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. Ennobled by adversity and leading by example, he had been dismayed and depressed but never defeated. The cheerless atmosphere at Valley Forge was much more the rule than the exception during the war. Few people with any choice in the matter would have persisted in this impossible, self-sacrificing situation for so long. Washington’s job as commander in chief was as much a political as a military task, and he performed it brilliantly, functioning as de facto president of the country. His stewardship of the army had been a masterly exercise in nation building. In defining the culture of the Continental Army, he had helped to mold the very character of the country, preventing the Revolution from taking a bloodthirsty or despotic turn. In the end, he had managed to foil the best professional generals that a chastened Great Britain could throw at him. As Benjamin Franklin told an English friend after the war, “An American planter was chosen by us to command our troops and continued during the whole war. This man sent home to you, one after another, five of your best generals, baffled, their heads bare of laurels, disgraced even in the opinion of their employers.”38

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 banners of captured flags that decorated the downstairs walls, evoked his extraordinary exploits. This isolation must have been sweetly congenial to Washington after the toilsome years of battle and the attendant lack of privacy. Ever the dutiful if exasperated son, he planned to visit his mother, but bad weather intervened, forcing him to defer the trip and enabling him to savor an unaccustomed solitude.

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 dinner and elegant ball in his honor, capped by a twenty-one-gun salute from local artillery. As best we can tell, Mary Washington skipped these festivities, but her son voiced the obligatory pieties to town dignitaries, touting Fredericksburg as “the place of my growing infancy” and expressing pleasure at “the honorable mention which is made of my revered mother, by whose maternal hand (early deprived of a father) I was led to manhood.”8

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 tyranny, paradoxically, only strengthened his view that the foremost political danger came not from an overly powerful central government but from an enfeebled one—“a half-starved, limping government that appears to be always moving upon crutches and tottering at every step.”10

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 cannot say but it makes me miserable if ever he complains, let the cause be ever so trifling . . . I hope the almighty will spare him to me.”11 She couldn’t conceive of a happy home devoid of children. “My little family are all with me,” she exulted to a friend, declaring that, without them, “I almost despair of ever enjoying happiness.”12