Washington: A Life

Seldom in history has a general been handicapped by such constantly crippling conditions. There was scarcely a time during the war when Washington didn’t grapple with a crisis that threatened to disband the army and abort the Revolution. The extraordinary, wearisome, nerve-racking frustration he put up with for nearly nine years is hard to express. He repeatedly had to exhort Congress and the thirteen states to remedy desperate shortages of men, shoes, shirts, blankets, and gunpowder. This meant dealing with selfish, apathetic states and bureaucratic incompetence in Congress. He labored under a terrible strain that would have destroyed a lesser man. E

PART FOUR

The Statesman

Bust of George Washington by Jean-Antoine Houdon, sculpted in 1785.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

American Celebrity

WITH PERFECT TIMING, George Washington made it home to the loving embrace of his family on Christmas Eve. His return to Mount Vernon made him acutely aware of the enormous distance he had traveled since he left for the Second Continental Congress in May 1775. In writing to Lafayette, he noted time’s steady passage, observing that he had “entered these doors an older man by nine years than when I left them.”1 He indeed cut a very different figure from the tentative, uncertain arriviste of the prewar years. Secure in himself and his place in history, he little resembled that edgily combative young man who never missed a chance for self-advancement. That bumptious, sharp-elbowed character would emerge again sporadically in business dealings but would now coexist uneasily with a far more mature self.

A heavy snowfall soon cast a hush over Mount Vernon—it was a winter of historic coldness—so that Washington discovered himself “fast locked up in frost and snow” and sequestered at home by icy gusts and impassable roads.2 Only his wartime trophies, including the ba

As he gazed back over the hazardous odyssey he had survived, he wondered at his own unaccountable preservation, telling Henry Knox, “I feel now, however, as I conceive a wearied traveler must do who, after treading many a painful step, with a heavy burden on his shoulders, is eased of the latter, having reached the goal . . . and from his housetop is looking back and tracing with a grateful eye the meanders by which he escaped the quicksands and mires which lay in his way and into which none but the all-powerful guide and great disposer of human events could have prevented his falling.”3 This hardheaded, practical man increasingly struck a reflective tone, experience having forced him to ponder the world more deeply.

Long burdened by wartime correspondence, Washington took a vacation from letter writing for several blissful days. It took a while to break his military habit of waking early and revolving in his overcrowded mind the day’s manifold duties. He kept realizing, with a start, that he “was no longer a public man or had anything to do with public transactions.”4 On December 28 he composed his first letter from home, proclaiming to New York governor George Clinton, “I am now a private citizen on the banks of the Potomac . . . I feel myself eased of a load of public care. I hope to spend the remainder of my days in cultivating the affections of good men and in the practice of the domestic virtues.”5 These early postwar letters emit an elegiac whiff, as if Washington thought his best days now lay behind him, and he dwelt inordinately on his own mortality. Sounding more like a sage than an aging warrior, he portrayed himself, in Old Testament language, as sitting “under the shadow of my own vine and my own fig tree, free from the bustle of a camp,” as he told Lafayette. “Envious of none, I am determined to be pleased with all, and this, my dear friend, being the order for my march, I will move gently down the stream of life until I sleep with my fathers.”6

For more than a month Washington postponed the trip to his mother due to inclement weather. When he at last set out for Fredericksburg in February 1784, he allotted a full week to his sojourn, which soon became enlarged into a state visit. The Virginia Gazette hailed his arrival in town “on a visit to his ancient and amiable parent.”7 Washington could not avoid a public di

Try though he might, Washington couldn’t completely extricate his thoughts from politics and feared that the still immature country would blunder into errors before arriving at true wisdom. As he affirmed, “all things will come right at last. But, like a young heir come a little prematurely to a large inheritance, we shall wanton and run riot until we have brought our reputation to the brink of ruin.” Only when a crisis materialized would the country be “compelled perhaps to do what prudence and common policy pointed out as plain as any problem in Euclid in the first instance.”9 This statement tallied with Washington’s often expressed view that citizens had to feel before they saw—that is, they couldn’t react to abstract problems, only to tangible ones. The long fight against British tyra

The snowbound house was enlivened by young people. The Washingtons ran something akin to a small orphanage, and the general must have fled sometimes from the rambunctious shouts of skylarking children to the silence of his study. As we recall, after Jacky’s death, George and Martha had taken in his two youngest children, Nelly, now four, and Washy, now two. Although the situation was never formalized, Washington referred to them as his “adopted” children. Martha seemed to transfer her affections intact from Patsy and Jacky to Nelly and Washy, including her propensity to spoil the boy and anguish over his health. “My pretty little dear boy complains of a pain in his stomach,” Martha wrote in one letter. “. . . I ca