As Rochambeau and his generals glided down the Delaware, they beheld something that overturned their preconceptions of a staid Washington. He stood on the riverbank in delirious elation, signaling gleefully with a hat in one hand and a handkerchief in the other. From across the water they heard him shouting “De Grasse.”11 “I caught sight of General Washington,” wrote Rochambeau, “waving his hat at me with demonstrative gestures of the greatest joy.”12 Once the French commander came ashore, the two men hugged with a mighty embrace. One French officer, Guillaume de Deux-Ponts, was amazed by Washington’s ebullience. Before, he had been convinced of Washington’s “natural coldness,” but now he had to reckon with the “pure joy” shown by the American: “He put aside his character as arbiter of North America and contented himself for the moment with that of a citizen, happy at the good fortune of his country. A child, whose every wish had been gratified, would not have experienced a sensation more lively.”13 The Duke de Lauzun agreed: “I never saw a man so thoroughly and openly delighted.”14 Washington’s boyish exuberance testified to the years of suppressed anxiety from which he was now beginning to feel emancipated.
Perhaps restoring his spirits, too, was knowledge that, for the first time in six years, he would soon set eyes on Mount Vernon. He spent a long day in Baltimore, trying to get more transports to ferry his men and enduring the ceremonial occasions he loathed. Then early the next morning he set out on horseback with a single aide, David Humphreys, and streaked across sixty miles of Virginia countryside in a day. The last time Washington had set eyes on Mount Vernon was May 4, 1775, when he departed for the Second Continental Congress, little realizing how his life would be turned topsy-turvy. To experience Mount Vernon anew after his long, itinerant military life must have been a heady sensation. The household was now enlivened by newcomers, especially the four children of Jacky and Nelly Custis, whom he had never seen; the baby boy had been christened George Washington Parke Custis. Humphreys, a young man of literary aspirations, versified the slaves’ reaction to Washington’s return: “Return’d from war, I saw them round him press / And all their speechless glee by artless signs express.”15 One wonders whether this homecoming was staged by slaves eager to parade their fidelity; the “speechless glee” doesn’t jibe with the discontent of the seventeen slaves who had raced to freedom aboard the British sloop Savage.
Within twenty-four hours Washington’s and Rochambeau’s entourages had arrived at Mount Vernon, ready to chart the Yorktown siege. For these battle-tested veterans, the mansion was a refreshing oasis. It was a tribute to Martha Washington’s talents that she could entertain in style amid wartime conditions. Colonel Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., complimented the gracious and well-appointed reception lavished upon the visitors. “A numerous family now present,” he wrote in his diary. “All accommodated. An elegant seat and situation: great appearance of opulence and real exhibitions of hospitality and princely entertainment.”16
The French officers appraised Mount Vernon and its hostess with considerable curiosity. After the frippery of the French court, Martha Washington struck them as the pattern of republican austerity. “Mrs. Washington is . . . small and fat, her appearance is respectable,” wrote Claude Blanchard. “She was dressed very plainly and her manners were simple in all respects.”17 In surveying the estate, Blanchard detected the tarnished glory inflicted by neglect. “As to the house, it is a country residence, the handsomest that I have yet seen in America . . . There are in the places around many huts for the negroes, of whom the general owns a large number . . . The environs of his house are not fertile and the trees that we see there do not appear to be large. Even the garden is barren.”18 Baron von Closen found the house’s relative modesty suitable for America’s hero: “The spacious and well-contrived mansion house at Mount Vernon was elegantly furnished, though there was no remarkable luxury to be seen anywhere; and, indeed, any ostentatious pomp would not have agreed with the simple manner of the owner.”19
Washington must have been distressed by the creeping signs of decay everywhere. Whatever the war’s outcome, he would be left a poorer man, which weighed heavily on his mind. That June, in a letter to William Crawford, the steward of his western lands, he broke down and confided his concern about his wealth withering away as the war progressed: “My whole time is . . . so much engrossed by the public duties of my station that I have totally neglected all my private concerns, which are declining every day, and may possibly end in capital losses, if not absolute ruin, before I am at liberty to look after them.”20
Among the pleasures of his return was the chance to see the mansion’s new north wing and the stylish dining room where he would entertain state visitors. It was likely here that he held a dinner for his guests on the night of September 12 before departing for Williamsburg the next morning. Jacky Custis prevailed upon his stepfather to take him along as a personal aide, a belated stint of service that must have awakened mixed feelings in Washington.
Arriving in Williamsburg late on the afternoon of September 14, Washington settled into the two-story brick home of George Wythe, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson’s old law professor. Washington moved about the town in a casual, unobtrusive fashion. “He approached without any pomp or parade, attended only by a few horsemen and his own servants,” observed St. George Tucker, a well-to-do young Virginia lawyer and militia colonel.21 Although Washington eschewed the swagger of power, his self-effacing presence sent an electric jolt through the ranks of soldiers.
As Tucker discovered, Washington had a retentive mind for detail and a politician’s knack for remembering names: “To my great surprise, he recognized my features and spoke to me immediately by name.”22 The young man also witnessed the fervent reunion between Washington and Lafayette, conjuring it up in a letter to his wife the next day. The marquis “caught the General round his body, hugged him as close as it was possible, and absolutely kissed him from ear to ear once or twice . . . with as much ardor as ever an absent lover kissed his mistress on his return.”23 Washington also remained accessible to ordinary soldiers. “He stands in the door, takes every man by the hand,” twenty-year-old Ebenezer Denny of Pennsylvania wrote home, still atremble with excitement. “The officers all pass in, receiving his hand and shake. This is the first time I had seen the general.”24
That evening Washington was entertained with an elegant supper and the overture from a French opera. The next morning he informed de Grasse of his wish to confer with him. The French admiral had already issued a rather huffy letter to him, questioning the dilatory pace of the Continental Army. “The season is approaching when, against my will, I shall be obliged to forsake the allies for whom I have done my very best and more than could be expected,” he wrote reprovingly.25 It was easy for the French admiral to quibble. The soldiers marching south from Head of Elk to Annapolis faced an exhausting trek through an inhospitable landscape that one soldier depicted as “abominable, cut by deep ravines and many small rivers, which the soldiers were obliged to ford after removing their shoes and stockings.” The next day they negotiated a riverbed “so rocky that the horses risked breaking their legs. All the way across we were in water up to our waists, and the horses up to their knees.”26 At Annapolis the soldiers could finally sail the rest of the way down the Chesapeake to the James River.