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

by Myron Magnet

  His own belief was deep but similarly undoctrinaire: the world has meaning; God has a plan for it; “the allwise disposer of events has hitherto watched over my steps” and will continue to “mark the course so plainly, as that I cannot mistake the way,” just as Providence protects the United States.125 Indeed, surely “peculiar scenes of felicity are reserved for this country,” he wrote, for “I do not believe, that Providence has done so much for nothing.”126 Though he belonged to the Episcopal Church, he attended irregularly, church-hopped from sect to sect when he wasn’t at Mount Vernon, stood rather than knelt to pray, and didn’t take communion. Though he had no clergyman attend his deathbed, he had a priest read the Episcopal burial service at his funeral, after which an aproned Freemason from the lodge he had joined as a young man conducted the rites of that brotherhood.127 A latitudinarian in the broadest sense, he left no stone unturned.

  ROUSSEAU ONCE WROTE that a “good and sound constitution is one under which the law holds sway over the hearts of the citizens,” and in the same spirit, Washington’s Farewell Address urged Americans, now that they had so epically vindicated “the right of the people to make and to alter their Constitution,” to cherish this “offspring of our own choice” as “sacredly obligatory upon all.”128 He counseled them to develop “a cordial, habitual and immovable attachment” to “the national Union” as “the Palladium of your political safety and prosperity,” and he hoped they would feel more “pride of Patriotism” in being Americans than in being Virginians or Pennsylvanians. Along with “the love of liberty” itself, which Washington thought was “[i]nterwoven . . . with every ligament of your hearts,” he considered these beliefs key to an American culture of liberty.129

  Of course the Farewell Address is a document of an age, as well as for all time; and these last points show the scars of President Washington’s political battles, when he thought that the Jefferson- and Madison-supported Democratic Societies had not only fomented government-destroying anarchy in the Whiskey Rebellion, but also had led Kentuckians to consider secession from the Union by their lie that John Jay had intentionally sold out western settlers in not pushing for Mississippi navigation rights.130 Even after eight years in office, Washington feared that the greatest accomplishments of the Founding—the Union and the Constitution—might not be settled and matured enough to be permanent.

  So in addition to urging cultural safeguards for that inheritance, he also condemned the forces threatening it. “Let me now . . . warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party,” which, “unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human Mind”—especially in “that love of power, and the proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart.” That spirit “agitates the Community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.” Parties can “become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the Power of the People, and to usurp for themselves the reins of Government,” the president cautioned. “There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the Administration of the Government and serve to keep alive the spirit of Liberty. This within certain limits is probably true,” Washington conceded, but, “there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage” that danger.131

  But the democratic dilemma is: How? Even if most Americans became moral, religious, well educated, and imbued with Washington’s culture of liberty, there is still no standard of infallibility to political opinions, to use Washington’s own words—and there can be none, for opinion isn’t fact.132 There will always be disagreements and animosities, clashes of interests and worldviews, and struggles for power among the people themselves, who are the source of power. So while Washington’s ideal was a government that would calmly frame “wholesome plans digested by common councils and modefied by mutual interests”—an ideal based on his experience of the Constitutional Convention and one that Madison had shared until the Convention rejected his vision of a senate of enlightened sages—the tone of American democratic government from 1790 onward has, perhaps unavoidably, been that of factional strife.133

  If there are no standards of political infallibility, that doesn’t mean there are no standards at all, of course, and Washington’s call for habits of thinking that are temperate, judicious, informed, patriotic, and virtuous is a better recipe for good policy making than rancor, suspicion, utopianism, and demagoguery. Washington’s Address proposed the surest standard: his legendary prudence. Is there a doubt whether a democratically reached policy is right? “Let experience solve it,” the Address advised. Don’t trust “mere speculation.” Do “a fair and full experiment.”134 There may not be infallibility to opinions, but there is truth, and one can find it out after the fact if not before, and adjust course accordingly.

  With the Republicans’ infatuation with the French Revolution in mind, Washington urged the same prudence in foreign affairs. A rational calculation of national interest should govern dealings with other countries, as he had first written almost twenty years earlier.135 Never, the Farewell Address counseled, should we form “permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations and passionate attachments for others,” for we will end up making decisions “contrary to the best calculations of policy,” adopting “through passion what reason would reject.” We should “steer clear of permanent Alliances,” Washington concluded, trusting to “temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.”136

  In his first address to Congress (and often thereafter), Washington had stated his key foreign-policy principle—“To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace”—and he recurred to that theme in the Farewell Address, noting that “timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it.”137 And in his very last speech to the legislature, in December 1796, he added one further wrinkle. “To an active external Commerce, the protection of a Naval force is indispensable.” As experience had taught him, a country can’t otherwise “secure respect to a Neutral Flag.” In fact, a strong navy “may even prevent the necessity of going to War, by discouraging” depredations that leave no other choice.138 Following this advice might have prevented the War of 1812.

  WASHINGTON HAD JUST turned sixty-five when he returned home in March 1797, and his time there proved cruelly short. Everywhere, Mount Vernon showed “wounds . . . sustained by an absence and neglect of eight years,” its owner wrote. “I find myself in the situation, nearly, of a young beginner; for although I have not houses to build . . . yet I have not one or scarcely anything else about me that does not require considerable repairs,” he wrote after two weeks back. Even the floor of his new dining room sagged and needed strengthening. “I am already surrounded by Joiners, Masons, Painters &ca &ca. and . . . I have scarcely a room to put a friend into or to set in myself, without the Music of hammers, or the odoriferous smell of Paint.” He fretted that “the expence of repairs almost as great, and the employment of attending to Workmen almost as much, as if I had commenced an entire new establishment.”139

  And he was worried about money. As a business venture, Mount Vernon was a flop. He now had twice as many slaves as he needed, so feeding and clothing them made the estate a break-even operation, at best. “To sell the overplus I cannot, because I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species,” he wrote in the last year of his life. “What then is to be done? Something must or I shall be ruined.”140

  As president, he had had so little success in converting his managers to profitable scientific-farming techniques that he had tried to lease out four of the estate’s five farms to skilled English farmers, whom he asked agronomist Arthur Young to try to recruit, arming him with an enticing description of Mount Vernon that is as infused with love as Odysseus’s
depiction of his homeland of Ithaca, whose beauty in his eyes is bound up with its fertility and usefulness. “No estate in United America is more pleasantly situated than this,” the president wrote. “It lyes in a high, dry and healthy Country. . . . Its margin is washed by more than ten miles of tide water; from the bed of which, and the enumerable coves, inlets, and small marshes with wch. it abounds, an inexhaustible fund of rich mud may be drawn as a manure. . . . This River . . . is well supplied with various kinds of fish at all Seasons of the year . . . ; the whole shore in short is one entire fishery.”141

  But he found no takers and planned to do the upgrading himself—which he never got to do. Meanwhile, still land-rich and cash-poor, he made ends meet by selling off $50,000 worth of his western property between 1794 and 1799.142

  He needed money not only to support his expensive estate but also because he had so many relatives dependent upon him, including step-grandchildren, nieces, and nephews, whom Martha had raised and whom he had paid to educate.143 When the ex-president moved back to Mount Vernon, the once-noisy household was quieter. Only Martha’s witty, talented, and sharp-tongued granddaughter, Nelly Custis, whom Washington loved, came with them. Her grandmother had supervised the education of what she called the “wild little creature,” sending her to boarding school, giving her painting and music lessons, and relentlessly making her practice the harpsichord. “The poor girl would play and cry, cry and play, for long hours, under the immediate eye of her grandmother, a rigid disciplinarian in all things,” Nelly’s brother recalled.144 Washington had bought her an opulent, London-made harpsichord in 1793, and back at Mount Vernon, in the Little Parlor where it now stands, Nelly would enchant family and visitors alike with the spell she could conjure from its two keyboards.145 For all Martha’s strictness, she “has been ever more than a mother to me, and the president the most affectionate of fathers,” Nelly wrote after they had died. “I love them more than anyone.”146

  IN TRYING to rent his farms, Washington had hoped not only to assure himself an adequate, predictable income but also, as he told his secretary, Tobias Lear, “to liberate a certain species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings; but which imperious necessity compels.”147 The deal, he hoped, would let him free his slaves, whom the English farmers would then hire as ordinary field hands.148

  His motives were both principled and practical. Though in May 1786 he had gently pooh-poohed Lafayette’s scheme for a South American colony of freed slaves, only four months later he had decided that “I never mean (unless some particular circumstances should compel me to it) to possess another slave by purchase; it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by the legislature by which slavery in this Country may be abolished by slow, sure, & imperceptable degrees.”149 Nor would he sell or rent out his slaves, for that would mean breaking up slave families, to which “I have an aversion.”150 He once stingingly condemned overseers as a class, because “they seem to consider a Negro much in the same light as they do the brute beasts, on the farms; and often times treat them as inhumanly.”151

  But beside its evil, he thought that slavery was just not tenable. “I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle,” Washington told one visitor. Moreover, he saw every day that while masters became “imperious and dissipated from the habit of commanding slaves and living in a measure without control,” slaves were “growing more and more insolent and difficult to govern.”152 So even before federal government action, he wrote, “I wish from my soul that the Legislature of this State could see the policy of a gradual Abolition of Slavery; It would prevt. much future mischief.”153

  Washington the slave owner knew about slavery’s dialectic of insolence and imperiousness from the inside. As his retirement neared, his wife’s favorite maid, Oney Judge, whom he had let roam freely around Philadelphia, recoiled at the thought of returning to hardbound slavery in Virginia, especially when Martha let slip that she planned to bequeath the twenty-two-year-old to one of her granddaughters, whom Judge disliked. So she ran away to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The Washingtons, unable to see that their affection didn’t outweigh liberty in Judge’s heart, assumed that only a rake (and probably a French one) could have seduced her away.

  But when a friend of Nelly Custis’s ran into Judge in Portsmouth, she learned that there had been no rake. Acknowledging how kindly the Washingtons had treated her, Judge explained herself: “I want to be free, misses; wanted to learn to read and write.” Outraged at her maid’s supposed ingratitude, Mrs. Washington pressed her husband to wield his power to bring her back. Far exceeding his legal authority, Washington asked Treasury secretary Oliver Wolcott to order a Portsmouth customs official to kidnap Oney and send her to Virginia. The official complied, but when he seized the girl, she unsettled him by saying that no one had seduced her but that “a thirst for complete freedom” had led her to flee. Out of her “great affection and reverence for her master and mistress,” the now-hesitant official reported to Washington, she would willingly “return and serve with fidelity during the lives of the president and his lady, if she could be freed on their decease.” Washington huffily rejected any such negotiation with a slave, and Judge stayed put. Three years later, Martha asked a nephew who was traveling to Portsmouth to try to get Judge back. Now married and a mother, Judge replied, “I am free now and choose to remain so.” And she did.154

  WASHINGTON REVEALED what was on his mind perhaps more than he intended when he explained his hard line to the customs man: “however well disposed I might be to a gradual abolition, or even an entire emancipation of that description of people,” he wrote, freeing Judge now would be both unfair, for it would “reward unfaithfulness,” and imprudent, sowing “discontent” in “the minds of all her fellow servants.”155 Two and a half years later, when he sat down to make a new will, he decreed just that emancipation, righting, as far as he was able, the great wrong he had taken part in all his life. He wanted to do right both for virtue’s sake and, still nursing his lifelong love of fame, to ensure “that no reproach may attach to me when I have taken my departure for the land of the spirits.”156 So crucial did he think the matter that he wrote the will himself “over many of my leisure hours,” with no lawyer’s help, and though the deeply considered result might seem “crude and incorrect” as a piece of legal draftsmanship, he expected his intent would nevertheless be “plain, and explicit.”157

  After leaving his whole estate to Martha, he directed that, after her death, “all the Slaves which I hold in my own right, shall receive their freedom.” The intrepid horseman Billy Lee, now old, crippled, and garrulous, would be free at once, however, with a $30-a-year pension, “as a testimony of my sense of his attachment to me, and for his faithful services during the Revolutionary War.” The will set up a fund to feed and clothe those too old and infirm, or too young, to support themselves after emancipation—as it did until the last beneficiary died in 1833. Freed orphans were to be apprenticed to trades until they were twenty-five, and taught to read and write. And Washington “most pointedly, and solemnly enjoin[ed]” his executors “to see that this clause respecting Slaves, and every part thereof be religiously fulfilled . . . without evasion, neglect or delay.”158

  From his own ambivalence, he understood better than most the urge to evade and delay: only on his deathbed did he ask his wife to get two wills out of his desk and burn the one he’d written in 1775, suggesting that he finally opted for emancipation only on the brink of the grave.159 But as a man who thought it wrong to break up enslaved families, he faced a special problem in freeing Mount Vernon’s slaves: he owned only 124 of them, while the other 153, belonging to the estate of his wife’s first husband, neither he nor Martha could free. So while liberating his own slaves upon his death, or even earlier, would accomplish justice and solve the economic problem of more slaves than he needed in one stroke, such a course, “t
hough earnestly wished by me,” presented “insuperable difficulties,” he thought, because his and Martha’s slaves were so intermixed by marriage that freeing one set without the other would “excite the most painful sensations, if not disagreeable consequences” from those remaining in slavery, while their own spouses or children went free.160

  But on whom would those “disagreeable consequences” fall? They fell on the widowed Martha, whose demise would mean freedom for 124 souls. She “did not feel as though her life was safe in their hands,” she told Abigail Adams, since “it was their interest to get rid of her.” In short order, someone tried to burn down Mount Vernon, and a year after Washington’s death, his frightened wife set his slaves free.161

  EARLY IN his retirement, Washington penned a whimsical account of a typical day back home: up at dawn, make sure “my hirelings are . . . in their places,” discover some new “wounds” in Mount Vernon, eat breakfast, “mount my horse and ride round my farms . . . until it is time to dress for dinner,” then “a walk, and Tea, brings me within the dawn of Candlelight.” Every day, “I resolve, that, as soon as the glimmering taper, supplies the place of the great luminary, I will retire to my writing Table and acknowledge the letters I have received; but when the lights are brought, I feel tired, and disinclined to engage in this work, conceiving that the next night will do as well.” Notice, he added, “that in this detail no mention is made of any time allotted for reading. . . . I have not looked into a book since I came home, nor shall I be able to do it until . . . the nights grow longer; when possibly I may be looking in doomsday book.”162 Two years later, acknowledging the news of his last brother’s death, he wrote, “[W]hen I shall be called upon to follow . . . is known only to the giver of life. When the summons comes I shall endeavour to obey it with a good grace.”163