, though both are subjects upon which he dwells at some length. The note for us is the fact that after long diplomatic instruction to his ambassador, Washington says:
“Before I close this letter permit me to request the favour of you to embrace some favorable opportunity to thank Lord Grenville in my behalf, for his politeness in causing a special permit to be sent to Liverpool for the shipment of two sacks of the field peas, and the like quantity of winter vetches, which I had requested our Consul at that place to send me for seed, but which it seems cannot be done without a special order from Government. A circumstance which did not occur to me, or I certainly should not have given it the trouble of issuing one for such a trifle.
“With very great esteem and regard
“I am, dear Sir,
“Your obedt. Servant,
“G. Washington.”
A treaty with Great Britain, Lafayette to be got out of prison, two sacks of field peas and some winter vetch—and there is George Washington. Our national heroes march down the ages without time to change costumes. While they live we call them everything under the sun; they die, and we endow them with a certain type-quality which they must wear forever to the exclusion of other and equally interesting qualities which they possessed in equal quantity. Unless some circumstance rescue those qualities from oblivion, a large part of the inspiration of their lives has been unnecessarily sacrificed. We have seen the first manifestation of such a process with the death of Colonel Roosevelt, and we wonder how frequently our children’s children will think of Roosevelt on the tennis-court, at Sagamore, in Montana, in Rock Creek Park, or facing death in Brazil. The nation loses a man, to mourn a saint. So in a lesser degree with our lesser heroes: Hale becomes the lay-figure of Loyalty, Franklin, of Common Sense, Grant, of Military Patience. Here, on a hill in Fairfax County, Virginia, in and about a great white house, we may catch glimpses of the man George Washington liked to be—glimpses denied us in the popular Washington legend.
He was a boy of three when his father first brought him there. He was seven when his father’s house burned, and the discouragement and loneliness of the wilderness plantation on the Potomac sent the young family to Fredericksburg to live. He was fifteen when he came back to live on the Potomac estate, now the property of his brother Lawrence. Lawrence was of no mean importance in his young brother’s eye—a veteran of the West Indian naval exploits of Admiral Vernon, and so full of them that he named the estate after his chief—altogether a rare big brother. And there were rare neighbors to be cultivated: like Lord Fairfax, an Oxford graduate and contributor to Mr. Addison’s Spectator, who took a fellow riding, and now and then rode after a fox.
As the boy broadened into self-reliance in such company as Lawrence’s, and into a degree of education by association with Fairfax, he fell heir to certain of their responsibilities. Fairfax sent him to survey his vast holdings. Lawrence developed tuberculosis, and his military duties devolved upon George. At twenty he was master of Mount Vernon, at twenty-one a lieutenant-colonel and fighting for the English against the French on the Ohio. Thackeray has pointed, in this episode, the caprice of fate: “It was strange that in a savage forest of Pennsylvania a young Virginian officer should fire a shot and waken up a war which was to last for sixty years, which was to cover his own country and pass into Europe, to cost France her American colonies, to sever ours from us, and create the great Western Republic; to rage over the Old World when extinguished in the New; and, of all the myriads engaged in the vast contest, to leave the prize of the greatest fame with him who struck the first blow!”
The next year he was a part of Braddock’s disastrous expedition, and news went home that he had been killed. John Augustine Washington made alarmed inquiries, to which George replied with a wit equal to Mark Twain’s under similar circumstances: “As I have heard, since my arrival at this place, a circumstantial account of my death and dying speech, I take this early opportunity of contradicting the first, and of assuring you that I have not as yet composed the latter.” He became a member of the legislature, and then, when he was twenty-six and a full colonel, he married Martha Dandridge Custis, who was by all odds the most accomplished and probably the wealthiest young widow in Williamsburg. It was time now to renew his neglected acquaintance with Mount Vernon.
During the period of their engagement, while Washington was absent at the frontier, and later, while he was attending the session of the House of Burgesses at Williamsburg, Mount Vernon, which had been so long neglected, was taking on a new dress. The activity on the plantation was contagious. It spread down river, to Belvoir, to Gunston Hall, and through the countryside to the other estates where Washington was intimately known, and where his earlier and generous attentions to attractive daughters did nothing to dampen their interest in his bride. Their swift coach-ride homeward bound from Williamsburg was like a triumphal entry. She added to his holdings of twenty-five hundred acres at Mount Vernon, and as many over the mountains, some fifteen thousand acres of her own. She found the house rebuilt, its exterior strengthened by new brick burned on the estate, new boarding and sheathing, new windows and a new roof; inside was new plaster, new flooring, and plenty of new closet-room, which probably touched her woman’s heart as inexpressibly thoughtful.
“I am now I believe fixd at this seat with an agreeable Consort for Life,” he wrote to a friend in England. “And I hope to find more happiness in retirement than I ever experienced amidst a wide and bustling World.” Few realize how wide and bustling was the world surveyed from Mount Vernon, nor to what extent he exerted himself to make use of the talents he had been given. Remember that there were no neighboring shops, no groceries, no service stations—not one, in fact, of the multitude of helping hands which science reaches out today to perform every conceivable task; and remember too that in his custody were, and upon his wise management depended, not only the happiness of his wife and her two children, but that of a company of several hundred others on the estate.
Husband and wife shared in an informal copartnership not unlike that of a manufacturer and a retail store-manager of today. It was her duty to anticipate the living demands of the estate, his to supply them. When she requisitioned cloth, he built a spinning-house and hired labor which in one year spun fourteen hundred yards of textiles, from broadcloth to bed-ticking. Convenient to the house, and flanking the serpentine drive, were his little factories: a smokehouse for meats, a laundry, a tailor-shop, a shoemaker’s shop, a carpenter’s, a smithy; here he wrought his raw materials to the needs of his establishment. And it was when he put on his “plain blue coat, white cassimer waistcoat, black breeches and boots” to visit the fields and the mill, his usual custom in the forenoon, that he was most truly the producer, and most contented.
The estate he divided into five farms, each under an overseer responsible to the manager of the estate, and each equipped with the necessary complement of labor, buildings and stock. Through the manager the reports of progress from the five farms were passed up to the master in the big house every Saturday morning, and with scrupulous precision he transcribed and classified them. Washington never heard of a microbe, nor studied chemistry, yet in these reports and his own conclusions will be found exhaustive experiments in inoculating the soil and rotating crops. He balanced his cultivation so as to produce sufficient food for his people and stock, and the utmost yield of negotiable grains. “Our lands,” he wrote, “were originally very good; but use and abuse have made them quite otherwise”—and so he sent abroad for new seeds to try out. Selected quantities of his grains he set aside for experiment upon the diet of his livestock. Although he was a host of lavish hospitality within the house, every move he made as a farmer was a lesson in conservation. His woodcutters got explicit orders to select the timber they cut; his overseers were told not to try to squeeze the land for high crop yield at the expense of upkeep; each new herd of cattle must be better stock than the last; the mill was re-engineered to grind more meal from each bushel of corn; a stone deposit became a quarry; the waters of the Potomac gave up “a sufficiency of fish for my own people” in the first catch, and beyond that a great supply for salting and sale in the winter market; every by-product of the estate was developed and applied. Jefferson sat at Monticello above nature’s workshop as at a play; Washington took off his plain blue coat and tinkered with the machinery to increase its efficiency.
In his admirable work on Mount Vernon, Paul Wilstach has hit upon the secret of its master’s enthusiasm:
“Mount Vernon was eventually brought to a state of high productiveness, but the scale of life there was such that rarely did the farms show a balance wholly on the right side of the ledger. Washington had to look to his estate for other assets than appeared in the physical valuation of its produce. He found its true and largest asset in the fulfilled ideal of private life; in solving the interesting problems of the planter; in mental health and physical strength; and in the enjoyment of the easy and graceful social life of the colonial country gentleman, of which Mount Vernon became a veritable example.”
A vigorous life is easy and natural to a man of Washington’s physical power. He was six-feet-three-inches high, rose with the sun, and went to bed at nine unless there were guests. His routine during the sixteen years preceding the Revolution was varied on this day to ride “Valiant” or “Ajax” after the hounds, on that to dine at Belvoir or Gunston Hall, or Belle Aire; now up-river to a dance at Alexandria, now down-river shooting ducks; this week to Annapolis and the races, next to Williamsburg on affairs of the legislature. A never-ending procession of guests arrived and departed, from parsons to British naval officers, and found a uniformly perfect welcome—even extending to the gentleman who “contrary to all expectation” held Washington motionless for three sittings while he painted his first portrait, and charged him slightly more than £57 for effigies of himself, Mrs. Washington, Martha and Jack Custis.
To the refurnished home Mrs. Washington had brought many objects of her own to add to its luxury, which was further enhanced from time to time by orders upon his London agents for furniture and ornaments. On one occasion he wrote for busts of Alexander, Caesar, Charles XII of Sweden and the King of Prussia, fifteen inches high; Prince Eugene and the Duke of Marlborough, somewhat smaller; and “Wild Beasts, not to exceed twelve inches in height nor eighteen in length.” He received instead:
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“A Groupe of Aeneas carrying his Father out of Troy, with four statues, viz. his Father Anchises, his wife Creusa and his son Ascanius, neatly finisht and bronzed with copper |
£3.3” |
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“Two Groupes, with two statues each of Bacchus & Flora, finisht neat & bronzed with copper |
£4.4” |
and “Two Lyons after the antique Lyons in Italy,” also “finisht neat,” with the following apology:
“There is no busts of Alexander ye Great (none at all of Charles 12th of Sweden), Julius Causar, King of Prussia, Prince Eugene, nor the Duke of Marlborough, of the size desired; and to make models would be very expensive—at least 4 guineas each.”
With other orders the agents had better luck, for it was neither difficult nor distasteful to satisfy a Virginia gentleman who merely described the articles ordered (if he described them at all) as either “good” or “neat” or “fashionable.” He bought the best, rarely specified price, and paid in the best tobacco—a fair deal all round, and a very agreeably furnished home Mount Vernon became.
There came a day when he was called to command the army in the north. For eight years thereafter Mount Vernon saw him but twice, and then for fleeting visits: once on his way southward from Dobbs Ferry to Williamsburg, during the march on Yorktown; once on his return to the north. Those years had seen his ascent to the height of public veneration. On December 4 of 1783 his officers bade him a frankly tearful good-bye at Fraunce’s Tavern in New York, and the chief “walked in silence to Whitehall, followed by a vast procession ... and entered a barge ... on his way to lay his commission at the feet of Congress at Annapolis.” His progress to Mount Vernon was a succession of popular demonstrations. And when on Christmas Eve he went up the hill and pandemonium broke loose to see the master returned, in his mind were no thoughts of consulates or dictatorships, empire or world-domination, but only profound relief that he had come at last into sweet and voluntary exile from affairs.
He had served without pay through the war, and his first concern now was to put the estate on its feet. He took up the flags of the eastern piazza, reinforced the foundations of the house, “removed two pretty large and full-grown lilacs to the No. Garden gate,” combed the neighboring forest for handsome trees to transplant, amplified his orchards, stocked a deer park, and made his daily rounds of the farms. The man who had lately dictated terms to the best soldiers out of Europe got from his gardener a promise to stay sober most of the time on consideration of “four dollars at Christmas, with which he may be drunk four days and four nights; two dollars at Easter to effect the same purpose; two dollars at Whitsuntide to be drunk for two days; a dram in the morning and a drink of grog at dinner at noon.”
If there had been visitors before the war, double their number flocked to him now. One night he was routed out of bed to receive a young French sculptor, sent by Jefferson and Franklin in Paris to make his statue for the capitol at Richmond. A Mount Vernon tradition says that a few days later Washington was called out to look at a pair of horses offered for sale. He asked the price, and was told “a thousand dollars.” He drew himself up in indignation, for a thousand dollars was an outrageous price for a horse and was likewise a tenth of his whole year’s living expense. Houdon, the sculptor, had been dogging Washington’s footsteps for days, studying his subject. He caught the general in the fine glow of dignified wrath, cried out, “I ’ave him! I ’ave him!” and set to work at once to make the pose immortal. With a life mask, sketches, and full measurements he returned to Paris, and there, with Gouverneur Morris posing for the standing figure, he made the composite statue which stands at Richmond today.
There came a youngster of twenty, very quiet and abashed at an audience with the great general. This boy’s name was Robert Fulton, he who later invented the steamboat. There came Noah Webster, who was to write the great American dictionary; there came Jedediah Morse, who wrote the first American geography. Lafayette, the “French boy,” was always welcome, and he spent nineteen days there in the autumn of 1784. Others were not so welcome: “My house may be compared to a well-resorted tavern,” wrote Washington. He had to summon young Laurence Washington to Mount Vernon to carry its social burden after candle-light, when he withdrew to his study to answer letters, or to taste the human pleasure of postponing answers “until tomorrow evening,” as he confessed to his former secretary of war. But, welcome or uninvited, they all came, for the country was to have a new government, and Washington was not only to help build it, but to run it. With the same modest misgivings of his own capacity for the post that he had frankly confessed in 1775, he went out again in 1789 to serve his country, and put aside again the labor that was nearest to his heart.
For eight years more his sight of Mount Vernon was limited to visits borrowed from public affairs, but he never lost his grip on its minute arrangements, directing, advising, correcting in his letters to his managers. In one downright homesick moment he said flatly that he would rather be at home with a friend or two than to be attended at the seat of government by the officers of state and the representatives of every power in Europe. John Adams, after his inauguration in 1797, wrote a letter to his wife, who had not been there to enjoy the greatest moment of his life. “It was made more affecting to me,” he said, “by the presence of the General, whose countenance was as serene and unclouded as the day. He seemed to enjoy a triumph over me. Methought I heard him say, ‘Ay, I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be the happiest!’” Everything on that bright March day in Philadelphia sang “Home!”
Presently he was there, admiring the new setting of the fine furniture and silver and glassware and china brought down from the Presidential Mansion in the Capital, some of which is in the house today. Sixty-five years old, with the western world at his feet, and he saw only the broad reaches of the Potomac down below the ha-ha walls. Sixty-six, and to see a young lad named Charles Carroll from Maryland courting his favorite grand-daughter made a man feel young himself. Sixty-seven, forty years married, the favorite grand-daughter to be married (though not to Charles Carroll), and life seemed perennial. One December morning he caught cold riding the farms, and two days later was dead.
Nothing short of the domestic enthusiasm of George Washington could have kept Mount Vernon in order. For sixty years it yielded gradually to the advance of time. Then, through the truly heroic zeal of Miss Ann Pamela Cunningham of Laurens, S. C., and the eloquence of Edward Everett, and the fine spirit of Miss Cunningham’s Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union, the estate was purchased, and with searching fidelity to the wishes of its master, restored to the state in which he would have had it. Too fulsome praise can hardly be expressed—certainly not here—for the good sense, discrimination and good organization which combine to maintain the estate. It is as if a hand had touched it lightly on a spring morning in the brightest year of its occupancy, and had held it, fixed forever in the pose, like the castle of the sleeping princess. No prince will come to rouse the place. But better than that, after sixty years of care and a century and a half of life, it re-creates each year to thousands of pilgrims the crises and victories that wrote our creed as a nation. And fortunately no landholder on this great farm of ours will leave Mount Vernon without a deep sense of relief that it is first and last a perfect monument to a country gentleman.