He had served without pay through the war, and his first concern now was to put the estate on its feet. He took up the flags of the eastern piazza, reinforced the foundations of the house, “removed two pretty large and full-grown lilacs to the No. Garden gate,” combed the neighboring forest for handsome trees to transplant, amplified his orchards, stocked a deer park, and made his daily rounds of the farms. The man who had lately dictated terms to the best soldiers out of Europe got from his gardener a promise to stay sober most of the time on consideration of “four dollars at Christmas, with which he may be drunk four days and four nights; two dollars at Easter to effect the same purpose; two dollars at Whitsuntide to be drunk for two days; a dram in the morning and a drink of grog at dinner at noon.”
If there had been visitors before the war, double their number flocked to him now. One night he was routed out of bed to receive a young French sculptor, sent by Jefferson and Franklin in Paris to make his statue for the capitol at Richmond. A Mount Vernon tradition says that a few days later Washington was called out to look at a pair of horses offered for sale. He asked the price, and was told “a thousand dollars.” He drew himself up in indignation, for a thousand dollars was an outrageous price for a horse and was likewise a tenth of his whole year’s living expense. Houdon, the sculptor, had been dogging Washington’s footsteps for days, studying his subject. He caught the general in the fine glow of dignified wrath, cried out, “I ’ave him! I ’ave him!” and set to work at once to make the pose immortal. With a life mask, sketches, and full measurements he returned to Paris, and there, with Gouverneur Morris posing for the standing figure, he made the composite statue which stands at Richmond today.
There came a youngster of twenty, very quiet and abashed at an audience with the great general. This boy’s name was Robert Fulton, he who later invented the steamboat. There came Noah Webster, who was to write the great American dictionary; there came Jedediah Morse, who wrote the first American geography. Lafayette, the “French boy,” was always welcome, and he spent nineteen days there in the autumn of 1784. Others were not so welcome: “My house may be compared to a well-resorted tavern,” wrote Washington. He had to summon young Laurence Washington to Mount Vernon to carry its social burden after candle-light, when he withdrew to his study to answer letters, or to taste the human pleasure of postponing answers “until tomorrow evening,” as he confessed to his former secretary of war. But, welcome or uninvited, they all came, for the country was to have a new government, and Washington was not only to help build it, but to run it. With the same modest misgivings of his own capacity for the post that he had frankly confessed in 1775, he went out again in 1789 to serve his country, and put aside again the labor that was nearest to his heart.
For eight years more his sight of Mount Vernon was limited to visits borrowed from public affairs, but he never lost his grip on its minute arrangements, directing, advising, correcting in his letters to his managers. In one downright homesick moment he said flatly that he would rather be at home with a friend or two than to be attended at the seat of government by the officers of state and the representatives of every power in Europe. John Adams, after his inauguration in 1797, wrote a letter to his wife, who had not been there to enjoy the greatest moment of his life. “It was made more affecting to me,” he said, “by the presence of the General, whose countenance was as serene and unclouded as the day. He seemed to enjoy a triumph over me. Methought I heard him say, ‘Ay, I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be the happiest!’” Everything on that bright March day in Philadelphia sang “Home!”
Presently he was there, admiring the new setting of the fine furniture and silver and glassware and china brought down from the Presidential Mansion in the Capital, some of which is in the house today. Sixty-five years old, with the western world at his feet, and he saw only the broad reaches of the Potomac down below the ha-ha walls. Sixty-six, and to see a young lad named Charles Carroll from Maryland courting his favorite grand-daughter made a man feel young himself. Sixty-seven, forty years married, the favorite grand-daughter to be married (though not to Charles Carroll), and life seemed perennial. One December morning he caught cold riding the farms, and two days later was dead.
Nothing short of the domestic enthusiasm of George Washington could have kept Mount Vernon in order. For sixty years it yielded gradually to the advance of time. Then, through the truly heroic zeal of Miss Ann Pamela Cunningham of Laurens, S. C., and the eloquence of Edward Everett, and the fine spirit of Miss Cunningham’s Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union, the estate was purchased, and with searching fidelity to the wishes of its master, restored to the state in which he would have had it. Too fulsome praise can hardly be expressed—certainly not here—for the good sense, discrimination and good organization which combine to maintain the estate. It is as if a hand had touched it lightly on a spring morning in the brightest year of its occupancy, and had held it, fixed forever in the pose, like the castle of the sleeping princess. No prince will come to rouse the place. But better than that, after sixty years of care and a century and a half of life, it re-creates each year to thousands of pilgrims the crises and victories that wrote our creed as a nation. And fortunately no landholder on this great farm of ours will leave Mount Vernon without a deep sense of relief that it is first and last a perfect monument to a country gentleman.
The Quincy Homestead
© D.McK
THE QUINCY HOUSE