Washington: A Life (150 page)

Ona Judge never returned to slavery or the South. In late December Joseph Whipple informed Washington that she would shortly get married, making a mockery of Washington’s scenario of a cunning Frenchman who had duped and impregnated her. That January she married a “colored sailor” named John Staines, and about a year later they had a daughter, the first of three children, proving that Judge had not been pregnant at the time of her flight. Despite this news, Martha refused to let the matter drop. During the summer of 1799, when she learned that her nephew, Burwell Bassett, Jr., was traveling to Portsmouth, the news led to one last attempt to recapture Judge. While instructing Bassett to shy away from doing anything “unpleasant or troublesome,” Washington told him that if Judge could be brought back by “easy … and proper means … it would be a pleasing circumstance to your aunt.”
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Bassett located Judge, who was now a mother, and assured her that no punishment would occur if she returned. Apparently she had heard rumors that Bassett would seize her and her child by force, if necessary, and she would not be coaxed back into bondage. “I am free now and choose to remain so,” she declared, settling the matter for good.
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The other slave who shocked the Washingtons by his disappearance was Hercules, who was owned directly by the president. We recall that he had noisily protested his loyalty to Washington over the issue of the six-month slave law in Pennsylvania. Hercules oversaw a mixed staff of slaves and indentured servants who worked in a separate kitchen building, attached to the executive residence by an underground passage. Being top chef for the president carried high status, and the dandyish Hercules, who was partial to black silk waistcoats, coats with velvet collars, cocked hats, and gold-headed canes, relished his eminence around town. He also appreciated the money he made from selling kitchen leftovers, spending it on fancy clothes, watches, and shoe buckles. One Mount Vernon visitor got this report of the headstrong Hercules: “The cook who rejoiced in the name of
Hercules
was … something of a tyrant, as well as a capital cook.”
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The freedom that Hercules enjoyed in Philadelphia could only have made more oppressive the prospect of returning to Virginia, emboldening him to escape. Around the time that Washington left the presidency, Hercules suddenly disappeared. Although Washington made efforts to retrieve him, they were neither as systematic nor as prolonged as with Ona Judge. For one thing, he knew that Hercules had friends in the local black community who could hide him and that with his culinary skills he could easily make a living. George and Martha Washington did not seem to feel as personally betrayed by Hercules’s flight as by Judge’s, perhaps because he was an older and more independent personality who had nothing to gain by remaining a slave now that the presidency had ended.

In January 1798 Washington sent a pair of notes to Frederick Kitt, a household steward during his presidency, laying out secret plans for recapturing Hercules. As with Judge, Washington wanted to have Hercules hustled aboard a ship bound for Alexandria “with a strict charge to the master not to give him an opportunity of escaping.”
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Washington showed implicit respect for Hercules’s shrewdness, warning Kitt that if he gets “the least hint of the design, he would elude all your vigilance.”
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Although Kitt made inquiries and verified Washington’s hunch that Hercules had indeed lingered in Philadelphia, the ex-slave was never caught and succeeded in winning his freedom. He paid a hefty price for it. He left behind his son Richmond, who had been sent back to Mount Vernon for allegedly stealing money, possibly the prelude to a joint escape with his father. He also had to say goodbye to a six-year-old daughter at Mount Vernon. When a French visitor confronted the little girl as to whether she was upset at her father’s action, she retorted, “Oh! Sir, I am very glad, because he is free now.”
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After the Washingtons returned to Mount Vernon in March 1797, the kitchen was a hectic, demanding place that had to handle the sudden advent of unexpected guests. Hercules’s flight threw the household into turmoil, and extensive inquiries were made to find a skilled cook to replace him. Martha wrote despondently to Eliza Powel, “The inconvenience I am put to since the loss of my cook is very great and rendered still more severe for want of a steward, who is acquainted with the management of such like matters.”
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Not a moment too soon, Washington found Eleanor Forbes, an English widow, to function as housekeeper and help supervise the kitchen. Washington told his nephew Bushrod that Martha had been “exceedingly fatigued and distressed for want of a good housekeeper.”
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For Washington, the search for a new slave cook ran into an insurmountable problem: it would force him to break his rule of not buying new slaves. “The running off of my cook has been a most inconvenient thing to this family,” he told a relative, “and what renders it more disagreeable is that I had resolved never to become the master of another slave by
purchase;
but this resolution, I fear I must break.”
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Washington did not stop to savor the irony here: Hercules would have had to remain a slave in order for Washington to make good on his pledge to end his purchases of slaves. However, the Washingtons could find no slave who replicated what the talented Hercules had done for many years and so decided to make do with Mrs. Forbes.

IN THE LAST YEAR of Washington’s presidency, James Sharples executed portraits of the first couple in the profile format that was his trademark. The George Washington he sketched still stood out as a powerfully commanding presence, with a long, pointed nose and thick sideburns that curled down almost to the chin line. Washington applied pomade to the hair that bulged from both sides of his face, making it wavy and shiny, while he drew the remaining hair straight back in military style and tied it in a big black bow, as he had done since the French and Indian War. Judging by the Sharples portrait, the years had been less kind to Martha. Time had sharpened her chin and made her nose more aquiline, and her strangely shaped headgear only emphasized the irregularity of her face.

Washington worked up the energy for one final address to Congress. Donning his black velvet suit and strapping his dress sword to his hip, he strode into the House on December 7, 1796, and discovered the gallery packed “with the largest assemblage of citizens, ladies, and gentlemen ever collected on a similar occasion.”
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In his thirty-minute address, he crowed about Britain’s evacuation of the northwestern forts and the liberation of American prisoners in Algiers. He also expounded on the need for a military academy, a vision later fulfilled at West Point, and issued a stirring plea for a national university in the new capital. Only in the final paragraph did Washington strike a private note, saying the present occasion aroused memories of “the period when the administration of the present form of government commenced.”
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For the most part, the speech was well received, although the lone congress-man from the new state of Tennessee, Andrew Jackson, who was enraged by the Jay Treaty, refused to salute the departing chief or join in the congressional response applauding him. The
Aurora
enjoyed bidding good riddance to Washington. “If ever a nation has suffered from the improper influence of a man,” it intoned, “the American nation has suffered from the influence of Washington.”
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Nor did many Republicans any longer feel the need to cloak their disenchantment with Washington. “The retirement of General Washington was a cause of sincere, open, and indecent rejoicing among the French party in the United States,” one Federalist reported. “The real friends of this country … considered the loss of Washington’s personal influence a public calamity.”
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A small anecdote speaks volumes about the lethal political atmosphere. After Washington published the farewell address, Federalists in the Virginia House of Delegates introduced a motion hailing “the virtue, patriotism, and wisdom of the President of the United States.” In a deliberate snub, the Republicans lobbied to delete the word
wisdom
from the resolution, prompting John Marshall to lead the battle to retain the disputed noun. “Will it be believed that the word was retained by a very small majority?” he later said. “A very small majority in the legislature of Virginia acknowledged the wisdom of General Washington.”
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As soon as the farewell address was published, the presidential campaign got under way in earnest. In many respects, Washington had made it difficult for the Federalists to emerge as a genuine national party. With his exalted stature, he never wanted to dirty his fingers with lowly organizational matters or countenance that detestable thing called a party; he wanted merely an association of like-minded gentlemen. His unassailable popularity also made it unnecessary for the Federalists to develop the broad-based popular leadership that Republicans had developed under the tutelage of Jefferson and Madison. The opposition had attained a powerful cohesion simply by sustained resistance to administration policies.

The 1796 election was the first contested presidential campaign in American history. With 71 electoral votes, Adams became the president, narrowly edging out Jefferson, with 68 votes. Since Jefferson nosed out Adams’s “running mate,” Thomas Pinckney, with 59 votes, he became vice president under rules governing the Electoral College at the time. At a presidential reception that December, Martha Washington, privy to rumors of Adams’s victory, pressed his hand in congratulation and said how pleased Washington was. As a glowing Adams reported to Abigail, “John Adams never felt more serene in his life.”
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At first, the mixed ticket seemed to promise a less partisan era, and people cited the importance of the friendship of Adams and Jefferson, dating back to Revolutionary days. More presciently, Fisher Ames saw an impending collision between the new president and vice president: “Two presidents, like two suns in the meridian, would meet and jostle for four years, and then vice would be first.”
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Thomas Jefferson believed that George Washington had led a charmed life, stealing credit from the more deserving while sticking them with his blunders. This envy was reflected in a comment he made to Madison that January: “[Washington] is fortunate to get off just 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 and that he will have his usual good fortune of reaping credit from the good acts of others and leaving to them that of his errors.”
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Embittered by his dealings with Washington, Jefferson clearly thought that the first president had been terribly lucky and overrated. By 1814 Jefferson would arrive at a more balanced verdict on Washington: “On the whole, his character was, in its mass, perfect, in nothing bad, in few points indifferent; and it may truly be said, that never did nature and fortune combine more perfectly to make a man great.”
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During a Philadelphia winter so frigid that residents skated on an ice-encrusted Delaware River, Washington ended up pioneering in one last area: how to behave as a lame duck president. Like later presidents, he endured an excruciating round of farewell parties, balls, dinners, and receptions. Though harassed by the final duties of public office, he seemed rejuvenated as the albatross was slowly lifted from his shoulders. Sick of party rancor, homesick for Mount Vernon, he craved a little privacy before he died. Martha too looked forward to the retirement that had always been her fond but forlorn dream.

Washington’s last birthday in office, his sixty-fifth, was crammed with festivities, including an “elegant entertainment” at Ricketts’ Amphitheater, followed by a dinner and ball “which for splendor, taste, and elegance was perhaps never excelled by any similar entertainment in the United States,” judged Claypoole’s newspaper.
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The vast gathering of twelve hundred guests took place in the cavernous circus hall, floored over for dancing. Like the couple atop a wedding cake, George and Martha Washington sat on a raised couch beneath a canopy and periodically descended to mill about with guests. Washington indulged in one last bout of gallantry with the ladies when he rose to present his toast: “May the members thereof [the dancing assembly] and the
Fair
who honor it with their presence long continue the enjoyment of an amusement so innocent and agreeable.”
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Showing her esteem for the outgoing president, Elizabeth Powel emerged from extended mourning for her husband and appeared radiant in a black velvet dress. There was no question that George and Martha, overcome by emotion, felt that an epic saga was ending. “Mrs. Washington was moved even to tears with the mingled emotions of gratitude for such strong proofs of public regard and the new prospect of uninterrupted enjoyment of domestic life,” a Judge Airedale reported to his wife. “ … I never saw the president look better or in finer spirits, but his emotions were too powerful to be concealed. He could sometimes scarcely speak.”
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On March 2, in one of his last acts in office, Washington wrote a condolence note to Henry Knox for his loss of three children. Perhaps moved by his old friend’s pitiable plight, he sought to repair the unfortunate damage inflicted on their long friendship by the Whiskey Rebellion. When he returned to Mount Vernon, Washington planned to travel no more than twenty miles from home again, which would sever him forever from old friends. This led him to say to Knox, “I am not without my regrets at parting with (perhaps never more to meet) the few intimates whom I love, among these, be assured, you are one.”
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