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 dinner for thirty guests at a time. Reverting to the man of fashion, he asked Lafayette to send him French silver salvers that could hold up to twelve glasses; where possible, he still attempted to boycott British goods. He retained his old aristocratic habits, having his arms engraved on new silverware, and he didn’t see any contradiction between such behavior and the war he had just waged against British nobility.

In eighteenth-century Virginia, where roadside taverns were sparse and travelers could easily be stranded in transit, feeding and lodging travelers who showed up unannounced at one’s doorstep were considered necessary marks of hospitality. The polite Washington was victimized by this tradition as veterans and curiosity seekers descended on his home in massive numbers. Much of the mystique later attached to the White House first crystallized around Mount Vernon, which became a sort of proto-presidential mansion. Except for Ben Franklin in Paris, Washington was the first American celebrity, and he only partially succeeded at shielding himself from supplicants. Strangers arrived intent upon seeing Washington, who had to figure out ways to bar their prying eyes. He often greeted people at the door, only to hand them off to slaves, then disappeared into his study or rode off to his farms. “Even friends who make a point of visiting him are left much to themselves, indeed scarcely see him from breakfast to dinner, unless he engages them in a ride, which is very agreeable to him,” said a visitor named Elizabeth Ambler Carrington.27 Sometimes, like a dutiful innkeeper, Washington showed up in the room of a sick guest, proffering a hot cup of tea and showing his basic decency.

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 dinner, half the people might be guests. “There is not one single officer on the whole continent who will forsake the pleasure of spending a few days with his General,” said Philip Mazzei, Jefferson’s Florentine-born friend. “. . . The result is that his house is continuously filled with strangers who bring with them an even larger number of servants and horses. As there is no village in the vicinity and no inn within reach, the General has to take charge of everything.”29

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 dinner without papers, Washington confessed in his diary that “I was at a loss how to receive or treat him.” Then he added: “He stayed [for] dinner and the evening.”33 One stranger who arrived in Washington’s absence was astounded by his courteous treatment: “Immediately on our arrival, every care was taken of our horses, beds were prepared, and an excellent supper provided for us.”34

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 Fanny, shed his work clothes, then reappeared in more fashionable garb, “with his hair neatly powdered, a clean shirt on, a new plain drab coat, white waistcoat, and white silk stockings.”37 Hunter conjured up a Washington who seemed relaxed after the great labors of war, a man still healthy and vital who could be elegant in the drawing room and energetic in the field. He noted that Washington was talkative with intimates, but that, cherishing his privacy, he was far more guarded and laconic with people he distrusted.

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 inner sanctum to which he denied admittance to strangers. As Washington gave him a tour of his extensive fields and gardens, Hunter reported that his “greatest pride is now to be thought the first farmer in America.”40 Far from being an aloof boss, Washington often dismounted from his horse to work alongside slaves and indentured servants, especially to ensure that construction matched his specifications: “It’s astonishing with what niceness he directs everything in the building way, condescending even to measure the things himself, that all may be perfectly uniform.”41