Another labor of love was adding the finishing touches to the renovation of the main house. At the north end Washington completed the New Room, the stately dining room featuring a long table that seated ten people. From Philadelphia he carted home twenty-four mahogany dining chairs, enabling him to expand the number of people he entertained. Unfortunately, delays in completing the room had so weakened the underlying girders that “a company only moderately large would have sunk altogether into the cellar,” Washington complained before undertaking expensive corrective work.18 Outside the house, the kitchen garden, greenhouse, and serpentine walks along the lawn created a beautiful geometric area where elegant, well-dressed people could stroll through fragrant, refreshing spaces. After negotiating the bad roads and thick woods nearby, visitors found the mansion house a sudden oasis of order. “Good fences, clear grounds, and extensive cultivation strike the eye as something uncommon in this part of the world,”noted architect Benjamin Latrobe.19

Spared the onus of public office, Washington permitted his mind to roam into the pathways of the past. In the spring of 1798, when he learned that Belvoir, the old Fairfax estate, was up for sale, he was flooded with memories about his youthful dalliance with Sally Fairfax. On some subterranean level, the entrancing memory of Sally, now a widow of nearly seventy, had stayed evergreen in his mind. In May 1798 he learned that Bryan Fairfax, Sally’s brother-in-law, was traveling to England, and he handed him an elegiac letter to Sally, which mixed frank references to their amorous past with staple Washingtonian rhetoric about America’s glorious future. Very often, he admitted to Sally, he cast a nostalgic glance toward Belvoir and wondered whether she would spend her final days near her Virginia relatives “rather than close the sublunary scene in a foreign country.”20 He acknowledged the many extraordinary events he had lived through, then abruptly declared that none of these events, “not all of them together, have been able to eradicate from my mind the recollection of those happy moments—the happiest of my life—which I have enjoyed in your company.”21 This unexpected line offered the ultimate romantic compliment: Washington had won a long war, founded a country, and created a new government, but such accomplishments paled beside the faded recollections of a youthful love affair. In its autumnal tone, the letter represented a farewell address of sorts. Having written it, he wanted to ensure that Sally did not misinterpret it as an invitation to revive their relationship. So the next day, using the same self-protective device he had employed with Elizabeth Powel, he drafted a letter to Sally under Martha’s signature in which the latter said it was among her great regrets that she no longer had Sally as her “neighbor and companion.”22

Washington’s life was more weighted with care than he admitted to Sally. For all the beauty and scenic vistas of his estate, the financial pressure remained unrelenting. His elaborate plan for renting four of the Mount Vernon farms had faltered because he wanted to rent them all at once, which was impossible. In the spring of 1797 he compromised and offered them for rent individually. In hiring his new estate manager, James Anderson, Washington had hoped that this “honest, industrious, and judicious Scotchman” would alleviate his chronic financial woes, but Anderson struggled in vain to make Mount Vernon more productive.23 He turned out to be too impulsive and improvident for Washington’s fastidious taste, though he did introduce signal innovations. The enterprising Anderson devised the concept of taking grain grown at Mount Vernon and converting it into corn and rye whiskey at a commercial distillery on the estate. For Washington, always rabid on the subject of alcoholism, it was an ironic turn of events, to put it mildly. Although the distillery started modestly, by 1799 it had five gleaming copper stills and produced eleven thousand gallons yearly, so that it may have ranked as the largest whiskey producer in America. Nevertheless, when Anderson talked of quitting in 1798, Washington chided him for having coaxed him into assuming “a very serious expense in erecting a distillery of which I had no knowledge . . . But do as you please in this matter. I never did, nor ever shall, wish to retain any person in my employ contrary to their inclination.”24

Washington again found himself sliding into a slow-motion financial crisis. Just as he had been forced to borrow to attend his own inauguration in 1789, he had had to sell “two valuable tracts of land” in western Pennsylvania and land in Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp to make the journey home in 1797 and “lay in a few necessaries for my family.”25 In his presidency’s waning days, he had been reduced to the indignity of personally dunning tenants in arrears on rent, threatening one with a lawsuit. Degraded to a bill collector, he had warned, “I w[oul]d fain avoid this appeal, but if I am obliged to resort to it, remember that it is brought upon you by your own default.”26 Upon returning to Mount Vernon, he scratched out testy notes to people, trying to settle their land disputes. When nephew Samuel Washington approached him for an emergency $1,000 loan, Washington grudgingly agreed, while lecturing him on the perils of borrowing and warning that “you are under the same mistake that many others are in supposing that I have money always at command.”27 To improve his financial situation, Washington started an economy campaign and froze the wages of overseers. He also began a gradual shift from agriculture to grazing, which curbed expenses and averted the need for more slave labor.

AFTER LEAVING OFFICE, Washington made a futile attempt to distance himself from politics. Because the post office lay nine miles away, he collected his mail only thrice weekly, so the bags when they arrived bulged with political letters, gazettes, and pamphlets. Inevitably, the irascible President Adams suffered from comparison with the tactful Washington. “There never was perhaps a greater contrast between two characters than between those of the present president and his predecessor,” James Madison observed. “The one cool, considerate, and cautious, the other headlong and kindled into flame by every spark that lights on his passions.”28 For all his vast legislative experience, the temperamental Adams was a complete tyro as an executive. Much as Jefferson predicted, Adams immediately had to contend with multiple crises as France seized nearly three hundred neutral American vessels and the popular mood turned bellicose. It did not help matters that Vice President Jefferson, far from aiding the president, functioned as a staunch opponent.

With the country irrevocably divided into two hostile camps, Washington expected to have no further dealings with Jefferson, whose followers had so vilified him. Then an incident occurred that ensured that there would be no rapprochement between the two Virginians. Jefferson had befriended a Florentine named Philip Mazzei, who sold wine in London before moving to Virginia, where he hoped to introduce vineyards. After Mazzei returned to Europe, he exchanged letters with Jefferson, who tended to express himself much more colorfully on paper than in person. In April 1796 Jefferson sent Mazzei a scathing letter about the Washington administration: “The aspect of our politics has wonderfully changed since you left us. In place of that noble love of liberty and republican government which carried us triumphantly thro[ugh] the war,” a monarchical party had “sprung up whose avowed object is to draw over us the substance, as they have already done the forms, of the British government . . . It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to these heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their head shaved by the harlot England.”29 Though Washington was not mentioned by name, he surely qualified as the Samson, if not the Solomon, in question.