This second set of children seemed far happier than the epileptic Patsy and the feckless Jacky, and family life at Mount Vernon was less troubled than before. When Robert Edge Pine painted the children, he captured their contrasting natures. A sprightly girl, clever and sociable, Nelly stares out boldly, even impudently, at the viewer. Washy has a soft mop of well-brushed hair that falls over his forehead, and he seems gentle, almost feminine, his thoughts trailing far away. When Washington hired tutors for them, he sounded far more tolerant and relaxed than he had been with Jacky and Patsy, saying their education would “be mere amusement, because it is not my wish that the children should be confined.”13 Though much loved, Washington was sometimes a grandly remote figure to these two stepchildren. “He was a silent thoughtful man,” Nelly said years later. “He spoke little generally, never of himself. I never heard him relate a single act of his life during the war.”14

The Washingtons agreed to provide guidance or financial support for an amazing assortment of nieces and nephews. As noted earlier, after her sister, Anna Maria Dandridge Bassett, died early in the war, Martha pledged to raise her charming daughter Frances, or “Fanny,” who was now a teenager and had moved permanently to Mount Vernon. In a Robert Edge Pine portrait, Fanny has pretty features, big deep-set eyes, a rosebud mouth, and long wavy hair that falls across her shoulder and slightly exposed bosom. Martha adored Fanny and let her function as an assistant plantation hostess. “She is a child to me,” she later wrote, “and I am very lonesome when she is absent.”15 Washington also delighted in Fanny’s “easy and quiet temper.”16 In fact, the girl with her cheerful, winning personality was universally popular. “There was something so pleasing in her appearance and manner that even a stranger could not see her without being interested in her welfare” was one visitor’s impression.17

The bulging household incorporated other young relatives. George Augustine Washington, the son of Washington’s hard-drinking brother Charles, had been an aide to Lafayette during the war and was already plagued by a lingering bout of tuberculosis that would only worsen with the years. Washington was also saddled temporarily with three children from his late brother Samuel, who had been married five times and died heavily in debt. “In God’s name,” Washington had wondered to brother Jack earlier in the year, “how did my broth[e]r Sam[ue]l contrive to get himself so enormously in debt?”18 Samuel’s three children by his fourth marriage—Harriot, Lawrence Augustine, and George Steptoe Washington—ranged in age from eight to eleven and had been left indigent. All three presented special challenges. Harriot, an awkward, slovenly young girl, found herself trapped in a household of manic perfectionists. Starting in 1784 and for the next eight years, Washington footed the bill to educate her two brothers at a Georgetown academy, but they were wild and uncontrollable and a constant trial to Washington, who was extremely generous with young relatives but quite exacting if they failed to measure up to his high standards.

By war’s end, Martha Washington was round and matronly in face and form, a fact recorded by one visitor: “Mrs. Washington is an elegant figure for a person of her years . . . She is rather fleshy, of good complexion, has a large, portly double chin, and an open and engaging countenance.”19 Although her hair was now gray, she still had smooth, unlined skin, and her eyes were warm and bright. She was fond of wearing sheer fabrics in light pastel colors that comfortably fit her full figure. By her own description, Martha was never either sick or well but hovered somewhere in between. Perhaps because she was short, she believed in a proud, erect posture and bought stiff collars for Nelly to encourage her upright carriage. The travel-weary Martha was slow to admit that her marital life had now changed forever: her husband could surrender his commission but not his fame. Later on, in a wistful mood, she would recollect to Mercy Warren that when her husband returned from the war that Christmas, she had little thought “that any circumstance could possibly happen to call the general into public life again” and that she “anticipated that from that moment they should have grown old together in solitude and tranquillity. This, my dear madam, was the first and fondest wish of my heart.”20 Whatever ambitions she might have harbored for her husband’s career had long since been gratified, and she never dreamed that the curtain would soon rise again on a vast and thrilling new pageant in their lives.

Whatever the strains of returning to private life, the period between the war and his presidency was a halcyon time for Washington, who laid aside the gigantic labors of nation building. Those who had seen him amid the tumult of war were struck by his happy metamorphosis back into a private citizen. Although he fondly invoked the “rural amusements” of his country cottage, such pastoral imagery didn’t quite square with the desperate economic plight he faced upon his homecoming.21 As he devoted every morning to business matters, the scenes of bucolic harmony he had envisioned while in uniform faded from the hard collision with reality. For nine years Mount Vernon had suffered terrible neglect, thinning his fortune. “I made no money from my estate during the nine years I was absent from it and brought none home with me,” he told his nephew Fielding Lewis, Jr.22 Great Britain exacted a high price from American farmers after the war by shutting West Indian markets that had once been open to the colonists. To further his economic woes, Washington’s debtors paid him in depreciated wartime currency, making it difficult for him to satisfy his own creditors. While France yearned to welcome the American hero, Washington told Lafayette that his straitened circumstances precluded an Atlantic crossing and might “put it forever out of my power to gratify this wish.”23

If Washington thought he could repair his affairs quickly, he was soon disabused, and more than a year after returning to Mount Vernon, he told Henry Knox despondently that his business affairs “can no longer be neglected without involving my ruin.”24 He had frequently reassured his estate steward, Lund Washington, of his confidence in leaving his wartime business in his hands. Nevertheless, as the war drew to a close, he berated Lund for failing to provide adequate financial statements and accused him of keeping him ignorant since Valley Forge. From brother Jack, Washington learned that his frontier tenants had fallen years behind in their rent, and he pleaded with Lund to travel west and collect the overdue money, accusing him of “an unconquerable aversion to going from home.”25 Unknown to Washington as he issued these intemperate charges, Lund had forgone his steward’s salary since the Valley Forge period. When he discovered it, Washington was mortified but had no immediate way of making up the shortfall.

In 1785, beset by growing financial troubles, Washington began to edge Lund aside and took over daily supervision of the five farms—Muddy Hole, Dogue Run, River, Union, and Mansion House—that constituted Mount Vernon, which had burgeoned to seven thousand acres. Now in his early fifties, Washington no longer had time to stay on top of his far-flung operations. When Lund stepped down as manager after twenty-one years, he was replaced by Washington’s nephew-in-residence, the sickly George Augustine Washington. Although Washington lacked the time to make the daily rounds, he didn’t wish to relinquish all control of plantation life and instituted a detailed system of weekly reports from each farm. As he told the departing Lund, “I am resolved that an account of the stock and every occurrence that happens in the course of the week shall be minutely detailed to me every Saturday.”26 There never seemed to be enough detail to satisfy his insatiable appetite for information.