How public-spirited a citizen Washington was is attested by his having laid the foundation of Alexandria’s free-school system, presented the town with its first fire-engine, organized its first militia company, and got up a lottery to raise a fund for improving the country roads thereabout. He was an earnest Freemason, and the lodge named for him owns a number of relics like the chair in which he presided as Master, his apron, his wedding gloves, his spurs, his pruning-knife, and a penknife which his mother gave him when he was eleven years old and which he carried till he died. It has also the last authentic portrait of him taken from life, a pastel done by William Williams of Philadelphia.
In and around Alexandria are other points of interest, including the house in which Colonel Ellsworth was killed, and one where, it is said, Martha Washington secreted herself for a while during her widowhood for fear of a slave uprising; a theological seminary which has graduated, among other eminent divines, Bishops Phillips Brooks of Boston and Henry C. Potter of New York; and the nearly obliterated remains of the road which, in 1765, General Braddock began to build into the West.
We can go to Mount Vernon by boat, or over a road which Congress has repeatedly, but without effect, been petitioned to acquire and improve. Already a trolley company has recognized a public demand and is running cars on a regular schedule from the heart of the capital city to the borders of Washington’s old estate. On the way down we pass Wellington, once the home of Tobias Lear, whom General Washington hired for two hundred dollars a year to act as tutor to the children at Mount Vernon, promoting him later to the post of private secretary. In both capacities, his employer provided, he “will sit at my table, will live as I live, will mix with the company who resort to the house, and will be treated in every respect with courtesy and proper attention.” Lear married three wives, one of them a kinswoman of the General’s. He acquired means, removed in later life to Washington, and became a merchant with a warehouse on the river. His tombstone in the Congressional Cemetery recites an overflowing list of his virtues and honors, and posterity owes him a large debt for having preserved many of the Washingtoniana most valued now by historians.
Mount Vernon became the property of the Washington family by a grant from Lord Culpepper in 1670 to John Washington, the great-grandfather of George. It was christened in honor of Admiral Vernon, a friend of Lawrence Washington, the half-brother who brought George up and superintended his education. George, who received it by inheritance, willed it to his nephew Bushrod, he to his nephew John, and John to a son of the same name. Financial embarrassments led the last heir to part with some of the land; but to an area of a few hundred acres, including the mansion, the family tomb, and the wharf on the Potomac, he held fast till arrangements could be made for its purchase by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, a society of patriotic women who, with money privately raised, have restored the place and kept it in order ever since. There is good reason to doubt whether this would ever have come about but for the heroic energy of Miss Ann Pamela Cunningham of South Carolina, who, though a confirmed invalid, devised and executed a plan which saved the estate from being sold to a professional showman.
Just as in Alexandria we found ourselves in touch with a George Washington who was a flesh-and-blood Virginian as distinguished from the colorless paragon of the standard histories, so at Mount Vernon we meet the same Washington in his character of husband, farmer, and host. Even here, however, we are not wholly beyond the penumbra of fiction; for only five miles away is the town of Pohick, once the parish seat of Parson Weems, the inventor of the cherry-tree myth on which my generation were industriously fed. Although, of course, no one still living in the region can remember Washington, there are not a few who are familiar with the details of his daily life, handed down in their families from ancestors who did remember him. These make him out a very human country gentleman, who loved to ride, to shoot, to fence, and to wrestle; who mixed business with pleasure in an occasional horse-race or real estate speculation; who disbelieved in slavery, and was recognized by his own two hundred bondmen as a kind master, yet was noted for getting more work out of a negro than any other slaveholder in Virginia, and for not hesitating to administer corporal punishment to one who deserved it.
We learn from these sources that he was “as straight as an Indian, and as free in his walk”; that he was what the ladies of that day, in spite of some marks left by the smallpox, styled “a pretty man”; that his weight of two hundred and ten pounds was all bone and muscle; and that he stood six feet and two inches tall in his shoes, which ranged in size from Number eleven to Number thirteen. His hands seem to have been his only physical deformity; they were so large as to attract attention and required gloves made expressly for them, three sizes larger than ordinary. His eyes are variously described as “blue,” as “of a bluish cast and very lively,” as “a cold, light gray,” and as “so gray that they looked almost white.” These alternatives may be reconciled, perhaps, by Gilbert Stuart’s recollection that his eyes were “a light grayish blue, deep sunken in their sockets, giving the expression of gravity of thought.” His hair was originally dark brown and fairly thick; his face was long, his nose prominent, his mouth large, and his chin firm. He suffered a good deal with toothache, particularly after his military service, and, as the rural remedy was the simplest known, he passed his last years almost toothless. This drove at least one portrait-painter into padding the front of his mouth with cotton wool, to make his lips look more natural than they did when drawn over the ill-fitting artificial teeth which he inserted for state occasions.
The great man lived well, his principal meal being a three o’clock dinner, which he washed down with five glasses of Madeira, taken with dessert. This allowance he gradually increased toward the close of his life till it reached two bottles. In sending away for sale a slave whom, though troublesome, he guaranteed as “exceedingly healthy, strong and good at the hoe,” he expressed his willingness to take in part payment “a hogshead of the best rum” and an indefinite quantity of “good old spirits.” In our gout-fearing era, these data have the ring of immoderate indulgence, but measured by the standards of the eighteenth century they were temperate enough. It must be said for the General, also, that he was charitable in his judgment of the weaknesses of others, as shown by his contract with an overseer, to whom he conceded the privilege of getting drunk for a week once a year; and his campaign expenses for election to the Virginia legislature embraced a hogshead and a barrel of punch, thirty-five gallons of wine, and forty-three gallons of strong cider.
It makes us feel a little nearer to the Father of our Country to learn that he was not immune to the influence of bright eyes and dainty toilets; that he was in love, or fancied he was, with several different damsels at as many different times; and that his self-surrender occasionally declared itself in amatory verse too dreadful for belief. His most serious infatuation seems to have been with a Miss Gary, whom he courted fervently, only to be dismissed by her father with the sordid reminder: “My daughter, sir, has been accustomed to ride in her own coach!” As this was a knock-down argument for a stripling surveyor who
Ford’s Theatre, the Old Front