Washington and Caesar

by Christian Cameron

  He didn’t fancy deep enquiry about the state of his soul. It sufficed him that he did good works for his peers and subordinates, that every man called him generous and that even his slaves remembered that he had treated them by hand when the pox hit his plantations. He didn’t enjoy the sort of searching often pushed by Reverend Massey; he wasn’t really sure that an afterlife existed, or that it was important that one should search. He had felt from his youngest days that such things were beyond his control, and lay in God’s hands, and he believed in God as he believed in the king and the empire. A pre-eminent spirit controlled all, as he controlled his plantation and his tenants controlled their farms, all the way down to the dogs boy controlling the dogs, all the way up to the burgesses and parliament and the king…and God.

  Wolfe had been devoted to Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which Washington had looked at without a spark of interest. It remained a title to him, but he looked at his own red-earthed country churchyard and wondered if Gray had seen the same things he saw: the value of the building, at 579 pounds Virginia currency; the bricklayer’s time and the value of the land; the work to “view and examine” as the wardens were enjoined. Washington doubted that a poet saw the value of things, or the work that built them.

  By some freak association, his thoughts went from the churchyard to Townshend, who had loathed Wolfe and still did. If Wolfe had won Quebec by luck, where was the justice in providence? It was the one aspect of war that had sickened him above all others—that neither courage nor hard work were necessarily rewarded or justly served by the results. Braddock’s expedition could be smashed and Forbes’s succeed, despite their relative merits; and while he strove with all his might to succeed, James Wolfe took Quebec by luck.

  Farming did not work in such a way. Farming required planning and work, acceptance of occasional defeat…but the farmer who worked would be repaid in time. War should repay work and interest, like farming. It was a matter of reducing it to principles, but it was unlikely that he would ever be called upon to do so again. The thought left him a little sorry, but the rain was beginning to go through his greatcoat, and he turned his horse’s head and trotted toward Truro Church, with time in hand to dry off when he arrived.

  Pompey, behind him on a pale nag, was soaked through and cold. He was missing the Reverend Cleve, who was speaking to the slaves at Mount Vernon. He only came one week in five, and Pompey was always sorry to miss the event, as he held his soul dear.

  Reverend Cleve was a wholly new experience for Caesar—a black minister, and a free man. He spoke beautifully, as Caesar himself hoped to speak. His clear diction rolled through the cart shed, and his challenges brought out the strongest responses in his congregation. His sermon was simple and direct, and on a theme calculated to appeal most strongly to his listeners: that salvation would come for the worthy, regardless of color or station; that God’s house had many doors, and that all of them were open. He never went so far as to say that worldly freedom was unimportant, but his listeners were able to note that eternity would outlast life, and freedom and grace defeat bondage in their own souls’ lives.

  Caesar was a baptized man, brought to Christ’s Table when fresh from Africa and newly enslaved, but no part of the religion had moved him like the preaching he heard from the Reverend Cleve. He raised his voice in response, affirming his loyalty to Jesus. Neither his glass of rum at the dance nor his frequent tumbles with Queeny troubled him. Later in the sermon, when both acts were denounced by the minister, Caesar felt some surprise that the gentle, new-light Jesus had time for such small stuff, but he responded that he would not do such things again. He meant it, at the moment the words were spoken. And when they reached the responses in the creed, he tried to form his responses exactly as the Reverend Cleve had spoken them, syllable by syllable. He heard his own voice speaking the words so well, above the cart-shed din, and he knew he could do it always, if he practiced.

  Because, though an eternity of heavenly bliss appealed to him, he still wanted freedom while on the earth.

  At Truro church, Reverend Massey droned on toward the completion of his sermon, the attention of most of his congregation taken up in the recurrent thunder and worries about their horses or shays outside. His theme had been warm enough, and well taken at the outset, but only the parish’s philosophers were still on the scent with the minister’s theological pack as they finally began to pull down their ethereal fox.

  Washington was elsewhere, his mind making an orderly survey of the new black children and how best to house them, the question of drainage in a new field on the upper parts of Dogue Run, the health of Old Blue and whether the African boy was all he seemed with the dogs, and most of all his stepson’s coming marriage and its consequences, which were great enough, for all love.

  Marriage with the Calverts of Baltimore was pleasant enough, and the girl seemed comely and proper, although a certain element of papishness clung to the family. Jack liked her out of all mind, had neglected his expensive studies at Columbia, and wouldn’t be satisfied until he had her, so have her he would. Martha was insistent. In this, she reminded him too much of his own mother, and made him writhe, but there was nothing for it.

  Providentially, the event was planned for Mount Airy; nothing he had to do but get on a horse and cross at the ferry. The effect on the estates would be negligible as long as everyone understood the precautions he had taken, and should his wife’s son, Jack Custis, decide to build himself a manor house, he now had the means to support one. Washington had worked hard on the Custis estate, which was really his wife’s and would now be Jack’s. It pleased him that Jack was now going to enjoy the work, but Washington hoped he didn’t enjoy it so much that he took either to spending his capital by selling lands or interfering with the excellent managers that Washington had installed.

  He could tell by Massey’s tone of voice that the end of the sermon was near, and he began to cast his mind toward his Maker in the sort of symbolic prayer the Masons taught. That was more real to him than all the talk. He thanked his Maker for the favor of the making and the providence that made him what he was, and turned by the congruence of names and ideas to look at his friend George Mason, who was nodding like a musician at someone else’s concert. George probably had a point he wanted to dispute. Then he felt Washington’s attention, turned, and gave him a significant look, and a long one. Washington had no idea what it meant, but it almost caused him to miss the closing words and the signal to rise.

  The closing, the admonition to go with God to love and serve him, a spartan procession, not like the papist affairs in some Anglican churches, a moment of silence, and he was walking in the yard, the rain past, with George Mason, who clearly had something urgent to communicate. They walked a distance from the others.

  “Boston has spoiled the East India tea.”

  Washington looked at him, fumbling for words and understanding simultaneously.

  “A group of men thinly disguised as Indians went on board the Indiamen and threw the tea in the harbor rather than pay the tea tax.”

  Washington tapped the church wall with his crop.

  “Idle fellows? Or a decision taken by the gentlemen of the town?”

  “Not known.”

  “I…I don’t think it was well done.”

  “Would you have us submit to the tax?”

  “Is the tax so illegal, Mr. Mason?”

  “It is an external tax. We have resisted Parliament’s attempts to impose such up till now.”

  “I mislike…I very much mislike the notion that men can take such an act against property into their own hands.”

  “So must all propertied men.”

  “And I fear that the Government’s reaction will be strong. We must await events.”

  But Mason’s eyes burned with the evangelical zeal of the true believer.

  “You still avoid English goods?”

  “Within bounds. I bought a pianoforte, I must confess.”

 
; “Oh, that’s nothing. It is the daily stuff we must learn to do without if we are to break this legislation.”

  Washington looked away. His lack of response had disappointed his friend, and his friend’s dejection at the reception of his news was spreading. Washington found prating about the injuries of the colonies rather like searching his soul; it didn’t accomplish very much.

  “This is, what, the fourth time we’ve embargoed goods?”

  “It works well enough, if all comply.”

  Washington winced slightly. In the earliest embargoes, he had consistently misunderstood the complex system by which the embargo of some goods “supported” the prohibition on “taxed” goods. But the picture of property destroyed by a mob did not please him at all, and it roused him to speech.

  “I still fail to see how cheaper India tea makes us slaves. I see how it harms the interests of the Boston smugglers, and this morning I resent such merchants raising a mob to destroy property—it could as easily be my tobacco or my wheat. Doubtless, my friend, you will lead me to see the error of my ways another day. Today, I see the cost of Pohick Church rise before me beside the cost of Jack’s wedding, and I think that our troubles with England can wait until my crops are in the ground and spring is here.”

  “You’ve other business, sir, and I will not detain you. The news is not so ominous, I allow, but the reaction of the Government to this check is likely to affect us all.”

  Washington shook his head solemnly. Other men had gathered to hear the last of the exchange—men with greater debts in England, men with more love, or less, for the mother country—and in a moment the yard was abuzz with it. Washington left Mason retelling the dumping of the tea, motioned to Pompey for his horse, and looked at his watch. Slow.

  “Care to pass me the time?” he said, bowing to the elder Mr. French, watch in hand.

  “Your servant, sir. Hmm, a quarter past twelve.”

  Washington opened the face of his watch and put an elegant gold key to the fuzee, and then to the hands. French caught the engraving on the key and smiled, closed his case with a sharp snap, and bowed; Washington eased his over the catch to save wear, but his bow was just as neat.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Bought that brig, did you?”

  “I hadn’t much choice. I took her in lieu of a debt, you know.”

  “Good buy, though. Will you send a cargo north, do ya think?”

  “I may. First the Indies with my flour.”

  “If she goes north, I’d be happy to help make a cargo.”

  “Thankee. That’s something to think on. Good day to you, sir.”

  “’Servant.”

  He rose from the bow and turned to find his horse to hand, mounted in one athletic movement, nodded to Pompey, and was gone before the next rain cloud opened.

  Mount Vernon, Virginia, January 1774

  Washington’s library had a more martial character than its master admitted, these days. Charles XII of Sweden, Voltaire’s beau ideal, gazed angrily down from a column that faced his ideological child, Frederick the Great of Prussia. Julius Caesar and Alexander locked gazes in the other corner, an unceasing contest between youth (Alexander and Charles) and age (Caesar and Frederick). Or sometimes the masters of war divided other ways, classical versus modern.

  The other furnishings of the room were to the latest taste, if a bit much by native English standards—drapes a little too plum, carpets a little too bright. All together, it was the room of a man of immense wealth, and the books that lined the shelves catalogued all his interests. A 1740 Humphrey Bland on military exercise, as well as a new subscription copy of Stevenson’s Advice to Officers in Command of Detachments, and a shelf of manuals of arms, directions on fortification with plates or without, Muller on artillery. The owner of the library had the most complete interest in war to be found in a library in Virginia.

  Farming filled other shelves. The foundation of the collection had come with his wife, being her former husband’s books on the subject. He added to the collection every year, books such as Duhamel’s Practical Treatise of Husbandry and Young’s Annals of Agriculture, Thomas Fairfax on sports and dogs and the preservation of game, Tull on the new English plowing, The Farmer his own Mechanic, and dozens of other titles. The newest were newer than the military volumes, and on the whole more plentiful.

  Sport for the sake of sport had its place as well: fishing, shooting, riding and keeping horses. There weren’t many of the classics: some schoolbooks, an uncut Ovid, a muchthumbed Epictetus in English and Latin—much thumbed because the owner knew that Frederick the Great had a copy and praised it. Washington liked Epictetus, because he had been a slave and spoke well of it. When Washington spoke to a slave, he tried to remember the precepts that Epictetus laid down. There was also Homer in translation by Pope—all the volumes save one, which his stepson, Jack, had lost while still in school and never replaced.

  They were well kept and their leather gleamed with solid worth; their master read most of them, whether to farm or make war. He had been a soldier, and now he was a farmer—head bent over a careful drawing of a drainage canal in the Great Dismal Swamp as he laboriously traced out his plans for further drainage. The Great Dismal was a watery fortress built by nature on the south coast of Virginia to keep farmers at bay. It would take more slaves, more effort, and more money to drain the swamp and till the ground, but the result would be thousands of acres of prime farmland reclaimed from the wilderness right on the coast, where cargoes would fetch the best price. The plan had started almost ten years before; it had never quite succeeded or failed, and its demands seemed to increase every year, no matter how much effort the original investors expended.

  He was a farmer, and yet he planned his assault for the year on the Great Dismal like a soldier: considering each drainage ditch an approach sap on nature’s fortress swamp; marshalling the forces of slaves and pressed labor available to the investors; planning against the day when the scheme would turn a profit and the siege would end.

  He was a farmer, and all his thoughts were on the coming planting, on drainage and foaling, water tables and wheat prices, and the extent of the herring run, and yet none of his heroes had ever excelled as farmers. They had all been soldiers, soldiers of the type that won their fame for the glory of their arms and not for the kingdoms that they built; indeed, Charles, Alexander and Frederick shared a failure to build very much at all. But they were his chosen companions in his library, as his pen gradually worked its way into the defenses built by nature to keep the European farms at bay in the Great Dismal Swamp, where ten years of labor had yet to yield a single crop. He looked at his new network of ditches without confidence, laid his pen carefully in a ready holder to avoid inking the map, scattered some sand on it, and rose.

  A house slave appeared instantly, looking expectant, but Washington waved him away.

  “I’m going out to the dogs, Jack.”

  “Yes, suh.”

  “Build up the fire, if you please.”

  “Yes, suh.”

  He walked out through the library hall and around the drive to the kitchen, nodding courteously to the cook, the maid, and the little black girl who helped with the kitchen and was clearly terrified by his appearance so late at night. He paused for a moment and looked at the stars, missing the child streaking by him down toward the deer park, bound for the kennel to warn the young man there that Master was headed that way, so that he was pleasantly surprised to find Caesar up, with a small rushlight in the kennel, sitting with Old Blue.

  “She still in a bad way, Caesar?”

  “She bin bettah…better, sir.”

  Her coat was not as dull as it had been, though, he noted, and she had her head in the boy’s lap, looking at him with some interest.

  “She eating?”

  “Eats a little, if’n I feed it to her slow.”

  “She’s a good dog—used to be the best in the pack.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I�
��d like to shoot tomorrow.”

  “How many dogs, sir?”

  “Just a pair. You work hard on your speech, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Washington smiled, though the subject didn’t really please him very much. He had worked hard to sound English when he joined Braddock’s staff; Lord Fairfax had helped him lose the provincial speech that might have marked him. Slaves who spoke too well, though—that was another matter.

  “You did a very good job on the hunt. Here’s a crown. That’s a quarter of an English pound. Spend it wisely.”

  Delighted smile, deep bow, genuine admiration. “Thank you, suh! Thank you, sir.” The black face beamed with pleasure and willingness to please, but Washington noticed that in his flurry of spirits, Caesar’s pronunciation had slipped, which was to be expected.

  “But I desire you to take care, Caesar. You can be overfamiliar. Do you understand me?”

  “No, sir.” The light went out. Washington had never been good at admonition; he was too cold, and it always came out as criticism without leniency. It had hurt him with his regiment.

  “You should not smile at me, or at Mr. Lee, as if we were your familiar friends.”

  The boy looked hurt and confused. He’d recover.

  “Talk to Queeny, boy. Tell her what I said. Both things. You are a good hunter, and you can have a good life here. But you must know your place.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Washington thought of clasping his shoulder, but he didn’t. A slave should not need comforting when the Master had spoken to him. Washington tried to regulate his slaves in the tradition of the ancients. His firmness would not have offended Epictetus, he was sure.

  4

  Mount Vernon, Virginia, late January 1774

  “Coward! Drunkard! That he would dare…”

  Washington’s voice trailed off as he realized that his angry words had been audible throughout the house and that the girl who had been tending the fire was now cowering in the corner. He colored in embarrassment, and within a moment Martha appeared from the back stairs and their own apartment just above, her pretty face a picture of concern.