The First President once wrote a letter to a Charleston gentleman named Thomas Pinckney, who was then American ambassador at the British court. His words were for Thomas Pinckney, not for posterity, so posterity finds it refreshing to see a president writing a specific letter to his envoy under the pitiless light of publicity. Its chief interest here is not his report of the Senate’s action on a proposed treaty with Great Britain, nor his anxiety over Lafayette’s imprisonment in Olmutz, though both are subjects upon which he dwells at some length. The note for us is the fact that after long diplomatic instruction to his ambassador, Washington says:
“Before I close this letter permit me to request the favour of you to embrace some favorable opportunity to thank Lord Grenville in my behalf, for his politeness in causing a special permit to be sent to Liverpool for the shipment of two sacks of the field peas, and the like quantity of winter vetches, which I had requested our Consul at that place to send me for seed, but which it seems cannot be done without a special order from Government. A circumstance which did not occur to me, or I certainly should not have given it the trouble of issuing one for such a trifle.
“With very great esteem and regard
“I am, dear Sir,
“Your obedt. Servant,
“G. Washington.”
A treaty with Great Britain, Lafayette to be got out of prison, two sacks of field peas and some winter vetch—and there is George Washington. Our national heroes march down the ages without time to change costumes. While they live we call them everything under the sun; they die, and we endow them with a certain type-quality which they must wear forever to the exclusion of other and equally interesting qualities which they possessed in equal quantity. Unless some circumstance rescue those qualities from oblivion, a large part of the inspiration of their lives has been unnecessarily sacrificed. We have seen the first manifestation of such a process with the death of Colonel Roosevelt, and we wonder how frequently our children’s children will think of Roosevelt on the tennis-court, at Sagamore, in Montana, in Rock Creek Park, or facing death in Brazil. The nation loses a man, to mourn a saint. So in a lesser degree with our lesser heroes: Hale becomes the lay-figure of Loyalty, Franklin, of Common Sense, Grant, of Military Patience. Here, on a hill in Fairfax County, Virginia, in and about a great white house, we may catch glimpses of the man George Washington liked to be—glimpses denied us in the popular Washington legend.
He was a boy of three when his father first brought him there. He was seven when his father’s house burned, and the discouragement and loneliness of the wilderness plantation on the Potomac sent the young family to Fredericksburg to live. He was fifteen when he came back to live on the Potomac estate, now the property of his brother Lawrence. Lawrence was of no mean importance in his young brother’s eye—a veteran of the West Indian naval exploits of Admiral Vernon, and so full of them that he named the estate after his chief—altogether a rare big brother. And there were rare neighbors to be cultivated: like Lord Fairfax, an Oxford graduate and contributor to Mr. Addison’s Spectator, who took a fellow riding, and now and then rode after a fox.
As the boy broadened into self-reliance in such company as Lawrence’s, and into a degree of education by association with Fairfax, he fell heir to certain of their responsibilities. Fairfax sent him to survey his vast holdings. Lawrence developed tuberculosis, and his military duties devolved upon George. At twenty he was master of Mount Vernon, at twenty-one a lieutenant-colonel and fighting for the English against the French on the Ohio. Thackeray has pointed, in this episode, the caprice of fate: “It was strange that in a savage forest of Pennsylvania a young Virginian officer should fire a shot and waken up a war which was to last for sixty years, which was to cover his own country and pass into Europe, to cost France her American colonies, to sever ours from us, and create the great Western Republic; to rage over the Old World when extinguished in the New; and, of all the myriads engaged in the vast contest, to leave the prize of the greatest fame with him who struck the first blow!”
The next year he was a part of Braddock’s disastrous expedition, and news went home that he had been killed. John Augustine Washington made alarmed inquiries, to which George replied with a wit equal to Mark Twain’s under similar circumstances: “As I have heard, since my arrival at this place, a circumstantial account of my death and dying speech, I take this early opportunity of contradicting the first, and of assuring you that I have not as yet composed the latter.” He became a member of the legislature, and then, when he was twenty-six and a full colonel, he married Martha Dandridge Custis, who was by all odds the most accomplished and probably the wealthiest young widow in Williamsburg. It was time now to renew his neglected acquaintance with Mount Vernon.
During the period of their engagement, while Washington was absent at the frontier, and later, while he was attending the session of the House of Burgesses at Williamsburg, Mount Vernon, which had been so long neglected, was taking on a new dress. The activity on the plantation was contagious. It spread down river, to Belvoir, to Gunston Hall, and through the countryside to the other estates where Washington was intimately known, and where his earlier and generous attentions to attractive daughters did nothing to dampen their interest in his bride. Their swift coach-ride homeward bound from Williamsburg was like a triumphal entry. She added to his holdings of twenty-five hundred acres at Mount Vernon, and as many over the mountains, some fifteen thousand acres of her own. She found the house rebuilt, its exterior strengthened by new brick burned on the estate, new boarding and sheathing, new windows and a new roof; inside was new plaster, new flooring, and plenty of new closet-room, which probably touched her woman’s heart as inexpressibly thoughtful.
“I am now I believe fixd at this seat with an agreeable Consort for Life,” he wrote to a friend in England. “And I hope to find more happiness in retirement than I ever experienced amidst a wide and bustling World.” Few realize how wide and bustling was the world surveyed from Mount Vernon, nor to what extent he exerted himself to make use of the talents he had been given. Remember that there were no neighboring shops, no groceries, no service stations—not one, in fact, of the multitude of helping hands which science reaches out today to perform every conceivable task; and remember too that in his custody were, and upon his wise management depended, not only the happiness of his wife and her two children, but that of a company of several hundred others on the estate.
Husband and wife shared in an informal copartnership not unlike that of a manufacturer and a retail store-manager of today. It was her duty to anticipate the living demands of the estate, his to supply them. When she requisitioned cloth, he built a spinning-house and hired labor which in one year spun fourteen hundred yards of textiles, from broadcloth to bed-ticking. Convenient to the house, and flanking the serpentine drive, were his little factories: a smokehouse for meats, a laundry, a tailor-shop, a shoemaker’s shop, a carpenter’s, a smithy; here he wrought his raw materials to the needs of his establishment. And it was when he put on his “plain blue coat, white cassimer waistcoat, black breeches and boots” to visit the fields and the mill, his usual custom in the forenoon, that he was most truly the producer, and most contented.