With the retirement to Mount Vernon at the close of the war, little more companionship was obtained, for, as already stated, Washington could only describe his home henceforth as a “well resorted tavern,” and two years after his return he entered in his diary, “Dined with only Mrs. Washington which I believe is the first instance of it since my retirement from public life.”
Even this was only a furlough, for in six years they were both in public life again. Mrs. Washington was inclined to sulk over the necessary restraints of official life, writing to a friend, “Mrs. Sins will give you a better account of the fashions than I can—I live a very dull life hear and know nothing that passes in the town—I never goe to any public place—indeed I think I am more like a State prisoner than anything else; there is certain bounds set for me which I must not depart from—and as I cannot doe as I like, I am obstinate and stay at home a great deal.”
MRS. DANIEL PARKE CUSTIS, LATER MRS. WASHINGTON
None the less she did her duties well, and in these “Lady Washington” was more at home, for, according to Thacher, she combined “in an uncommon degree, great dignity of manner with most pleasing affability,” though possessing “no striking marks of beauty,” and there is no doubt that she lightened Washington’s shoulders of social demands materially. At the receptions of Mrs. Washington, which were held every Friday evening, so a contemporary states, “the President did not consider himself as visited. On these occasions he appeared as a private gentleman, with neither hat nor sword, conversing without restraint.”
From other formal society Mrs. Washington also saved her husband, for a visitor on New Year’s tells of her setting “‘the General’ (by which title she always designated her husband)” at liberty: “Mrs. Washington had stood by his side as the visitors arrived and were presented, and when the clock in the hall was heard striking nine, she advanced and with a complacent smile said, ‘The General always retires at nine, and I usually precede him,’ upon which all arose, made their parting salutations, and withdrew.” Nor was it only from the fatigues of formal entertaining that the wife saved her husband, Washington writing in 1793, “We remain in Philadelphia until the 10th instant. It was my wish to have continued there longer; but as Mrs. Washington was unwilling to leave me surrounded by the malignant fever which prevailed, I could not think of hazarding her, and the Children any longer by my continuance in the City, the house in which we live being in a manner blockaded by the disorder, and was becoming every day more and more fatal; I therefore came off with them.”
Finally from these “scenes more busy, tho’ not more happy, than the tranquil enjoyment of rural life,” they returned to Mount Vernon, hoping that in the latter their “days will close.” Not quite three years of this life brought an end to their forty years of married life. On the night that Washington’s illness first became serious his secretary narrates that “Between 2 and 3 o’clk on Saturday morning he [Washington] awoke Mrs. Washington & told her he was very unwell, and had had an ague. She … would have got up to call a servant; but he would not permit her lest she should take cold.” As a consequence of this care for her, her husband lay for nearly four hours in a chill in a cold bedroom before receiving any attention, or before even a fire was lighted. When death came, she said, “Tis well—All is now over—I have no more trials to pass through—I shall soon follow him.” In his will he left “to my dearly beloved wife” the use of his whole property, and named her an executrix.
As a man’s views of matrimony are more or less colored by his personal experience, what Washington had to say on the institution is of interest. As concerned himself he wrote to his nephew, “If Mrs. Washington should survive me, there is a moral certainty of my dying without issue: and should I be the longest liver, the matter in my opinion, is hardly less certain; for while I retain the faculty of reasoning, I shall never marry a girl; and it is not probable that I should have children by a woman of an age suitable to my own, should I be disposed to enter into a second marriage.” And in a less personal sense he wrote to Chastellux,—
“In reading your very friendly and acceptable letter,… I was, as you may well suppose, not less delighted than surprised to meet the plain American words, ‘my wife.’ A wife! Well, my dear Marquis, I can hardly refrain from smiling to find you are caught at last. I saw, by the eulogium you often made on the happiness of domestic life in America, that you had swallowed the bait, and that you would as surely be taken, one day or another, as that you were a philosopher and a soldier. So your day has at length come. I am glad of it, with all my heart and soul. It is quite good enough for you. Now you are well served for coming to fight in favor of the American rebels, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, by catching that terrible contagion—domestic felicity—which same, like the small pox or the plague, a man can have only once in his life; because it commonly lasts him (at least with us in America—I don’t know how you manage these matters in France) for his whole life time. And yet after all the maledictions you so richly merit on the subject, the worst wish which I can find in my heart to make against Madame de Chastellux and yourself is, that you may neither of you ever get the better of this same domestic felicity during the entire course of your mortal existence.”