His Excellency: George Washington (26 page)

Of course, being a legend in his own time was not a novel experience for Washington. He had, in effect, been posing for posterity ever since his designation as “His Excellency” during the earliest weeks of the war. Even earlier, his near-miraculous talent for surviving the disaster at Fort Necessity and the massacre at the Monongahela instilled a keen sense that he was blessed, a sense that only deepened during the Revolutionary War when soldiers died in bloody heaps all around him and he emerged unscratched. But after 1783 his legendary status was inscribed in the first page of the new nation’s history as a permanent presence to be enshrined and embellished forever. The sculptors, painters, chroniclers, and sheer gawkers descending upon Mount Vernon signaled an installation at the very pinnacle of America’s version of Mount Olympus.

There was also one new ingredient in the heroic chemistry: Washington’s growing recognition that, just as his place in the heavens was assured, his time on earth was running out. During the war he was too preoccupied with the daily duties of command to notice that he had moved past the allotted time—fifty years—that male members in the Washington line seldom reached and that he referred to as “the meridian of life.” As he observed to the officers at Newburgh, his hair had in fact grown gray in service to his country. Those huge eye sockets were now permanently creased. The impressive muscularity of his torso had begun to soften and sag. The massive bone structure that had carried him with such grace on horseback or on the dance floor was now afflicted with rheumatism. (The man who had once led the pack in foxhunts now often declined the invitation to join the hunt rather than bring up the rear.) A somber note of resignation began to appear in his correspondence, the poignant tone of a once-great athlete past his prime who felt, literally in his bones, that he was “gliding down the stream of life.” When Lafayette departed Mount Vernon after an extended visit in 1784, the parting prompted nostalgic reminiscences of bygone days and a stoic forecast of encroaching darkness: “I called to mind,” he later wrote Lafayette, “the days of my youth, & found they had long since fled to return no more; that I was now descending the hill, I had 52 years been climbing—& that tho’ I was blessed with a good constitution, I was of a short lived family—and might soon expect to be entombed in the dreary mansions of my father’s—These things darkened the shades & gave a gloom to the picture . . . but I will not repine—I have had my day.”
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The deaths of several younger protégés and former comrades-in-arms only intensified his fatalistic mood. John Laurens went down in a meaningless skirmish after Yorktown, one of the last casualties of the war. Tench Tilghman, another trusted aide-de-camp, succumbed to a viral infection in 1786. Nathanael Greene, his most loyal and valued subordinate, died of sunstroke that same year. They all joined Charles Lee, the former colleague and rival, who had gone to his grave in 1782 amidst his beloved hounds and irreverencies. (Lee’s will stipulated that he must be buried more than a mile from any Presbyterian or Baptist church, explaining that “I have kept such bad company when living, that I do not choose to continue it when dead.”) Though Washington was accustomed to seeing death all around him throughout his life, these departures became morose reminders of his own aging, the narrowing time of his time.
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Hindsight permits us to regard Washington’s postwar years at Mount Vernon as a mere interlude between two major chapters of active service; if you will, the pastoral interruption separating the general who was “first in war” from the president who was “first in peace.” But Washington himself experienced these years as an epilogue rather than an interlude. A decade later, when two other prominent Virginians, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, retired to their respective versions of rural solitude, John Adams predicted that their political ambitions were merely hibernating, observing that “political plants grow in the shade.” Neither Washington nor anyone else believed that his ambitions were growing beneath his vines and fig trees at Mount Vernon. His public career, he firmly believed, was over, his life nearly so.
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Though he considered his own contribution complete, he did not feel that the American Revolution was over. The next step, “as plain as any problem in Euclid,” and “as clear to me as the A., B., C.,” was an enlargement of federal power sufficient to consolidate the energies of an exploding population and the resources of half a continent. Only a more powerful central government, he believed, could secure the gains made by the American Revolution, but it would probably require a crisis to make it happen. “I believe all things will come out right at last,” he observed philosophically, “but like a young heir, come a little prematurely to a large inheritance, we shall . . . run riot until we have brought our reputation to the brink of ruin.” In effect, things had to get worse before they could get better; or, as he put it, “the people must
feel
before they will
see.
” But that would take time, more than he was allotted. He expected to use what remained to him arranging his private papers for the scrutiny of future historians, posing for painters and sculptors, entertaining the steady flow of admiring guests, making the final renovations on his mansion in order to render it as complete as his career. The great man of action was in a contemplative mood.
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POSTERITY, THE POTOMAC, AND THE CINCINNATI

H
IS OWN INTIMATIONS
of mortality prompted a growing concern about his prospects for immortality. Never a deeply religious man, at least in the traditional Christian sense of the term, Washington thought of God as a distant, impersonal force, the presumed wellspring for what he called destiny or providence. Whether or not there was a hereafter, or a heaven where one’s soul lived on, struck him as one of those unfathomable mysteries that Christian theologians wasted much ink and energy trying to resolve. The only certain form of persistence was in the memory of succeeding generations, a secular rather than sacred version of immortality, which Washington was determined to influence and, if possible, control as completely as he had controlled the Continental army. Most of the prominent leaders of the revolutionary generation recognized that they were making history, and took care to preserve their correspondence and edit their memoirs with an eye on posterity’s judgment. But none of them, including such assiduous memorialists as Franklin, Jefferson, and John Adams, were as earnest in courting posterity as Washington.
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His posterity project had started toward the end of the war. In 1781, Washington persuaded Robert Morris and the Continental Congress to fund a team of secretaries led by a young officer named Richard Varick and charged with the task of transcribing Washington’s entire wartime correspondence. (At a time when the officers and soldiers of the Continental army were not being properly fed, clothed, or paid, Morris’s willingness to subsidize this project is truly stunning.) Washington provided meticulous instructions to Varick, warning him that the task would prove more demanding than he could possibly imagine. Varick and his team worked eight hours a day for two years in Poughkeepsie, New York, before producing twenty-eight volumes. When they were completed and about to be shipped to Mount Vernon, Washington assured Varick that “neither the present age or posterity will consider the time and labour which have been employed in accomplishing it, unprofitably spent.”
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Washington was convinced that his chief claim to fame would be the defeat of Great Britain in the War of Independence. The Varick manuscripts became the treasure trove on which all histories of the war would depend and, so he believed, the primary prism through which biographers and historians would view his life. “Any memoirs of my life,” Washington explained, “distinct and unconnected with the general history of the war, would rather hurt my feelings than tickle my pride whilst I lived.” He hoped to avoid interviews about his personal life by referring the countless chroniclers to the official wartime correspondence, thereby protecting his privacy and avoiding even the appearance of self-promotion. Personal interviews also struck him as vain, adding somewhat imperiously that “I do not think vanity is a trait of my character.”
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The first historian granted access to the Varick manuscripts was William Gordon, a Boston minister who had cultivated a correspondence with Washington during the war. Gordon visited Mount Vernon in August 1784 and published a four-volume history of the War of Independence four years later. (For several reasons, chiefly its turgid style, Gordon’s pioneering effort never fulfilled its author’s soaring expectations.) Washington agreed to amplify Gordon’s research with personal reminiscences of fellow officers, saluting the passionate patriotism of the recently deceased Laurens and the abiding fortitude of Knox and Greene. He offered little commentary on rivals like Gates and Lee, presumably preferring to let Lee and his sleeping dogs lie. He did respond to Gordon’s request about the fiasco at Fort Washington in 1776, which remained the major source of criticism he received about his conduct of the war. The final decision to defend that indefensible position, he correctly noted, rested with the officer on the scene, who was Greene, “not that I want to exculpate myself from any censure which may have fallen on me, by charging another.” Greene’s untimely death the following year probably caused Washington some silent anguish, since he had shifted the Fort Washington stain to someone whom he deeply respected and who died ingloriously, hounded by creditors.
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After a year of retirement Washington concluded that he too was being hounded to an early grave, not by creditors but correspondents. “Many, mistakenly, think that I am retired to ease,” he complained, “but in no period of my life—not in the eight years I served the public, have I been obliged to write so much
myself
as I have done since retirement.” (Congress had inadvertently exacerbated the problem by making all letters to and from Washington immune to the postage requirement.) When he was commander in chief, Washington had enjoyed the assistance of bright, young aides at headquarters. Now he decided to reinstitute the same system, making Mount Vernon the headquarters for another kind of protracted campaign to protect and preserve the image of a private citizen who now happened to be a national institution.
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Tobias Lear, Harvard educated and fluent in French, joined the Washington entourage in May 1786, soon accompanied by David Humphreys, an aspiring poet and somewhat overpolished stylist educated at Yale. Though Washington never doubted his own intelligence, he was sensitive about his lack of formal education, especially his prose, which tended to be muscular but awkward. Lear and Humphreys could contribute the requisite felicity to letters that were being sent to subsequent generations as much as to current correspondents. Which is to say that he recognized that every letter he signed was likely to be preserved, copied, and catalogued like the Varick manuscripts, and eventually contribute to that corpus called the Washington legacy. He was not just writing to his contemporaries; he was writing to posterity.
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Despite his earlier refusal to cooperate with any biographical venture that did not confine itself to the wartime years, Washington felt sufficiently comfortable with Humphreys to cooperate in sketching a memoir of his youthful exploits during that earlier war in the Ohio Country. In what might be called revisionist history, he edited out his early ambition to become a British officer and inserted slight distortions or evasions designed to conceal the controversies surrounding his surrender at Fort Necessity and his partisan behavior during the Forbes campaign, thereby sanding down the rough edges of his pre-hero phase of development.
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And despite his congenital impatience with the time-consuming demands of visiting artists, he welcomed Robert Edge Pine for a three-week occupation filled with marathon sittings: “I am now so hackneyed to the touches of the Painter’s pencil,” he confessed, “that I am altogether at their beck, and sit like patience on a Monument whilst they are delineating the lines of my face. . . . No dray moves more readily to the Thill than I do to the Painter’s Chair.” In the fall of 1785 he welcomed Jean-Antoine Houdon, France’s most distinguished sculptor, who had traveled all the way from Paris at Jefferson’s request to make a life mask for his classic bust and statue. As Washington explained to Lafayette, these tedious sessions had become like mandatory military formations; artists like Houdon were “the doorkeepers of the temple of fame” who held “the keys of the gate by which Patriots, Sages and Heroes are admitted to immortality.” It was the unavoidable price of being an icon.
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If posterity was heaven on earth in the future, Washington was certain that the American future was a heavenly location in the West. “If I was a young man, just preparing to begin the world,” he told one friend, “I know of no country where I would rather find my habitation than in some part of that region.” And he was nearly certain that the river that flowed past Mount Vernon was divinely ordained as the avenue over the Alleghenies into the bounty of the American interior. The massive piazza Washington added to the eastern side of Mount Vernon in the 1780s afforded a magnificent location from which to visualize the Potomac dream, which also carried his imagination upstream and backward in time to his youthful explorations in the Ohio Country, as well as to the continental empire that was the palpable prize of his wartime triumph. For all these reasons, Washington devoted considerable attention and energy during his retirement years trying to transform his Potomac dream into a reality. Like his posterity project, it was an aging man’s effort to extend his control over the shape and size of his legacy.
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