His Excellency: George Washington (25 page)

Two presidential portraits, both from life but each strikingly different in its depiction of the elder statesman. by Rembrandt Peale, 1795;

by Gilbert Stuart, 1796

Realistic and romantic images of Washington. the bust by Jean Antoine Houdon, based on the life mask of 1785;

the Sears, Roebuck catalogue cover by Norman Rockwell, 1932

The highly staged depiction of Washington crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze, wrong in most details, right in its mood of heroic desperation, painted in 1851

The ill-fated attack on Chew House during the battle of Germantown, as rendered by Howard Pyle in 1898

The case and decanters Washington purchased from Robert Cary and found so outrageously expensive

An 1804 engraving of the piazza on the Potomac side of the mansion, where Washington liked to socialize with guests after dinner

Two final Washington projects. plans for the city of Washington, 1792;

the census of slaves at Mount Vernon in 1799, compiled while Washington drafted his will

CHAPTER FIVE

Introspective Interlude

N
OTHING WOULD EVER
be the same again. Before the American Revolution, Washington’s reputation was regional rather than national, and it rested—rather precariously, it turned out—on his landed wealth, part of which came with Martha’s dowry and part of which came as a consequence of his military service during the French and Indian War. After Yorktown his preeminence was national, indeed international, and it rested on the purity of his revolutionary credentials, a nearly inexhaustible reservoir of conferred grace akin to canonization. He had made himself the center of gravity around which all the revolutionary energies formed, had sustained the Continental army for nearly eight years of desperate fighting, and then had surrendered his unprecedented power in a symbolic scene that struck most observers as the last act in a historical drama written by the gods. He was, as one lyrical tribute put, “the man who unites all hearts,” the American Zeus, Moses, and Cincinnatus all rolled into one. The poet Francis Hopkinson described him as “the best and greatest man the world ever knew,” adding that “had he lived in the lap of idolatry, he had been worshipped as a god.”
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No American had ever before enjoyed such a transcendent status. And over the next two hundred years of American history, no public figure would ever reach the same historic heights. (Being present at the creation confers unique opportunities for immortality.) It took a while for Washington to adapt to this new role as America’s secular saint. At first he took refuge in silence, noting that the slower cadences of rustic life required a period of adjustment after the crowded routine of wartime, when he was constantly, as he put it, “upon the stretch.” After a few months he developed a standard response to the avalanche of accolades: he was not a god, but merely the beneficiary of providential forces which had somehow guided him through what he called “the quicksands and Mines which lay in his way.”
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Though he began to refer to himself in the third person, Washington could also make jokes about the ludicrousness of it all. When the Confederation Congress sent him a gold box containing his surrendered commission—his souvenir as Cincinnatus—he observed that a century later it might become a religious relic worshipped by his descendants. When the King of Spain transported a prize jackass to Mount Vernon as a gift designed to establish an improved line of American mules, Washington observed that the jackass was so deficient as a breeding stud that it must have obtained its sexual appetite from the dwindling male line of the Spanish monarchy. As the endless stream of visitors determined to make a pilgrimage to Mount Vernon occupied more of his time, he periodically attempted to offset his reputation for aloofness with a human touch, as when one perfect stranger who was coughing through the night found Washington standing by his bedside with a cup of tea for relief. Another early visitor, a French dentist who specialized in implants, also commented on Washington’s courtesy, though not even Washington could have predicted that, two centuries later, his false teeth and bridgework would become a major tourist attraction at Mount Vernon.
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