Washington: A Life (94 page)

Sharp-eyed visitors noted how Martha Washington, in her cheerful, self-effacing way, facilitated social interactions, making her husband’s life easier. “As to his lady, she appears to me to be a plain, good woman, very much resembling the character of Lady Bountiful,” wrote Captain John Enys. She “is very cheerful and seems most happy when contributing towards the happiness of others.”
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Neither plain nor showy, she occupied a congenial middle ground. As a Rhode Island merchant noted, “Mrs. Washington is an elegant figure for a person of her years … She was dressed in a plain black satin gown with long sleeves” and a gauzy black cap with black bows. “All very neat, but not gaudy.”
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One snobbish female visitor professed shock at the doyenne’s unpretentious appearance. She and a friend had “dressed ourselves in our most elegant ruffles and silks and were introduced to her ladyship. And don’t you think, we found her
knitting and with
a specked [checked] apron on!”
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Among the major tourist attractions at Mount Vernon was Washington’s stable of Thoroughbred horses, especially those he rode during the war, who had earned a rest. Early in the war his steed of choice had been Blueskin, so named for its bluish-gray skin. In 1785 Washington gave the horse to a lady friend, Elizabeth French Dulany, adding an affectionate note of apology: “Marks of antiquity have supplied the place of those beauties with which this horse abounded—in his better days.”
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Even more renowned was his chestnut Nelson, who had served at Yorktown and withstood gunfire better than any other horse. After the war, Old Nelson was exempt from all work and able to graze to his heart’s content. “They have heard the roaring of many a cannon in their time,” one appreciative visitor said of these two horses. “… The General makes no manner of use of them now; he keeps them in a nice stable, where they feed away at their ease for their past services.”
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For the most part, Washington stuck close to home after his years of military exile and resigned from the vestry of Truro Parish, a position he’d held for twenty-two years. Some scholars have attributed this to political motives. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Anglican vestrymen still had to vow obedience to the “doctrine and discipline of the Church of England,” which had George III at its head.
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Obviously George Washington couldn’t submit to such a public pledge without provoking a brouhaha. During the next few years, as the Anglican Church distanced itself from its British roots and evolved into the Protestant Episcopal Church, Washington’s church attendance still remained intermittent. One explanation has been that a minister once chided Washington for failing to take communion, preaching that great men needed to set an example for the community. Perhaps taking umbrage, Washington continued to attend the church but avoided Sundays when communion was offered. One also wonders whether Washington didn’t feel an unseemly sense of being on public display at church, his presence attracting large crowds and adding to the already weighty burden of his celebrity.

After the war Washington was a far more voracious reader than generally recognized. Though hardly a Renaissance man on a par with Jefferson and Franklin, he pursued a broad range of interests throughout his life. Long an attentive reader of agricultural treatises and other books of practical knowledge, he also read the important literature of his time, and his library included volumes of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Milton, and Oliver Goldsmith, as well as Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary. In the spring of 1783, from his Newburgh headquarters, he had ordered books advertised for sale in a gazette, and one is impressed by the substantial works on the purchase list. For his eclectic postwar reading he had lined up Voltaire’s
Letters to Several of His Friends,
John Locke’s
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
and Gibbon’s
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. Showing a decided biographical bent, he ordered lives of Charles XII of Sweden, Louis XV of France, and Peter the Great of Russia. Apparently still hoping to make a trip to France, he ordered a French dictionary and grammar, although he showed little aptitude for foreign languages and made no discernible headway.

Though not notable for scintillating repartee, Washington enjoyed the society of writers and never felt intellectually threatened by their company. In May 1785 the lexicographer Noah Webster spent a day at Mount Vernon, angling to get Washington to support a copyright law in Virginia. In all likelihood, he furnished Washington with a copy of his
Sketches of American Policy,
which made the case for a strong central government. A surprising wheeler-dealer, Webster attempted to cut a deal with Washington: he would tutor Nelly and Washy gratis in exchange for unrestricted access to Washington’s papers. Scenting a bad bargain, Washington spurned the offer.

For ten days in June he entertained a well-known British historian, Catharine Macaulay Graham, and her younger husband. Taken with his visitor, he told Henry Knox that a “visit from a lady so celebrated in the literary world could not but be very flattering to me.”
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A woman with a very long, pale face, sharply accentuated by a very long, pale nose, she was an expert in English and Roman history. A radical Whig and a distinguished friend to American liberty, she entered into serious political talks with Washington. “It gave me pleasure to find that her sentim[en] ts respecting the inadequacy of the powers of Congress … coincided with my own,” Washington told Richard Henry Lee.
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Perhaps Washington was also subtly screening a potential biographer for himself, for he confessed to his diary: “Placed my military records into the hands of Mrs. Macaulay Graham for her perusal and amusem[en]t.”
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Dr. Samuel Johnson memorably satirized the female historian as a high-minded hypocrite, once asking her to show her faith in her egalitarian beliefs by inviting her footman to dine at her table. She never forgave Johnson for the taunt.

Washington’s desire to socialize with literary personalities likely arose from his belief that writers crowned those who won fame and ended up in history’s pantheon. In 1788, when he steered Lafayette to the American poet Joel Barlow, then resident in France, Washington described Barlow as “one of those bards who hold the keys of the gate by which patriots, sages, and heroes are admitted to immortality. Such are your ancient bards who are both the priest and doorkeepers to the temple of fame. And these, my dear Marquis, are no vulgar functions.”
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Washington went on to say that military heroes, far from being passive, could groom their own advocates: “In some instances … heroes have made poets, and poets heroes. Alexander the Great is said to have been enraptured with the poems of Homer and to have lamented that he had not a rival muse to celebrate his actions.”
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The passage shows Washington’s underlying hunger for posthumous glory and how calculating he could be in gaining it. He ended the letter by lauding the golden ages of arms and arts under Louis XIV and Queen Anne and by expressing the hope that America would not be found “inferior to the rest of the world in the performance of our poets and painters.”
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For all of Washington’s professions of modesty, the thought of his high destined niche in history was never far from his mind. Few historical figures have so lovingly tended their image. As we have seen, he had issued detailed instructions for preserving his wartime papers. When the wagon train loaded with these bulky papers set out for Mount Vernon in November 1783, he fussed over their transport, telling the lieutenant entrusted with the mission that he shouldn’t cross the Susquehanna or the Potomac by ferry if the winds were too high or any other dangers arose. As if the wagons were encrusted with precious jewels, he delivered this warning: “The wagons should never be without a sentinel over them; always locked and the keys in your possession.”
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He experienced vast relief when the papers showed up safely at his home.

No sooner had these documents arrived than a would-be biographer, John Bowie, and a would-be historian of the Revolution, Dr. William Gordon, emerged from the woodwork. In an extraordinary tribute, Congress had given Washington access to its secret papers on the same terms as its members, enhancing the value of his cooperation to future historians. To maintain the tradition of military submission to civilian authority, Washington decided not to open his papers until Congress did likewise with its archives. Washington wasn’t reluctant to disclose the historical record; he just thought it might seem conceited and presumptuous to do so first and that a congressional decision would make it seem less self-aggrandizing. Of the two projects, Washington was more troubled by the biography, fearing his cooperation might smack of vanity. “I will frankly declare to you … that any memoirs of my life, distinct and unconnected with the general history of the war, would rather hurt my feelings than tickle my pride whilst I lived,” he told Dr. James Craik. “I had rather glide gently down the stream of life, leaving it to posterity to think and say what they please of me, than by an act of mine to have vanity or ostentation imputed to me.”
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Washington looked favorably upon William Gordon’s history, as long as Congress first gave him license to open up his papers. A dissenting minister from Roxbury, Massachusetts, Dr. Gordon had been a staunch supporter of the independence movement. When Congress gave Washington its approval to unseal his papers, the indefatigable Gordon spent more than two weeks at Mount Vernon in June 1784, reading himself blind all day, pausing only for meals. In a letter to Horatio Gates written soon afterward, he summarized the scope of Washington’s extraordinary literary repository: “thirty and three volumes of copied letters of the General’s, besides three volume of private, seven volumes of general orders, and bundles upon bundles of letters to the General.”
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When Gordon’s multi-volume history appeared in 1788, Washington bought two sets for himself and urged friends to buy it.

Despite the years of work devoted to conserving his papers, Washington thought they had not yet attained an acceptable state and planned to dedicate the winter of 1784-85 to rescuing them from “a mere mass of confusion.”
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To his dismay, he never had time to tidy the letters or “transact any business of my own in the way of acco[un]ts … during the whole course of the winter or, in a word, since my retirement from public life.”
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He remained the prisoner of a clamorous procession of visitors. Even more time-consuming were the reams of mail that arrived daily, badgering him for recommendations, referrals, and answers to war-related queries. Feeding this flood tide of correspondence was a well-meant congressional decision to exempt from postage all mail to and from Washington. Someone else of Washington’s Olympian stature might have simply ignored unsolicited letters, but with his innate courtesy, he replied dutifully to all of them, even at the expense of his business. Duty had long since become a deadly compulsion that he was helpless to conquer, however much it exhausted him. During the war his large staff of quick-witted young aides had handled his correspondence; and now he complained that “not in the eight years I served the public have I been
obliged
to write so much
myself
as I have done since my retirement” from military service.
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Unable to escape fame even in his own home, Washington felt confined to his desk, and his health suffered for lack of sufficient exercise. “I already begin to feel the effect,” he told Henry Knox. “Heavy and painful oppressions of the head and other disagreeable sensations often trouble me.”
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A physician, possibly James Craik, advised him that the worrisome head symptoms resulted from excessive paperwork and that he had to stop. The solution grew crystal-clear to Washington: “I am determined therefore to employ some person who shall ease me of the drudgery of this business.”
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In July 1785, he hired a young man, William Shaw, as his factotum to draft letters, organize his papers, and even tutor Nelly and Washy. But Shaw had a habit of gallivanting about whenever Washington needed him and lasted only thirteen months.

Far happier was Washington’s association with Lieutenant Colonel David Humphreys, who had served as his aide late in the war. A Yale graduate and former Connecticut schoolmaster, he was a husky young man in his mid-thirties with a dense thatch of wavy hair, a soft, jowly face, and an engaging gleam in his eyes. Washington doted on Humphreys to the point that John Trumbull said, with only a touch of mockery, that he was the “belov’d of Washington.”
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Humphreys had turned in such a stellar performance at Yorktown that Washington honored him with a special distinction: he had carried the twenty-four captured British flags to Congress and was presented, in turn, with a commemorative sword. An able writer, Humphreys drafted many of Washington’s remarks at the stultifying round of receptions that followed the evacuation of New York.

After the war Humphreys worked in Paris with Jefferson and helped to negotiate commercial treaties. In July 1785 Washington acceded to Humphreys’s request to write a biography of him. In laying out the conditions of employment, which would include arranging his papers, Washington smothered the younger man with attention, promising to provide him with oral reminiscences and access to his archives: “And I can with great truth add that my house would not only be at your service during the period of your preparing this work, but … I should be exceedingly happy if you would make it your home. You might have an apartment to yourself in which you could command your own time. You would be considered and treated as one of the family.”
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By now Washington had guaranteed that objectivity would be impossible for Humphreys, embraced as he was by the American god. In a telling comment, Washington told his prospective Boswell that he would have undertaken his own memoir but lacked the time and was also “conscious of a defective education and want of capacity to fit me for such an undertaking.”
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It is striking that Washington’s earlier insecurity still resided beneath his confident air. One visitor picked up an interesting verbal tic of Washington’s that may reflect a lack of education, the way he tripped over words: “The general converses with great deliberation and with ease, except in pronouncing some few words: in which he has a hesitancy of speech.”
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Such pauses may also have owed something to Washington’s slippery dentures.