While Washington opened up in Hunter’s company, he clammed up with others. If he didn’t like someone, he would be correct but never warm. As one European visitor observed, “There seemed to me to skulk somewhat of a repulsive coldness, not congenial with my mind, under a courteous demeanor.”42 One Dutchman also came away disgusted: “I could never be on familiar terms with the General—a man so cold, so cautious, so obsequious.”43 It did not occur to these tourists that Washington felt burdened by uninvited visitors gaping at him, particularly since he wasn’t a backslapping soul who feigned friendship with total strangers. His modesty disappointed those who expected him to narrate the wartime drama especially for them. “He announces a profound discretion and a great diffidence in himself,” said the French journalist Brissot de Warville. “. . . His modesty is astonishing to a Frenchman; he speaks of the American war and of his victories as of things in which he had no direction.”44 Of course, the many volumes of letters upstairs underscored Washington’s sense of his own overwhelming importance in the war, but he preferred to let his deeds speak for themselves.

Sharp-eyed visitors noted how Martha Washington, in her cheerful, self-effacing way, facilitated social interactions, making her husband’s life easier. “As to his lady, she appears to me to be a plain, good woman, very much resembling the character of Lady Bountiful,” wrote Captain John Enys. She “is very cheerful and seems most happy when contributing towards the happiness of others.”45 Neither plain nor showy, she occupied a congenial middle ground. As a Rhode Island merchant noted, “Mrs. Washington is an elegant figure for a person of her years . . . She was dressed in a plain black satin gown with long sleeves” and a gauzy black cap with black bows. “All very neat, but not gaudy.”46 One snobbish female visitor professed shock at the doyenne’s unpretentious appearance. She and a friend had “dressed ourselves in our most elegant ruffles and silks and were introduced to her ladyship. And don’t you think, we found her knitting and with a specked [checked] apron on!”47

Among the major tourist attractions at Mount Vernon was Washington’s stable of Thoroughbred horses, especially those he rode during the war, who had earned a rest. Early in the war his steed of choice had been Blueskin, so named for its bluish-gray skin. In 1785 Washington gave the horse to a lady friend, Elizabeth French Dulany, adding an affectionate note of apology: “Marks of antiquity have supplied the place of those beauties with which this horse abounded—in his better days.”48 Even more renowned was his chestnut Nelson, who had served at Yorktown and withstood gunfire better than any other horse. After the war, Old Nelson was exempt from all work and able to graze to his heart’s content. “They have heard the roaring of many a cannon in their time,” one appreciative visitor said of these two horses. “. . . The General makes no manner of use of them now; he keeps them in a nice stable, where they feed away at their ease for their past services.”49

For the most part, Washington stuck close to home after his years of military exile and resigned from the vestry of Truro Parish, a position he’d held for twenty-two years. Some scholars have attributed this to political motives. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Anglican vestrymen still had to vow obedience to the “doctrine and discipline of the Church of England,” which had George III at its head.50 Obviously George Washington couldn’t submit to such a public pledge without provoking a brouhaha. During the next few years, as the Anglican Church distanced itself from its British roots and evolved into the Protestant Episcopal Church, Washington’s church attendance still remained intermittent. One explanation has been that a minister once chided Washington for failing to take communion, preaching that great men needed to set an example for the community. Perhaps taking umbrage, Washington continued to attend the church but avoided Sundays when communion was offered. One also wonders whether Washington didn’t feel an unseemly sense of being on public display at church, his presence attracting large crowds and adding to the already weighty burden of his celebrity.

After the war Washington was a far more voracious reader than generally recognized. Though hardly a Renaissance man on a par with Jefferson and Franklin, he pursued a broad range of interests throughout his life. Long an attentive reader of agricultural treatises and other books of practical knowledge, he also read the important literature of his time, and his library included volumes of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Milton, and Oliver Goldsmith, as well as Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary. In the spring of 1783, from his Newburgh headquarters, he had ordered books advertised for sale in a gazette, and one is impressed by the substantial works on the purchase list. For his eclectic postwar reading he had lined up Voltaire’s Letters to Several of His Friends, John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Showing a decided biographical bent, he ordered lives of Charles XII of Sweden, Louis XV of France, and Peter the Great of Russia. Apparently still hoping to make a trip to France, he ordered a French dictionary and grammar, although he showed little aptitude for foreign languages and made no discernible headway.

Though not notable for scintillating repartee, Washington enjoyed the society of writers and never felt intellectually threatened by their company. In May 1785 the lexicographer Noah Webster spent a day at Mount Vernon, angling to get Washington to support a copyright law in Virginia. In all likelihood, he furnished Washington with a copy of his Sketches of American Policy, which made the case for a strong central government. A surprising wheeler-dealer, Webster attempted to cut a deal with Washington: he would tutor Nelly and Washy gratis in exchange for unrestricted access to Washington’s papers. Scenting a bad bargain, Washington spurned the offer.

For ten days in June he entertained a well-known British historian, Catharine Macaulay Graham, and her younger husband. Taken with his visitor, he told Henry Knox that a “visit from a lady so celebrated in the literary world could not but be very flattering to me.”51 A woman with a very long, pale face, sharply accentuated by a very long, pale nose, she was an expert in English and Roman history. A radical Whig and a distinguished friend to American liberty, she entered into serious political talks with Washington. “It gave me pleasure to find that her sentim[en] ts respecting the inadequacy of the powers of Congress . . . coincided with my own,” Washington told Richard Henry Lee.52 Perhaps Washington was also subtly screening a potential biographer for himself, for he confessed to his diary: “Placed my military records into the hands of Mrs. Macaulay Graham for her perusal and amusem[en]t.”53 Dr. Samuel Johnson memorably satirized the female historian as a high-minded hypocrite, once asking her to show her faith in her egalitarian beliefs by inviting her footman to dine at her table. She never forgave Johnson for the taunt.

Washington’s desire to socialize with literary personalities likely arose from his belief that writers crowned those who won fame and ended up in history’s pantheon. In 1788, when he steered Lafayette to the American poet Joel Barlow, then resident in France, Washington described Barlow as “one of those bards who hold the keys of the gate by which patriots, sages, and heroes are admitted to immortality. Such are your ancient bards who are both the priest and doorkeepers to the temple of fame. And these, my dear Marquis, are no vulgar functions.”54 Washington went on to say that military heroes, far from being passive, could groom their own advocates: “In some instances . . . heroes have made poets, and poets heroes. Alexander the Great is said to have been enraptured with the poems of Homer and to have lamented that he had not a rival muse to celebrate his actions.”55 The passage shows Washington’s underlying hunger for posthumous glory and how calculating he could be in gaining it. He ended the letter by lauding the golden ages of arms and arts under Louis XIV and Queen Anne and by expressing the hope that America would not be found “inferior to the rest of the world in the performance of our poets and painters.”56