George Washington

by David O. Stewart

  * * *

  Washington’s last annual address, delivered to Congress in early December 1796, recited many accomplishments. The country was at peace with the tribes and occupied the western posts that the British had vacated. Under the Jay Treaty, joint commissions were marking the boundary between Maine and Canada and resolving American claims for seized ships. The Mississippi was open to American trade, captured sailors in North Africa had been released, and the boundaries with Spanish Florida and Louisiana were resolved. Washington called on Congress to create national institutions to reinforce the union: a national university, a board of agriculture, a military academy, and a navy. The first never would be built; the last three came after his time.14

  Washington looked forward to retirement. About ten days before John Adams was to assume the presidency, Mrs. Liston congratulated Washington “on his approaching happiness.” The president replied “like a child within view of the holidays” that he had “counted the months, then the weeks, and I now reckon the days.” Washington’s mind was turning to projects for Mount Vernon. “There are so many things I wish to have done soon,” he wrote to his farm manager, “and so many others that are essential to do, that I scarcely know what direction to give concerning them.” He approved a proposal for a Mount Vernon distillery, which thrived; in 1799, it produced 11,000 gallons of whiskey.15

  In his final weeks in office, Washington attended the theater and concerts. He hosted receptions for the diplomatic corps, congressmen, merchants, Pennsylvania’s governor and legislators, army officers, and the Society of the Cincinnati. His birthday celebration began with bell-ringing and cannon blasts and ended with a dinner and ball that drew 1,200.16

  With his dentist, the president consulted about his collapsed dentures of human teeth and hippopotamus ivory. The remaining structure, Washington complained, made his lips bulge out, a pattern visible in Stuart’s late portrait of him. Also, the dentures were turning black and his lone remaining tooth fell out. Such woes were both painful and embarrassing for a public man acutely conscious of his appearance. Every morning for years, he had to wedge into his mouth, onto gums raw from friction, a contraption of wire, metal, springs, and ivory that obstructed his speech and slid while he chewed whatever food was soft enough for him to attempt. Once he had the dentures in place, the rest of his day must have seemed easy.17

  At Adams’s inauguration on March 4, 1797, Washington was joyful. He wore a simple black coat and his expression, according to Adams, was “as serene and unclouded as the day. . . . Methought I heard him think Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in! see which of us will be happiest.” The new president admitted, “I envied him more than he did me; and with reason.” Adams assured his wife that weeping onlookers were not moved by their joy over the new president. The tears, he sighed, reflected “grief for the loss of their beloved.”18

  As Washington strode from the chamber, spectators rushed after him for a last look. In the street, he waved his hat to cheering onlookers. The crowd, falling quiet, followed him through the street to the president’s residence. Reaching the door, he turned to the now-silent crowd, his face grave, tears on his face. Unable to speak, he gestured his thanks and farewell.19

  * * *

  Washington’s return to Mount Vernon was another triumphal procession. His countrymen cheered him in Baltimore, in Georgetown, and in Alexandria. His return was soon darkened, however, by news that his sister, Betty Lewis, had died. That left only Washington and his brother Charles of the original nine siblings and half-siblings.20

  Home for good, Washington pitched into Mount Vernon improvements. “We are like the beginners of a new establishment,” he wrote. There were rooms to paint, defects to repair. Though the work would be troublesome and dirty, it would “give exercise both to the mind and body.” He hoped to spend his remaining days—“which in the ordinary course of things (being in my sixty-sixth year) cannot be many”—ignoring politics in favor of “the more rational amusement of cultivating the earth.”21

  Yet Washington had unfinished business with the nation, and with other Americans. He had spent his life supported by the involuntary labor of people who enjoyed none of the liberty and freedom he praised so extravagantly and fought for for so long. The slave society he managed at Mount Vernon utterly contradicted every ideal that Washington claimed to hold dear. His work was not done.

  FREEDOM

  Chapter 51

  Home for Good

  The world in 1797 offered few models of former rulers in voluntary retirement. For kings, emperors, and popes, the prevailing fates were death or resentful exile. In his first months at home, Washington blazed a third trail as farmer and private citizen, though he could never entirely recede from the nation’s life.

  When President Adams delivered an important speech concerning France, Washington refused to comment on it. His goals, he insisted, were to raise his crops, repair his house, secure his public papers, and sell his flour. He looked forward, he wrote to a friend, to “more real enjoyment than in all the bustling with which I have been occupied . . . which . . . [is] little more than vanity and vexation.” On a visit to Mount Vernon, Henrietta Liston thought Washington seemed “like a man relieved from a heavy burden. He has thrown off a little of that prudence which formerly guarded his every word.”1

  He felt his time shortening, and often said so. He referred to “the few years I have to remain on this terrestrial globe,” while predicting that “my glass is nearly run” and “my thread is nearly spun,” and “the days of my sojournment . . . cannot be many.” He described himself as “near the bottom of the hill,” “approaching the shades below,” and having a “remnant of a life journeying fast to the mansions of my ancestors.” Gloomy fatalism, however, was not new for him. Before he was thirty, he had described himself struggling with “the grim king.” In autumn 1799, with the death of his last surviving sibling, his brother Charles, Washington vowed, “When the summons comes, I shall endeavor to obey it with good grace.”2

  He retained physical talents, proving more adept in a billiards match than an opponent expected, and kept his striking presence and carriage. After a chance encounter with the ex-president on a country road, a traveling actor marveled:

  Every feature suggested a resemblance to the spirit it encased and showed simplicity in alliance with the sublime. The impression, therefore, was that of a most perfect whole; . . . you could not but think you looked upon a wonder, and something sacred as well as wonderful—a man fashioned by the hand of heaven, with every requisite to achieve a great work.3

  Washington described his days as beginning with the sun. If Mount Vernon’s workers had not yet stirred, he wrote archly, “I send them messages of my sorrow for their indisposition.” After reviewing the home farm, he breakfasted at seven, then rode through the more distant farms until dinner at three. He welcomed strangers who stopped for a look at the hero, so long as they were well dressed. By one calculation, in 1798 the Washingtons gave dinner to 656 guests and provided lodging for 677. He reserved evening for addressing the deluge of correspondence, but he sometimes abandoned it in favor of sociability.4

  A new French crisis ended his liberation from public cares. That country’s resentment of the Jay Treaty had quickly ripened. Its armies triumphant in Europe, France attacked American trade, seizing roughly 600 ships during the eighteen months after the treaty was ratified, and abusing American sailors. American exports shrank by more than 20 percent and maritime insurance rates jumped. President Adams sent three envoys to patch things up, but the French kept them idling for months. In a letter to Adams’s secretary of war, Washington asked a lighthearted question with a serious undertone: “Are our commissioners guillotined?”5

  The situation became a crisis when public outrage greeted the news that French officials (identified as “X, Y, and Z”) demanded bribes from the American diplomats. Overnight, everything French became anathema to Americans
. All Philadelphians, a friend reported to Washington in April 1798, had removed French cockades from their hats.6

  An infuriated Congress authorized an army of 10,000 men, plus a “provisional army” of five times that many. Only one man could command them. “We must have your name,” Adams wrote to Washington. “There will be more efficacy in it than in many an army.”7

  However flattering Washington may have found this demand, he also recognized its negatives. He feared another emergence from retirement would invite ridicule or resentment, and worried if he was physically and mentally equal to the job. Creating an effective fighting force, he warned Adams, might be beyond the powers of the “old set of generals” from the Revolutionary War, who might lack “sufficient activity, energy & health.”8

  He likely was wary of being subordinate to Adams, though he never said so. Washington respected the New Englander and supported his policies, but the new president could be unpredictable. Adams demonstrated his volatility by not waiting for Washington’s consent before nominating him to command the new army. Congress put aside its partisan bickering and unanimously approved the appointment, marking the fifth time that Washington won high office without a dissenting vote.9

  The military undertaking proved misbegotten, a fumbling coda to Washington’s career. Adams and Washington locked horns over the top hierarchy of generals. Washington wanted Hamilton as his second-in-command. In the Continental Army, at the Constitutional Convention, as treasury secretary, and in the Whiskey Rebellion, the younger man had demonstrated high energy and organizational talent. Washington, who intended to join the army only in case of invasion or great emergency, needed a thoroughly capable surrogate. But Adams and Hamilton were political antagonists, so the president pressed for his fellow New Englander, Henry Knox, or Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, both of whom had outranked Hamilton in the Continental Army.10

  Adams finally relented; he might be president, but Washington was Washington. But the disagreement delayed the recruitment of soldiers for more than six months and muddled the army’s organization. Distance exacerbated the delay. Adams preferred to spend his time in Massachusetts, which hamstrung communication. Washington, the natural center of attention wherever he appeared, came to Philadelphia for only a single five-week period, organizing the army with Hamilton and Pinckney during the day and plunging into a social swirl at night. After the general returned to Mount Vernon, he complained that he was so ignorant of events that if he had to respond to an emergency, it would be as though he had dropped from the clouds.11

  Yet Washington exercised his gift of silence. Pressed to comment on a diplomatic situation, he answered, “The vessel is afloat . . . and considering myself as a passenger only, I shall trust to the mariners . . . to steer it into a safe port.” Without consulting Washington or his cabinet, Adams sent more diplomats to France in a final bid to avoid war. Many Federalists denounced the maneuver, but Washington supported it; happily for the nation, it brought a peaceful resolution.12

  This final public engagement underscored two developments in Washington’s thinking. First, he had abandoned any pretense to nonpartisanship; he was a Federalist. He and Secretary of War McHenry agreed that, because Republican officers might “divide and contaminate the army by artful and seditious discourses,” all army officers should be Federalists. In correspondence with friends, he denounced Republicans as attempting to subvert the Constitution and the government. When James Monroe published a pamphlet defending his work as minister to France, Washington inscribed spirited retorts in the margins. He found one passage “curious and laughable,” another “insanity in the extreme!” while a third reflected the views of “a person incompetent to judge, or blinded by party views.” Washington cheered when anti-French feeling carried Virginia’s Federalists to success in the 1799 elections.13

  Also, Washington had become more candid about the dangers of slave revolt that shadowed the lives of white Southerners, dangers that had been accentuated by the successful slave rising in Santo Domingo during the 1790s. Any French invasion of America, he told Adams, would come in the South, where “there can be no doubt of their arming the Negroes against us.” Henry Knox agreed that the French would deploy Black troops from the West Indies and “excit[e] the slaves” with the “natural desire of liberty.”14

  * * *

  When army matters did not press, Washington’s days overflowed with other projects. He despaired that the Potomac River improvements proceeded so “limpingly,” chronically short of funds. The same affliction hampered construction of the new seat of government upriver from Mount Vernon. To meet a pledge to build two houses in the federal city, Washington took out the first bank loan of his life.15

  The largest part of his energy went to repairing his finances after eight years as president. Mary Washington’s eldest always worried about money, but his worries were real. Despite its beauty, Mount Vernon’s soil was thin and gullied and its farms produced little profit. The thriving new distillery could not retrieve the situation. Washington had to sell off or lease out the lands he had spent a lifetime acquiring.16

  But few Americans wished to be tenants, while the scarcity of cash made it difficult to find buyers for his vast western tracts. When he made potentially lucrative sales—one would have brought in more than $200,000 (nearly $5 million today)—purchasers often failed to pay. Smaller sales kept Mount Vernon afloat.17

  Washington knew why his estate, despite his hard work, could not pay for itself: Ninety percent of the people at Mount Vernon were enslaved. The estate could not support them all, not with the unmotivated labor that the slave system generated.

  Washington’s attitudes toward slavery were complicated and contradictory, like those of many Americans, and evolved through his life. As a young man, he seems to have been an unreflective slave master, one who accepted the coerced labor system of his time and place. That unthinking acceptance dissolved in the face of the rebellion’s exaltation of human liberty and the sacrifices of his African American soldiers, which created a profound internal struggle for Washington. He could hardly justify enslaving people who were willing to die fighting for his liberty. He resolved first to become a humane slaveholder, to avoid the harshest features of the system without overturning it. He would not sell or buy enslaved people, in order to avoid breaking up families, but he was inconsistent about that. He always maintained that men and nations follow their own interests rather than high-flown ideals; that could prove true for him when his economic interests conflicted with his dislike of slavery.

  The slave system posed the greatest test of Washington’s political skills. For virtually all his life, he failed it. He made no public statement nor took any public action that questioned the legitimacy of slavery, fearing that it would upend the republic for which he sacrificed so much. On the most pressing moral question facing the nation, its greatest leader did not lead.

  In quiet hours working on correspondence in his study or riding across his farms or gazing at the Potomac from his rear portico, Washington could not deny that failure. He understood that the slave system disfigured America’s vaunted freedom. Finally, he accepted his obligation to speak the truth that his interests, and the nation’s interests, could not be reconciled with slavery. He decided to confess that he had been wrong to dwell within that system. It was a momentous step, one that he hoped would encourage Americans to end slavery. Washington took it at the last possible moment, when he himself would not have to endure any negative consequences from it, yet it was a righteous act.

  Chapter 52

  Wrestling with Sin

  When Washington left for the First Continental Congress in 1774, Mount Vernon was home to 119 slaves older than sixteen. The following year he paid taxes on 135 enslaved people there. He had amassed those slaves by inheritance, by marriage, and by purchases at auctions and from slave merchants. He traded wheat and flour to acquire a group from the West Indies. Altho
ugh Washington followed Virginia custom by referring to the people he owned as “family,” the euphemism could not conceal the harsh realities of forced bondage. As explained in a recent book on Washington’s slaveholding, Mount Vernon and the Custis estates he managed saw many of slavery’s worst abuses: “whipping, keeping someone in shackles, tracking a person down with dogs, or selling people away from their family.”1

  Of the almost 700 Mount Vernon slaves managed by Washington from 1760 forward, forty-seven tried to escape. Enslaved people stole from him, set his property on fire, and avoided work by breaking his tools and feigning illness. He recognized that punishment “often produces evils which are worse than the disease,” yet even after announcing an end to whipping, he still employed the practice. “If the Negros will not do their duty by fair means,” he wrote to his farm manager in 1797, “they must be compelled.”2

  In 1774, when he was forty-two, Washington first joined a public statement hostile to slavery. As the prime sponsor and most visible signatory of the Fairfax Resolves, he endorsed its statement demanding “an entire stop” to the importation of enslaved people, “a wicked cruel, and unnatural trade.”

  Anti-slavery sentiment was awakening then. In the Somerset decision two years earlier, an English court limited the rights of slave owners in that country; the Virginia Gazette printed six articles about the ruling. Some New England clergy called for emancipation of enslaved people, as did Quakers and Methodists. In 1771 and 1774, the Massachusetts Assembly voted for abolition, but the royal governor vetoed both bills. Rhode Island and Connecticut provided that slaves entering the state would become free. Delaware banned slave imports, a step Virginia took in 1778. By the end of the Revolution, every state had made those imports illegal, though only Massachusetts and Pennsylvania prohibited slave ownership. Patrick Henry candidly admitted that although he owned slaves for his convenience, “I will not, I cannot, justify it.”3