by Hugh Howard
When the carriages emerged from the woods, the majestic mansion stood before them. It was an immense Grecian temple, with light pouring out of the large windows that lined the façade. As the carriages grew closer, the splash of light from the open front door could be seen, illuminating the interior of the portico. Indoors Mr. and Mrs. Custis and other family members waited.
For Lafayette these people could only bring to mind his old friend. Washington had been a private man whose intimate relationships were closely guarded. But in twenty years of letters to “My dear Marquis,” he was warmer and more immediate than he was with most people. As Washington himself had written to Lafayette many years before, “You know it always gives me the sincerest plea sure to hear from you . . . that your kind letters . . . so replete with personal affection and confidential intelligence, afford . . . me inexpressible satisfaction.”12Washington had been given to strong feelings; he was alive to love and to loss (men of his time, including Washington himself, unabashedly cried real tears in public); and he was possessed of large hopes. Lafayette was one of few people in his life with whom he was able to share these feelings and aspirations. Theirs was a friendship, Lafayette sensed, that endured even in death.
The man who stepped down from his carriage that evening little resembled the reedy nineteen-year-old whom General George Washington first met at a Philadelphia dinner in 1777. Lafayette had celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday the previous month, and the years had taken an evident toll on the fresh-faced but grave young nobleman. He had spent half the closing decade of the eighteenth century in prison. He still mourned his wife, Adrienne, who had died in 1807 of lead and laudanum poisoning, medicaments she had been given to treat ailments resulting from her own incarceration.
Lafayette walked with a cane; it was both stylish and practical, as an old injury to his knee left him with a pronounced limp. He maintained the firm, upright posture of the military man, looking taller than his five-foot, nine-inch stature, but he wore a coat and vest (never a uniform or any military decoration). Despite his simple broadcloth coat, his advancing age and creeping infirmities, his was an imposing presence. He was, wrote one who saw him that week, “a man of extraordinary attractions; in face, much changed within thirty years. His complexion, originally clear and white, is now sunburnt; his forehead, which is very high, is covered very low with a wig; but it is still most attractive . . . All that he says and does is distinguished by a singular taste and good sense. He never seems for a moment to overstep the modesty of nature.”13
Wash escorted the Lafayettes into the drawing room to meet Molly, their daughter Mary, and the party assembled there. He was welcomed as a most honored yet familiar guest; in return, he was courtly and cordial. It was Molly Custis who presented General Lafayette with a fresh rose, one fetched that morning from Mount Vernon. Once more Lafayette was nearly overcome with emotion as he pressed the bloom to his heart.
II.
October 17, 1824 . . . The Tomb of Washington . . . Mount Vernon
THE TECHNOLOGY OF transportation having advanced since they last visited America, the Lafayettes boarded a vessel powered by steam, the Petersburg, for the next leg of the journey. As the ship prepared to leave Alexandria, a large party joined the father and son on board the Petersburg, including more than a dozen American military officers, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, members of Congress, and other notable citizens. The Tent of Washington awaited them in Yorktown (it was indeed the late General’s own campaign tent, from the Custis collection) but even by steamship, Yorktown would be an overnight passage. The passengers settled in below decks as the ship steamed south toward the Chesapeake Bay.
Barely two hours after losing sight of the Capitol, the travelers heard a cannon salute fired, and the ship slowed. The echoing of the guns from Fort Washington, Mary land, was a signal that the ship was approaching another destination, and, on cue, a military band on deck began to play a dirge. Slowly the passengers made their way on deck and gazed westward to the Virginia shore. Atop a gentle rise, a substantial white mansion soon came into view. “We were approaching the last abode of the Father of his Country,” Lafayette’s secretary Auguste Levasseur noted in his account of the day, “. . . [and] the venerable soil of Mount Vernon was before us.”
After forty years, the sight of Mount Vernon, home of the man he had come to regard as his spiritual father, brought Lafayette to his knees in “an involuntary and spontaneous movement.”14
The Petersburg dropped anchor and a barge ferried the crowd to the shore—this was a scheduled stop on the tour—where the Lafayettes père and fils were given seats in a carriage. While the other guests climbed the slope to the Mansion House, the Nation’s Guest was greeted by Washington’s nephew Lawrence Lewis, husband of Martha’s granddaughter Nelly, and one of the General’s great-nephews, John Augustine Washington. (Another nephew, Mount Vernon’s owner, Supreme Court Associate Justice Bushrod Washington, was in Philadelphia tending to court duties.) The younger Lafayette quickly reconnoitered the house where he had been welcomed as a teenage exile and declared it little changed. His father stood on the piazza—the wide covered porch that overlooked the Potomac with the vista of the Mary land hills beyond—a place where, on his last visit, he had drunk tea and shared remembrances with his “adoptive father” during Washington’s period of retirement between the Revolution and his call to service as president.
The visit was another family affair, and G. W. P. Custis guided the visitors. He led Lafayette and a handful of others—the larger crowd remained at the Mansion—to the family tomb some two hundred paces from the house. Nearly hidden by overhanging cypress trees, the unmarked wooden door was opened. As Lafayette descended alone into the Washington vault (he bumped his head on the door lintel as he disappeared from sight), the cannon thundered again.
Lafayette reappeared a few minutes later, his eyes full of tears. Taking the hands of his son George and Levasseur, he descended a second time into the tomb, where the three Frenchmen knelt and kissed the coffin. When they emerged, Wash Custis presented Lafayette with a large gold ring that contained a lock of the General’s chestnut hair, along with a few strands of Martha’s.15
W
UPON RETURNING TO the Mansion House, the visitors noticed the key to the Bastille hanging in the central passage. Sent by Lafayette to his “Beloved General,” it had arrived in 1790 along with a drawing of the “fortress of despotism” that Lafayette had ordered demolished. The key, Lafayette had written to Washington, “is a tribute Which I owe as A Son to My Adoptive Father, as an aid de Camp to My General, As a Missionary of liberty to its Patriarch.”16
Elsewhere in the house the Houdon bust remained (in the inventory taken at Mount Vernon in 1800, it was listed as “1 Bust of General Washington in plaister from the life,” with an appraised value of $100). But little else that had belonged to the General was still there. Like milkweed seed carried by the wind, the contents of the house had gone in many directions.
The visitors toured the house, including Lafayette’s old bedchamber at the head of the stairs. They walked the grounds, and as they returned to the shore, they cut cypress branches from the trees by the tomb. The travelers returned to the Petersburg in silence. Only after Mount Vernon disappeared from sight did the time of quiet meditation end. Lafayette, settled on the steamboat’s quarterdeck, talked until evening, recollecting Washington as the ship steamed toward Yorktown.
LAFAYETTE WAS AMONG the last survivors of a great generation. He had expected his American sojourn would last four months; instead, the triumphal tour required thirteen months, covered five thousand miles, and encompassed visits to all twenty-four states. His contribution to the American War of Independence was celebrated: he had, after all, risked his life, accepted no salary, paid the expenses of his men, and helped persuade Louis XVI to support the American cause with more money, men, and matériel.
An adoring American public saw in the Nation’s Guest the personification of what the revoluti
onary generation had accomplished. Few of the Founding Fathers survived, and Lafayette visited most of them, including John Adams, infirm and nearly blind, and Thomas Jefferson, hopelessly in debt, suffering with dysuria, but still mentally sharp (though Lafayette’s English was virtually flawless, Jefferson insisted they speak French). In addition to renewing his acquaintance with the old guard, Lafayette dined with presidential candidates John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. He was still in the United States when Adams, whom Lafayette had known as a fifteen-year-old in France during his father’s diplomatic service, became president in 1825 (it had fallen to the House of Representatives to decide the election when no candidate won a majority of the electoral vote). Lafayette thus bore witness to the constitutional process by which Americans chose their leaders by democratic means, demonstrating that the system worked, even in the absence of the Found ers. The nation Lafayette revisited had been transformed. The economy was booming, the currency was sound, and a network of passable roads linked the spreading nation.
As he made his American circuit, he did so as Washington’s surrogate. At almost every dinner, the first toast was drunk to George Washington, the missing but unavoidable presence. No one would confuse the elegant Lafayette with George Washington, but the Frenchman in 1824 was untainted by the partisanship of the Federalist vs. Democratic-Republican confrontations; those parties hadn’t even been conceived when he had last been in America. The sun seemed to have set on the revolutionary generation but here was Lafayette, the man the newspapers took to calling “the Friend of Washington,” an appellation that helps explain the extraordinary outpouring of emotion—nationalistic, patriotic, and nostalgic—that flooded the land.
WASH CUSTIS DECIDED to write an account of the visit. His multipart “Conversations with Lafayette” ran in the Alexandria Gazette and attracted national attention when it was republished widely. Among those who read the pieces with particular interest was a popular historian named John F. Watson. He immediately wrote to Custis, suggesting they might collaborate on a Washington memoir. Watson thought he might ask the questions and, working with Custis’s answers, “develop, as by moral painting, the individual character of General and Mrs. Washington, as they appeared in domestic and everyday life.”17
The project seemed tailor-made for Custis, who abbreviated his Lafayette series in order to set to work collecting his thoughts on the Chief. His first “Recollection of Washington” was published in May 1826, and, for many years thereafter, usually on the occasion of Washington’s birthday or Independence Day, new memory pieces would appear in the pages of the National Intelligencer and many other papers.
Custis’s writing expanded to other venues. Throughout his life, George Washington had been fascinated with the theater. His hours as an audience member watching the thespians of the day informed his native gift for making an entrance, his ability to draw attention to his striking presence, his use of silence. He had seen to it that his ward was exposed to the theater, too, arranging for the boy, along with Nelly and George Lafayette, to attend plays in Philadelphia. In manhood Custis returned the favor by writing a play that honored Washington.
Titled The Indian Prophecy, the story featured the young Virginia colonel and climaxed with the prophecy of the title. A Kanawha Indian chief predicts that the brave soldier will not die in battle but will live to found and lead a mighty empire. When the play was first produced, in July 1827, at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theater, the prediction had long since come to pass.
Custis also tried his hand at painting, though with largely unremarkable results (according to his own daughter, the value of his paintings lay in “their truthfulness to history in the delineation of events, incidents and costumes”).18He painted the battle scenes at Princeton, Germantown, and Yorktown. One painting stands out from the rest. It quite evidently owes its inspiration to John Trumbull’s portrait General Washington at Verplanck’s Point, the canvas the artist had given to Martha and that had hung in the New Room at Mount Vernon. Custis coveted the original, but it had gone by Martha’s bequest to another Custis relation, so he had made his own version (it can’t truly be called a copy). His is primitive. The horse has a mythic quality, anatomically odd, rendered by an unschooled hand. Yet as painted by his step-grandson, the General has real dash. Custis’s portrayal somehow manages to convey, as Trumbull had done, a sense of the man’s physical power in repose. It hung in the entry hall at Arlington House, together with Peale’s Virginia colonel.
GEORGE WASHINGTON PARKE Custis was a poet, playwright, antiquarian, painter, and most of all, family historian whose favorite subject was always the man he called the Chief. He was a curator, too, whose care for a range of Washington objects helped assure their survival (many later migrated back to Mount Vernon).
When he, in turn, went to his grave in 1857, he was the last of the General’s immediate family (Nelly had died five years earlier). Custis left copious writings about Washington, and his daughter oversaw their publication in Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington by His Adopted Son George Washington Parke Custis three years later. It would prove to be the most enduring personal memoir of the Chief. Despite the differences in their ages, G.W.P. knew the man intimately, at least in the paradoxical and sometimes subliminal way that a child understands adult affairs. He was family; he knew the inner dynamics of Washington’s personal world very well. He was a writer and researcher, and he used his agreeable manner and family connections to gain unique access to the memories of others who knew his grandfather, among them Lafayette, Dr. James Craik (Washington’s oldest friend from military service in the 1750s, as well as his personal physician); the freed slave, William Lee; and others. The man managed to be both the child of Mount Vernon and the sage of Arlington. He was a self-appointed memory keeper; his assemblage of miscellaneous memories remains an essential, if eccentric, source for historians.
Though technically childless, the General was survived by a spiritual son and a step-grandson. Long after the great man’s death, Lafayette and Wash Custis showed the world something of the private Washington, the devoted family man and generous friend. They made him more accessible, revealing an aspect distinct from the stony-faced Founding Father, iconic and unapproachable, mounted on a pedestal.
III.
The Lives of the Painters
TO HIS PORTAITISTS, Washington was a protean figure. The relaxed country squire whom Peale painted in 1772 became the tired and haggard man that Rembrandt Peale limned a quarter century later. The Virginian spent most of the intervening years in public service, initially at war, often in the line of fire. He experienced another kind of crossfire as president, which, though strictly speaking political, was no less heated, as Jefferson and Hamilton were forever sniping at each other within Washington’s own cabinet.
The personalities of Washington and his recorders can be identified by looking at the canvases. Peale’s paintings are always unmistakable from across a gallery or down a hall, and in Peale’s round faces we can almost sense his own cherubic personality. In his first Washington we note the man’s girth, because Peale liked to portray people in their stout, full-bodied prosperity. Trumbull shows us a more patrician view. For him, Washington is a figurehead. Trumbull’s desire was to capture the heroic Washington, to precipitate with oil paints a semblance of the man’s historical importance. Savage aspired to less, and as artisan and showman he shaped workmanlike portraits. Stuart’s genius for suggesting rather than reproducing what he saw seems to have suited the vagaries of a habitual drinker and snuff-user.
All of these men outlived George Washington, as did their images of him. CHARLES WILLSON PEALE painted Washington from life seven times, producing almost seventy likenesses. But the intellectually curious Peale spent more of his later life pursuing his fascination with the natural sciences and operating his Museum than he did painting. Even so, at his death in 1827, he left a vast body of work, including more than a thousand portraits. Taken together, they constitute the
single best visual record of the revolutionary generation. Peale’s pen produced an autobiography, diaries, and voluminous correspondence (his selected papers fill five hefty volumes). He was also survived by a living legacy of painters. Of his seventeen children, several had an important artistic presence, including sons Raphaelle and Rubens, best known for their still-life paintings, and Titian Ramsay, who painted natural history subjects.
After his father’s death, the best-remembered son, REMBRANDT PEALE, remained in pursuit of portraiture. Despite having made only one likeness of Washington from life (and that when he was seventeen), Rembrandt lived to paint almost eighty copies of his composite Patriae Pater. Even in his last days (he died in the autumn of 1860), he was working to complete two more Washington portraits and had achieved wide fame for his lectures on Washington.
Despite having determined to pursue other career paths in the 1790s, JOHN TRUMBULL periodically resumed painting in what proved to be a long life. When he returned to America after another Eu rope an sojourn in 1815, his arrival coincided with the rebuilding of the Capitol after the British had burned the unfinished structure during the War of 1812. Trumbull took the opportunity to resurrect his Revolutionary War project, persuading Congress to commission four large-scale versions of his history paintings. He was paid generously, collecting a fee of $32,000 for The Surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga, The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, The Declaration of In dependence, and The Resignation of General Washington. They went on public view in November 28, 1826, in the Capitol Rotunda, where they remain today.
