His Excellency: George Washington (40 page)

His correspondence during his last months in office makes no mention of the ongoing election to choose his successor. (Jefferson carried the same studied detachment to an extreme, claiming that he did not even realize that he was a candidate.) Washington was surely pleased when Adams won a narrow electoral victory, since it meant a continuation of Federalist policies, but his expression of congratulation was deliberately restrained and official. His one piece of advice to Adams was to retain John Quincy, his son, in the foreign service, despite the inevitable accusations of nepotism. Showing that his eye for young talent remained sharp, Washington described the younger Adams as a precocious lad who would “prove himself to be the ablest of all in the Diplomatic Corps.” Otherwise, he busied himself in packing for the move back to Mount Vernon, drafting final commands to the commissioners at Federal City to focus all their energies on the completion of the Capitol, complaining that the French Directory was misnamed because it lacked any sense of direction, and ordering new dentures to replace the temporary set, which did not fit and caused his lips to protrude discernibly in a way he found embarrassing.
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The last days were spent hosting dinners and dances in his honor. The ceremonials culminated with the Adams inauguration, where, somewhat to Adams’s irritation, more attention was paid to the outgoing than incoming president. Adams reported to Abigail that he thought he heard Washington murmuring under his breath at the end of the ceremony: “Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be the happiest.” But the story is probably apocryphal. Washington’s diary entry for the day was typically flat and unrevealing: “Much such a day as yesterday in all respects. Mercury at 41.” The public man was already receding into the proverbial mists. The private man could not wait to get those new dentures and place himself beneath those vines and fig trees.
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CHAPTER SEVEN

Testament

T
HE VINE
and fig tree motif suggested bucolic splendor, afternoon naps in the shade, relaxed routines aligned with the undulating contours of rolling hills. Nothing could have been more alien to Washington’s temperament. “We are all on litter and dirt,” he explained less than a month after his retirement, “occasioned by Joiners, Masons & Painters working in the house, all part of which, as well as the out buildings, I find, upon examination, to be exceedingly out of Repair.” While he had been tending to the business of the nation, no one had tended to the business of Mount Vernon, at least according to his own exacting standards. The required renovations meant hiring a small army of carpenters and painters, then adjusting to the chaos created by what he called “the Music of hammers, or the odiferous smell of Paint.”
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A day in the life of George Washington in retirement began at five o’clock with the rising of the sun: “If my hirelings are not in their places at that time, I send them messages of my sorrow for their indisposition.” In other words, he woke them up, then provided meticulous instructions about their respective assignments for the day. At seven o’clock he ate a light breakfast, often corn cakes lathered with butter and honey, cut in thin slices in order to limit the work required of his ill-fitting dentures and swollen gums. Then he was on horseback, riding around his farms for six hours, ordering drainage ditches to be widened, inspecting the operation of a new distillery he had recently constructed on the premises, warning poachers that the deer on his property had become domesticated and must not be hunted, inquiring after a favored house slave who had recently been bitten by a mad dog.

He arrived back at the mansion at two o’clock. No one needed to take the reins of his horse. Washington simply slapped him on the backside and he trotted over to the barn on his own. (Horses, like men, seemed disposed to acknowledge his authority.) He then dressed for dinner, at three o’clock sharp, which usually featured multiple courses and multiple guests, some of whom were perfect strangers who had made the pilgrimage to Mount Vernon to witness the great man in the flesh and could not be turned away without violating the open-ended Virginia code of hospitality. As a living legend Washington recognized that he remained public property, though even he observed that it was somewhat disconcerting to realize that he and Martha had not sat down for a meal by themselves in over twenty years. Even the sheer gawkers, he acknowledged, “came out of respect to me,” then added, “would not the word curiosity answer as well?”

After dinner he liked to show guests his collection of medals, the key to the Bastille sent by Lafayette, and prints done by John Trumbull depicting famous battles in the War of Independence, all this done with becoming modesty about his own contribution to the cause. He then led his guests to the piazza facing the Potomac, where he paced back and forth and liked to talk about farming (plow designs, the dreaded Hessian fly, crop rotation schemes). He often enjoyed an after-dinner glass of Madeira, which he held casually with his arm draped over a chair while listening impassively to any political talk that he preferred to avoid. Awkward silences did not disturb him, and one guest, expecting a more engaged conversationalist, expressed disappointment that “he did not, at anytime, speak with any remarkable fluency.” On the other hand, several visitors reported that he went on at considerable length about the obvious advantage of placing a national university in the still-unfinished Federal City. A visiting Polish nobleman also described him delivering an impassioned soliloquy on the destructive consequences of the French Revolution and the tragic fate of his beloved Lafayette, who was still imprisoned in Austria.

It was his custom to leave his guests at about five o’clock in order to spend two hours in his study, writing letters and reading one or more of the ten newspapers to which he subscribed. At seven he reappeared for tea, bowed to the ladies, then resumed pacing and chatting with the men. He and Martha retired at nine for the night, leaving first-time visitors with the distinct impression that they had been privileged to witness the most commanding physical presence on the planet in its most natural habitat.
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At least on the physical side, appearances were not wholly deceptive. Throughout his final retirement Washington experienced no debilitating injury or discernible deterioration of his mental or physical powers. The long midday ride provided more exercise than he could manage during the presidency, making him more trim and fit than he had been in eight years. (In 1798 he estimated his weight at 210 pounds.) To be sure, the creases around his eyes continued to deepen; his hair, though still full, was now completely gray; and he turned down an invitation to the annual ball in Alexandria by claiming that neither he nor Martha could move on the dance floor with their previous elegance. But he was, in fact, aging gracefully, putting the lie to all those Jeffersonian rumors of his imminent descent into decrepitude and senility. Friends who recommended special diets or health potions received a polite rebuttal that suggested a man at peace with his mortality. “Against the effect of time, and age, no remedy has yet been discovered; and like the rest of my fellow mortals, I must (if life is prolonged) submit.” His stoicism on this score was real, not a brave pose. When the grim reaper eventually came to claim him, he was vulnerable only because he had insisted on making his daily rounds with utter disdain for a raging sleet storm that drove everyone else to cover.
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Two shadows loomed over his serenity during his final retirement. The first came from those fields and farms he inspected every day. For visitors, Mount Vernon was a mansion, a national shrine with a majestic view of the Potomac that visually embodied the majesty of their host and hero. For Washington, Mount Vernon was the land and all its occupants beyond the mansion, which posed problems that no amount of carpentry or fresh coats of paint could cure. An inventory done in April 1797 by James Anderson, the new and forever beset manager at Mount Vernon, revealed a collection of farms containing 123 horses, mules, and asses, 680 cattle and sheep, and approximately 300 slaves, of which only 100 were fully employed, the rest being too old, too young, or too sick to do a day’s work. Economically, Mount Vernon had long ceased to be a plantation in the Tidewater mode with tobacco or wheat as its chief cash crop. It had become a highly diversified collection of farms dedicated to multiple crops and livestock, much of which were consumed on the premises. Two overlapping and interacting questions preoccupied Washington on his daily rides: what could be done with the land to transform the lethal chemistry of high expenses and negligible or nonexistent profits, and what should be done with those three hundred black residents of Mount Vernon, whom he could not in good conscience sell without breaking up families, could not afford to keep without enlarging his annual costs, and whose very presence constituted a massive contradiction of the principles on which his heroic reputation rested.
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The other shadow came from the direction of Philadelphia, where the prospects of war with France and the increasingly partisan political battles between Federalists and Republicans formed ominous clouds that soon drifted over Mount Vernon. Being an ex-president proved just as unprecedented as being president. (Kings and emperors did not have the problem, since they always died in office or exile, whereas Washington remained alive and lurking in the middle distance.) He had come out of retirement twice before: in 1787 to chair the Constitutional Convention; and in 1789 to head the national government. The pressure to extend this pattern, or else witness the dissolution of all that he had worked for as commander in chief and then president, mounted throughout 1797. His response to that pressure proved to be the poorest judgment of his political career, for he allowed himself to become a pawn in a dangerous scheme that threatened the republican experiment and eventually killed the Federalist Party.

A USEFUL AEGIS

E
VEN BEFORE
Washington settled into his retirement routine, Jefferson made a shrewd prediction about the post-Washington political world: “The President is fortunate to get off as the bubble is bursting, leaving others to hold the bag. Yet, as his departure will mark the moment when the difficulties begin to work, you will see that they will be ascribed to the new administration.” Jefferson even claimed that he felt relieved to have lost the presidential election to Adams, who now faced the “shadow of Washington” problem, as well as the legacy of a looming war with France, all amidst an increasingly shrill press. Before the
Aurora
shifted its guns toward Adams, it fired one final salvo at Washington himself that accurately previewed the escalating character of the verbal warfare that would rage for the next four years.
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Tom Paine wrote an open letter to Washington in which he actually prayed for his imminent death, then wondered out loud “whether the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor, whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.” Other editorials described Washington as “a tyrannical monster” and his Farewell Address as “the loathings of a sick mind.” Washington, for his part, pretended not to notice. Letters going out from Mount Vernon repeated the major themes of the Farewell Address—neutrality abroad and unity at home—and urged that “instead of being Frenchmen, or Englishmen in Politics” all citizens come together as Americans. He regretted the partisan bickering and personal invective, which now, he claimed, had the faint sound of cannon shots in the distance. “Having taken my seat in the shade of my Vine & Fig tree,” he postured, “I shall endeavor to view things in the Calm Lights of mild Philosophy.”
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This was not what he truly felt or thought. A visitor who accompanied him on a tour of the construction sites in Federal City reported that Washington could joke about the unfinished buildings, suggesting the congressmen and senators might have to camp out for a few years. But when the subject of French attacks on American shipping came up, he went into a tirade about the destructive consequences of the French Revolution. “I never heard him speak with so much candor,” observed the witness, “nor with such heat.” A more private outburst occurred in March 1798, when James Monroe published a lengthy defense of his conduct as American minister to France. (He described his insubordination as a higher form of patriotism and Washington’s decision to remove him as a treasonable act.) Washington went into his study, venting his anger in a line-by-line critique of Monroe’s pamphlet that was more sarcastic and scathing than anything he had ever written. Finally, in the same month, he denounced Jefferson more directly than he had ever done before. The specific occasion was a strange incident involving Jefferson’s nephew, Peter Carr, who hatched a misguided plan to write Washington under a pseudonym in the hope of eliciting a response that might generate incriminating evidence of Washington’s anti-French sentiments the Republican press could then circulate. Nothing came of this, though Washington endorsed his informant’s characterization of Jefferson as “one of the most artful, intriguing, industrious and double-faced politicians in America.” Whether Jefferson was directly involved in this plot to stigmatize Washington is unclear, but Washington’s willingness to believe so put yet another nail in the coffin of their relationship and unleashed a diatribe against Jefferson’s integrity more explicit than anything he had permitted himself during his presidency.
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