Washington- The Indispensable Man

by James Thomas Flexner

  Washington was on the whole glad that Adams did not take the paintings. As a collector of art, Washington was several generations ahead of the taste of his time. Not that he set out to be pacemaking. Typically, he followed, indifferent to convention, his own interests.

  One might assume that, being himself a historical hero, he would take naturally to what was then considered the “high style”: elaborate compositions that depicted in an “elevated,” supposedly inspiring manner great moments out of history or legend. In so far as they reproduced the work of American artists resident in London—West, Copley, Trumbull—Washington did buy engravings after such compositions, but for the large oil paintings that were the most ambitious of his artistic purchases, he demanded a type of painting scorned by “correct” connoisseurs.

  In his neoclassical time, when the proper study of man was considered to be man, to depict landscape was regarded as trivial and mean. Washington was indifferent to such theorizing. As he dreamed in a city of rivers, fields, and forests, the frontiersman and farmer limited his major patronage to landscapes. And he insisted that the painters—the Anglo-Americans William Winstanley and George Beck—play down those evidences of man-made refinements which gave the landscape art of his day what small value it was correctly admitted to have. Commissioning depictions of American scenery at its wildest, Washington anticipated by several generations the mid-nineteenth-century conceptions of the Hudson River School.

  After he had got rid of everything that he could which he considered superfluous, Washington still had to hire a sloop to take the residue to his wharf on the Potomac. Breakables were stowed into his carriage around the bodies of his coachman and family. He wrote with the high spirits of a beleaguered family man, “On one side, I am called upon to remember the parrot; on the other, to remember the dog. For my own part, I should not pine if they were both forgot.”

  On March 15, 1797, the coach rumbled up the bell-shaped drive to Mount Vernon. Washington promised himself “more real enjoyment than in all the business with which I have been occupied for upwards of forty years.” All that business seemed to him now “little more than vanity and vexation.” He would view the world “in the calm lights of mild philosophy.”

  But mild philosophy received a severe shock when “more by accident than design” he discovered that the great girder which supported his banquet hall was so decayed that “a company only moderately large would have sunk altogether into the cellar.” Washington’s “long forsaken residence at Mount Vernon” was dilapidated everywhere. He ordered such a flood of repairs “that I have scarcely a room to put a friend into or set in myself without the music of hammers or the odoriferous smell of paint.” Seven months later he was still at it, and complaining, “Workmen in most countries, I believe, are necessary plagues. In this, where entreaties as well as money must be used to obtain their work … they baffle all calculation.” He could fill several pages “with the perplexities I experience daily from workmen.”

  The Washington Family, by Edward Savage, 1796. Washington, wearing a military uniform, has his hand on a map of the District of Columbia. Also present are Martha, her grandchildren, Nelly and Washington Custis, and a black servant in livery. The background shows a landscape suggestive of the view from Mount Vernon (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

  The workmen had their problems too. Washington rose with the sun. “If my hirelings are not in their places at that time, I send them messages expressive of my sorrow for their indisposition. Then, having put these wheels in motion, I examine the state of things further,” always finding more “wounds” in his structures that needed to be healed. At a little after seven o’clock breakfast was ready. “This over, I mount my horse and ride round my farms, which employs me until it is time to dress for dinner, at which I rarely miss seeing strange faces, come, as they say, out of respect to me. Pray, would not the word curiosity answer as well? And how different this from having a few social friends at a cheerful board!

  “The usual time of sitting at table, a walk, and tea, brings me within the dawn of candlelight, previous to which, if not prevented by company, 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.…

  “Having given you the history of a day, it will serve for a year.… It may strike you that in this detail no mention is made … of reading.… I have not looked into a book since I came home, nor shall I be able to do it until I have discharged my workmen … when possibly I may be looking in doomsday book.”

  Doomsday book! Washington, so brave on battlefields, had always, in times of quiet, seen death stalking him. Now the fear was surely more than an insubstantial vision. He hoped, he wrote, that esteem of good men and his consciousness of having done the best for his country would “alleviate pain and soften any cares which are yet to be encountered—though hid from me at present.”

  Washington’s farms were in an even worse situation than his buildings, and that situation was much more difficult to remedy. When, years before, he had taken over Mount Vernon, the soil had already been depleted. While he had been in residence, he had labored to enrich the land with crop rotation and fertilizers; he had tried, by perpetual attention to drainage ditches, to protect the thin topsoil from erosion. Now all was a shambles. Measly crops drooped in fields torn with gullies; the “live fences” were more gap than hedge; his horses, sheep, and cows had become smaller and weaker through inattention to breeding.

  His plight was particularly brought home to Washington when the English author of The Experienced Farmer, Richard Parkinson, appeared in anticipation of renting one of the Mount Vernon farms. Washington expressed himself as “much flattered” by the visit of so celebrated an agriculturalist, but Parkinson noted that the General was soon “not well pleased with my conversation.” The English farmer told the American hero that the barrenness of Mount Vernon was “beyond description.” If Washington were to offer him twelve hundred acres as a present, he would not accept them.

  To justify such strictures Parkinson had, of course, to treat Washington “with a great deal of frankness.… I gave him strong proofs of his mistakes” by comparing Mount Vernon with English farms. Washington had on three thousand acres a mere one hundred sheep, while Parkinson’s own father had only six hundred acres yet clipped eleven hundred sheep. The father got ten pounds of wool per fleece, the American not three. The elder Parkinson grew ten times as much wheat per acre as the General did—and so on down through all Washington’s farming activities and possessions except his mules. Parkinson admired Washington’s mules.

  Washington’s own survey of the Mount Vernon plantation, made in December, 1793 (Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union)

  Upgrading Mount Vernon once more was made endlessly more difficult by a human hangover of Washington’s Presidency. When trapped in Philadelphia, Washington had yearned for an estate manager who would not sicken or move away and, towards the end of his second term, he had found one, an elderly Scot named James Anderson. Anderson had contributed to the cash income of Mount Vernon by getting Washington on a large scale into the distilling of whiskey. But in relation to the farms he proved, after Washington’s return, a thorn in the proprietor’s side.

  To Washington’s comments on deficiencies everywhere, Anderson promised that all would be immediately rectified. Yet, as Washington rode around grimly, he could see nothing achieved. Turning on his estate manager all the lofty anger of an ex-commander in chief and ex-President, Washington thundered that such inefficiency “is not at all pleasant to a man who has practiced himself, and been accustomed to meet as much regularity as I have from others.” Anderson replied unhappily that he would resign.

  Washington considered it “strange and singular indeed” if a proprietor could not
say anything without offending his manager. But he made a tactful effort to persuade the Scot to accept reduced responsibilities at no reduction of salary: he should manage the distillery, the commercial mill with its automated equipment, and some of the fisheries, leaving immediate supervision of the farms to Washington. Anderson replied that he was primarily a farmer. Washington yearned to discharge the troublesome subordinate but found himself “unwilling by any act of mine to hurt his feelings or … to lessen his respectability in the eyes of the public.” He continued to accept the bumbling intervention that made even less possible the task of getting Mount Vernon back into shape during the few years that the proprietor assumed were left to him.

  Even before the Presidency, when Mount Vernon had been operating with maximum efficiency, Washington had been unable to live on the income it produced. Now the situation was, of course, much worse. He wrote in 1799, “Were it not for occasional supplies of money in payment for lands sold within the last four or five years to the amount of upwards of $50,000” (more than half a million in modern currency), he would be “in debt and difficulties.”

  During those economically troubled years, Washington’s success as a land speculator was phenomenal. While he prospered, many of the nation’s financial leaders, including the great Robert Morris himself, were carried by the collapse of their real estate schemes into debtors’ prison. Not the least of the reasons that Washington was an exception was that he made no use of the financial facilities created by Hamilton. He did not expand his credit with the practice, so treacherous in time of sinking values, of “pyramiding”: borrowing on assets that had themselves been purchased with the help of loans. Adhering to the economics of a farmer rather than a financial entrepreneur, Washington wrote, “It has been a maxim with me from early life never to undertake anything without perceiving a door to the accomplishment in a reasonable amount of time with my own resources.”

  An endemic problem of speculators in western land was how to find out about and successfully administer properties far from their counting-houses. But Washington could find in every community men glad to be in communication with so celebrated a man. Only a few years before, he had leaned over backwards not to take advantage of his eminence. Now he was completely shameless, asking government officials and private individuals to assess the value of tracts, see to surveying and improvements, advise him as to the reliability of respective buyers, collect sums due to him, and so on. For the services of gentlemen, he never offered payment, but asked their permission to reimburse actual outlays. Only in matters too minor “to trouble my friends with,” did he employ agents.

  Washington was further helped by the fact that he had begun his purchases of western lands when he was a teen-ager almost a half century before. The tracts in the Shenandoah Valley where he had practiced as a surveyor and in western Pennsylvania where he had fought, were now worth more than a hundred times what he had then paid.

  Like all other possessors of western acres, Washington had great difficulty achieving sales. The war had blocked the flow of well-off European immigrants who had previously bought western land. And French depredations on American commerce had created a general depression. Since crops could not be exported safely, their value dropped. Few men desired more land to farm. Thus Washington usually could only sell to speculators who bought in expectation of a rise in values.

  Such men were looking to the future rather than the present, and cash was, in any case, scarce. Thus Washington could not expect to get the whole purchase price in cash. The less credit he would give, the lower the amount he could ask. And a universal lack of liquid assets made it difficult to distinguish between reliable purchasers and those who could only complete their payments if fortune took a lucky turn.

  In this welter, Washington operated with the dogged persistence which had stood him in good stead as general and President. He bought shrewdly and was an eager salesman, extolling his property. He kept a sharp eye on all details. Almost always unwilling to go to law—he disliked proceedings which distressed the helpless—he fired off many angry letters. He was often forced to accept a loss or take his land back, yet enough cash did come in to enable him to continue his style of living with only an occasional financial squeeze.

  In July, 1799, Washington assessed his still unsold land at $488,137 (several millions in modern currency). This estimate was based on what he considered foreseeable increases in value, and was thus optimistic, but it was not vaguely visionary.

  Washington’s financial success was based altogether on his own efforts. He had no business staff. And for many years he had been able to devote to his affairs only what little time he could disentangle from the most demanding of public pursuits. Clearly, he had great business gifts.

  By temperament, Washington could never lie easy. For all his prosperity, he was perpetually worried about his finances. These worries were greatly enhanced during his very last years by an effort he made to help along that darling among his projects, the new national capital, which was now firmly named “Washington.” The government was due to move there in 1800, but the general financial confusion had bankrupted the real estate operators who had agreed to build the necessary housing and had even contracted to advance money to complete the government buildings.

  The former General could be high-spirited about the matter as when he wrote, “Oh well, they can camp out. The Representatives in the first line, the Senate in the second, the President and his suite in the middle.” However, he felt called upon to erect twin buildings, which he himself designed, intended to form a boarding house that would, in its sixteen bedrooms, accommodate twenty to thirty congressmen. He thought he had an innkeeper lined up to take over, but when the crucial moment came, the prospect did not even answer letters. Washington found that, to pay the builders whose charges he considered wildly exorbitant, he had to enter “a new scene.” He had to borrow money from a bank.

  Again and again the ex-President expressed horror at having been forced into a “a measure I never in the course of my life had practiced.” The luxury of his Mansion House, the spreading farms at Mount Vernon, the deeds to extensive lands stowed away in his strong box, all seemed, when the old farmer awoke in the nights, evanescent. He was terrified to think that he had been reduced to “a necessity of borrowing from the banks at a ruinous interest.”

  On leaving Philadelphia after the end of the Presidency, Washington, feeling that a personal farewell “is not among the pleasantest circumstances of one’s life,” had said good-bye to Mrs. Powel in a letter. He soon heard from his flirtatious friend, to whom he had sold his personal desk: “I take up my pen to address you, as you have given me a complete triumph on the subject of all others on which you have I suppose thought me most deficient and most opposite to yourself.” She had found in a secret drawer a packet of love letters from a lady. “What,” Eliza asked, “will the goddess of prudence and circumspection say to her favorite son and votary for his dereliction of principles to which he has hitherto made such serious sacrifices?” Eliza kept Washington in suspense until she finally admitted that the letters were from Martha.

  Washington replied that if he had had love letters to lose, Eliza’s long preamble “might have tried how far my nerves were able to sustain the shock of having betrayed the confidence of a lady.” If Eliza had not been too discreet to peek, she would have found Martha’s letters “more fraught with expressions of friendship than of enamoured love.” A reader “of the romantic order” could only have given the sheets “warmth” by setting them on fire.*

  Many legends circulate as to Washington’s sexuality. The man who was probably sterile is said to have been a eunuch, even a woman in disguise; he is said to have been known as “the stallion of the Potomac.” Eliza, who was surely in the best position to know, testifies to his continence in his later years. Although he undoubtedly had his fling when a young man, no one has ever discovered any authentic evidence that he was unfaithful to Martha. His lifetime battle for self-
control included the sexual with other passions. However, both Eliza’s letter and his reply make it clear that he was no prude: Eliza flirtatiously admitted her own shortcomings, and George implied that he would not have been concerned at being found in adultery but only at having “betrayed the confidence of a lady.”

  On an earlier occasion, Washington had contrasted unfavorably “the giddy rounds of promiscuous pleasure” with “domestic felicity.” This graduate from an unhappy childhood was glad to achieve in marriage tranquillity, not more excitement, of which he usually had plenty elsewhere.

  But Martha was not much company in his retirement. She was slightly older than he and had gone downhill more rapidly. She was “greatly distressed and fatigued” by housekeeping details she had once enjoyed, and now preferred copying letters her husband had drafted to writing her own. Washington had been back at Mount Vernon only a few months when he sent a hurried invitation to a nearby friend. “Unless someone pops in unexpectedly, Mrs. Washington and myself will do what I believe has not been done within the last twenty years by us, that is to set down to dinner by ourselves.”

  Washington found himself a stranger in his own land. Almost all of the friends to whose houses he had ridden for a convivial night or a long stay had died or moved away. And the younger Virginians, following in the wake of Jefferson, were now his most passionate opponents. If he rode beyond his immediate neighborhood, he saw not smiles but frowns.

  Mount Vernon was, of course, always crowded. Although Washington complained about the flow in and out of curious strangers, he would pounce eagerly on any individual who seemed to offer interest. He would hold such men in conversation for hours, beg them to stay the night. Wishing to have resident at Mount Vernon “a companion in my latter days,” he tried to lure his former military aide David Humphreys, who was now American Minister to Spain. However, the news that Humphreys was getting married “annihilated every hope.” Washington (thinking perhaps of Martha and her niece Fanny Bassett) intended never again “to have two women in my house when I am there myself.”