The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  Washington could not have been clearer about feeling such passions himself. He described himself in 1758 as “a person who would gladly be distinguished in some measure from the common run of provincial Officers,” and twenty years later he was still avowing that “to stand well in the good opinion of my Countrymen constitutes my chiefest happiness.”56 Later still, in thanking Benjamin Franklin’s daughter for sending him some praise from her father, he wrote that “nothing in human life, can afford a liberal Mind, more rational and exquisite satisfaction, than the approbation of a Wise, a great and virtuous Man.”57 He knew, too, that such feelings impelled his troops, no less than himself, to deeds of bravery and endurance. He told the Continental Army that he hoped “a laudable Spirit of emulation”—the ambition to excel—would pervade it, for “without such a Spirit, few Officers have ever arrived to any degree of Reputation, nor did any Army ever become formidable.”58

  So the third great conviction he formed in the French and Indian War was that he would never get the honor his merit deserved from Britain—that the Mother Country (“our unnatural Parent,” as this son of a withholding mother later called it) would always treat him and his fellow Virginia officers as second-class citizens.59 “We cant conceive, that being Americans should deprive us of the benefits of British Subjects; nor lessen our claim to preferment,” he wrote Governor Dinwiddie in 1757. After all, “it is the service done, not the Service engag’d in, that merits reward,” so surely royal commissions should be granted as readily “for three years hard & bloody Service, as for 10 spent at St James’s &ca where real Service, or a field of Battle never was seen.” The top brass should realize, he concluded, that “the disregarding the faithful services of any Body of His Majesty’s Subjects; tends to discourage Merit and lessen that generous Emulation, spirit, and laudable ambition so necessary to prevail in an Army and which Contributes so much to the Success of Enterprize.”60

  He was becoming dispirited himself, but he stayed for one more push to retake Fort Duquesne in November 1758. The expedition proved anticlimactic, except for one frightful moment when two Virginia detachments, mistaking each other for the enemy, began killing one another; Washington galloped in to push up their gun barrels with his sword and “never was in more imminent danger.”61 Hearing that a huge force was approaching, the small French garrison blew up the fort and fled, leaving only a smoking ruin behind.62 Shortly thereafter, thanking his officers—“for if I have acquired any reputation, it is from you I derive it”—he quit forever the service of His Britannic Majesty.63

  HE “EXCHANGED the rugged and dangerous field of Mars for the soft and pleasurable bed of Venus,” as he once put it, marrying a rich, warmhearted widow named Martha Dandridge Custis in January 1759 and a month later, on his twenty-seventh birthday, taking his seat in Virginia’s House of Burgesses.64 To understand how different his life now became from fighting in the backwoods only weeks before, let’s quickly double back in time. For a run of unlikely strokes of fortune befell him—smacking more of the picaresque world of Tom Jones or Candide than of real life—and, with a strange mix of grief and good luck, they changed everything.

  Ten years earlier, while Washington was surveying Lord Fairfax’s lands, his half brother Lawrence contracted tuberculosis. Neither London doctors nor Virginia hot springs helped; so, because his wife had to stay home with their new baby, Lawrence asked Washington to take him to Barbados, then thought healthy for consumptives. Two weeks after they arrived in November 1751, Washington caught smallpox—his first lucky calamity, for his light case of the dread disease made him immune to the eighteenth-century military’s greatest scourge. Lawrence’s lungs got worse, however, and he died at Mount Vernon in July 1752, aged thirty-four. Death carried off his little girl two years later, and his widow, Ann, soon remarried and moved away. Since Lawrence’s will decreed that if he died with no surviving child, Mount Vernon and his fortune would go to his favorite half brother after Ann’s death, Ann gladly leased her life interest in the now-vacant 2,126-acre estate for a hefty rent to its heir. When she died at thirty-three in 1761, Washington became Mount Vernon’s outright owner. Already rich as master of his wife’s inheritance, as husbands were by eighteenth-century law, he now became very rich.65

  Nevertheless, he spent more than his income. In the army, he had signaled his thirst for distinction through his regiment’s showy uniforms, like Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, who in displaying his drawerful of custom-made shirts paradoxically tried to show through his outer trappings the inner specialness and refinement he craved. For his officers, Washington prescribed a blue coat, faced and cuffed with scarlet and trimmed with silver; a scarlet waistcoat; and a silver-laced hat, “of a Fashionable size.”66 He had already outfitted himself with gold: gilt buttons, gold shoulder knot, gold lace on his hat.67 Even late in life, he was still designing uniforms for himself, puzzling over whether to have embroidery or not, slash cuffs or not—but needing for sure “tasty Cockades (but not whimsically foolish),” incorporating silver eagles, for his hat.68

  But now Mount Vernon became the outer emblem of his inner worth, showing him as perfect an English country gentleman as any officer with a royal commission who had ever condescended to him. It became his self-created embodiment of his own ideal life, continually evolving as his view of himself and the world deepened. It was his mental escape hatch from the battlefield: no matter where he was or what privations he suffered, he could conjure up in his mind’s eye, with a surveyor’s precision, every inch of the house, every outbuilding, tree, and field, and he daydreamed about improving, extending, planting, beautifying. The work of art he spent thirty years perfecting, Mount Vernon represented all that he was fighting for.

  The minute Washington had leased the estate, prior to owning it outright after Ann’s death, he started planning, deep in the Indian-thronged woods, to enlarge Lawrence’s story-and-a-half wooden house, with four rooms on a floor, that their father had built on a Potomac bluff around 1740. Content simply to build upon the past, he raised the roof and added a story in 1757, in preparation for his marriage to Martha, so he now had five good second-floor bedrooms, plus an attic. Acting, like so many eighteenth-century gentlemen, as his own architect, with a stack of English pattern books to consult, he slathered on the ornament between 1757 and 1760, enriching the exterior with a cornice modeled on the Roman Pantheon, a pedimented front door, and wooden siding beveled and finished with a mix of sand and buff paint to look like blocks of stone.

  More ambitiously, he turned the interior into a jewel box of mid-century classicism, though each room’s corner fireplace, relatively small size, and modest ceiling height ensured snug coziness rather than grandeur. The wide center hall, its east and west doors open to river breezes in hot weather, he embellished with paneling, a cornice echoing the one outside, pedimented doorways, and a rich new walnut staircase. A pair of pottery British lions, each with a paw on a globe, stood guard on brackets over the riverside door. With no compunction about the faux, he later had the walls and doors grained to look like mahogany.

  The west parlor got the full Palladian treatment: an ornately pedimented door case with Ionic pilasters went in, along with raised paneling and a finely carved rococo chimneypiece and overmantel adapted from The British Architect and incorporating a marble fireplace surround and a “neat landskip” from England.69 Carved in a scrolled pediment crowning the overmantel were Washington’s coat of arms and flying-griffin crest in which he took great pride, though he had never heard of the ancestral Washington home—sixteenth-century Sulgrave Manor in Northamptonshire—or of his great-great-grandfather Lawrence, a fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, persecuted by the Cromwellians. All he could tell the master of the Royal College of Arms, who sent him genealogical queries when he was president, was that, “I have often heard others of the family, older than myself, say that our ancestors . . . came from some one of the Northern Counties of England,” but which one “I do not precisely remember.”70

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sp; Nevertheless, the arms and crest, cyphers of distinction, went on everything, from the silverware he had made for his wedding, to the coach he ordered from London “in the newest taste, handsome, genteel, & light,” to the brass-mounted harnesses for his horses, the bookplates for his library, the gilt mirror between his windows, and the gold head on his stick. From London, too, he ordered a mahogany bed for his newly paneled downstairs bedroom, a dozen mahogany chairs, damask table linens, china, wallpaper: everything to be “fashionable—neat—and good.” And starting with the purchase of 500 additional acres in 1757, he added land to the estate, too, which totaled 8,000 acres when he was done.71 By 1763, all this “swallowed up before I well knew where I was, all the money I got by Marriage nay more.”72

  WHEN WASHINGTON DIED, his wife burned most of the personal letters written between her and her “Old Man,” as she called him, so we can’t hear firsthand the tone of their marriage; but we can catch it in the advice the president, then married thirty-five years, gave his step-granddaughter Betsy Custis when she pondered wedlock. “Do not,” he counseled, “look for perfect felicity,” and remember that “love is too dainty a food to live on alone.” While “a necessary ingredient for . . . matrimonial happiness,” it is less important “than that the object on whom it is placed, should possess good sense [and] good dispositions”—which “cannot fail to attract (after marriage) your esteem and regard, into wch. or into disgust, sooner or later, love naturally resolves itself.” After all, “all our enjoyments fall short of our expectations,” none more so than “the gratification of the passions.”73

  Esteem and regard, good sense, and a good disposition: a very precise description of the foundation of the Washingtons’ marriage. A British observer thought Washington “a more respectful than a tender husband,” but those who knew the couple well saw the devoted affection under the respect. “Mrs. Washington is excessive fond of the General and he of her,” General Nathanael Greene remarked during the Revolution. “They are happy in each other.” With the romantic hyperbole of a young Frenchman, the Marquis de Lafayette concluded that the then-matronly Mrs. Washington “loves her husband madly.”74 As Washington himself told her when he left to take command of the Continental Army, “I should enjoy more real happiness and felicity in one month with you, at home, than I have the most distant prospect of reaping abroad, if my stay was to be Seven times Seven years.”75

  Though the pair had no children, Washington doted on Patsy, Martha’s daughter from her first marriage, and he was almost as inconsolable as his wife when, after their years of worried visits with doctors about her worsening epilepsy, the “Sweet Innocent Girl” died suddenly at seventeen, “without uttering a Word, a groan, or scarce a Sigh,” her stepfather wrote.76 When Martha’s son Jacky died at twenty-six, the Washingtons took in his two youngest children, as they did Martha’s motherless niece and the three orphaned children of Washington’s brother Samuel.77 Fussing over a houseful of children seemed Mrs. Washington’s natural element.

  One other piece of matrimonial advice, to step-granddaughter Nelly Custis, shines a different light on this part of Washington’s life. “Love is said to be an involuntary passion,” he wrote. But everyone has seen that, once a woman beautiful and accomplished enough to have “set the circle in which she moves on fire” gets married, the “madness ceases and all is quiet again, . . . because there is an end of hope. Hence it follows, that love may and therefore ought to be under the guidance of reason.”78

  Easy to say, but there’s a world of self-mastery there, among Washington’s many classical virtues of self-mastery. When Sarah Fairfax, wife of his friend and wilderness companion George William Fairfax, wrote to congratulate him on his engagement to Martha, he replied with an oblique revelation of whom he really loved. “Tis true, I profess myself a Votary to Love—I acknowledge that a Lady is in the Case”—a lady “known to you . . . , as well as she is to one who is too sensible of her Charms to deny the Power, whose Influence he feels and must ever Submit to. I feel the force of her amiable beauties in the recollection of a thousand tender passages,” confided Washington. “I have drawn myself, into an honest confession of a Simple Fact—misconstrue not my meaning—’tis obvious—doubt it not, nor expose it—the World has no business to know the object of my Love, declard in this manner to—you when I wanted to conceal it—One thing, above all things in this World I wish to know, and only one person of your Acquaintance can solve me that, or guess my meaning.”79 But he would never ask Sarah directly if she loved him back. When the Fairfaxes moved permanently to England and had the contents of Belvoir auctioned, Washington bought more than half, from mahogany furniture to a bust of Shakespeare, all fraught with layers of sentiment for him.80

  EXCEPT FOR his passionate foxhunting—out before dawn three times a week in a blue riding coat and gold-trimmed red waistcoat, with his “Turkish”-costumed, turban-wearing slave, Billy Lee, an equally fearless horseman, at his side—Washington was too much an entrepreneur to be an ordinary country squire at Mount Vernon. He restlessly experimented with sixty-odd crops before giving up soil-depleting tobacco in 1766 for more profitable wheat and corn. He built a high-tech gristmill and exported flour and cornmeal to the West Indies, England, and Portugal. The Potomac at his door was beautiful, yes, but surely it had a use too. He bought fishing boats, and by 1772 he was salting and exporting a million herring a year, plus sturgeon and shad. He started a distillery, ultimately America’s biggest, pumping out 11,000 gallons of rye and bourbon a year.81 He operated with a methodical precision that Ben Franklin would have approved, and he favored such Poor Richard–like aphorisms as “System in all things is the soul of business,” or “many mickles make a muckle,” an “old Scotch” adage recommending attention to detail.82

  Slaves did most of Mount Vernon’s work, and at this stage of his life, Washington’s feeling toward them was chiefly annoyance. They ran away, and he advertised rewards for them, with closely observed descriptions, from Jack’s scar-decorated face (“being his Country Marks”) and large feet (“for he requires a great Shoe”) to Cupid’s coarse skin, “inclined to be pimpley,” and his “unintelligible English,” since a slave ship had brought him only two years earlier. They stole. They sometimes so misbehaved that he sold them to the West Indies, where slaves’ lives were especially nasty, brutish, and short.83 And—in a remarkable failure of sympathy on his part—he couldn’t understand why people robbed of their liberty had no work ethic. He denounced the slave carpenters of his buildings as an “idle set of rascals,” and, standing over them with his pocket watch in his hand, he drove them to quadruple their output of boards. He complained that his slave seamstresses turned out nine shirts a week when Mrs. Washington was at Mount Vernon, but only six when she wasn’t. “There are few Negroes who will work unless there be a constant eye on them,” he grumbled, as if such passive resistance were a moral failing.84

  Much of his entrepreneurial zeal surged into real-estate speculation. How were the colony’s greatest fortunes made? he asked a neighbor rhetorically in 1767. “Was it not by taking up & purchasing at very low rates the rich back Lands which were thought nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable Lands we possess?” And opportunity still abounded: “an enterprizing Man with very little Money may lay the foundation of a Noble Estate in the New Settlemts upon Monongahela for himself and posterity.”85

  Enterprise might mean cutting the odd legal or moral corner, though, which didn’t faze the devil-take-the-hindmost Washington of this era. True, Britain had outlawed land sales west of the Alleghenies, he wrote one of his ex-officers living there; but surely, in an expanding country surging with entrepreneurial vim, the ban could only be “a temporary expedient to quiet the Minds of the Indians & must fall of course in a few years.” Therefore, anyone “who neglects the present oppertunity of hunting out good Lands & in some measure Marking & distinguishing them for their own (in order to keep others from settling them) will never regain it.” Washington p
roposed a deal: if his ex-comrade would pick out prime lots in huge quantity, Washington would pay to survey and register the claims as soon as it became legal, with a fair cut for his accomplice. “I would recommend to you to keep this whole matter a profound Secret,” Washington counseled, so as not to “give the alarm to others,” who might try to horn in. You might carry out the scheme, he suggested, “under the pretence of hunting other Game.”86

  In 1770, he drafted his brother Charles into a stealthier scheme. Because of a tangle of competing land claims on top of the 1763 British settlement ban, who knew when—or if—the government would honor its promise of land grants to French and Indian War officers? But it might. So though he “would hardly give any Officer a button for his Right,” Washington wrote Charles, he nevertheless heard that one lieutenant sold his rights to 2,000 acres for £10. “Now, coud I purchase 12 or 15,000 Acres upon the same terms, I woud do it, considering of it as a Lottery only,” for if it worked out, it “woud form a Tract of . . . great dignity.” So “if you woud (in a joking way, rather than in earnest at first) see what value they seem to set upon their Lands,” and if they ask £5 to £7 per thousand acres, buy them, “in your own name; for reason’s I shall give you when we meet” and settle up. But “do not let it be known that I have any concern therein.”87