FOLLOWING YORKTOWN, Washington had to deal with another troubled dimension of his life: his prickly seventy-three-year-old mother. After Jacky’s burial, he stopped by Fredericksburg to see her and learned that she had gone west on a trip to Frederick County with daughter Betty and ailing son-in-law Fielding Lewis. Mindful of her waspish comments about his financial neglect, Washington dropped off ten guineas before riding on to Mount Vernon. The poorly educated Mary sent him a thank-you letter in which she misspelled his name. This letter, full of self-pity, solicited more money: “My dear Georg I was truly unesy by Not being at hom when you went thru Fredriceksburg it was a onlucky thing for me now I am afraid I Never Shall have that pleasure agin I am soe very unwell this trip over the Mountins has almost kill’d me I gott the 2 five ginnes you was so kind to send me i am greatly obliged to you.”⁷⁴ Now that George had bought her a house in Fredericksburg, she wanted one beyond the western mountains—“some little hous of my one if it is only twelve foot squar.” In a postscript, she asked to be remembered to Martha, then crossed out the words “I would have wrote to her but my reason has jis left me.”⁷⁵ The world might be buzzing excitedly about Yorktown, but Mary Washington resolutely refused to congratulate her son or even mention the event. “When others congratulated her and were enthusiastic in [George’s praise],” wrote Washington Irving, “she listened in silence and would temperately reply that he had been a good son, and she believed he had done his duty as a man.”⁷⁶ Neither did she extend condolences or refer to Jacky’s death. Mary Washington had always been a peevish, egocentric woman, but one suspects that some mild form of dementia may have set in by this point. The failure to mention Jacky Custis’s death suggests a lapse in short-term memory, and her allusion to her reason having “left” her indicates an awareness of impaired mental faculties.

When Washington attended a ball in Fredericksburg to honor the French and American officers who had fought valiantly at Yorktown, Mary was told that His Excellency was coming for the occasion. “His Excellency!” she snapped. “What nonsense!” ⁷⁷ As during the French and Indian War, Mary seemed to regard her son’s long years of military service as a trick perpetrated to deprive her of his attention. Rumors of her Loyalist sympathies continued to make the rounds, and one French officer, the Count de Clermont-Crèvecoeur, was “amazed to be told that this lady, who must be over seventy, is one of the most rabid Tories.”⁷⁸

George squired his aged mother to the Fredericksburg ball, the only occasion when we know for sure that the two appeared in public together. Perhaps George wanted to squelch rumors that he had abandoned his mother. Mary didn’t stay long at the dance. At nine o’clock she announced that “it was time for the old people to be at home” and left on her son’s arm.⁷⁹ The ball was noteworthy as one of the last times that George Washington danced away the evening, displaying the graceful virility for which he was known. Before the decade was over, his body would become stiffer, his face worn and impassive, and history would forget the lithe, magnetic younger man who had led the Revolution.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Man of Moderation

FOR ALL WASHINGTON’S SKEPTICISM that the war had ended, his behavior that autumn and winter reflected an altered reality. He lingered at Mount Vernon for several weeks, consoling Martha and enjoying some much-needed rest. The man who had shuddered at the thought of prolonged separation from his restive army spent four leisurely winter months in Philadelphia, nestled in a town house on Third Street. From the moment he descended on the capital, Washington was lionized at every turn. Two artistic residents, Charles Willson Peale and Alexander Quesnay, unrolled giant transparent paintings of him in windows that, when lit from the back, projected his glowing vision into the night, showing laurel wreaths crowning his brow and an antique spear grasped in his hand as he crushed a British crown underfoot. The theater offered no surcease from his own omnipresent image. Washington attended a performance of The Temple of Minerva, perhaps the first serious American opera, only to hear the chorus thunder from the stage, “He comes, he comes, with conquest crowned./ Hail Columbia’s warlike son! / Hail the glorious Washington!”¹

Washington was the honored guest at every gathering and admitted sheepishly to the Chevalier de Chastellux that his time was “divided between parties of pleasure and parties of business. The first, nearly of a sameness at all times and places in this infant country, is easily conceived . . . The second was only diversified by perplexities and could afford no entertainment.”² Taking time to lobby the states, he urged them not to disband their regiments and asked Congress to renew its focus on pay and provisions to stifle any mutinous stirrings among his men.

Washington also received a valuable education in finance from Robert Morris, who had raised money for the Continental cause on his own credit. Because the states had refused to collect their quota of taxes, Morris couldn’t service the sizable debt raised to finance the war. He warned that creditors “who trusted us in the hour of distress are defrauded” and that it was pure “madness” to “expect that foreigners will trust a government which has no credit with its own citizens.”³ To end Congress’s servile reliance on the states for money, Morris proposed that it have the right to collect customs duties, and the fight for this “impost”—the first form of federal taxation—became a rallying cry for proponents of an energetic central government.

After George and Martha Washington had enjoyed their fill of Philadelphia politics and society, they took up residence in late March on the Hudson River in their new headquarters in the town of Newburgh. They occupied a two-story stone farmhouse with a pitched roof and twin chimneys, which sat high atop a bare bluff on the Hudson at a dreamy bend in the river. The heart of the house was the parlor, which Washington turned into his dining room, an eccentric space claiming the odd distinction of having seven doors and one window.

While there, Washington approved one of the war’s most adventurous schemes: a plot to kidnap Prince William Henry, son of King George III, along with the British admiral Robert Digby, both now resident in New York. Washington worried that all the talk of peace would sap America’s will and act as a “fresh opiate to increase that stupor” into which the states had fallen, giving them an excuse to renege on taxes and fail to complete their battalions.⁴ The kidnapping of Prince William Henry might serve to dishearten George III. As we have seen, Washington had long been beguiled by kidnapping plans, having first approved one for Benedict Arnold, then another for Sir Henry Clinton, and the plan for Prince William Henry followed a similar script. On a dark, rainy night, a squad of thirty-six men, dressed up as sailors, would board four whaleboats on the Jersey shore of the Hudson and row across to Manhattan. They would disable British sentinels, then grab the prince and admiral in their riverfront quarters. With his penchant for espionage, Washington was minutely involved in mapping out the operation.

On March 28, 1782, Washington sent a sober set of instructions to Colonel Matthias Ogden, the operation commander, setting the tone for the abduction. His overriding concern was that the abducted dignitaries be treated respectfully, not manhandled like ruffians. “I am fully persuaded,” he wrote, “that it is unnecessary to caution you against offering insult or indignity to the persons of the prince or admiral . . . but it may not be amiss to press the propriety of a proper line of conduct upon the party you command.”⁵ Washington knew that any abuse by the captors could translate into a propaganda victory for the British, yet in demanding gentlemanly treatment of the prisoners, he also betrayed some residual respect for royalty and rank. The plan was never carried out, and Washington was enraged at Ogden for snatching away his chance for a surprise victory. Many years later the U.S. minister to Great Britain showed Prince William Henry, now King William IV, Washington’s March 28 letter to Ogden. “I am obliged to General Washington for his humanity,” the king replied, “but I’m damned glad I did not give him an opportunity of exercising it towards me.”⁶