[118] Custis.
[119] Lewis.
[120] It was in the form of a “Letter to George Washington, President of the United States.” Dwight was a violent republican, and an uncompromising advocate for the immediate and total abolition of slavery in the United States. Because Washington was a slaveholder, he considered him extremely vulnerable on that point, and in his “Letter" he twice alludes to the fact.
“Had the French Revolution,” he said, “commenced ten years later, or you retired to the shades of Mount Vernon four years ago, the friends of public virtue would still proudly boast of one great man free from the breath of public dispraise, and your fondly partial country, forbearing to inquire whether or not you were chargeable with mental aberrations, would vaunt in you this possession of the phœnix.” After making strictures on the events of the past four years, he said: “Would to God! you had retired to a private station four years ago, while your public conduct threw a veil of sanctity round you, which you have yourself rashly broken down. Your fame would have been safe, your country without reproach, and I should not have the mortifying task of pointing out the blind temerity with which you come forward to defend the religion of Christ, who exist in the violation of its most sacred obligations, of the dearest ties of humanity, and in defiance of the sovereign calls of morality and liberty—by dealing in HUMAN SLAVES.” Again, after asserting that “posterity will in vain search for the monuments of wisdom" in his administration, he says they will, on inquiry, find that had he obtained promotion, as he expected, for the services rendered after Braddock's defeat, his sword would have been drawn against his country; and that they would discover “that the great champion of American freedom, the rival of Timoleon and Cincinnatus, twenty years after the establishment of the republic, was possessed of FIVE HUNDRED of the HUMAN SPECIES IN SLAVERY, enjoying the fruits of their labor without remuneration, or even the consolations of religious instruction—that he retained the barbarous usages of the feudal system, and kept men in livery—and that he still affected to be the friend of the Christian religion, of civil liberty, and moral equality—and to be, withal, a disinterested, virtuous, liberal, and unassuming man.”
CHAPTER XXXVII.
washington leaves philadelphia for mount vernon—receives honors by the way—his arrival home—his enjoyment of private life—letters to his friends—his own picture of his daily life—entertainment of strangers burdensome—invites his nephew to mount vernon—nelly custis and her suitors—washington's letter to her—lawrence lewis preferred—washington's dream of permanent repose disturbed by a gathering storm—early associations recalled—again summoned into public life.
Washington left Philadelphia for Mount Vernon on the ninth of March, a private citizen and a happy man. He was accompanied by Mrs. Washington and her grand-daughter, Eleanor Parke Custis; and by George Washington Lafayette and his preceptor, M. Frestel, whose arrival and residence in the United States we have already noticed. George Washington Parke Custis, the brother of Eleanor, or “Nelly,” as she was familiarly called, was then in college at Princeton, where he had been for several months. The letters which have been preserved by the Custis family, of the correspondence between Washington and that adopted son, during the college life of the latter, are very interesting, and exhibit the Father of his Country in a light in which he is not viewed by history in her delineation of him, namely, as the father of a talented but wayward boy.