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Even as his finances suffered from his long enforced absence, Washington needed to keep up a show of prosperity and entertain the stream of visitors, friends and strangers alike, who descended upon the shrine of Mount Vernon. He was never able to enjoy fully the respite from national duty that he had so richly earned. He didn’t cultivate adulation so much as endure it and played the fifty-two-year-old smiling public man. Toward the war’s end he had begun bracing for the rigors of receiving visitors on a lavish scale. After the British evacuation of New York, he tried to hire a cook who could whip up a proper di
In eighteenth-century Virginia, where roadside taverns were sparse and travelers could easily be stranded in transit, feeding and lodging travelers who showed up una
He never resolved the problem of the tremendous expenses he incurred in taking care of visitors. Not only did guests devour his food, but their horses freely ate his forage. “My situation is very little understood by most people,” he explained in later life. “Whatever may be my property, the income of it is inadequate to my expenses. Not from any wish or desire I have to live extravagantly, but from unavoidable necessity proceeding from the public walks of life in which I have been and the acquaintances made thereby, which fill my house continually with company.”28 At a typical di
As legions of hopeful tourists made a pilgrimage to this mecca, George and Martha Washington struggled to retain some modicum of privacy. Sometimes they behaved like inmates held hostage by an overflowing wave of visitors, condemned to make small talk with complete strangers. One of the sadder lines in Washington’s copious papers occurs in his diary entry for June 30, 1785, where he notes that he “dined with only Mrs. Washington, which I believe is the first instance of it since my retirement from public life.”30 One can almost hear the sigh of relief. Washington admitted to Franklin that “retirement from the public walks of life has not been so productive of the leisure and ease as might have been expected.”31 Benjamin Franklin scarcely needed a lesson. “Celebrity may for a while flatter one’s vanity,” he wrote, “but its effects are troublesome.”32
The nation wouldn’t let Washington enjoy the ease of a private citizen, and he had to learn to manage his celebrity. One unspoken trick he used to deter unwanted visitors was to post inadequate signs indicating the way to his house, erecting a natural barrier against intruders. The nine-mile ride between Alexandria and Mount Vernon confounded travelers, forcing them to traverse bogs, thick woods, and winding trails; the visitor files at Mount Vernon abound with comic tales of travelers getting hopelessly lost in this trackless maze. Although Washington weeded out guests by asking for letters of introduction, he was too civil to turn people away even if they lacked referrals. When a French officer showed up for di
The visitors’ accounts during these years give many candid glimpses of Washington. Their impressions vary dramatically, suggesting that he reacted quite differently to people—so much so that, at times, he scarcely seemed the same person. He could be merry and convivial or, if he didn’t care for the guests, silent and morose. This mutable personality, reflecting his shifting levels of trust in his listeners, has made it hard for historians to form a coherent sense of his personality. Seldom quotable in person, Washington could never be surprised into confessional statements. But if few visitors came away with treasured table talk, he made his presence powerfully felt.
A young Scottish visitor, Robert Hunter, left this portrait of Washington’s venerable appearance: “The General is about six foot high, perfectly straight and well made, rather inclined to be lusty. His eyes are full and blue and seem to express an air of gravity.”35 He picked up Washington’s fastidious regard for appearance. When they first met, the general “was neatly dressed in a plain blue coat, white cashmere waistcoat, and black breeches and boots, as he came from his farm.”36 Washington left him briefly with Martha and Fa
Hunter recorded the clockwork regularity of Washington’s days as the latter followed a farmer’s routine of going to bed at nine, then rising with the sun. Mornings he devoted to the masses of mail that swamped him. “It’s astonishing the packets of letters that daily come for him from all parts of the world,”noted Hunter.38 With evident pride, Washington showed him the vast archive of wartime letters he had transcribed for posterity: “There are thirty large folio volumes of them upstairs, as big as common ledgers, all neatly copied.”39 Hunter discovered that his study, with a thousand books shelved behind glass, was the i