His Excellency: George Washington (8 page)

CHAPTER TWO

The Strenuous Squire

O
VER THE COURSE
of his long public career, Washington made several decisions that shaped the basic contours of American history, but nothing he ever did had a greater influence on the shape of his own life than the decision to marry Martha Dandridge Custis. Her huge dowry immediately catapulted Washington into the top tier of Virginia’s planter class and established the economic foundation for his second career as the master of Mount Vernon. His first career as a professional soldier still hovered about his reputation in the form of the title “Colonel Washington.” And it apparently still hovered about in his own head as well, since in 1759 he ordered four large busts of military heroes—Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charles XII of Sweden, and Frederick the Great—to decorate the mansion he was already in the process of enlarging. The invoice to his London agent requesting the busts included requests for kid gloves, negligee, a velvet cape, and several purgatives for intestinal disorders. The agent was able to find all the other items, but not the military busts. This was prophetic, because for the next sixteen years Washington devoted his energies to perfecting the elegant lifestyle of a Virginia aristocrat, making his military experiences into memories, but eventually worrying himself sick that he and his fellow Virginia grandees were trapped in an imperial network designed to reduce them all to bankruptcy and ruin.
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DOMESTICITIES

H
E WAS ENTERING
what turned out to be the most settled period of his life. The physical centerpiece for his newfound stability was, of course, Mount Vernon, both the mansion itself and the lands surrounding it. Renovations in the mansion had proceeded apace during his absence in the Forbes campaign, effectively adding a full story to the home he had inherited from Lawrence—or, more accurately, from Lawrence’s widow, who died in 1761. Though not in the same league with brick mansions like the Fairfaxes’s Belvoir or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, the enlarged and embellished interiors of the new Mount Vernon were designed to make a statement. The home now visited by more than a million tourists a year looks different than the home that the newly married couple inhabited in 1759—the distinctive cupola, piazza, and several of the grandest rooms were not added until later—but Mount Vernon still effectively announced the arrival of an impressive new member of Virginia’s elite. Passing through in the summer of 1760, the inveterate English traveler Andrew Burnaby was suitably impressed: “This place is the property of Colonel Washington, and truly deserving of its owner. The house is most beautifully situated upon a very high hill on the banks of the Potowmac, and commands a noble prospect of water, of cliffs, of woods and plantations.”
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Burnaby spoke of plantations in the plural because Mount Vernon, like most Virginia estates in the revolutionary era, was not a centralized agrarian factory like the cotton plantations of the antebellum South, but a series of loosely connected farms, each with its own distinctive name, slave workforce, and overseer. Between the time he moved in with Martha and the time he departed for the war against Great Britain in 1775, Washington more than doubled the size of Mount Vernon, from about 3,000 to 6,500 acres, chiefly by buying up adjoining parcels of land when they became available. He more than doubled the size of the slave population, from fewer than fifty to well over a hundred, much of the increase coming from the forty-six new slaves he purchased during this time. Although appearances turned out to be deceptive, the newly ensconced master of Mount Vernon appeared to hold sway over a burgeoning and flourishing enterprise.
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The emotional centerpiece of Washington’s new world was Martha, who came complete with two young children, Jackie (four) and Patsy (two). If the main source of Martha’s appeal was initially more economic than romantic, there is reason to believe that the relationship soon developed into an intimate and mutually affectionate bond of considerable affinity. We cannot know for sure—matters of this sort can seldom be known for sure—because Martha destroyed their private correspondence soon after her husband’s death. (Only three letters between them survive, compared to over a thousand between John and Abigail Adams, the most fully revealed marriage of the age.) But later efforts to suggest that Washington’s marriage lacked passion, and that the slogan “George Washington slept here” had promiscuous implications, have all been discredited by most scholars.

The fact that they had no children of their own is almost certainly not a sign that they were sexually incompatible, but rather that Washington himself was most probably sterile. Although these are not the kind of questions we can answer conclusively, and it is possible that Martha lost the capacity to conceive after delivering her last child, it is more likely that the man who would become known as the “Father of his Country” was biologically incapable of producing children of his own. As for the suppressed feelings for Sally Fairfax, all the evidence indicates that everyone behaved themselves. Sally and George William Fairfax were the closest neighbors and became good friends of George and Martha, the most frequent guests at Mount Vernon, intimate accomplices in the hurly-burly of the ambitiously genteel social life within the Northern Neck. It seems likely that both Martha and George William realized that their respective partners had a past, but the longer no one mentioned it, the more it became history.
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As a stepfather, Washington was dutiful and engaged, especially when it came to Jackie, whom he wanted to receive the kind of classical education that he had missed. In fact, the boy was raised with all the advantages and privileges that Washington himself had been denied: his own personal servant; a private tutor who resided at Mount Vernon; the newest toys and finest clothes, all ordered from London; his own horses and hounds for foxhunting. The only item Jackie was denied was adversity, and the predictable result began to surface soon after he went to study Latin and Greek with Jonathan Boucher, first at Fredericksburg and then Annapolis. “His mind is a good deal relaxed from Study,” Washington admitted to Boucher, “& more than ever turned to Dogs, Horses & Guns.” Boucher wrote back to apprise Washington that it was worse than he knew: “I must confess to You I never did in my Life know a Youth so exceedingly indolent or so surprisingly voluptuous: one wd suppose Nature had intended Him for some Asiatic Prince.”
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If Jackie had been his own son, perhaps Washington would have raised him differently. But he consistently deferred to Martha on all final decisions concerning the children. He was their guardian; she was their parent. He was to provide, but not to decide. So off Jackie went to King’s College (now Columbia) in New York—the College of William and Mary was not good enough for him—where he lasted only a few months. In 1773, at age nineteen, he announced his decision to marry Eleanor Calvert, the daughter of Benedict Calvert, a descendant of Maryland’s founding family. Under prodding from Martha, Washington acquiesced, then did everything he could to establish Jackie and Nelly in proper style on one of the inherited Custis estates. Poor Jackie predictably failed at managing his plantation and died young, in 1781, just when Washington was sealing American victory in the American Revolution at nearby Yorktown.
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Patsy’s story was even sadder than Jackie’s. Even as a little girl she began to experience seizures that only worsened with time and eventually took the form of almost weekly epileptic fits. The latest London dolls and toys were ordered for her every year, along with medicinal potions, to include—a clear sign of parental desperation—a medieval iron ring with allegedly magical curative power. Even with these efforts, and despite several trips to different doctors and health spas that Washington personally supervised, nothing worked. She died suddenly after one of her seizures in 1773 at the age of seventeen. Washington ordered a black cape for Martha to wear in mourning for the following year.
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THE SQUIRE

B
EYOND THE DOMESTIC
centerpieces of Washington’s world at Mount Vernon there lay a broad spectrum of different roles and responsibilities that, taken together, allow us to conjure up several different mental pictures of the mature man in his pre-icon phase. Perhaps the most jarring picture, because it clashes so dramatically with his subsequent reputation as the epitome of public virtue, is that of the indulged Virginia gentleman for whom the phrase “pursuit of happiness” meant galloping to hounds.

And the foxhunt is not just a metaphor. According to his diary, Washington spent between two and five hours a day for forty-nine days in 1768 on horseback pursuing the elusive fox. He also devoted considerable energy to breeding his hounds, who frequently confounded him with their ingenuity at linking up—what he called “lining”—with partners of their own choosing. Especially after 1765, when Lund Washington, a distant relative, assumed many of the managerial responsibilities at Mount Vernon, Washington enjoyed a great deal of leisure time. He traveled to Alexandria, Annapolis, and Williamsburg to take in the horse races. After 1768 his trips were often made in an expensive chariot, custom-made in London, with leather interiors and his personal crest emblazoned on the side. His record of card-playing expenses from 1772 to 1774 reveals that he played twenty-five times a year and just about broke even in his wagers. He purchased his wine, usually Madeira, by the butt (150 gallons) and the pipe (110 gallons). On any given day he enjoyed the attention of two manservants, Thomas Bishop, a white servant who had been with him since the Braddock campaign, and Billy Lee, a mulatto slave, who came on the scene in 1768.
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This picture of the provincial aristocrat at play would not be complete without noticing his clothing. His coats, shirts, pants, and shoes were all ordered from a London tailor, but they invariably did not fit. He complained that “my Cloaths have never fitted me well,” but the reason for the persistent problem was that the instructions he customarily gave his tailor were misleading. For example, when ordering an overcoat he directed the tailor to “make it to fit a person Six feet high and proportionally made, & you cannot go much amiss.” But Washington was at least two inches taller than six feet and disproportionately made, with very broad shoulders and huge hips. When Charles Willson Peale came down from Philadelphia to paint his portrait in 1772, Washington chose to wear his old military uniform from the Virginia Regiment days. Biographers have speculated that his decision to be depicted as a soldier might have been a premonition of his looming role in the American Revolution. It is also possible that he wore the only suit of clothes that fit him.
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The clothing scene is comical, but so is any one-dimensional picture of Washington as a laconic embodiment of Virginia’s leisure class. (The Peale portrait, by the way, which is generally regarded as a poor likeness, reinforces the laid-back image, paunch and all.) Most of the time Washington was on horseback he was not foxhunting but riding out to his farms, in effect overseeing his own overseers, offering meticulous instructions about when to harvest his tobacco crop, what fields to plant with corn and peas, how many hogs to slaughter. Or he was riding over to Truro Parish to perform his duties as a vestryman. (A lukewarm Episcopalian, he never took Communion, tended to talk about “Providence” or “Destiny” rather than God, and—was this a statement?—preferred to stand rather than kneel when praying.) Or he was traveling down to a session of the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg, where he served on two standing committees and handled most of the veterans’ claims. Though his diary entries are usually devoted to the weather—when he describes which way the wind is blowing, he is not being metaphorical—they also record the busy, fully engaged life of a typical Virginia planter with multiple responsibilities to his family, neighbors, and workers.
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Most of those workers were African slaves, at least some recently arrived in Virginia, with distinctive tribal markings and little command of English. Later in his career, especially after his experience in the American Revolution exposed him to a broader set of opinions on the matter, Washington developed a more critical perspective on the institution of slavery. At this stage of his life, however, there is no evidence of any moral anxiety about owning other human beings. Like most Chesapeake planters, Washington talked and thought about his slaves as “a Species of Property,” very much as he described his dogs and horses. When they ran away, he posted notices for their recapture, included descriptions (which is how we know about the African markings), and if they ran away again, he sold them off. One recalcitrant slave named Tom, for example, was shipped off to the Caribbean. Washington’s instructions to the ship captain described Tom as “a Rogue & Runaway,” but also a hard worker who should fetch a decent price “if kept clean & trim’d up a little when offered to Sale.” Washington estimated that Tom was worth one hogshead of molasses, one of rum, a barrel of limes, a pot of tamarinds, ten pounds of sweetmeats, and a few bottles of “good old spirits.”
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