by Ron Chernow
Washington decided to convene a cabinet meeting there in early November. On October 28 he packed and left Mount Vernon, teamed up with Jefferson in Baltimore, and arrived in Germantown on November 1. The small village was scarcely impervious to the troubles crippling the nearby capital, and hundreds of Philadelphia refugees milled about, fearful of venturing back to their homes. After renting the meager home of Isaac Franks, Washington had furniture carted out from Philadelphia. The sage of Monticello was reduced to sleeping in a bed tucked into the corner of a local tavern. As the weather cooled, the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia waned, although the city would still struggle for months to return to normal. In early December, amid lightly falling snow, Washington saddled his horse and returned to a place sadly transformed by disaster. “Black seems to be the general dress in the city,” Martha noted. “Almost every family has lost some of their friends.”10 Out of respect for the dead, plays and dances were canceled, and as the town’s foremost citizen, Washington took the lead in dispensing charity to widows and orphans left stranded by the epidemic.
Members of Congress were now rapidly flocking back to the capital, and as soon as Washington learned on December 2 that a quorum had been mustered, he decided to deliver his fifth annual address to Congress the next day, escorted for the last time by his first-term cabinet, the warring triumvirate of Jefferson, Hamilton, and Knox. As war raged in Europe, Washington felt the need to combat pacifist fantasies and insisted upon the need for sufficient “arms and military stores now in [our] magazine and arsenals.”11 As always, he touted military preparedness as the best way to prevent war and gently raised the question of whether militias were adequate to the country’s defensive needs. He also defended his neutrality proclamation and explained the rationale behind the seeming betrayal of the historic French alliance. Beyond its policy particulars, the speech reaffirmed that the government had weathered the yellow fever epidemic and would now revert to some semblance of normality.
WHILE THE TEMPORARY CAPITAL suffered from the horrors of yellow fever, the permanent capital was beginning to emerge in all its splendor. That September Washington had been on hand in the federal city for the ceremonial laying of the cornerstone for the U.S. Capitol. Among his endless responsibilities, he was bogged down in administrative minutiae related to the new capital, having to approve personally, for example, the contract for a bridge over Rock Creek. The Residence Act of 1790 had stipulated that government buildings in the district should be ready by December 1800, and an impatient public clamored for visible signs of progress.
Disclaiming any special talent as an architect, Washington nonetheless endorsed a design for the new home of Congress sketched by Dr. William Thornton, a versatile doctor, inventor, and abolitionist. Thornton came up with a clever amalgam of classical architecture and modern American themes. Jefferson rejoiced in the building’s style as “Athenian” and, to emphasize the parallel with antiquity, changed its name from the plain-sounding Congress House to the far more grandiose Capitol. 12 Washington was especially enamored of the dome, which he thought would lend “beauty and grandeur to the pile,” its visual effect enhanced by a magnificent colonnade.13 Washington’s approval also helped the Irish architect James Hoban win the commission for the President’s House, later known as the White House. “He has been engaged in some of the first buildings in Dublin,” Washington wrote admiringly of Hoban, “appears a master workman, and has a great many hands of his own.”14 The White House cornerstone was laid on October 13, 1792. As in all matters pertaining to the capital, Washington wanted an elastic design that would accommodate future growth. “It was always my idea . . . that the building should be so arranged that only a part of it should be erected at present,” he told the commissioners, “but upon such a plan as to make the part so erected an entire building, and to admit of an addition in future.”15 Curiously enough, the Supreme Court was then held in such low regard that it did not merit its own edifice and had to settle for a room in the Capitol.
Washington’s strategy of building slowly and allowing for future expansion was an apt metaphor for his strategy for developing the entire country. An unintended metaphor perhaps cropped up in the composition of the downtrodden workforce laboring to complete the capital. Washington had favored importing indentured servants to do the building—he praised Germans for their steady work habits, Scots for their mechanical abilities—but there was no way that a southern capital could emerge without drawing heavily on slaves, given the local shortage of free labor. Hundreds of slaves pulled up stumps, leveled trees, made bricks, and scooped out trenches. Because Congress had authorized no money to acquire property and construct buildings, the project had to subsist on the proceeds of land auctions, and using slave labor helped cushion the budgetary stringency. By 1795 three hundred slaves were hard at work in the federal district, hurrying to finish public or private buildings.
On September 18, 1793, at Mount Vernon, Washington greeted a fife and drum corps from Alexandria and presided over a festive procession to install the cornerstone of the Capitol. After he crossed the Potomac, many Masons gathered to receive him, appareled in their order’s ceremonial garb. The grand parade to the Capitol site proceeded under the auspices of Lodge No. 22 of Alexandria and the Grand Lodge of Maryland and its assorted chapters. Officiating as Grand Master, Washington donned the elaborately embroidered Masonic apron that, in happier times, had been a gift from Lafayette’s wife. To the sharp reports of cannon, Washington stepped into a trench, hoisted a trowel, and spread cement on the cornerstone before pouring oil, corn, and wine over it as spectators offered up Masonic chants. Incorporated into this southeast corner of the Capitol was a silver plate engraved with the words “the year of Masonry 5793.”16 That Washington performed Masonic rituals at the new capital proved not that he was in thrall to a secret society but probably something more banal: that he believed that the “grand object of Masonry” was “to promote the happiness of the human race,” and that nobody could possibly object to such an inarguable, community-minded goal.17 After parading by the President’s House, the gathering settled down to celebrate by dining on the barbecued remains of a five-hundred-pound ox.
With the town named after him, Washington was especially solicitous about the course of its building campaign and bought four lots there. At many points he prodded the three commissioners to speed up their work, insisting that they live in the federal district to expedite flagging construction. As he surveyed the muddy terrain, he worried that, should the project lag behind schedule, the southern states might well lose the capital to the avid boosters of Philadelphia. “The year 1800 is approaching with hasty strides,” he warned. “So ought the public buildings to advance towards completion.”18 The pace of progress seemed so sluggish that James Madison began to despair that the capital would ever escape from the great “whirlpool of Philadelphia.” 19 Whenever the project stagnated, Washington purchased more parcels to give things a timely fillip. He preferred selling individual lots to modest investors rather than multiple lots to large speculators, persuaded that the former would work harder to make long-term improvements. At every turn, Washington advanced his pet project for a national university in the new capital where students could attend congressional debates and absorb the basic principles of representative government. It had long disturbed Washington that American students attended universities abroad, where they might imbibe foreign ideas inimical to a republican polity.
ONCE WASHINGTON AGREED to serve a second term, the decision only fueled his apprehension about the state of his business affairs at Mount Vernon. There had been some improvements during his presidency, most notably the innovative, sixteen-sided threshing barn that Washington had designed. But in his absence, despite such scientific strides, Mount Vernon was overtaken by general decay, and his letters are replete with long-running complaints about dilapidated buildings, fences, hedges, barns, gates, and stables needing repair.
Having lost the services of George August
ine and Anthony Whitting, Mount Vernon lacked a guiding hand, and it was all Washington could do to keep the place running from afar. He never overcame his chronic financial anxieties, which only worsened with the distractions of his political career, and he remained a notably relentless, hard-driving boss. His incomparable success in life seemed not to soften his views or lighten his touch with employees, as if his economic insecurity were too deeply rooted ever to be extirpated. It never seemed to dawn on him to apply the same courtesy to his employees that he did to colleagues in Philadelphia, where he was such an exquisitely tactful politician. In December 1792 he badgered Anthony Whitting to keep a slave named Gunner hard at work, even though Gunner was probably around eighty-three years old. “It may be proper for Gunner to continue throwing up brick earth,” the president wrote.20 Despite his theoretical opposition to slavery, he cautioned his overseers against the “idleness and deceit” of slaves if not treated with a firm hand.21
Washington’s business letters home have an unpleasantly caustic tone, as if he felt himself at the mercy of so many dunces and knaves. He was constantly on guard against inept overseers, whom he thought too lax in dealing with slaves. If overseers weren’t up with the sun, he warned, slaves would sleep late, loaf, and cost him money. In essence, the overseers became slaves to the long hours of the slaves they supervised. In petulant weekly letters to the consumptive Whitting in 1792 and 1793, Washington scarcely ever offered an encouraging syllable. With painful consistency, he faulted Whitting’s work, loaded him with advice, and seemed to accuse everyone of malingering.
In mid-March 1793, as Whitting was spitting up blood, Washington informed Fanny Bassett Washington that the doctors had pronounced his tuberculosis “critical and dangerous.”22 Whitting himself wrote pathetically to the president: “I am just now able to walk a little. Am very much reduced and very weak.”23 Nonetheless that spring, as he grappled with neutrality and Citizen Genet, Washington continually lambasted Whitting and talked to him as if he were a fool or a child. When he thought Whitting did not respond adequately to his questions, he told him to take a slip of paper, jot down all the instructions, then cross off each item on the checklist as it was accomplished. At the time Whitting was so weak that he could scarcely mount a horse; a month later he lay in critical condition. Bedridden, barely able to speak, he nonetheless fretted about his failure to file weekly reports with Washington. As Tobias Lear reported from the scene: “Mr. Whitting was much concerned at your not having received the reports of last week, but observed that he had directed [James] Butler [the Mansion House overseer] to take them, as he was unable to do it himself.” 24 A few days later the estate manager was dead.
Preoccupied with political problems, Washington was thrown into turmoil by Whitting’s death and promptly launched a search for a successor, looking for an honest, sober bachelor between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. Only after Whitting’s death did Washington learn to appreciate his virtues, telling one correspondent, “If I could get a man as well qualified for my purposes as the late Mr. Whitting . . . I sh[oul]d esteem myself very fortunate.”25 Even so, Washington continued to defame Whitting, claiming that he “drank freely, kept bad company at my house and in Alexandria, and was a very debauched person.”26
In late September, Washington hired William Pearce as the new estate manager and quickly trained him in his own exacting style, telling him how he liked everything in tip-top shape, humming smoothly along. As with Whitting, he told Pearce to keep a checklist of his instructions and review them often, “because I expect to have them complied with or reasons assigned for not doing it.”27
By this point Washington was convinced that Mount Vernon was veering toward chaos and that he had to crack down on overseers and slaves alike. In the same language he had long used with his military and political associates, he coached Pearce on how to handle recalcitrant overseers: “To treat them civilly is no more than what all men are entitled to, but my advice to you is to keep them at a proper distance; for they will grow upon familiarity in proportion as you will sink in authority, if you do not.”28 He gave Pearce scathing character sketches of the five overseers, calling one “a sickly, slothful, and stupid fellow,” and urging him to correct the abuses that had crept into the daily workings of Mount Vernon.29 Ironically, the only one of the five overseers for whom he spared a kind word was the one black: “Davy at Muddy Hole carries on his business as well as the white overseers and with more quietness than any of them. With proper directions, he will do very well.”30
Priding himself on being a progressive farmer, Washington was frustrated by his inability to introduce modern methods. When Henry Lee told him about a new threshing machine, Washington responded that “the utility of it among careless Negroes and ignorant overseers will depend absolutely upon the simplicity of the construction, for if there is anything complex in the machinery, it will be no longer in use than a mushroom is in existence.”31 His letters teem with regrets that his overseers refused to apply the crop-rotation system that had been his will-o’-the-wisp for many years.
Finally, on December 23, 1793, right before Christmas, Washington devoted a large portion of the day to writing five consecutive letters to his five overseers, blaming them for ruining his hopes for crop rotation and for the general decline of his business. In terms of pure, unadulterated rage, these five letters have no equal in Washington’s papers: they suggest a daylong temper tantrum and show just how sharp-tongued and frustrated he could be. Their jeering tone is almost willfully cruel, as if Washington wanted to say things with brutal clarity and telegraph a tough new regimen. They show how exceedingly anxious he was about his financial position and the economic situation at Mount Vernon. They may also express some displaced anger from the violent attacks being made on him in the Jeffersonian press and by the Democratic-Republican Societies. Not mincing words, Washington wrote to overseer Hiland Crow that he had beenso much disturbed at your insufferable neglect [of plowing] that it is with difficulty I have been restrained from ordering you instantly off the plantation. My whole place for next year is ruined by your conduct. And look ye, Mr. Crow, I have too good reasons to believe that your running about and entertaining company at home . . . is the cause of this now irremediable evil in the progress of my business . . . I am very willing and desirous to be your friend, but if your conduct does not merit it, you must abide the consequences from Y[ou]rs.32
Crow was a savage overseer in flogging slaves, Washington describing him to Pearce as “swayed more by passion than by judgment in all his corrections.”33
Washington criticized overseer Henry McCoy for failing to plow after the late October rains, jeopardizing his spring oat crop: “How durst you disobey this order and, instead of bringing the whole force of your plows to this, you employ them now and then only, or one or two a week, as if it were for amusement, thereby doing everything which was in your power to derange my whole plan for the next year.”34 If McCoy remained inattentive to business, Washington threatened to banish him “at any season of the year without paying you a shilling . . . If I suffer by your neglect, you shall not benefit by the money of one who wishes to be your friend.”35 Overseer William Stuart suffered a similar drubbing for his failure to plow as soon as the October rains had ceased.
Washington chastised overseer Thomas Green for failing to perform work at the Dogue Run barn. “I know full well,” Washington told him, “that to speak to you is of no more avail than to speak to a bird that is flying over one’s head; first, because you are lost to all sense of shame and to every feeling that ought to govern an honest man, who sets any store by his character; and, secondly, because you have no more command of the people over whom you are placed than I have over the beasts of the forests.” If Green did not shape up, Washington threatened to “discharge you that mom[en]t and to dispossess your family of the house they are in, for I cannot, nor will not, submit to such infamous treatment as I meet with from you.”36
After instructing overse
er John Christian Ehlers on how to graft fruit and plant trees properly, Washington administered a stern lecture on the evils of alcohol: “I shall not close this letter without exhorting you to refrain from spirituous liquors. They will prove your ruin if you do not. Consider how little a drunken man differs from a beast; the latter is not endowed with reason, the former deprives himself of it; and when that is the case acts like a brute, annoying and disturbing everyone around him . . . Don’t let this be your case.” Then, punning harshly on Ehlers’s middle name, Washington concluded, “Show yourself more of a man and a Christian than to yield to so intolerable a vice.”37
The stress of managing Mount Vernon had finally become so draining for Washington that he wanted to free himself of the burden of supervising overseers and slaves. Since he contemplated stepping down as president in a year, his mind already dwelt on retirement, and he felt oppressed by a surplus of both slaves and white indentured servants. So he concocted an ambitious plan to rent out four of the Mount Vernon farms to four capable English farmers, retaining only the Mansion House farm for himself. In expounding this rental scheme to Tobias Lear, Washington admitted candidly that his motive was “that the remainder of my days may thereby be more tranquil and freer from cares; and that I may be enabled . . . to do as much good with it as the resource will admit. For although in the estimation of the world I possess a good and clear estate, yet, so unproductive is it, that I am oftentimes ashamed to refuse aids which I cannot afford, unless I was to sell part of it to answer the purpose.”38
