After consulting with the French at Newport in February 1781, Washington returned to New Windsor to discover one of the most bizarre letters of his career. Benjamin Harrison, speaker of the Virginia assembly, informed Washington, with some trepidation, that his mother had instigated a movement in the legislature to provide her with an emergency pension: “Some Gent[leme]n of the last assembly proposed to apply to that body for assistance to your mother, who, they said, was in great want, owing to the heavy taxes she was oblig[e]d to pay. I took a liberty to put a stop to this, supposing you would be displeased at such an application. I make no doubt but the assembly would readily grant the request and it now only rests with you to say whether it shall be made or not.”³⁹ Perhaps afraid of infuriating or insulting Washington, Harrison had stalled in writing the letter. Clearly Mary had made no effort to forewarn her son of her petition. She had now progressed from quaint or eccentric to dangerously erratic.

From Washington’s abashed response, one can tell that he had not heard about the matter before or communicated with his mother in years. He was mortified by the insinuation that he was an unfeeling son and that his mother had consequently thrown herself upon the charity of the state. The charge of neglect was substantially the same one Mary had trotted out since he first rode off to the French and Indian War. Now, amid his manifold wartime duties, Washington sat down and recounted for Harrison his tortured history with his mother, telling how he had set her up in Fredericksburg before the war and instructed Lund to take care of her. He seemed baffled and hurt by her charges: “Whence her distresses can arise, therefore, I know not, never having received any complaint . . . Confident I am that she has not a child that would not divide the last sixpence to relieve her from real distress. This she has been repeatedly assured of by me. And all of us, I am certain, would feel much hurt at having our mother a pensioner while we had the means of supporting her. But, in fact, she has an ample income of her own.”⁴⁰ Washington asked the assembly to desist from taking any action.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Plundering Scoundrels

AS THE WAR WANED in the northern states, it waxed ever hotter in the South. The British, stymied in their goal of galvanizing southern Loyalists, nonetheless continued to fight aggressively. Lord Cornwallis ached to avenge the humiliation Banastre Tarleton suffered at Cowpens in January. For three weeks Nathanael Greene’s ragtag army led him on a long wild-goose chase; then, on March 15, 1781, Cornwallis spotted his chance, as his men approached a phalanx of local militia that Greene had lined up south of Guilford Court House in North Carolina. After firing one volley, the North Carolina men dispersed, as Greene had ordered, but the Continental soldiers stubbornly held their ground in fierce combat until Greene signaled a belated retreat. “I never saw such fighting since God made me,” declared a thunderstruck Cornwallis, who had a horse shot from under him in the carnage.¹ Desperate for victory and in defiance of his officers, Cornwallis ordered his men to fire grapeshot amid hand-to-hand combat, causing British marksmen inadvertently to slay British soldiers.

Technically a British victory, the battle cost Cornwallis dearly: 532 dead and wounded soldiers, more than a quarter of his force. As Charles James Fox pointed out in Parliament, “Another such victory would ruin the British Army.”² Nathanael Greene concurred: “They had the splendor, we the advantage.”³ Cornwallis decided to move his bruised and exhausted troops into Virginia to link up with Benedict Arnold. He was being worn down by the wily, resourceful Greene, who came into his own during the campaign. Washington understood that Greene, despite the defeat, had acquitted himself nobly. “Although the honors of the field did not fall to your lot,” Washington told him, “I am convinced you deserved them.”⁴

With the war intensifying in Virginia, the piecemeal transfer of men to the South hollowed out Washington’s army. As British forces pushed deep into the Virginia heartland, they gladly laid waste to the estates of Revolutionary leaders, and Washington knew that Mount Vernon might be next. In January and again in April, Brigadier General Benedict Arnold led his British and Tory troops along the James River in a rampage of unbridled destruction, burning homesteads and tobacco warehouses. Britain’s naval strength operated to advantage in a state well watered by rivers. After activating the militia, Governor Thomas Jefferson appealed to Washington to move southward, saying his presence “would restore [the] full confidence of salvation.”⁵ For Washington, who longed to be home, this message was hard to hear. “Nobody, I persuade myself, can doubt my inclination to be immediately employed in the defense of that country where all my property and connections are,” he replied.⁶ Nonetheless he cited “powerful objections” to leaving his army or marching them hundreds of miles south.⁷ He had already diverted a large number of men to Virginia under Lafayette, but he didn’t wish to join him when there was a chance of collaborating with the French to take New York, which Washington still envisioned as the climactic battle of the Revolution.

Intermittently Washington lapsed into passing reveries about his old life at Mount Vernon. Early on he had written home frequently and at length, the mental connection with his estate still unbroken. Now, he told a correspondent, he had “long been a stranger” to such “private indulgences.”⁸ Nevertheless he still deluged Lund Washington with minute questions about a place he hadn’t set eyes on for six years. “How many lambs have you had this spring?” he asked in March 1781. “How many colts are you like to have?” He inquired about the progress of the covered walkways connecting the main house to the outlying buildings. “Are you going to repair the pavement of the piazza?” he wished to know.⁹

These nostalgic recollections of Mount Vernon were shattered weeks later when a British sloop, the Savage, dropped anchor in the Potomac near the plantation. Captain Thomas Graves had burned homes on the Maryland side to soften up his victims on the Virginia bank. Then he sent ashore a party to Mount Vernon to demand a large store of food and offered asylum to any slaves; seventeen of Washington’s slaves—fourteen men and three women—fled to the ship’s freedom, embarrassing the leader of the American Revolution. Lund Washington knew that his boss wanted him to resist any cooperation with the British, and at first he balked at their demands. Then he went aboard the Savage, bearing provisions as a peace offering. After this conference he consented to send sheep, hogs, and other supplies to save Mount Vernon and possibly to recover the departed slaves. Maybe Lund wondered whether Washington, at bottom, was prepared to sacrifice his majestic estate. An indignant Lafayette warned Washington of the unfortunate precedent Lund had set: “This being done by the gentleman who, in some measure, represents you at your house will certainly have a bad effect and contrasts with spirited answers from some neighbors that had their houses burnt accordingly.”¹⁰

As Lafayette expected, Washington reacted with unalloyed horror when he learned that Lund had boarded the Savage to negotiate with the enemy, and he promptly administered a grave rebuke to his steward for his decision to “commune with a parcel of plundering scoundrels,”¹¹ as he dubbed them. “It would have been a less painful circumstance to me to have heard that, in consequence of your non-compliance with their request, they had burnt my house and laid the plantation in ruins.”¹² Washington showed his classic stoicism here, his uncompromising refusal to beg or bow to anyone. Since Lund was his proxy, he felt personally humiliated by the incident. In a fatalistic mood, he concluded that, unless the French brought a superior naval force to Virginia, “I have as little doubt of its ending in the loss of all my Negroes and in the destruction of my houses. But I am prepared for the event.”¹³ He ordered Lund to remove at once any valuables from the estate. Martha Washington was then laid up with recurrent liver trouble, abdominal pain, and jaundice. So traumatized was her husband by the Savage incident that when the widow of a British Army paymaster sent Martha a parcel of citrus fruits as a get-well present—the Washingtons had stayed at her New York home in 1776—he brusquely returned it as an unacceptable gift from the enemy.